"Many young people can read the face of their iPhone better than the face of the person sitting next to them. I’m not saying young people don’t understand emotions. Our digital world is full of emojis, and the term “emo” didn’t exist back in my schoolyard days. But emojis don’t create interpersonal, face-to-face fluency." I am really tired of statements like these.
> I am really tired of statements like these. Sure, but is it wrong ?
Yes I think so.
Even if it isn't, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that its actually true.
The bit about emojis in particular however seems completely out of touch.
I'm 42 now, still highly employable, although not at all companies. And that's fine. They want someone who can churn out cheap but perhaps not so good code, more power to them. That's not what I'm interested in, anyway. But I know what I'm worth. I know that my code is top notch. I know that my standards are above most things out there, and it shows. I've released almost half a million lines of code for free as open…
Half of us are average coders. I'd still like a job at 50. This isn't an issue in other professions. Doctors don't become stale with age. Lawyers typically become partners.
You can say this may be survivorship bias. But I at least haven't seen the data that says this is survivorship bias. I haven't seen really solid numbers about how unemployed software engineers are at 50. All I've got are vague and anecdotally-substantiated allegations of age bias in Silicon Valley, which may be localized in the startup arena, and also Silicon Valley is not the entire industry.
I saw lots of people commenting about it on job sites in many places that arent Silicon Valley. Others had to train their young or H1-B replacements as their last duty. There's definitely more data out there than Silicon Valley complaints.
Their voices are also being silenced by conditions imposed for unemployment/etc.
I think things work differently at the C-suite level. This guy was never a developer. He was a founder and CEO with a successful exit. He was hired as a former founder and CEO, by a business working in the same space in which he was a founder and CEO. It's an interesting story, but unfortunately its relevance to the career trajectory of the average tech old-timer is somewhere close to zero.
Given how jobs seem to be dying, self employment may be the wave of the future. It was also something the founders of the U.S. thought was critical as a foundation for a truly free and empowered society. I think this is correct. When I had a corporate job, I worried a lot that they would trip across my online activities and fire me for them for some damn reason. It seriously curtailed my online activities for a time.…
There's a problem, of course. The economy has centuries of history of filtering out all competition and leading to monopolies/monopolistic competition. There are significant pressures in the 'free' economy toward centralization of power. Those pressures include over half of the US political landscape. Small business can't save itself let alone the rest of us.
This just feels irrelevant to me. Ageism is directed towards older individual contributors, not higher level executives whose job is mostly strategy. (And unofficially, providing meaning and perspective to the younger workers) It even seems to provide proof that being an older IC makes you irrelevant because the success story is not a coder. The lesson is that as you age it's either up or out. You either learn higher…
This just feels irrelevant to me. Ageism is directed towards older individual contributors, not higher level executives whose job is mostly strategy. (And unofficially, providing meaning and perspective to the younger workers) It even seems to provide proof that being an older IC makes you irrelevant because the success story is not a coder. The lesson is that as you age it's either up or out. You either learn higher…
This just feels irrelevant to me. Ageism is directed towards older individual contributors, not higher level executives whose job is mostly strategy. (And unofficially, providing meaning and perspective to the younger workers) It even seems to provide proof that being an older IC makes you irrelevant because the success story is not a coder. The lesson is that as you age it's either up or out. You either learn higher…
Survivorship bias. There are plenty of older engineers who are still quite curious on the unemployment line.
Note that the author isn't an engineer; he's the ex-CEO of a hotel company. One believes the situations to be somewhat different.
Yeah, hello? This is the most atypical model possible for older tech workers. A hugely successful hospitality CEO joins a tech startup disrupting the global hospitality industry. How is that experience instructive for anyone except Chip Conley? Emotional intelligence in Mr. Conley's world apparently doesn't require any sense of irony. How hospitable.