How the Valley treats experienced people • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#101

Post by Alex3917 » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

ianai wrote: post #46

zik wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of ageism isn't really visible to you unless you're the subject of it. Yes, it's real.

Society in general is pretty hard on older people and it increases with age. Think of the way older women are treated as “grandmas”. They can be shoehorned into a role they may not want to play.

> Think of the way older women are treated as "grandmas". They can be shoehorned into a role they may not want to play.

The (American) Jewish term of endearment for a female baby is bubbeleh, which translates roughly as "tiny future grandmother." On the surface it might look like shoehorning, but I think it's meant to be aspirational more than limiting. There may (or may not) be something similar at play here.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#102

Post by john_of_peaches » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

slics wrote: post #88

If one thinks 35+ is to old to code, well I have news for you. At 35+ you learn how to manage time and prioritize better. Life throws another ranch in your bucket of problems, marriage and children. When you are young, you are hired as an engineer to work 40 hours, which we all know very well that working for startups that means 80 hours or you are not putting good effort. Well with a family that’s not possible, as y…

+100, thanks for emphasizing the importance of family for the next generation.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#103

Post by qaq » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:39 PM UTC

ramtatatam wrote: post #25

I had a chat with some recruiters recently and they told me there is no future in the industry for people who are 35+ years old. I'm 33 so I just smiled and walked away. I later learned the founder of this recruitment company was 26. Young kids seem to think there is no brains in older people. On the other hand I always thought the natural progression for the programmer is to move to higher abstraction level, become…

If you are 40+ you kinda expected to have a network. We have a dude pushing 70 he would be able to get a new job the day he would let people know he would consider switching a job.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#104

Post by sokoloff » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:39 PM UTC

ramtatatam wrote: post #38

avip wrote: post #36

Ageism is real in many verticals. It is healthy to acknowledge that. It’s equally important to face facts related to age: I am noticeably less focusable, and my memory is not as good. I slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows (or feels). Most importantly, I have many out of work responsibilities - parents (not getting younger) and kids (not getting older in sufficient pace). Consequently, odds of…

Would you share how old are you? Sorry if you find that question out of place, but I'm 33 and have kids and I don't (yet?) make such observations as yours.

Not @avip, but I’m 47 and definitely feeling the time/family responsibilities crunch. Our parents have all just turned 70+/-2, we have two smart kids in elementary school who need to be fed almost every single day :), a house/yard instead of apartment, everyone’s healthy, but just managing school, activity, and holiday calendars is grueling. In my 20s and 30s, I could code like hell, have time to devote to learning new thing in depth, and play on 4-5 sports teams. Now, I’m still able to function almost the same mentally, but there are 20-40 fewer “free” hours in the week.

Something has to give and we’ve decided it’s not the kids... I wouldn’t go back and change anything, but it’s not the same.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#105

Post by taude » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

Living and working in the Boston tech market, I have a lot of thoughts about Ageism. It's very much alive and well here. There's also a severe case of Elitism if you didn't go to MIT or Harvard, too. I'd like to think more about this and write dome some elegant thoughts, but...

I'll sum it up as it's a little humbling but massively humiliating. It's extremely frustrated being interviewed by people with obviously way less experience and people applying their hiring "playbook" without much thought. I'm pretty sure many companies hiring is explicitly catered to aging people out, or at least setting a different bar for older engineers.

Also, when I do get a job offer it's for quite a bit lower salary that much younger, less experienced people who are two or three years out of school are making in this market. It's almost as if the tech industry wants most of the people to have two or three years experience.

I've been equating it to working in Hollywood to some.

Still trying to figure out where I went wrong in my career, but as others have said below, not all startups you work for succeed, not all companies you create succeed, lock-up periods, senior executive corruption (I worked for a publicly traded company where the CFO actually went to jail), etc.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#106

Post by ghaff » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #49

tokyodude wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it really depends on lots of factors. My father joined a startup in the late 90s, after 5-6 yrs the company failed. At 60 he was unable to get a new job. I'm guessing companies assumed he'd leave in 3-5 years and didn't want to invest the time. I also know from running my own company with partners back in the mid 90s, we were all early 30s except one partner who was 52ish. When getting health insurance for th…

> I'm guessing companies assumed he'd leave in 3-5 years and didn't want to invest the time. 3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry. The longest I’ve ever held a job is just barely 5 years. Most tech employers— at least the smart ones— know the average bounce rate in the industry is high. Older employees tend to value stability, for various reasons. So I don’t buy your argument. If there’s a reluctance t…

>3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry.

That's a rather SV-centric view. Otherwise 5-10 years (or longer) is quite normal, including in tech. At many companies, a bunch of 3 year stints for a job candidate is something of a red flag.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#107

Post by chasing » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

Young developers will work mindless hours and not demand proper compensation. That's why (poorly run) start-ups prefer 'em.

Also, wealth is the world's shittiest metric for success. I know a ton of people with incredible skills who work rather low-paying jobs because they want to improve the world, follow a particular passion, or whatever.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#108

Post by taude » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:44 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #61

sureaboutthis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is that many young people in the industry now would never think of staying at one place for 3-5 years cause they don't want to invest the time. A neighbor of mine is in his 60s and lost his job the same way. He can run rings around anyone I know but he can't find a job or even get an interview. Bjarne Stroustrup, the C++ creator, wrote a blog post about going for a job interview and being told he "didn't…

Not being able to have an interview is a red flag. Companies can't tell the age from a resume. If they can, take off the date of birth, remove the year on your degrees and don't list experiences beyond 20 years.

I've done this on mine, and I'm pretty sure when companies see this, it's a signal for an older person.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#109

Post by opportune » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

I think I must be one of the younger people on this site because while I agree ageism is a bad thing in the sense that age should simply not be a factor when it comes to hiring/pay, and that experience is good, I also have direct experience working with older developers who didn’t know the new tools we were trying to use (in my case, AI and big data) very well and so weren’t any more productive / were less productive than younger people who were more experienced within that subject area.

That being said, by far the best engineers I’ve met were the people who usually pioneered these systems 20 years ago and were now domain experts. But what I mean by this post is that I also have met a bunch of people who basically only know basic crud, and just because they had a lot of experience in that area didn’t mean that transferred very well to other areas.

There’s a limit to how much your knowledge of SQL and Windows server from a decade ago will help you with Kafka and Cassandra

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#110

Post by Consultant32452 » Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

ianai wrote: post #46

zik wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of ageism isn't really visible to you unless you're the subject of it. Yes, it's real.

Society in general is pretty hard on older people and it increases with age. Think of the way older women are treated as “grandmas”. They can be shoehorned into a role they may not want to play.

For men and women it tends to be equal and opposite. Young men are at their lowest social value when young, they're disposable, expected to destroy their bodies to make a living, etc. As they get older their social value goes up. It's the opposite for women whose social value peaks at 18 and declines over the years with a significant drop in the 30s when fertility wanes.