Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination? • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by lamontcg » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 6:41 AM UTC

buserror wrote: post #80

rubicon33 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big money question is: How have you managed to stay passionate about your job? I just posted a comment in another thread about burnout. It's very common in our industry. I believe it's due to the Coolidge Effect. Aka, the brains inherent search for novelty. It's a struggle to not look at almost all programming tasks as just some variation of the same problem, if you've been doing this long enough. How do you keep…

I had a bit of a burnout around 2006 -- I had worked my ass off on a fantastically complex framework, the pinacle of years of experience, and it was a joy. It was SO cool. There was an application on top, which was also pretty cool. And the marketing bods/management and so on more or less dragged the project off track, up to the point I didn't want to work on it at all, I quit, I left my 'baby' and had a hard 6 month…

Yeah, as someone who generally winds up rewriting the mess that you wrote for everyone in the room, I really wish you'd pay more attention to the outcome in the end.

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

#202

Post by james_s_tayler » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 7:53 AM UTC

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…

What actually ends up happening is people like you make outlandish truth claims about the dispositions, aspirations and futures of strangers on the internet who they have no context for. And get it it oh so wrong.

People often misconstrue my pragmatic hyper-realism for pessimistic defeatism. It's nothing of the sort.

Nice rhetoric though! I really pictured the rotting corpse at the computer in the basement of the fortune 10 and partying on the beach with models and bottles making the promo video for Fyre festival. You really took me there.

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

#203

Post by james_s_tayler » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 8:14 AM UTC

effie wrote: post #44

neolefty wrote: post #22

I'm 47, but my kids are reminding me 50 is coming soon! I'm working as a web engineer — not a manager or even team lead — working remotely from the Midwest for a coastal company, and I'm pretty happy with it. All I can say is keep learning, be friendly, and delight in the energy of all you young people. I am not entirely sure why I have been hired, or even whether it was a good idea for my employer. So maybe stay hum…

Could you share some examples of the things you learned but then became irrelevant? I wonder if we could find some pattern to help people avoid learning modern stuff that will have the same fate.

There's a good course on Pluralsight about learning management strategy. It basically boils down to considering the expected half-life of the knowledge and then apportioning time based on that and stratifying the learning.

I can't recall the specifics but it's something like

  10% deep-diving on long-lived fundamentals
  25% going deep on your core stack you will be using for the foreseeable future
  The rest on the what's in front of you + what's coming next

I really like it.

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

#204

Post by james_s_tayler » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 8:18 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #66

newlikeice wrote: post #2

Side questions if anybody answers this. How did you get your first job industry? I imagine corporation weren’t like there are now and thought of code as black magic.

Late ‘90s, and it was just as hard as today. Applied to dozens of companies as a Senior in undergrad. Similar 1 on 20 response rate as today. I remember the interview—typical “solve this trivial thing in a language of your choice.” Most college kids picked java. I picked x86 assembly and nailed it. In think that impressed someone.

I'd be impressed by that. Like who does that? Especially if it was these days. That'd be inspirational.

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

#205

Post by koonsolo » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 9:10 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #144

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…

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 useful to make you sellable in the future... Instead of listening to you and I (age 50) there are some young people who would rather claim that basic/low-level/first…

The problem is that it's hard to bring your years of experience on an interviewing table.

Some older people I worked with (I'm 40 now) were well respected by the others, because they prove time and time again that their experience is really valuable on all kinds of stuff, both low level details and high level strategies. To show this in an hour is difficult.

Although I was once able to do it, and was hired. They asked me a typical OO inheritance questions with a base class Animal, and derived classes Dog and Cat, and then let them "bark" and "meow". I knew were it was going, so I said "There will probably come more animals after this, so what I would do is drop the inheritance and move into a data-driven approach, where the specific animal behaviors can be defined in a config file, without needing to go through programmers have to compile a new exe every time". They liked that response, although that was probably not the standard answer that they were looking for when interviewing juniors.

And basically such things are your job as a senior anyway, to look into the future and steer the short sighted solutions that juniors come up with.

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

#206

Post by koosnel » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 9:11 AM UTC

I am in ny early 30s and working on post graduate research at night. I do it because it is interesting but also to be employable in a academic context later in my life.

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

#207

Post by orwin » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 9:34 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #127

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…

So, any suggestion for a COBOL book ? jk what would you consider a solid, time-proof set of fundamentals ?

Language-wise, assembly and C will allow you to excel at debugging. And debuging will make you earn a lot of money if you're interested, or will help you spending more time on developpement cycles.

For training, i think you should try some easy "security challenge" that exist on the web, especially those based on shell, network and assembly with no stack-protection. They are not usable in the "real world" (well, some shell exploit might still work tbh), but you will learn how to use debugging tools efficiently, as well as reading assembly. If you want to be a devops, those skills are very important imho.

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

#208

Post by mikkelam » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 9:36 AM UTC

megaman8 wrote: post #111

moosey wrote: post #60

Everyone here is talking about their skillset, and I'm going to take another direction: appearance and interpersonal skills. There is ageism, yes, but I think a deeper problem is reaction to peoples appearance. If you are late twenties concerned about age, then hide it, starting now. * Always wear sunscreen when you are outside, regardless of race. It prevents skin aging, and you'll still tan and get Vitamin D regard…

I agree with all this except the sunscreen part. I was under the impression that sunscreen can actually increase the chance of cancer. Furthermore, sunscreen does block vitamin-D. But, you don't need much (sunblock free) sun exposure to max out your vitamin-D absorption (just 12 minutes a day will do it). On a side note, I do intermittent fasting and caloric restriction to hopefully reduce my rate of aging.

Not using suncreen will also cause cancer, namely skin cancer.

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

#209

Post by meh2frdf » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 11:01 AM UTC

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?

Angular will pass, so will the next framework and react to, once you’ve been through a few of these frameworks, you’ll probably become less excited about investing your time into them if you have the opportunity to invest into something more fundamental, say functional or logic programming, data modelling or architecture skills.

Young devs are surprised when I say Git is only okay, look forward to the next SCM tool, they tend to think git will be the tool fir eternity, and surprised when I list if the 6 other tools I’ve gone through in my career ... so far!

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

#210

Post by wyclif » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 11:06 AM UTC

_Nat_ wrote: post #194

larrywright wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you have difficulty making eye contact with people when you're speaking to them, practice it over and over again until it becomes natural. This was tough for me at first; I had to practice a lot. I tended to start the conversation making eye contact but then dropping my gaze, looking away, or glancing over the shoulder of the person I was speaking to.

Eye contact is a powerful thing, especially if you're trying to be persuasive. And persuasion is an important part of business, even if you're not in sales and even if you're a software developer.