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Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

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Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#191

Post by stuxnet79 »

souprock wrote: post #164
jimbokun wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took me a while to see the value of Docker. Ever deploy the same software to multiple servers, and it maddeningly behaves slightly differently on different servers, and you're not quite sure why? This is the problem docker solves. Install exactly once, when you build the image. Then deploy the exact same code, down to the bit, as many times as you want, to as many servers as you want. Or quickly roll back to the Dock…

So why not just make a virtual machine image and keep a pristine copy of it? I think this dates back to the mainframe era.

I don't find the Docker API particularly intuitive. For my use-cases so far I've found it much simpler to spin up a VM if I want to duplicate a particular environment.

I think where Docker tends to shine is when you are operating at scale. For larger players using VMs to recreate a computing environment is expensive and eats into your bottom line. In such situations there's value in having some kind of tooling or API that partitions and simulates specific environments for processes running in the same kernel space. For better or for worse, in 2019, Docker is the best solution to this problem.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#192

Post by diminoten »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #116
diminoten wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like these are so infuriating! You get to shit on a huge community with zero reasoning, and zero consequences for being wrong. Your negativity is only rewarded if somehow you're right (which is more a result of broken clock syndrome than anything else), so you and people like you are incentivized to keep sniping from afar.

Is there not some part of you deep down that looks back at the last decade of technology and feels "well I'm glad we're not doing things that way anymore, it was totally wrong for our situation"? It just seems that that is constantly the case. We might well be another 3 or 4 decades away from software development technology hitting real maturity in terms of really streamlined tooling, frameworks, languages that help…

What actually ends up happening is people like you get left behind. Jobs become harder to get as you struggle to keep up, your ambition hardens into a self defensive ego shield, and you're stuck telling yourself that you were right to stop moving forward because things only got downhill from the moment you chose to stop learning.

The rest of us reap the benefits of innovation, standing in the sun, while you rot in some forgotten basement where the last self-hosted server rack at a fortune 10 company is kept. You'll have cursed yourself to the menial task of caring and feeding the pets surrounding you, the last vestiges of what you've tricked yourself into believing was a simpler, saner time.

Pessimism loses against the unyielding light of positivity. It may feel good to take shots from the shadows, but you're developing a hunched back, hiding from view.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#193

Post by vips7L »

mreome wrote: post #89
paulrpotts wrote: post #23

I'm 51 and I have found that doing embedded and low-level programming seems to insulate me somewhat from age discrimination. I think in part that is because people expect programmers who work very close to the hardware, like me, to be geezers. Breadth of experience seems to help as well. By comparison, trying to get a job in web or app development was a nightmare of interviewing with twenty-somethings in open plan of…

I see something similar in my industry. I work on embedded systems for industrial automation and in my mid 30's I still tend to be one of the younger ones in any group of coworkers/clients. In my case don't think this is issue of "insulation" but rather a difference between technical fields. Industrial automation is a long-game. Development projects can last a year or more, and client support can stretch into the 10s…

How did you get into embedded? Web work doesn't really interest me and I've been studying kernel programming for a few months.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#194

Post by _Nat_ »

larrywright wrote: post #115
stockkid wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Practice getting people talking about themselves. It's the best way to get people to think that you are interesting. Could you elaborate why why that is the case?

If you haven't read it, pick up "How to Win Friends and Influence People" - it's the best book on interpersonal skills you're likely to find. One of the key points in there is that people love to talk about themselves. If you want to impress someone you've just met, start asking them questions about themselves, and be genuinely interested in what they have to say. When you part ways, that person is likely going to th…

That sounds like good advice! But if you could elaborate a bit, how do you actually apply this in everyday situations?

Any recent examples?

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#195

Post by kristianp »

buserror wrote: post #20

I'm 49! I've been working since I'm 17 as a developer -- I think the KEY thing is to be valuable, and be able to change quickly BUT not as quickly as the snowflakes. Ignore the fad tech, get a good, serious, bulletproof base in actual computer science -- I mean, LOW LEVEL stuff--, that will help you learn ANYTHING computer related quickly, and continue surfing that wave with whatever tech you fancy might actually be…

Just wondering what you consider fad tech? Would you call SPAs and Angular fad tech for example?

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#196

Post by quickthrower2 »

kristianp wrote: post #195
buserror wrote: post #20

I'm 49! I've been working since I'm 17 as a developer -- I think the KEY thing is to be valuable, and be able to change quickly BUT not as quickly as the snowflakes. Ignore the fad tech, get a good, serious, bulletproof base in actual computer science -- I mean, LOW LEVEL stuff--, that will help you learn ANYTHING computer related quickly, and continue surfing that wave with whatever tech you fancy might actually be…

Just wondering what you consider fad tech? Would you call SPAs and Angular fad tech for example?

SPAs are no fad IMO, but they are not the best solution for everything either.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#198

Post by burfog »

diminoten wrote: post #192
james_s_tayler wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there not some part of you deep down that looks back at the last decade of technology and feels "well I'm glad we're not doing things that way anymore, it was totally wrong for our situation"? It just seems that that is constantly the case. We might well be another 3 or 4 decades away from software development technology hitting real maturity in terms of really streamlined tooling, frameworks, languages that help…

What actually ends up happening is people like you get left behind. Jobs become harder to get as you struggle to keep up, your ambition hardens into a self defensive ego shield, and you're stuck telling yourself that you were right to stop moving forward because things only got downhill from the moment you chose to stop learning. The rest of us reap the benefits of innovation, standing in the sun, while you rot in so…

The big companies self-host for legal reasons. It is easier to put up a legal fight with self-hosting. With other hosting, your data can be silently grabbed. You won't even know your data has been compromised.

It's also just cheaper and more reliable at that scale.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#199

Post by kkarakk »

adamredwoods wrote: post #166
avip wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in short the cure for ageism is to try and look younger than you are? No one saw that one coming.

Great advice, if we could all look younger when we want, we would! A lot of it depends on genetics. We'd all exercise more if our knees and backs weren't grinding down from years of use. Any over 50 female developers care to respond to this "look younger" advice?

>over 50 female developers

people i've interacted with irl but never seen online

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#200

Post by sexyrouter »

Sure but it's not the only descrimination my friend who is also 50 faced.

She's been working in tech companies for long and it's sad that some 20 somethings call her MILF when she's not around.

Age descrimination is a very small thing in the grand scheme of things, so she said she doesn't feel much descriminated as age is a proxy for experience if you are good with what you do.

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