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On Getting Older in Tech

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Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#71

Post by soham »

Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process.

In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job.

You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial, healthy, nice and culturally sensitive are necessary and useful things to keep your job after you join, but the gatekeeping itself is biased on the other side, which reduces the intake to a trickle.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#72

Post by lisper »

bogomipz wrote: post #66
lisper wrote: post #55

One of the things that has made me old (52) and crotchety is that I learned Lisp very early in my career. That gave me the ability to see that 99% of "new" technologies were really just poor re-inventions of (parts of) Lisp. Even today, Common Lisp -- despite (or, as some would argue, because of) the fact that it hasn't been officially updated in decades is still not only a viable language but one of the best choices…

Out of curiosity what flavor/dialect of LISP do you recommend? Common or something else?

I like Common Lisp, and Clozure CL in particular, but it doesn't really matter all that much. The cool kids seem to be using Clojure (with a J, not a Z) nowadays. Pick whatever works for you.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#73

Post by hvidgaard »

soham wrote: post #71

Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process. In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job. You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial…

I'm not sure it's because the interview favors faster minds. When you're 25, and good at what you're doing, there is a good chance you simply don't see what a 40 years old have to offer. Never mind that the day they turn 40 themself, they'll be able to brig far more value to the table because they have 15 years of additional experience.

If there is noone with 20 years of dev experience within the company, there is noone to speak up for this, and the cycle continues.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#74

Post by lisper »

fulafel wrote: post #70
lisper wrote: post #55

One of the things that has made me old (52) and crotchety is that I learned Lisp very early in my career. That gave me the ability to see that 99% of "new" technologies were really just poor re-inventions of (parts of) Lisp. Even today, Common Lisp -- despite (or, as some would argue, because of) the fact that it hasn't been officially updated in decades is still not only a viable language but one of the best choices…

Isn't there a good big comnunity in Clojure now?

Depends on what you count as "big". If you look at languages used on github, for example:

http://githut.info

Clojure is doing OK (better than Common Lisp), but not great (worse than Haskell and Emacs lisp).

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#75

Post by gesman »

I worked at IBM Research where one of the top experts in malware research was a 60 y/o guy wearing a big copper bell hanging on the rope and he was diving into assembly level code like a water.

Smart companies want smart solutions to tough problems.

Assuming that solution is coming from certain audience, like age/race/gender based is a recipe to failure.

Smart companies are after smart people. Who cares about anything else.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#76

Post by [deleted] »

rifung wrote: post #44

> let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30 I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very…

[deleted]

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#77

Post by neeleshs »

soham wrote: post #71

Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process. In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job. You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial…

Why do you think often faster coders are younger? With many more tricks up their sleeves, a more experienced coder will be faster. Or are you saying compared to literally older people, but not experienced?

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#78

Post by dangero »

soham wrote: post #71

Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process. In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job. You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial…

36 year old checking in. If there is any perceivable gap in speed between a younger and older software engineer, that gap can EASILY be made up with experience. After over 10 years in the industry I can honestly say interview questions aren't that original. If anything I have a huge advantage because I've heard all of them before: Answer a question that demonstrates you understand polymorphism + Algorithms 101 And that covers most of the questions I see right there. Yes it's insanely stupid to interview like that, no I don't think my age does now or ever will put me at a big disadvantage.

In my experience older people get cut out based on not being "a good cultural fit". This has been discussed ad finem on Hacker News because "cultural fit" leads to all kinds of discrimination: racial, gender, age, etc.

Every job I've had we put a person through a series of interviews, then we have a group meeting and we vote. There is no quantifiable evidence that this person actually interviewed the best. It comes down to how people feel in a room. That is the issue, not the speed at which a person can give answers. I've seen people voted down based on all kinds of illegitimate reasons and with age I think it came down to fear in some cases. A lot of software teams don't want to hire the best person they can find. They want to hire someone who is pretty OK, but will also make them look good. Yes, sometimes people don't get the job because they are too good. Am I going to hire someone who makes me look like an under-performer, or could get promoted to before me? Bingo, bad cultural fit.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#79

Post by neeleshs »

JTenerife wrote: post #14

Younger people are not smarter. They might learn faster new things. On the other hand, older people understand related new things much better as they already have a large context (experience). The biggest difference of my current self (44) to my younger self is that I did spend much more energy in my projects when I was younger. I created results much faster at the cost of limited consideration. Now, I can still burn…

Agreed. My current self can understand complex concepts faster than my younger self. Understanding the innards of a distributed database is easier now than ten years back.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#80

Post by cyraxjoe »

rifung wrote: post #44

> let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30 I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very…

That is a recurrent point that Uncle Bob tends to do. In my opinion, sounds resonable. e.g.: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
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