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On Getting Older in Tech

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Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#211

Post by Jaruzel »

to3m wrote: post #200
jgdx wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the author failed to explain this abbreviation is beyond me. Who in their 50s doesn't know that you spell out important concepts and key terms, then shorten them in parentheses?

Maybe it didn't occur to him that people wouldn't know what it is. If you were writing an article about programming, would you explain what BASIC stands for?

No of course not, everyone knows it stands for 'Badgers Are Super Intelligent Creatures'.

:)

(Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code... which now I type it out, obviously cheats. From here on, it shall be known as BAPSIC.)

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#212

Post by gaius »

solatic wrote: post #177

There's a reason why ageism exists in the industry and it isn't because of some undeserved stereotype about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks. 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…

Therefore no employer wants to hire somebody who writes code which almost immediately turns into legacy code

But what is "legacy" or not is not to do with technology, but fashion. Let me give you an example: everyone rants on here about what awful languages PHP and JS are. Is COBOL really a worse language than either of those? If so why? What algorithms or data structures can't be implemented in it? What tooling doesn't exist?

The only reason COBOL is considered a legacy language is because it's unfashionable, and a large part of that - I'm not even kidding - is the clothes COBOL programmers used to wear have fallen out of fashion. There's actually no reason that you couldn't use it for any application you might want to write today, and it would probably be more productive to do so than some modern languages...

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#213

Post by IshKebab »

inimino wrote: post #129
IshKebab wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"First appeared: 1959" and it looks it. I don't think the author is doing himself any favours by going on about such an archaic language!

...and that's exactly the attitude the author is pointing out.

No, the author is actually saying that that attitude is fine. His point is that you need to keep learning and doing things that are relevant today, not learn today's technology and then stick with it for the rest of your career.

> I could tell you about all my accomplishments over three decades, such as replacing the use of a System/3 punch card system with the AS/400, writing a Cobol debugger, or…. Ah, I’m boring you. What you do care about are things I did in the last two years.

RPG is only relevant today in the same way Cobol is.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#214

Post by falcolas »

otaviokz wrote: post #172
smokestack wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed. The deliberate ignoring the whole world outside FB/Google is a alarming sign that the idea is just to get blog reads by piggybacking the last bombastic statement by someone famous in the sw industry.

> ignoring the whole world outside FB/Google

The whole world outside of GAFA looks to those companies for "how to do software development right" - no matter if they are right or not.

I've watched more than a few well established companies start to ape Google's hiring practices, or Amazon's churn, or Facebook's development practices just to try and attract new young developers.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#215

Post by timemachiner »

I'll probably be ~36 by the time I complete a PhD in CS. Should I be OK in terms of finding jobs at hip companies upon graduation (big 4, etc)? My areas of interest is in ML, algorithms but I'm completely OK with normal software development positions.

Reason I'm older is I decided I had a passion for it in my late 20s / wanted to do research, but had to go back to school to take classes before enrolling into a PhD. Hope my age + PhD wouldn't hinder me for software development jobs?

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#216

Post by Icedcool »

32yr old here. This is interesting to me, coming from times of 28kbps internet where the dude with a huge beard was a tech god.

Reading this and reading the posts, I'm aware of what occurs to be a trade off in young/age, in that young can be cutting edge while old tends to have wisdom/smarter about approach/worldlyness.

Seems shortsighted to think that young is better.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#217

Post by huherto »

zeroer wrote: post #202
delegate wrote: post #156

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…

> Have lots of sex - your wife will love you again :) Not in my experience ... oh, you meant with her.

"Take a mistress. Your wife will believe that you are with your mistress. Your mistress will believe that you are with your wife. And you can spend more time hacking code."

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#218

Post by whostolemyhat »

entropy_ wrote: post #181
metafunctor wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. JavaScript, the core language, is OK. Sure, there are warts, like this , lack of a good module system, and weird type coercions. Most of the bad rap JavaScript gets is because it lives in the browser, and the DOM, with all the cross browser issues that come with that. It's not all JavaScript's fault. In fact, most of it is definitely not JavaScript's fault.

At least as far as I'm concerned, the biggest wart of all is variables that are global by default. That just makes no sense at all...

But this was fixed with strict mode; this is like criticising Java for not having generics, even though generics were added ages ago.

You can still assign/use global variables in the browser, but like the parent says, this is the browser's fault - having to accept old and badly-written code for compatibility reasons.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#219

Post by mxuribe »

I'm a 42 year old technologist who just got laid off last week, and very much dread age discrimination. Although I'm told that I look about 8 or 10 years younger than I look, it still scares me. And, funny enough I'm about as energetic - or very close to it - as I was when I was 22. Beyond all the great notes that the blog post's author wrote, I think the parts about "exude energy...it’s crucial to be spirited." really hit home with me. Especially now with my current situation, i appreciate this blog post!

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#220

Post by djedipus »

I think it’s more about not appreciating experience enough as opposed to discriminating against age. I’m 31 with 13 years professional experience. I’ve worked as an employee, contractor and as a single person start-up. Last year I interviewed for ~10 jobs in SV and I was rejected for all of them. None of the jobs valued my experience enough to consider my asking salary to be worth it. I make ~$300K USD contracting and was willing to take a pay cut to ~$240K to work at a big company and for access to big problems. I found out, via a friend, that one of the jobs I missed out on was due to my asking salary. They ended up hiring a guy with much less experience for ~$120K for the position. A year later and the project failed due to lack of experience costing many millions of dollars. I wanted them to succeed and I know that I could have done it but I’m not going back to $120K - at $300K customers only let you work on important stuff, no busy work. This story gets repeated over and over. There is a culture problem that doesn’t value experience. It’s not my problem because I'll go to where my experienced is most valued; it’s SVs problem because it results in failed projects and wasted money.
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