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?

#211

Post by mikekchar » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 11:20 AM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #54

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…

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…

Not the OP, but I'm 51 ;-) This week I'm writing some logging code for about the 1 millionth time. Logging is fascinating. What's the best way to do it? Global variable? Send a parameter to basically every function? And then when you log something, you need a time stamp. Where do you get it from? Do you insert side effects into virtually every function? Do you have any choice? It's amazing. I can write it a hundred different ways and I have no idea which way is best. How do I get past that?

Every day is the same. If you want to search for novelty, it's the fact that it is the same problem and it's been broken from the beginning of time. So do something else! But what? That's what drives me.

You can't dally, either. It would be easy to just spend a year logging (and probably get nowhere). But you can't do it in a job. They won't stand for it. So what can you do in your few minutes of leeway? What difference can you make? You aren't going to fix it, so how can you extract just a tiny bit more information so that maybe someday it will all click?

I think most people don't care about this stuff. Programming is inherently boring. You need to care about insignificant details to really get deep into programming, I think. I mean, it doesn't really matter. Global variable, passed parameters. It sucks one way or it sucks the other way. Who cares? Only crazy people, probably. But in my opinion, that's where the fun is.

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

#212

Post by philpem » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 11:54 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #174

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-- I can’t agree with this. Most businesses aren’t doing anything that require leetCode and deep algorithms knowledge. After a certain age, what’s important is to know how to drive business value and how to either save the company money or make the company money. Also, be well aware of where a technology fa…

" Most businesses aren’t doing anything that require leetCode and deep algorithms knowledge. "

And yet, those are still the most popular interview questions :/

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

#213

Post by aprdm » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 12:05 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #174

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-- I can’t agree with this. Most businesses aren’t doing anything that require leetCode and deep algorithms knowledge. After a certain age, what’s important is to know how to drive business value and how to either save the company money or make the company money. Also, be well aware of where a technology fa…

I understood the low level stuff as to how memory, disk, CPU, syscall, network works. Those models haven't changed in years and are useful for anything that runs in a computer.

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

#214

Post by ja27 » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 12:13 PM UTC

Started my own mobile app company. B2C is a rough market but I love not dealing with customers, sales people, etc. I do hope to shift into some B2B webapps instead.

Also now working on another startup with friends roughly my age and have a couple other startups as options there if I wanted to take on more.

My specialty is pretty much being a jack of all trades and being able to learn new ones quickly. In some ways it sucks because there isn't any one stack that I eat, sleep, and breathe, but on a typical day I do some golang backend, js/html/webgl frontend, obj-c iOS, maybe some python, linux sysadmin, and some graphic design. The benefit is that it means not needing to go find and hire/contract another resource.

Keep learning new things. I know many people my age that spend 10+ years on a single tech stack and never really learned anything new. Then suddenly they're out of work and realize the demand for C99 on Solaris isn't that high. Go to Meetups, conferences, webinars. Take on side projects. Mentor students.

It helps that I look a bit younger than my age. I honestly probably get more discrimination due to my weight. Working on that, but if you can maintain your fitness and the appearance of boundless energy, it overcomes a good bit of age.

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

#215

Post by ghaff » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 12:21 PM UTC

acutesoftware wrote: post #189

ghaff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. The main shareware program I sold for a number of years was written in x86 assembler. The horror. The horror. :-) I was just reminded this afternoon when someone sent me a message on company chat asking if I was the person who wrote said program. When I code these days, I'll take Python.

Well, what was the program you wrote? We wont judge you

Directory Freedom. DOS directory utility.

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

#216

Post by sethammons » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

robertAngst wrote: post #123

jaysonelliot wrote: post #100

I'm lucky enough to look young for my age, so I leave my early jobs off my resume, and don't put my graduation year on there. While I don't exactly hide the fact that I'm in my late 40s, I do find myself avoiding some discussions at work that would show my age, like talking about my older experiences or making pop culture references from the '80s or '90s. Yes, you can talk about making yourself so useful that age doe…

>How often have you assumed something about a person because they were older than you, and what can you do to overcome that and judge them on their merits instead? I pretty much always think they are 'smarter' than me. The only issue I've had with older folks is that they often say 'not my job'.

I've had a similar bias. I (unconsciously) assumed that because a cayndidate was older, they naturally have much more experience and should be super impressive. That is not fair. Evaluate them in comparison to the job requirements and the applicant pool, and don't give them a higher bar just because you imagine they should more awesome.

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

#217

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

philpem wrote: post #212

scarface74 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignore the fad tech, get a good, serious, bulletproof base in actual computer science -- I mean, LOW LEVEL stuff-- I can’t agree with this. Most businesses aren’t doing anything that require leetCode and deep algorithms knowledge. After a certain age, what’s important is to know how to drive business value and how to either save the company money or make the company money. Also, be well aware of where a technology fa…

" Most businesses aren’t doing anything that require leetCode and deep algorithms knowledge. " And yet, those are still the most popular interview questions :/

I’ve only been asked about algorithms twice. Once in 1999 when the job was to write portable C and the second time I was asked to write a merge sort in 2016.

Even though they made an offer, it told me a lot about the company that they never asked me any architectural questions. I declined the offer. The job I did take, the manager asked me what would my 6 month plan be to create a modern software development department and to migrate their system from one based on PowerBuilder written in 2000 to use modern technologies.

For my current job - still as just as individual contributor at a small company, we discussed the technical challenges and the goals he had and we started diagramming.

I would have to try my best not to laugh at a company who was building yet another software as a service CRUD system who asked me to do algorithms.

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

#218

Post by sethammons » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 12:37 PM UTC

canuseeme wrote: post #132

robertAngst wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How often have you assumed something about a person because they were older than you, and what can you do to overcome that and judge them on their merits instead? I pretty much always think they are 'smarter' than me. The only issue I've had with older folks is that they often say 'not my job'.

> The only issue I've had with older folks is that they often say 'not my job'. Which, from my experience, is not a bad thing. It's often a sign of someone who recognizes that meeting everyones else's expectations at the cost of their job expectations is short sighted and the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot. And rarely does anyone have enough time to even meet their personal job expectations. There are th…

There are two sides of "not my job." There is the Art of Saying No where you protect your deliverables, and there is the non-team player who wont help others.

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

#219

Post by grumpy-cowboy » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

Start your own freelancer/consultant business. Businesses will pay you a lot of money for your knowledge and wisdom. This is what I did 9 years ago (I'm 43 now) and I never looked back.

My ex-employer said that if I want to have a better pay, I'll had to have a management job. I'm not interested AT ALL about having a management job. I LOVE programming, system engineering, ...

This is why I started my own "one-man" freelancer business : I do what I want (and not what my boss want), when I want, ...

Now, I work for MY dreams and not the dreams of another person ;)

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

#220

Post by moosey » Thu, Feb 07, 2019, 3:23 PM UTC

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?

I do understand that women have a different experience than men in tech, and everywhere for that matter, regardless of age. I'm sorry for this, I didn't create the situation, but I live in it. I want to be part of that solution. That's not what I'm going to discuss next, though.

Working out with a bad knees and back is not that hard, and is really common with runners who started in high school. Extremely common in fact, especially with road runners. I see these people in the gym all the time lifting weights because it's so low impact, while at the same time being a primary defense against osteoporosis. Nothing that you do can replace it and I would strongly encourage it after talking to your doctor.