Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

oldgeekjobs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 391 posts

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

#271

Post by Noseshine »

kafkaesq wrote: post #256
Noseshine wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not because one is in agreeance with the alleged "racial" distinctions That's what I said, the word is being used with a different/wider meaning and not with that narrower original meaning. > (in the mind of the racist) I doubt the attackers thought of the Polish person as of a different "race" as in the biological meaning of that word. Same thing, shift of meaning of the word.

I doubt the attackers thought of the Polish person as of a different "race" as in the biological meaning of that word. That's the thing -- "race" doesn't really have a biological meaning. If anything it's just a vague suspicion that certain people are inferior or "alien" because of their DNA, the breeding, or simply their cultural upbringing. Of course it's all invented tripe, and biologically speaking it's equally u…

    > "race" doesn't really have a biological meaning
Please work with me. Communication requires willing partners, I don't know where you want to take this sub-thread? I know "race" does not exist - and yet we did (and do) have the word. We were talking about language and meanings, not truth. Enough people did (and do) associate a biological meaning - what an actual geneticist has to say about that is besides the point.

And now the meaning of that word has shifted. That is all I said.

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

#272

Post by dragonwriter »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #206
mattdeboard wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Rotary phones are from the 70's and earlier.

> Rotary phones are from the 70's and earlier.

The last rotary phone I saw for sale was, I think, in the 1980s, the last one I saw in use was in the 2000s. Its quite possible that someone could be a millennial and have used one (IIRC, we used one in my house until 1986 -- the other phones in the house were touch tone -- and only ditched it because we happened to move.)

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

#273

Post by dragonwriter »

mattdeboard wrote: post #142
sjdchid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except old people are objectively better off in the US. It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.

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…

> There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now

The usual starting point for the Millenial generation is a birth year of 1980; if 36 is "starting 40 in the face", it is not from a particularly close distance.

And that's the absolute leading edge.

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

#274

Post by jknoepfler »

biocomputation wrote: post #253
jknoepfler wrote: post #127

As someone who entered the industry at ~32 and was immediately hired into Amazon to work on a team in AWS where I am around the median age, I find this conversation peculiar. The job I worked myself through a second college degree with was on small software team that was all older than myself. I went on a round of interviews recently and got an offer from all of them... I definitely don't feel like I'm going to expir…

>> I don't think that ageism isn't a problem, I guess I just haven't seen it. It can be difficult to see it for what it is because its most common form is as a bias, which can be very difficult to discern, even within ourselves. ( Daniel Kahneman and many others have done amazing work about unconscious / barely conscious biases ). I never saw it when I was younger because I didn't think about it; I didn't even know t…

Your post is illustrative of a more general point, which is that in my limited experience, the devs I've worked with have been consistently more self aware and open to self criticism than the mean, and have on the whole been lovely human beings. It's a very welcoming culture. I'm sort of dreading the day I stumble into the snake pit of ageist, sexist bro-holes that supposedly makes up startup culture, but something tells me no one needs to...

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

#275

Post by nul_byte »

employee8000 wrote: post #100

I'm in my mid 40s and have not had any problems getting interviews and job offers. It might depend on your attitude and your skill set. There might be a time when my age will become a factor but not yet. I've more than accepted that kids half my age are very talented and I need to prove my worth. Boy there are 26 year olds that I work with that are so mature and intelligent that it makes me worry. But my experience d…

Thats very much the same approach I take. As long as I can keep learning and expanding what I know, I don't think I will go to wrong.

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

#276

Post by sidlls »

int_handler wrote: post #254
InclinedPlane wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks" This kind of thing is the worst in interviews. Like getting asked some fill-in-the-blanks question on the pillars of OOP or to define some random bit of jargon or what-have-you. That coupled with the "have you seen this question before" interviewing is just infuriating.

Is this really a phenomenon that is exclusive to Bay Area companies though?

I don't about "exclusive" but the very first time a "data structures and algorithms" question ever appeared in an interview I had was in the Bay Area, after having spent 10+ years on the east coast. Prior to that interviews focused almost exclusively on design patterns (not just OO, but general architecture), project experience, and language specific questions where appropriate. I've been here a while now so I have no idea what the interview culture outside the Bay Area is like anymore.

This area has a high density of people who conflate academic computer science with software engineering, or who think the latter is some easily learned demi-skill to be looked down on, etc.

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

#277

Post by nul_byte »

employee8000 wrote: post #126
fatdog wrote: post #92

Can someone state honestly and pseudonymously why they don't hire oldz? Speculating I would say: - chose younger hire because cheaper and can be moulded into company specific role. - younger candidate more easily managed by less experienced (cheaper) manager. - wants to keep culture "pure," and needs kids to drink kool-aid. - values power and control over less experienced technically acceptable candidates. - get extr…

I'm in my 40s. I interview frequently and the problem with most devs over 40 is that they are slow or dont keep up with technology. I interviewed one guy in his 60s who went to school at MIT for his phd. I was excited. And then when it came to the coding exercise not only was he using perl, which had no relevance to our stack (which he was informed about) he took 3x as long to complete the question. I interviewed ano…

That's why as a 40+ engineer I am always pushing myself to learn new tech. It's evening here in the UK, and while my kids are sleeping and my wife is catching up on her soap operas, I am just taking time out from learning GraphQL to see what's on here.

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

#278

Post by chetanahuja »

commandar wrote: post #187
bdavisx wrote: post #111

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 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…

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."

Only if there was some sort of a "survey" on people's attitudes in different parts of the country. Perhaps people with competing ideologies would represent one side or another and then the general public would decide to pick one of those choices to represent the majority view from that area. This way we'd actually know what a majority of the population in a given state/region believes.

Of course it would suck for the reputation of a certain part of the country where bigoted, white supremacist people keep getting the majority votes year after year, decade after decade. But I guess that reputation would be well deserved if those representatives keep winning so consistently for so long a time.

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

#279

Post by fredgrott »

gozur88 wrote: post #258
derekp7 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From the company's perspective the job has to be one for which the company can reliably measure your output. If you're doing data entry for medical records the company can easily count the number of patients you've finished, the number of pages, even the number of keystrokes. But for a developer working from home the company can't tell the difference between a bug that took three days of plugging away to find and one…

BULLSHIT!

I can damn well see when a issue has been entered in a bug tracker and when the bug has finally been marked fixed with the commit listed in the bug tracker..

So can everyone else including managers

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

#280

Post by nul_byte »

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…

One good route to more senior / management roles is to be an architect. The problem with that though, is your spend more time with your node in microsoft powerpoint, then you do in an IDE.
Post reply on HN