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Show HN: Hire an Oldster

tryoldster.com

191–200 of 308 posts

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#191
post #171

I'm not old, 32, but this problem worries me. My plan for addressing the "Must keep up with latest tech" problem is to CREATE the latest technology. My hope if I create enough of it that in 15 years I'll be that old guy who created tech X or Y and nobody is going to bother wondering if I can keep up. Will this plan work? Who knows. Best way to predict the future is create it right?

What happens when the technology you created becomes "last year's" technology? Then you have to continually create the latest tech, which is probably even more exhausting than simply keeping up with the latest.

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#192

Earlier 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…

Is it just me or does this comment make no sense at all?

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#193
post #42

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 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.

Yeah, fuck that bullshit. Irked the heck out of me too. I hope it's not too common.

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah it irks me when people with kids think they are better than people who don't too. ;)

Appropriate username? They never said they thought they were better.

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's nothing stupid about working for $30,000 doing a job that's worth half a million, when your friends are earning $20,000 as barristas at starbucks." That's patently false. Undervaluing your labor because your friends work in a poorly compensated industry makes no sense. If anything the money you are earning when you are younger is more important to secure for ROI purposes.

All right: to the best of my current understanding, there is nothing wrong with ever taking a salary vastly under market in one's twenties, including literally performing CTO-level work worth half a million and equal to the work of many developers under you (or hell, even leading or directing them), for $30,000. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's not a bad life choice. Especially if one's social life is also i…

I feel like you're not fully articulating your point here; in what circumstance would prioritizing leisure entail working for 6% of one's market value?

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#196
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A two week crunch time every 6 months is OK, maybe even beneficial Being overworked nearly 10% of the time is not "OK"

Depends how often you're underworked.

If people are overworked 10% and underworked 10% (or any other similar number) that's an "project management smell". I wouldn't want to work there.

Unless they offer tons of vacation. :-)

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then that recruiter should schedule themselves for a rectal occipital extraction :)

At the risk of sounding like an apologist for ageism -- why?

There's no magic button you can push in your brain that says 'don't form conditional expectations based on protected categories'. If you're a recruiter and older candidates keep blowing you off, would you really continue to put in the same amount of effort to try to recruit them, even if you consciously attempted to?

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#198
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. 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…

> He saw object oriented programming as snake oil and a passing fad for how long ? I dont blame him for reading about C++ in 1989 and saying "hrmmmf! hogwash!". But in 1995 ? in 2000 ? It sounds like he got set in his ways, and how is that NOT an "age problem" ? I'm also 32, and I'm getting slightly more set in my ways as I get older. > he begrudgingly learned Java/C#/JavaScript/SQL and took a major pay/prestige cut…

I've got a year on you and I think I'd agree that OO is snake oil. The worst code bases I've ever seen (and I've seen some horrors) have been from over used inheritance and mixing logic and data. Provided you avoid global state (also a problem with OO) I think a c program would be more understandable than a lot of java/c# ones.

Not to say there aren't useful features, that would go well with a language like c, like interfaces, but I'd love to get rid of inheritance, encapsulation and mixing data and code.

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#199
post #130

Earlier 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…

At 25 everything seems new and exiciting, now in my mid 30's I'm starting to see new tech as just a new spin on old ideas. If you were familiar with smalltalk for instance, you probably wouldn't have found java or .net particularly exciting, you probably wouldn't have as hard a time picking it up either.

Re: Show HN: Hire an Oldster

#200
post #28

I was recently working with an older developer. I don't know, maybe of 65 or 70 years. He was working on aerospace network intrusion detection systems, and I was helping him set up a simulation system. He was slinging around low-level computer architecture terminology, while I was quickly trying to access what I remembered from a college class 15 years prior, just to keep up with the conversation. Older programmers a…

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…

I'm on the opposite end of this as I'm pushing 40. It's like speed chess vs chess over snail mail. I tend to see all the way to the end of a problem within moments of hearing about it, already formulating solutions to edge cases 10 steps ahead while others seem to ask almost quaint questions about the first step. They spin very quickly while I don't appear to be doing anything at all, yet I often go completely around a problem. It generally takes me longer to explain how I arrived at the solution than it does to just solve it. But I've been trying to be more communicative, to work in a more communal way so that others can participate and I can count on them.

Of course nobody believes me about any of this and I've long given up trying to explain. I just quietly go about my work. It's frustrating though because I have no real leverage, no way to demonstrate my experience other than to just keep plodding odd glacially. I've utterly failed in any kind of management role but at the same time am having a hard time letting go of being a "hands on" dev in the trenches. I just hope that the level playing field of the internet dissolves agism before I'm faced with its ramifications.

An added bonus of brain age is being able to remember people's names. I never used to be able to do that, and I never tried to learn. It just happened one day. I guess I care more about people now and it seems like the least I can do is remember their fricken name.

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