Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#241

Post by kafkaesq » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:23 PM UTC

Noseshine wrote: post #124

ASalazarMX wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"making the website effectively racist regarding devs" Just so your communication skills improve, discrimination is not the same as racism.

On this different topic: I got a lot more relaxed about language after reading numerous books by linguists (because that is their attitude, they just watch what is going on). In this context, I think the train has left the station (as we Germans say, "der Zug ist abgefahren") and "racist" now indeed has a new much wider meaning in public discourse contexts . It now seems to include "being different", in not necessari…

"...they are treating incident ... as racially aggravated"

The term is used because the person being attacked was thought of as being of a different "race" by their racist attackers (and because that's the reason he was attacked; bot for being non-heterosexual, or for being a fan of the wrong football team). Not because one is in agreeance with the alleged "racial" distinctions (in the mind of the racist).

BTW:

der Zug ist abgefahren

In English one would say "the horse has left the barn."

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#242

Post by GFischer » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:26 PM UTC

20yrs_no_equity wrote: post #152

Unlike most engineers I want to be a manager. But it seems there is no opportunity for that. It seems that the non-engineers who are in the executive positions want non-engineers to manager engineers perpetuating the problems startups have. There are few engineering management positions listed. The few I saw in the bay area resulted in excluding me because of my age (Stripe, I'm looking at you.) It's frustrating to k…

I did a Masters in Management of Technology, that opened up several recruiting opportunities.

I ended up not getting a management position however (they're extremely hard to get here in Uruguay), I believe it was because, like you, I didn't have a formal management position (I did end up having a lot of informal authority at my last job, and I've already won a lot of trust at my current one 3 months in).

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#243

Post by devonkim » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:30 PM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #219

JPKab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird situation, because I was working remotely for a tech company and was required to move to the Boulder, CO area recently. It's an awesome company and I was stoked about the area, so I went ahead and did it, but the requirement for collocation that has been driven by certain management ethos' is odd in such a technology driven world. The advantages I've had by moving from Arkansas to here have been numerous…

And yet there are companies that think nothing of hiring offshore workers to replace local jobs. Sometimes within the same organization. Why is it that a company will require you to either be on-site, or in India, but nowhere else?

A lot of places simply are not structured to handle remote workers and penalize them when away from centralized offices. Remote work or distributed companies are an anomaly that present risks when your management doesn't understand the basics and that's understandable.

The presumption is that remote means lower value or productivity as a default in classic companies. It's not necessarily a matter of luxury either; your C levels don't work from their yachts in a marina normally. Some are just too rigid in approach to change how they work even if it's demonstrably negligible. I had a client before that had a mostly distributed team and wouldn't let us increase the hourly rate unless we relocated to an office - few people even at the offices ever talked that often and we hardly ever met in person with the client ourselves even for those five miles down the road.

The usual tech company reasoning now is that the tools for remote work do not facilitate creative, spontaneous insights that are critical for competitive companies.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#244

Post by pessimizer » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:38 PM UTC

bdavisx wrote: post #111

rdtsc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. I like that quote. Copied it to my notes for future reference. To expand more on the topic, I wonder if remote workers are a good way to bring some revival for smaller rural communities. I visit some of those places and many have a beautiful setting, everyone knows each other…

>> Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. >I visit some of those places and many have a beautiful setting, everyone knows each other, there is a sense of a community. It is quiet. Depending on what part of the country you're talking about, many of those beautiful small communities are very bigoted also -- and not ju…

This entire subthread is just stereotype bingo. Small communities are numerous and diverse.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#245

Post by mattdeboard » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:40 PM UTC

sjdchid wrote: post #185

mattdeboard wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we're not talking about Baby Boomers here, chief. There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year). Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and ho…

Tell me more about all the places where a home bought in 2000 is worth less now, and all the colleges where tuition was not 50% cheaper in the 90s.

Sure, tuition was cheaper. Doesn't mean it was cheap. And when future you is talking to a 20-year-old, they'll be lambasting you about how easy your life was when a 4-year degree from a public instituion only cost you $80,000.

If you're truly ignorant of the subprime mortgage crisis a few years back, you can check out The Big Short (book or movie, but I'm told the book is much better) for good insight into history and mechanics.

