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Why Ageism Never Gets Old

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Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#161

Post by logfromblammo »

acuozzo wrote: post #122
YeeHawGeddyUp wrote: post #13

Well, 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.

I'm not kidding here… If you're eligible for a clearance, move to MD or VA and work for a DoD contracting company. I'm 29, but most of the people I work with are 40-60+. Ageism simply doesn't exist here and the salaries (6+ figures for new grads) and benefits are excellent.

If you don't want to live in the DC Metro, you can also move to any city adjacent to a major military base. Huntsville, NW Florida, San Diego, Clarksville, Waukegan, Ft. Worth, etc.

Salaries are lower, but traffic is better.

Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#162

Post by fjsolwmv »

henrik_w wrote: post #15
jeremyjh wrote: post #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 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 occ…

Remember when we were all becoming functional programmers and we put loops and if-statements behind us?

Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#163

Post by irrational »

The code I wrote in my 20s was pure garbage. The code I wrote in my 30s was embarrassing. The code I'm writing in my 40s is perhaps passable. I'm hoping that by the time I get to my 60s I will be able to write good code. I'll probably retire just as I'm hitting my peak as a programmer.

Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#164

Post by ChiliDogSwirl »

irrational wrote: post #163

The code I wrote in my 20s was pure garbage. The code I wrote in my 30s was embarrassing. The code I'm writing in my 40s is perhaps passable. I'm hoping that by the time I get to my 60s I will be able to write good code. I'll probably retire just as I'm hitting my peak as a programmer.

In my 40s and feeling the same. It's the sad irony of life that just as we get truly good at this stuff, we either retire or move into management.

Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#165

Post by jpindar »

whack wrote: post #103

> "Dan Lyons, a fifty-one-year-old Newsweek reporter, gets his first shock when he’s laid off. “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college,” he’s told" I wonder to what extent, the above is the reason behind senior workers having a harder time finding/maintaining their job. It almost sounds like a Keynesian liquidity trap. People expect their salaries to continually grow over the course of thei…

How do you signal that you'd be willing to work for low pay though? That would look really weird on a resume.

Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#166

Post by lmm »

mbesto wrote: post #146
jasode wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>median age of an American is 41. That we're discussing people in that age range as counterexamples kind of proves the point. Don't take my previous post as a complete dataset. It was only coincidence that I happen to list programmers in their 40s off the top of my head. Here are some more in their 60s: - Google also hired Vint Cerf (TCPIP) at age 62. - Amazon AWS recently hired James Gosling (Java) age ~62. - PayPal…

> will actually discriminate against the young 20-somethings for certain roles. Uhh that's not age discrimination, that's creating a job role "Chief Internet Evanglist" and hiring the best person for the job, "Vint Cerf". Do you think anyone other than the creator of the TCPIP protocol could fill that role regardless of age? Also, isn't there also an implicit age discrimination against younger people in any job spec…

> isn't there also an implicit age discrimination against younger people in any job spec when you say "X years experience"?

Yes there is, and it's lazy and wrong. Figure out how to test for the skills you need; how many years someone's been using something is only very weakly correlated with how well they know it.

Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#167

Post by danjoc »

Ageism Burnout

Change what you call it and the conversation changes. It depends on the narrative the author wants to push. Those two things are related.

The middle age software dev you burned out then tossed aside has the children most likely to be software devs. You spoil your reputation with the kids before they're even old enough to apply at your company.

You've also increased the chance that, due to unstable home life thanks to layoff, the kids won't ever become software devs in the future. Then you complain about needing H1Bs. Those things are also tightly related.

Zuckerbergs of the world are too immature to see cause and effect. They only see next quarter results while driving society to ruin.

Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#168

Post by ryandrake »

maccard wrote: post #145
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to share my story related to ageism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642428 If it's that hard for me, it seems true to say it's much harder for someone much older. I hear you about the -ism fanaticism. But there seem to be serious problems on the horizon. I can't make you believe them. All I can do is try to relate it to something in your life.

I've read your post, and I try to empathise, but at the same time I can't help but feel you were naive in thinking you could take on a web development job without having any of the skills required, even a very basic level of them. If a 20 year old applied for a job that involved writing SQL queries, and couldn't, I'd expect him to be rejected. There's a world of difference between low level C/C++ style programming, a…

My first real job out of college was writing graphics device drivers in C and assembly. I had no idea how to do it before joining the company and in fact bought a book on writing Windows device drivers a few weeks before I started so I could at least start out knowing basic terminologies.

Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#169

Post by matt4077 »

throwanem wrote: post #53
Spooky23 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people pushing this viewpoint are self-interested Vinod Khosla’s quote is missing a punchline — “Young people are just smarter” [except for me]. The only timeless ageism thing is the willingness of old men to schnooker young turks into things, whether that is getting blown up on a battlefield for king and country or getting exploited to make guys like Khosla money.

You'd think someone who writes for such an august publication would be a little less of a chump, wouldn't you? (ETA: Unless you're familiar with the output of such publications, I suppose, at least enough so to validate the "Gell-Mann amnesia" concept firsthand. I can't say they serve no useful purpose - one doesn't care to contemplate packs of feral journalists roaming the streets, shaking down sundry passersby for…

One would expect people to have some familiarity with the concept of "half-life" before accusing others of being chumps.

Re: Why Ageism Never Gets Old

#170

Post by nilkn »

discreditable wrote: post #118
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #112

>> With the advent of the cloud and off-the-shelf A.P.I.s—the building blocks of sites and apps—all you really need to launch a startup is a bold idea. Silicon Valley believes that bold ideas are the province of the young. Well, right now I don't see any "bold" ideas coming out of SV. What I see is everyone doing "X with deep learning", or "Facebook for Y", or "Uber for Z but with deep learning"). That's, like, the o…

> What I see is everyone doing "X with deep learning" Agreed. Even Google is guilty. Press releases from them that don't mention "Machine Learning" are becoming rare. "Machine Learning" is the new "cloud" buzzword.

Google is also responsible for creating many of the success stories for deep learning. So I think this might be a little unfair to them. They created the bandwagon more than they jumped on it, and they've gotten phenomenal results so far in general. (This seems to be a general trend for Jeff Dean's career overall.)
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