Why Ageism Never Gets Old
newyorker.com
Why Ageism Never Gets Old
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Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#2Silicon Valley, in particular, has always seemed to me to fetishise the pseudo-legendary brilliant young school leaver overachiever superstar. Anyone who hasn't burned out by the time they hit 40 is clearly either lazy or an underachiever, and therefore not the sort of person we would want to hire.
The Valley's most cherished myths are amongst some of the most societally detrimental.
(Disclosure: I'm 40 and work in tech. This sort of thing gives me waking nightmares.)
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#3> In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three.
This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Yes there are new languages and frameworks we have to learn, but if we apply any effort (and we've stayed current over the years) that happens really quickly because we're just integrating all the knowledge we already have around a new set of features.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#4I always love to hear about cultures where old people are the most respected of a society. I think such cultures are happier, because they ensure that the future looks bright, no matter how old someone is.
But ... such cultures might be in conflict with the information society we have built.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#5I always love to hear about cultures where old people are the most respected of a society. I think such cultures are happier, because they ensure that the future looks bright, no matter how old someone is. But ... such cultures might be in conflict with the information society we have built.
Not really.
Ageism seems largely concentrated on the Silicon-Valley style society.
As far as I am concerned, ageism does not exist at my workplace. Old engineers, even software engineers are looked for because they bring possibly valueable experience.
The simple truth is that ageism is a result of not valuing the lessons of an experienced engineer because they're not up-to-date enough.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#6I always love to hear about cultures where old people are the most respected of a society. I think such cultures are happier, because they ensure that the future looks bright, no matter how old someone is. But ... such cultures might be in conflict with the information society we have built.
I would be interested to hear stories about whether it changes as demographics changes. If there is a declining birth rate, does culture move toward the middle aged? I would like to think so, but I've read that Japan is still a youth culture despite aging population.
Maybe the opposite is true, as the article implies. When mortality is high and there are fewer old people they acquire value through scarcity.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#7> In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three. This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Yes there are new languages and fr…
This mythology leads directly to horribly created software that will either ensure many terrible security breaches in the future or the continued proliferation of "magic" throughout a product.
One of the issues is using the word "engineer" for any of the brogrammer types. an engineer in any other proper engineering discipline does not become worthless with age, their experience actually counts for something.
Somehow we have confused people who stitch together software from pieces of "magic" that they do not understand with engineers.
The work I did in my 20s cannot even begin to compare with what I am doing today in my 30s. Those years of experience really makes a massive difference.
It is time people are honest about ageism and simply states the real reason they prefer fresh grad or 20-something brogrammers. It normally boils down to those people being willing to work longer hours for less money. At least in most of the cases of ageism that I have seen.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#8> In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three. This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Yes there are new languages and fr…
I've worked in C, embedded and server-side, for about 15 years of my 17 year career. Companies I've worked with recently are having trouble finding C-capable developers, particularly C developers who have the first clue about 'modern' developments like CI and CD, or git.
C is a language invented in the 70s. If you kept up with thread APIS when they became usable in the late 90s you could quite easily have had a 40 year career in one tech stack, and be looking at a bit of consultancy by now (if you haven't moved in to management or other areas).
So even without keeping current on frameworks and languages, the idea that knowledge becomes obsolete in our field after just a few years is wrong. You do need to keep an eye on wider trends and newer tools, but still.
That said, there is still ageism in this arena. And I'm breaking out because, really, there are better things to be doing in 2017 :)
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#9> In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three. This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Yes there are new languages and fr…
Even languages and frameworks don't change that much outside of certain niches. Django and Rails have been around for over a decade. Go, a "new" language, is eight years old. I've been working for 5.5 years with a Python-based platform called Odoo (purely by chance of employment) and I don't see it going away any time soon.
A colleague of mine also recently got a very good offer for helping maintain a codebase in Informix-4GL.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#10How about y'all stop complaining about everything