I really hope that the ageist title was on purpose.
Why Ageism Never Gets Old
11–20 of 272 posts
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#12As the bulge in older people progresses and ageism becomes worse in an irrational way, it may make sense for older people to come together and form companies of their own, focused on selling to older people, who, of course, have the wealth (if not always the income).
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#13Well, I am 37 and in my Junior year of a Computer Science degree. I'm not gonna lie, this freaks me out a bit. I do live on the east coast though, hopefully that will help some.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#14How about y'all stop complaining about everything
Would you please stop posting like this, read the guidelines, and then comment civilly and substantively?
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#15> 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 think the "half life of knowledge" misses so many parts of what makes a SW developer good. Sure, there are new languages, libraries and frameworks to learn and keep up with. But the fundamental parts of programming don't change - it is still sequences, loops, if-statements. Also, quite a large part is independent of the language - how to break the problem down into parts, thinking through the scenarios that can occur, good naming, consistency in the small and large.
Not to mention everything else that isn't programming per se - domain knowledge, talking to people, negotiating, in which order to develop things...
More details on what I think makes a good dev: https://henrikwarne.com/2014/06/30/what-makes-a-good-program... and about programmer knowledge: https://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#16> 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…
Yep, that engineering half-life is so much bullshit. Electromagnetics hasn’t changed much in 120 years. Maybe a new transistor topology comes out every 20 years.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#17I 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.
"Ageism seems largely concentrated on the Silicon-Valley style society."
I saw ageism many years ago at a big aerospace firm in the L.A. area. It was understood and even outspoken that young engineers would get the call to work extra hours and weekends if needed, as well as the occasional graveyard shift when a unit was in thermovac testing. Older engineers were not usually called upon become they had "paid their dues" as young engineers. Colleagues at other big aerospace firms said is was pretty much the same for them. Ageism for sure, in hardware development, and not in Silicon Valley.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#18Well, I am 37 and in my Junior year of a Computer Science degree. I'm not gonna lie, this freaks me out a bit. I do live on the east coast though, hopefully that will help some.
So do I, and I haven't fallen foul of it yet.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"Ageism seems largely concentrated on the Silicon-Valley style society." I saw ageism many years ago at a big aerospace firm in the L.A. area. It was understood and even outspoken that young engineers would get the call to work extra hours and weekends if needed, as well as the occasional graveyard shift when a unit was in thermovac testing. Older engineers were not usually called upon become they had "paid their due…
And I'm sure the older engineers will be more likely to be called upon when the situation demands experience, no?
I fail to see the harm in "discriminating" a bit against the younger engineers by having them collect more experience.
Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old
#20> 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 Inf…
C# has been around since 2002. 15 years. It's changed quite a bit since it's introduction. C# is just a wee tot compared to C.