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Show HN: Hire an Oldster
161–170 of 308 posts
Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
That wisdom makes you of negative business value to your manager, since he still believes 60-hour gauntlets are an intrinsic part of being on time and under budget. Hence, you won't get hired.
More like, I won't "hire" him. Hiring is a two way street. Always ask about how much overtime is expected from a job during interviews. If you don't believe in >40 hour work weeks, except maybe under rare conditions, then don't "hire" your prospective employer.
But once a recruiter has this type of experience with a few older candidates, they will be more likely to discount older candidates in the future, regardless of whether those later individuals were willing to do 60+ hour weeks or not.
Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster
#163Cool idea. There are some creative people out there. Rather than complain about the perceived age discrimination in tech and business generally, someone decided to do something about it. I hope it helps people.
I wonder if there's a broader solution to the problem that might involve more outreach and educational efforts to communicate to the younger folk that us oldsters have something valuable to offer, despite our encroaching senility and decrepitude :)
Perhaps however, the proof's in the pudding. Nudge some of the bigger corps. like Facebook & Google to expand the upper end of the age range a bit, and then people will rub shoulders with people possessing different and possibly broader life experience.
That said, I do find lots of 20-30-something techies to be quite smart and experienced so am not trying to knock them here. Quite often it comes down to the individual's qualities and not merely their numerical age.
Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster
#164If 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…
So the TLDR is old people are the problem? I see....
Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse). If this is the case, then when someone entered the workforce has absolutely no relevance. What is relevant is staying current. It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old. > How confident are we that the…
> It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old. I don't know if I agree with that. When I was 25, I was all over every new technology that came out. I was the expert in my group. I'm now pushing 50. The latest tech isn't nearly as interesting. And honestly, I'm getting tired of chasing it. My energy level has dropped a bit. Physically I'm not in as…
I'm your age, and I think a good example of what you're talking about is javascript frameworks. Younger programmers might dissect each one and suss out the details like any of us might have done with CONFIG.SYS, but as an older programmer they all seem essentially similar and as far as professional skills go I can probably either just choose one or wait until the dominant one shakes out. This of course is aided by my sense/prediction/bigotry that JS frameworks are following Hotelling's Law.
Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster
#166If 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…
And so hiring managers simply reject older candidates out of hand.
No matter what level of training/education the candidate has (and likely his existing skill set far exceeds the value of a ruby boot-camp), the preconception will preclude it ever being seen at certain shops.
Rather than pretending there is no ageism and it's all the candidate's fault, what is needed is a list of companies that simply will not hire people over 35. That way we can all stop wasting eachother's time.
Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster
#167[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster
#168If 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 read #2 about kids and beer bonding and it really irks the heck out of me. This is our industry? A bunch of selfish immatures? Nice.
Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster
#169So, I'm not an oldster, not a young'un, but somewhere in between in my mid 40's, and I've been in this industry for over 20 years at this point. I see my friends from the same age group go different ways; quite a number stay in tech as employees, getting more senior and climbing the engineer ladder. They're the ones who are affected by age discrimination, particularly as they get into their 50's and over. The other g…
How have your colleagues who became managers fared?
Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not that bad. All are in a push CMS. We have a staff for content and UX. Many sites are small. Probably total 15,000 pages for all sites. These are univeristy sites so they are not complex apps. But there is a lot of backend code and middleware for pushing files to the CDN and to an xml database.
All right. I'll be honest, I forgot what thread we were on, I was just in awe at all of the sites you run. My next thought was, "man, I wish I could use some guy like him, but he is just too expensive." One thing is for sure: there are definitely, 100%, no-questions about it, over 1 people who can be reached and who, at least for a few months, would take over 15,000 pages and 154+ sites. (An early 20s hacker). For un…
Once you find the person stupid enough to accept crap pay for doing something that earns you tons of profit - are you sure you found a person smart enough to do what you need?