201–210 of 308 posts
Between "tryoldster.com" and "oldgeekjobs.com" it strikes me as a stunning display of blatant ageism. I'm in the second half of my career and I like the idea of writing articles and making the case for hiring experienced men and women. 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).
Is this legal? Seems like age discrimination to recruit via this platform.
There is ageism and it's completely unfounded, but some recruiting leans towards younger workers for whatever reason.
I think this is similar to H1-B's getting jobs for lower wages. Companies tend to believe that adding X developers to problem Y will produce a better/quicker product. They believe this of younger workers at times as well.
They are always wrong. I'm pretty sure my 40 hours is significantly more productive than most 25 year old's 60 or even 80 hours.
What I have observed first hand is that if the job requirements are relatively stable then older people are fantastic, but if the requirements change from month to month (or week to week) then they struggle. As I know from personal experience fluid intelligence declines with age and as you get older rapid change gets increasing difficult to deal with. I wish it were otherwise :(
There are of course exceptions, the problem is that it is really hard to know who can adapt to rapid change in an interview or from a CV. A service that could test the fluid intelligence of job candidates would be very valuable, but it would almost certainly be sued out of existence for discriminating against older employees.
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> 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…
When I was younger, I thought most people over 30 were basically worthless. As I've aged, I changed that up a bit.
Young and old have their place.
When I was in my twenties, and thirties; you couldn't pay me to sit in front of a computer--literally.
What was I interested in? Guess? Girls! And then Girls! And then anything other than sitting at a desk all day, especially looking into a screen. Was I entitled? A bit?
Only as I aged, did computer science become palatable. Do I love it? No, but I haven't loved anything besides a few family members, and my pets.
I think where Hiring Managers get it wrong is assuming all young people will be Rock Stars, with great ideas. They will be happy with free food, and lofty promises. I never bought it. I took what I wanted. I smiled, looked promising, but hated my employers. I would not want to hire myself after college. I finished college ready for med school, and looked back, and could count on my hands what courses weren't a waste of time. I was dissalusioned.
I do think the best ideas still come from mainly young people, but separating the the best from the herd is impossible.
Peter Thiel has the money to throw at young people, and wait for the shooting star. He knows that combination of being young, hormones at full throttle, and angst; might just produce another Mark Zuckerburg. (I used Mark, but he might have just stole an idea, and got very lucky? I honestly haven't figured it out.)
And to be perfectly honest; the young guys, I know, who became rich--all had wealthy enabling fathers. The more I think about it, it was their fathers(50 plus) who provided the idea, and capital, but weren't willing to give up their day gig to see their product through.
The ageism won't go away soon.
I think it will take another five to ten years for the industry to realize you don't need to fire programmer at 40, but who knows?
I personally think in a decade, this profession will be talked about in the past tense. Yes, a few will always have a secure job, but most jobs will be contracted out to the lowest bidder.
Hell, I don't think it will be ten years. Once "Let it go whatever", rehashedidea.com, etc. run out of free money; we will have a huge group of dissalusioned 25-35 year olds. Many will be homeless? Many talking about the good ole days when companies treated you like you were a valuable commodity.
"Rember the free stuff?"
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I'm 63 with a BS in Chemistry and MS in Environmental Systems Engineer. I was a student teacher of microbiology when I was in graduate school. I started coding fortran in HS about 1969 or 1970. > I'm pretty knowledgeable about paid search and social but I don't think my Political Science degree has anything to do with that. To imply that someone's age precludes them from understanding paid search, mobile advertising,…
so you're the exception to the norm; you're one data point against... ;)
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so you're the exception to the norm; you're one data point against... ;)
I am 49 and have a CS Degree, ~25 years experience. I run my own mobile/web development company out of my home, making more money than I ever have before. I've been in business for about 3 years and each year my revenue increases by 20-30% I am principle architect and coder. In order to do this, I have had to learn new languages, frameworks and new ways of thinking about things. Some of those "new" things weren't dif…
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 wonder what an effective approach would be for 40+'ers who don't have kids or other outside constraints. I'm thinking they wouldn't necessarily want to bring it up in an interview, since familial status is a protected class and employers may blanch at statements along these lines.
i know employers aren't supposed to take those things into account but i think they do anyway.
As a slightly older person (I am 46) and employer the issue I have found with older employees is they don’t cope well with frequent change. I have always hired the person I thought was most qualified for the position and so have hired quite a few older people over the years. What I have observed first hand is that if the job requirements are relatively stable then older people are fantastic, but if the requirements c…
As much as we'd like our job to be engineering, it's usually more like craftsmanship. Craftsmanship goes back a LONG ways, and the traditional approach for learning a craft is for apprentices to learn from experienced masters. Those masters can teach you what to do, and what not to do, in the traditional ways that they've learned over many years. What they can't teach you is new techniques that they've developed, unless they're among the few masters that are advancing the craft.
I suspect that works for our craft as well. Most experienced developers can do the work very well, and can also help you to avoid bad practices that they've seen before and can predict the likely outcomes. But only a subset of those experienced developers are able to advance the craft. They have a mixture of the drive and creativity of the younger inexperienced developers, along with the experience to quickly weed out bad ideas and see the potential of the good ideas.
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>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…
I'm pretty confident that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will NOT be big in 2035. Computers will probably have evolved into pretty different forms, and we'll have different ways of interacting with them. However, the principles of engineering good computing systems will probably be pretty similar. And the higher level skills needed to be a good engineer will almost certainly be the same. I…
I have to say that based on my experience I believe very little meta engineering skills would transfer between these two industries. The way software is written for a full authority digital engine control and the way software is written for an e-commerce website have very little in common other than they are both called "software engineering." The process is immensely different, the technology is immensely different, testing is immensely different, integration is immensely different. It's a different universe. If I went back to work for one of those companies I would be starting from the bottom - if they would even hire me. Yes, if you squint really hard, you can see parallels in the two industries - they both test, for example - but to try to extrapolate beyond that is... well, quite a big pitfall.
The things you mentioned - a good sense for designing things for greater productivity, where to be paranoid about failures, what corners can be safely cut, or where the pitfalls are - are extremely different between the two industries.
The nature of computation opens up a boundless universe of possible ways to both run a software project and build a software project. This sets us apart from other engineering disciplines -- there are a limitless number of ways to architect almost any software project, but there are only so many safe ways to build a bridge.
This allows our industry to fork off into places we can't possibly imagine today. I agree with you that in 2035, our field will be very different.