81–90 of 308 posts
Venues which seem to explicitly encourage candidates/jobseekers to focus on age violate the spirit of the law if not the letter (29 U.S.C. § 626).
If you take a survey of hiring managers they will point to three primary reasons that candidates 40 - 60 have a harder time finding jobs: 1) They are typically more expensive than "market" for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc. 2) They are less flexible - the…
Older people _can_ run 60 hour gauntlets. We're just wise enough to know that it leads to no good outcome.
If you take a survey of hiring managers they will point to three primary reasons that candidates 40 - 60 have a harder time finding jobs: 1) They are typically more expensive than "market" for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc. 2) They are less flexible - the…
> higher related costs like healthcare for a family How exactly is this a concern for a hiring manager ? I thought a company's employees were insured as a pool. In any case, discriminating against someone because of their healthcare status is pretty scummy (in my opinion), but I don't even understand why this is a concern, let alone a legitimate one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 40 and don't feel that way at all.
…and not an "unknown," perhaps laid-off, looking for work, correct?
But really, I mean I don't feel even slightly threatened by the technical ability of 20-something coders. I was warned throughout much of my career that I'd eventually have to head off to management to keep afloat, but, nope, that was bogus advice.
I can go into more detail here but I'm derailing things slightly already. It is not my contention that ageism isn't a thing. I'm sure it is --- I mean, I'm confident it's a real problem.
I'm just pushing back on the "40 is 1000 in tech years" snark. No, it isn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a weird experience if you're a clever youngster. I liken it to speed vs torque. I have to rely on being fast and being able to scan a problem as fast as I can to understand it. But an older engineer will just know the lay of the land. I had this happen a lot with an older electrical engineer. He seemed slow and I looked to run circles around everyone, but he could point to things as a root cause before I even un…
This is fundamentally true and basically is a great anecdotal argument for why we have the concept of a PE. Edit: Context is America and also obviously this isn't a thing in software but is very much the normal way of doing business in classical engineering.
If you take a survey of hiring managers they will point to three primary reasons that candidates 40 - 60 have a harder time finding jobs: 1) They are typically more expensive than "market" for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc. 2) They are less flexible - the…
> higher related costs like healthcare for a family How exactly is this a concern for a hiring manager ? I thought a company's employees were insured as a pool. In any case, discriminating against someone because of their healthcare status is pretty scummy (in my opinion), but I don't even understand why this is a concern, let alone a legitimate one.
If you take a survey of hiring managers they will point to three primary reasons that candidates 40 - 60 have a harder time finding jobs: 1) They are typically more expensive than "market" for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc. 2) They are less flexible - the…
I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) and it's astounding. I can't imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be. If you're hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an "acceptable tradeoff of competency" unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place. Also if you're 50 and are relying on a new job's retirement program you're probably…
I completely agree (I'm 32), but what is worrying is the possibility of a fundamental shift that doesn't occur within individual companies but rather manifests itself as a new industry of sorts, and then a slow decline of the industry we're in right now - a paradigm shift, for a lack of a better term. That one is harder to detect until it's blatantly obvious, at which point the early practitioners in the new industry are now the senior engineers and newly minted college graduates are overwhelmingly starting their career in the new industry. Developers in the old industry have to cling on to whatever jobs are left or start over.
My uncle is a good example of this - he's in his 50s and has spent most of his career working in what are now ancient IBM technology stacks (ever hear of RPG?) He saw object oriented programming as snake oil and a passing fad. When there were finally no jobs left near him for working in this IBM stack, he begrudgingly learned Java/C#/JavaScript/SQL and took a major pay/prestige cut basically starting over.
It's not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse). What experience ends up transferring to the new industry? Soft skills, perhaps, but lots of people outside either the old or new industry have good soft skills experience, so what do you bring to the table that they don't?
This isn't an "age problem." It's something deeper than that. If my uncle had jumped ship from his IBM world and into e-commerce in the 90s, which he was perfectly capable of doing, he would probably be a senior leader somewhere right now. But how could he have known? When the .com bubble burst, he probably felt vindicated in his decision to stay put.
How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035? I'm not very confident at all. But how do I recognize when to jump ship?
edit: grammar
If you take a survey of hiring managers they will point to three primary reasons that candidates 40 - 60 have a harder time finding jobs: 1) They are typically more expensive than "market" for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc. 2) They are less flexible - the…
I attended a lecture last week, older people were one of the topics that got touched. Instead of having old employees teaching the younger, he told a story of a business requiring old people to receive fresh young employees as their mentor.
If you take a survey of hiring managers they will point to three primary reasons that candidates 40 - 60 have a harder time finding jobs: 1) They are typically more expensive than "market" for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc. 2) They are less flexible - the…
We tried it like that before and this is what will happen. But instead if you do it this way you will be more successful.
Some bosses may not like the push back and see it as questioning their authority. However if they can overlook that the teams they manage will be more successful.
If you're unemployed in IT over 50, especially in Silicon Valley, you're going to have to adjust your salary expectations down. The older programmer may not want to work for less but it is far better than the alternative.