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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?

#231

Post by jimbokun »

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.

It's similar, but far more resource efficient.

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

#232

Post by moosey »

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.

There is vast scientific evidence showing that using sunscreen reduces cancer risk. There was a study that showed it could cause increases, but when analyzed further (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447210/) it showed that people who use sunscreen spend more time in the sun. While using sunscreen reduces your chances of getting cancer, there is nothing quite like avoiding the sun entirely for the vast majority of the day.

There are more recent studies like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22086817, where if you go to the link, it actually points out the value in spending some time in the sun, getting some melanin and vitamin D development, which will fight a specific kind of skin cancer (CMM) that doesn't seem to be stopped by sunscreen, and might have a number of confounding factors.

The basics are that it's complicated, but that if you are spending time in the sun, you should be using sunscreen, but that you also need some sun, or something like that, who really knows.

https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/skin-care-and-aging

That article also suggests the use of sunscreen.

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

#233

Post by oicu812 »

jimbokun wrote: post #165
0000011111 wrote: post #67

I am 31, my plan for the next 19 years until 50 is to Max out my Roth 401k and Roth IRA each year. Yep tax advantaged savings is key part of my plan.

This is the best advice I've seen here. (Although you have to make it to 59 1/2 to withdraw without penalties!)

Except that you don't have to wait until 59 1/2 to withdraw it without penalties. You can start at 55 or earlier using the "Rule of 55" or SEPP exception depending on the retirement plan that you want to withdraw from.

https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-rule-of-55-2894280

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

#234

Post by cmonfeat »

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.

One reason to use containers over VMs is that building, updating and extending containers is far easier and more maintainable than full virtual machines.

Containers give you the ability to layer the pieces you need on top of each other, so you are only responsible for the parts that you maintain. No need to rebuild an entire VM image every time one piece of the stack is updated.

Distribution of containers is also far more efficient than full virtual machines (especially important in a highly distributed environment).

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

#235

Post by cmonfeat »

projectramo wrote: post #133

It’s obvious: act young. Die your hair and adopt the “lingo” of the cool dudes. Like double barrel your boss with your fingers and wink and say “I like your style” no matter what he says. Or if you agree with a colleague you say “fo shizzle” to gain their respect. Refuse to program in anything old. All code has to be Haskell or whatever and throw in a neural network. If you can do that in a container you’re home free…

Liberal use of the word "lit" when describing the latest and greatest framework always works for me.

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

#236

Post by stuxnet79 »

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…

To echo the other commenter. How easy is it to transition to embedded if all the experience you have so far is web related? Is this possible?

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

#237

Post by peterhi »

I'm 57. A self taught generalist who's been paid to do this since the early 80's

What keeps me going? There is just so much interesting stuff going on with computers - how can you ever get bored :)

There are a lot of people better than me, also younger than me, but I can still knock out solid code. I think not thinking I have mastered something keeps me going. There is massive churn in languages and technologies, all my COBOL / FCS / IBM Mainframes skills are consigned to the dumpster but they help me learn new things like C / CP/M / MSDOS / Assembler. Which got dumped for Unix (not Linux) / Macintosh (pre OSX) / Prolog / Lisp / C++

I'm now doing Python and Ruby on Rails and learning Nim and Virtual Reality

What a time to be alive!

Age discrimination - can't say I've noticed it but I've always expected to be judged by my abilities not may age. Perhaps I've been lucky

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

#238

Post by imhoguy »

lamontcg wrote: post #201
buserror wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the grand parent meant business outcome, where he kept quality of work high as far as management decissions let him.

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

#239

Post by scarface74 »

stcredzero wrote: post #227
scarface74 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you have that far of history on your resume? I only have 11 years worth of experience on my current resume and my year of graduating isn’t on there either. No one cares about my C programming experience on mainframes in the mid 90s nor my C++/MFC/COM programming up until 2008.

No one cares about my C programming experience on mainframes in the mid 90s nor my C++/MFC/COM programming up until 2008. In my current job, I'm working with C++/MFC.

How easy would it be to get another job? That’s kind of the point. I found one or two C/MFC jobs back then but dozens of C# and Java jobs that I wasn’t qualified for.

If I need a job now, I want to be able to call my list of recruiters and within the next week have dozens to choose from and 3 or 4 offers which has been easy to do between 2008-2016. When I was looking in 2017, there were more companies looking for Node and full stack developers paying what I was looking for than C#. I happened to find a job that needed my combination of C# and architectural experience, but the pickings were getting slimmer.

So now, as much as I hate it, I’m going down the full stack JavaScript road because that’s where the opportunities are, and filling in a few gaps that will let me be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant”/“cloud consultant”, etc. (Yes I die a little every time I say those words).

One skillset is about getting a job fast if needed the other is by getting one that pays more. It’s about optionality.

When you are still trying to be a software developer in your 40s you can't afford to not keep up. Companies are far more willing to let younger people learn on the job than older, presumably better paid old developers. They already stereotype us as not being up to date, no need to reinforce it.

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

#240

Post by scarface74 »

stcredzero wrote: post #230
scarface74 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of listening to you and I (age 50) there are some young people who would rather claim that basic/low-level/first principles knowledge is irrelevant. It is irrelevant to most jobs and no I am neither young nor inexperienced. I first started programming in the 80s in 6th grade doing a combination of 65C02 and x86 assembly language and I spent my first 12 years professionally bit twiddling in C - first on DEC VA…

It is irrelevant to most jobs and no I am neither young nor inexperienced. Just as one example, the basic level of algorithms, where one could realize when they're creating a O(n^2) routine, is relevant to just about every shop I interacted with working for a language/VM vendor. I found it disturbing, the number of times I could play the hero just by knowing that much. I've worked in shops using C, where I kept bumpi…

How much is really relevant to the average developer out there writing a bespoked internal app that no one will ever see outside of a company or yet another software as a service CRUD app?

I think I’ve had to implement one complicated algorithm that was low level and not a complex business requirement in years and that was the “shunting yard” algorithm to convert a string algebraic expression to a number as part of the parser for the compiler I was maintaining.

Most developers could go there entire successful career without ever knowing how a compiler works.

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