Point is that the economy has changed a LOT in the last 15 years, and lots and lots of people suffered. Generation X is not the Baby Boom generation. I think you sound a bit foolish/ignorant appropriating the "Baby Boomers ruined the economy!" rhetoric and applying it to the generation-and-a-half that followed them.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#246

Post by pessimizer » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:40 PM UTC

serge2k wrote: post #222

commandar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the south isn't bigoted in the ways many people assume. There are absolutely small towns where open discrimination is a problem. And there are absolutely small minded jerks that have a problem with people of color. But what I've observed personally living in the south and travelling the country is that the south is often less functionally segregated than other areas of the country. It's sheer demographics if noth…

> And the south isn't bigoted in the ways many people assume Is it "assuming" when you base your opinion on things said by federal courts?

I'm from Chicago, which isn't a small town and isn't in the south, and the federal courts have had plenty to say. What have the federal courts had to say about every small town in the south again?

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#247

Post by oldmanjay » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:46 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #121

tjic wrote: post #2

I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world. I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discri…

San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places. The rapidity with which people flip the idiot bit on you, due to puddle-shallow signalling in the Bay Area really takes my breath away. - The sound of keys clicking in a phone interview automatically means you are Googling the answer in an interview. Never mind that you are a dynamic language programmer and you are writing a 10 second s…

I'm always amused when I have a polar opposite experience to someone's virulent assertions, which is definitely the case here.

Edit: in a further comment, you assert an unspoken insult being communicated in a perfectly neutral sentence. I guess what I'm saying is I bet you bring quite a bit of the negativity you experience to your interactions.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#248

Post by madengr » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:49 PM UTC

noddingham wrote: post #150

JPKab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird situation, because I was working remotely for a tech company and was required to move to the Boulder, CO area recently. It's an awesome company and I was stoked about the area, so I went ahead and did it, but the requirement for collocation that has been driven by certain management ethos' is odd in such a technology driven world. The advantages I've had by moving from Arkansas to here have been numerous…

As someone that also works in Boulder, is your compensation enough to allow you to actually live in Boulder?

Yeah, inquiring minds would like to know. I'm in Boulder right now for a conference, and looking at Zillow, it's f'ing insane. Prices seem to start at $1M.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#249

Post by robohamburger » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:51 PM UTC

initram wrote: post #123

robohamburger wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without the legality, it is super weird. If someone told me I was old at 30 I would laugh :)

My spouse is a dancer. They generally retire at around 30 yrs. old. (And by retire, I mean find a different job because you aren't going to retire on a dancer's salary.)

I suppose there are many aspects in regards to aging. The concept of young vs old I suppose is a strange cognitive shortcut to apply when what you really care about is fitness at a particular activity. All the more reason to dispense with it!

I am curious, did they need to retire because they no longer possessed whatever it took to dance, or was it because people in their industry assumed they no longer could, or simply because they needed a more lucrative job?

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#250

Post by 6stringmerc » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 8:51 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #184

6stringmerc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been on the flip-side of ageism - being the young person in fields traditionally led / managed / etc by those in their 40s or older - I'm very unsympathetic to this kind of discussion. I had to wade through years of inflated expectations (BA + 5 years experience + tech skills = $35k / year job) and put-downs about actually understanding technology ("We old people do the important work, you just make it look go…

I'm barely 30 so don't take this as some graybeard being snarky, because I too waded through years of bullshit in my early and mid 20s. A. Turnabout is not fair play; two wrongs do not make a right, especially when your wrong is to discriminate against people other than those who may have discriminated against you B. Inflated expectations != discrimination C. Discriminating against someone because they are too old is…

What I'm getting at is that A. isn't really a problem at all - if one doesn't have the marketable skills to "win" a job then pointing at any one issue (age, in this case) is simply coping / self-serving, because what I meant by turnabout is that "do unto others" is a principle that the world doesn't run on and thinking otherwise is naive whether 25 or 65.

It is completely discriminatory in B. when the only people who could possibly meet those inflated expectations can not logically be under the age of 30. I've seen this far too often to dismiss it as occasional - it is/was systemic.

It's the burden of the accuser to claim they were discriminated against because of age, and as we can see, there's no qualms with making lots and lots of articles and "think-pieces" out of the hypothesis. Sometimes "older" workers have unreasonably inflated senses of skills and/or worth, and can't take the ego blow, so, off to coping (see A) above.

Haha thanks for the armchair therapy with D., it's worth every penny from your barely 30 perspective.