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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are replying to an ironic post to begin with. Doubt that quote was to prove a point, but to highlight the problem.
Sure - I still find it amusing tho - totally worth the downvotes...
I'm in the opposite of this situation, I'm among the 10% of the youngest employees in the company, when around 60% of the company will be retiring within a decade. We're also in one of those high cost housing markets, and while I'm very well paid comparatively to others in my particular part of the technology sector - its still not enough to buy a house, or settle down - but they're somewhat unsympathetic when I talk…
If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t until I was 30 that my wife and I had enough for a downpayment for a house. When I graduated, my salary was $40k. And, 3-bedroom houses, in my economically-attractive, but not extravagent, area were around $300k. Rent for a 2br was about $1000 / month, so saving $60k took quite a few years. Of course, several co-workers had well-off parents who bought them their first house…
As a salesman who is constantly told he is "too young" and is habitually underpaid/fired, I can tell you that age discrimination is both real and highly arbitrary. If anybody out there can see the value in having an enthusiastic customer advocate, rather than just another sales guy, please do reply :)
Also check out Albert’s List on Facebook. There are a lot of non tech jobs posted on there.
WTF: "an Old" Is that supposed to be "millennial" lingo?
This one takes an adjective and makes it a noun. Sounds more like 1950s lingo (a black, a white, a gay etc.) but with the illusion of freshness with its being applied to old people for the first time. Call me a rude, but it's a sucky. At least "old person" acknowledges they're a person.
> Team social events shouldn’t require physical prowess or alcoholic excess—so forget paintball and bar crawls. As a 57 year-old backend engineer I would like to keep the bar crawls, thanks.
I'm going to be that old engineer sooner rather than later. So yea, I agree... let's keep that going.
In the dozen years I've been running my SaaS products, despite being Old during that entire timespan, nobody has ever so much as asked me my age. Let alone discriminated against me because of it.
And I've been "Consulting While Over 30" for nearly 20 years now for individual clients. None of which have ever held my lack-of-inexperience against me.
Granted, I've done fine during my occasional forays back into traditional-ish employment with respect to the whole "ageism in tech/you're never gonna work again" thing. But if that ever did start to happen, I wouldn't worry about it happening so much to the entrepreneurial side of my world.
> Team social events shouldn’t require physical prowess or alcoholic excess—so forget paintball and bar crawls. As a 57 year-old backend engineer I would like to keep the bar crawls, thanks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130808111450/http://ryanfunduk...
Good article. It’s kind of scary to me that “old” in tech means 40.
Only because as people get experience they end up in the “Engineering Manager” role & such. Plus there’s a GLUT of fresh grads joining each year.
The various systems, incentives, lies - ALL, arise from the growth paradigm.
That paradigm depends on more cheap, energetic fresh meat arriving out of college/recruiters every year.
Fresh grads cost less, have relatively more energy, fewer ties, and probably better cognition responses.
They lack experience, but that's a solvable problem.
The question to ask is this: Why WONT there be work place discrimination, when younger, cheaper candidates show up every day?
System incentives are not in favor of growing old in tech.
And whats laughably worse about this is that humans are TERRIBLE at making out correlation from causation:
people will eventually associate youth with tech work, so an OLD person doing tech - will be tagged as an outlier and assessed on that.
(And Firms would NEVER admit that its just easier for them to ignore work place equality issues in favor of "fit" and "cultural match")
It's not complicated: the costs of software development are almost entirely in labor. As long as that remains true, older people will be at a severe disadvantage simply because they cost 2-5 times as much as a new hire. Once Moore's Law slows down (or whatever we want to call the current golden age we're seemingly still in), this will change, but until then you're just fighting against exponential growth.
Why does an older person cost more? Either they produce more, or they’re overpaid. The first type is definitely worth finding and paying... I’ve seen companies built solely by 22-year old script kiddies and usually the stack can’t scale. At that point, you’re in a trickier spot because a 40-year-old who can inject some good sense at the beginning of a project is a lot more abundant than a 40-year-old who can lead a t…
Spending extra time to "Show you love your work" is not something they care about.
On the other hand that is something most American Techies in SV firms or on HN already are part of.
Just sitting here on HN for so many years I know what it takes to look like an up and coming coder - and that is to breathe and live code.
Weekend projects on XYZ project. Work efficiency on ABC tasks.
Plus older people are not going to accept the usual promises of riches at the end of the rainbow, so may usually ask for better deals.
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I think people are too quick to run from here to blame -
Instead this is a systems/people problem.
Theres certain cultural expectations of work culture in tech. There are also unending flows of graduates to tech.
While this remains, this problem will continue. Firms are responding to the resources at their disposal and optimizing
Should some magic new industry arise, which absorbs all the smartest minds in the world - you will see tech change.
I'm in the opposite of this situation, I'm among the 10% of the youngest employees in the company, when around 60% of the company will be retiring within a decade. We're also in one of those high cost housing markets, and while I'm very well paid comparatively to others in my particular part of the technology sector - its still not enough to buy a house, or settle down - but they're somewhat unsympathetic when I talk…
If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t until I was 30 that my wife and I had enough for a downpayment for a house. When I graduated, my salary was $40k. And, 3-bedroom houses, in my economically-attractive, but not extravagent, area were around $300k. Rent for a 2br was about $1000 / month, so saving $60k took quite a few years. Of course, several co-workers had well-off parents who bought them their first house…
I'm 35, the nearest house I can afford is about 30-40 miles away - I cant touch something for less than 500k, in that radius.