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Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

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381–390 of 391 posts

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

#381
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No joke, I'm 31, only 2-3 years ago the companies were all over me, I would get offers right and left. Now, not so much, I've noticed a pretty huge difference.

So you're saying you post your age in your profile?. This has no correlation

I usually mention it in my cover letter. I wouldn't want to work in a place that discriminates based on age (or on any other factors, for that matter)

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

#383

http://www.meetup.com/DenverIPhone/messages/boards/thread/25...

"There are tons of federal acts trying to make everyone equal but at the end of the day companies know exactly what they want and will say "their personality doesn't fit the culture" or "their experience isn't a match" when in reality the individual is too old. "

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

#384
post #26

Well, a funny thing, I'm not old, I'm just 37. In my country I need to work for the next 30 years to retire. However companies don't want to talk with me about getting a job regardless my 14 year of commercial experience. Sometimes I hear during an interview "oh, you did so many things, I wish I could have the same experience". And then I don't get this job. And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point…

http://www.meetup.com/DenverIPhone/messages/boards/thread/25...

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they look (at least from job posting) for ridiculous years of experience Yeah, they want 20 years of experience. But they still won't hire anybody over 25. Start young, kids!

Actually we did, but nobody is hiring for C64 Basic and assembly anymore.

Right, I forgot: 20 years of experience with Angular.js.

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

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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 Z…

> In English one would say "the horse has left the barn." At least in my native English speaking world, we also say "that train has left the station". It's even listed as a cliche on a MetaFilter page on cliches and hackneyed sayings[0]. We also say "that ship has sailed". 0. http://ask.metafilter.com/177148/Thats-so-cliche

Heavens, you got me there.

But the cat's out of the bag now, so what can I do?

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

#387
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Sometimes "older" workers have unreasonably inflated senses of skills and/or worth, and can't take the ego blow

I've seen this more with younger workers. In fact, that was me exactly 10 years ago.

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

#388
post #336
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would usually be a wrong tool for all of these reasons: 1. There isn't a low-level performance bottleneck within most web-dev code. It's almost all occurring at levels slightly above that(disk access, network bandwidth, database queries, horizontal scaling). The stuff that needs to eke out another 50% in an inner loop through optimizing cache access or careful use of hardware parallelism tends to be a single algor…

Some counterpoints: 1. There are a number of reasons one might choose C++ that aren't related to low-level performance in almost any application. For a particular web application it may or may not be a good choice, but I wouldn't categorically reject it, even for a class project or assignment web app. 2. Any language or suite of them has whole categories of errors, deficiencies in tooling and other issues that can ma…

Obviously this is a very late response to this thread, but I thought I'd add what I actually ended up building for this assignment.

The requirements were specifically to build a game, any game, and as long as it was playable (and your code was readable) you'd get an A.

So, annoyed as I was at the requirement that the backend be built in C++, I decided go above and beyond the requirements and built a single page Othello game, complete with a strong and fast AI (I happened to take this class much later in my studies than the standard curriculum called for, so I had already taken an AI class and had learned how to build a minimax tree with alpha beta pruning, though up until that point I'd only ever done it in Lisp).

So, by changing the actual requirements of the project, I actually made C++ a more appropriate choice of tools for this project and was able to build a very responsive single page Othello game with a strong AI capable of running pretty fast on the hardware we were tasked with using.

I was the only one who used Ajax to make it a single page app, and the only person to build an AI. Needless to say, I got the best grade in the class, but I suppose I had an unfair advantage.

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

#389
post #350
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> conflate academic computer science with software engineering Which is mind boggling. I took an introductory "software engineering" class in (a reasonably prestigious) university ~15 yrs ago which was ostensibly about learning how to use the right tool for the right job, and one of the assignments was to build a web application in C++! Perhaps the intent of that assignment was to show that it wasn't the right tool,…

one of the assignments was to build a web application in C++! As an aside, we were doing this in the mid-late 90s (NSAPI) and we were running rings around Perl/CGI shops. Why? Because what took them a whole rack of machines took us a single box, and we simply skipped all the issues of syncing data, accessing a shared database with locking etc etc etc that they had to deal with. Right tool for the job ;-)

see my (late) follow up comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12559900

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happily coding at 51.

Me at 59:-)

I am 64 and still love to write software, but currently unemployed. Unfortunately the software industry here in the San Francisco area seems to think that a 20'something who has memorized a few buzzword algorithms from their recent college experience, has no social life and willing to be in a cubical for 12 hours a day, is a more valuable employee. Their lower pay grade may have something to do with it.

I had a real job interview last month. The 25 year old "team lead" asked me (in broken English, his second language) to write a bubble sort - in real code - on the white board. Seriously.

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