171–180 of 440 posts
The best place in tech for older is a govt. job where age skewers older and you may even be a minority amongst your fellow laid back/no drama, hard working Indian co-workers. The pay is more then good too!
I don't find this post inspiring, I find it sad. It's partly self-encouragment, part PR. The fact that it even exists is proof that the author is facing some issues, no matter how confident they would like to appear. That recipe to stay current looks tiresome. Listen to two podcasts, two webcasts, subscribe to four magazines, teach courses, go to one conference per year, blog regularly, read blogs, follow the latest…
Almost every ageism post I've read on HN ignores the hundreds of thousands of others jobs that exist outside of [hot SV tech companies] (avg age at FB is 28? no way!), and also don't mention those people who are right of the bell curve and working at companies like that (because their experience actually is valuable). Some of these posts are real ageism claims, but most are "I'm old, I'm scared, how am I going to sur…
I'm going to apologize ahead of time. this might be a ramble. 63 year old white guy with little hair and a lifelong beard that is now white. A tad overweight as well. I feel for so many people expressing angst about ageism. I've seen it elsewhere but not where I work now. I suspect that at the faster growing companies and companies in tech centers, mostly on the coasts, see more pronounced ageism. My last job was at…
^A golden nugget buried in an insightful ramble.
(BTW: just so it's clear I apply this same rule to everyone - this is the same advice I would give to any discriminated group, whether women in tech, people of color, Jewish or Asian or whatever group that find themselves on the victim side of discrimination)
Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. Be razer clear what your value is.
Almost every one will have some or other circumstance where some trait of his/her counts against himself, that is life, but these are merely speedbumps on the way, not show stoppers.
If you can't overcome bias at one specific company or in one specific country, move or do whatever YOU can do to solve it. Crying aint gonna fix it.
Take acid and go to crazy festivals if you want to stay young. No really, do it once at least. You need to bathe in youth from time to time in order to experience it - it's fantastic. Of course you need to keep up to date, try to use your wisdom to understand which technology/language is going to survive the test of time. For example, C/C++ is going to stick around for a while; make sure you're up to date (C++ 14 and…
I usually use statistics. If you select a random point on the lifetime of something. There is a 50% chance, that you are closer to the middle then either start or end. Thus: Always assume you are roughly in the middle of the lifetime. In other words, if some technology is only one year old, assume it is dead in another year.
1) Most business-critical projects have long lifetimes. There's a reason why banks are still running COBOL and mainframes, and why Java's continued promise of backward compatibility with every new release is so valuable to companies.
2) Maintaining legacy systems is a bitch. Nobody likes maintaining legacy systems.
3) Therefore no employer wants to hire somebody who writes code which almost immediately turns into legacy code, either because it's not tested, or not written using modern language features designed to make the language safer, etc.
4) Learning to write code in a modern fashion requires continued education.
5) Employers will not budget or pay for this continued education in a no-compete-clauses-are-illegal environment where smart employees will take the training and run to another employer willing to pay for the benefit of another employer which already put in the legwork of investing in that employee.
6) Employees therefore need to spend significant time educating themselves on their own time. This is great for the minority who are computer geeks who treat it as a hobby and it's terrible for everyone else.
7) Most people will not spend personal time educating themselves, because they prefer to invest that time in friends and family. This is all the more true, not less true, after one's children are grown.
8) Therefore they slowly become unemployable as their skill set turns obsolete.
9) Therefore employers have a hard time finding older people who do have that combination of a modern skill set and decades of general industry experience. And it's for the same reason it was difficult to hire any programmers at all in the 90's, because the competent labor pool (then in general and now in the older age group) is basically limited to computer geeks.
10) Continued interviews of older people who did not bother to keep their skill set modern and honed creates a stereotype that old people aren't "smart".
It's not a problem that some Chief Diversity Officer at some Big Four company can solve, because they're either going to literally fight human nature (people desiring quality time with their families) or they're going to adapt an affirmative action policy that'll only make the problem worse, as prefer-false-negative hiring policies set up to protect codebases from incompetence get overturned for what's essentially a political reason, breeding resentment.
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…
I used to be able to burn longer when I was twenty, but I'd spend that fuel on shit I've learned doesn't matter like 100% test case coverage, setting up continuous integration servers, and load testing against massive amounts of traffic I'd never see. I could go on and on about the stuff I'd do I don't do anymore. It's not that those things don't have their place, or that all young programmers are guilty of premature…
Either in your current role / in interviews / on the street?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why you think I haven't learned new technologies. I have learned them whenever I needed to. Most of the new technologies are not that special. That makes them easy to learn, but, also, kind of annoying because I can see that they're just repeating a mistake I've seen 20 years ago already.
I obviously don't think you haven't learned new technologies in 25+ years. It seemed like the claim to ageism was that the kiddies expect you to know the hot, new technology. Requiring knowledge of new technologies for candidates isn't exclusive to veterans. And it's definitely not a requirement of the other 90% of companies that are using older technologies.
My point, going up this discussion thread a few clicks, was that new technology is not always better than the old. Ageism comes into play when one's opinion about the new tech is dismissed just because one has some gray hair.
I'm going to apologize ahead of time. this might be a ramble. 63 year old white guy with little hair and a lifelong beard that is now white. A tad overweight as well. I feel for so many people expressing angst about ageism. I've seen it elsewhere but not where I work now. I suspect that at the faster growing companies and companies in tech centers, mostly on the coasts, see more pronounced ageism. My last job was at…
"I find these days I spend less time coding and I end up with better applications because I think through the design before coding." ^A golden nugget buried in an insightful ramble.
Great irony also is that I've seen teams try to be agile, which they seem to think means code > design.. Often ends up poorly.