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No Country for Old Developers

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Re: No Country for Old Developers

#21

Post by swozey »

user5994461 wrote: post #15
swozey wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 36 and have not once experienced blatant ageism. I keep my skills current and have pivoted my career many times when things got less interesting or I could tell the market was falling off. I went sysadmin>neteng>syseng>SRE and will have to pivot in 4-5 years again, probably, once some other culture-breaker has hit distributed systems for the 3rd time in my career. Now, I don't have kids so you might go "hey you'v…

Had the opposite experience in London and I am not even 36 yet. Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay). Gave up on interviewing for startups and medium companies. Get a job in a top tier company or starve to death. (Top tier is mostly finance in London becaus…

Do you list every single position on your CV, like is it multiple pages with 15+ years on it? I believe CVs are like that whereas my resume is a 1 pager that only has my last decade of SUPER relevant experience listed; my last 3 SR Eng roles.

I could submit a 3 page resume with all of my sysadmin, etc jobs on it but then I would definitely be aging myself, even worse because my career actually started when I was 16 (I only mention this in casual interviews). If I started back then it'd probably look like I was 42+ on paper but at that point it's kind of more of a "why is this person listing irrelevant skills from 2005?"

Unfortunately I think that's the expectation with CVs? The ones I've seen look like they're describing the persons entire life to me.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#22

Post by m00dy »

amiune wrote: post #2

I'm 37 I thought I was too old but I decided to start all over again. Took some courses from Coursera about Deep Learning and last month started competing in kaggle and similar competitions sites. I earned 7k dollars but the most important is that I'm learning a lot like if I was in the university again, I think I'm learning even faster.

31 here. I almost did the same. I was working as fullstack developer + infrastructure engineer on AWS and I have recently pivoted to deep learning field and now working for a nlp product at this moment.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#23

Post by pc86 »

user5994461 wrote: post #15
swozey wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 36 and have not once experienced blatant ageism. I keep my skills current and have pivoted my career many times when things got less interesting or I could tell the market was falling off. I went sysadmin>neteng>syseng>SRE and will have to pivot in 4-5 years again, probably, once some other culture-breaker has hit distributed systems for the 3rd time in my career. Now, I don't have kids so you might go "hey you'v…

Had the opposite experience in London and I am not even 36 yet. Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay). Gave up on interviewing for startups and medium companies. Get a job in a top tier company or starve to death. (Top tier is mostly finance in London becaus…

> Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay).

This isn't ageism. People do leave jobs they're underqualified for at a much higher rate. And if the salary band for a given job is £50-75k and you require £85k then why would they interview?

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#24

Post by pauljurczak »

bartread wrote: post #17

"Young people are just smarter." - Mark Zuckerberg Spoken like a naive individual without much in the way of life experience. Keep taking the pills, Mark. Onto more positive points, whilst I have no doubt that ageism exists in our industry, there are also companies with a more enlightened view of age and experience. I tend to prefer hiring people with more experience, in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, when I can. I particu…

> "Young people are just smarter." - Mark Zuckerberg

At the advanced age of 36 he should be replaced by someone younger, stat!

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#26

Post by vsareto »

danielscrubs wrote: post #8
amiune wrote: post #2

I'm 37 I thought I was too old but I decided to start all over again. Took some courses from Coursera about Deep Learning and last month started competing in kaggle and similar competitions sites. I earned 7k dollars but the most important is that I'm learning a lot like if I was in the university again, I think I'm learning even faster.

I don’t want to be a downer but don’t you think it’s just way easier to learn now because we have so many great resources available to us?

We do, but there's more surface area to cover because job requirements have also gone up and technology is more complex. Interviewing for tech has also branched off into its own skill with an industry that promotes its own existence.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#27

Post by lukeramsden »

tosser0001 wrote: post #12

I’ve only ever experienced salary-ism which is just a side effect of being in the industry for so long. The issue with getting decent reviews and salary bumps is that eventually you’re making more money than many people are willing to take on. I’m 57 and working with a lot of people my age. We’ve hired a lot of older people.

Do you know of anywhere that hires more older people that would also consider hiring some younger, junior candidates as well? I don't know about other younger developers but personally I'd rather work with older, experienced developers, I think that would be of great benefit to my development.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#28

Post by recursivedoubts »

> "a prejudice that older people simply can’t learn as well as younger people"

This prejudice happens to be true.

https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-the-age-you-reach-peak-...

I'm an older software developer, and I do not have the same ability to learn new things as I did when I was young. I do have more experience and, with it, a better sense of what matters and what doesn't, so I waste less time on the stuff that doesn't.

That is, however, a more subjective attribute and, thus, I don't blame large companies for not being able to evaluate it. They are inherently volume-based and thus focused on more obvious and measurable attributes that directly (though imperfectly) map to developer productivity.

As the kids say: it is what it is. If you want to make increasing amounts of money for a long time, become a banker or a doctor. I like writing code.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#29

Post by duxup »

Bear with me if you've heard me tell this story before on HN:

After age 40 I changed careers from a networking career to coding via a bootcamp. I was among a couple folks who were in my age group in the camp.

It was a great experience working with folks of all ages in the camp. I think mixing different ages, backgrounds, experience is valuable.

While finishing the camp I was working with another person who was my age and he got a call back from a recruiter after a phone interview. He put them on speaker and the recruiter proceeded to note that they didn't think he would be a 'culture fit'.

He was braver than I and asked what that meant.

"They think you're too old for the group, everyone is young here."

We were a bit shocked and just to be sure he heard her right he asked again:

"You're too old."

For some folks it doesn't even seem to occur to them that such discrimination is wrong.

I was a bit floored by the experience. Growing up I remember overhearing some teachers quietly chat to each other and realizing that they could be just as petty as any kids could be. From then on I really never thought much in terms of age. For whatever reason when I go to meetups younger devs don't seem to notice / are a bit surprised when they find out how old I am.

When I think back on my career(s) I realize how just one opportunity here or there can make a huge difference and having a place that is obviously closed to me based on age make it known was pretty shocking.

Nothing ever came of that event. While trying to just get your foot in the door he didn't want to do anything about it and I could hardly blame him.

Both of us were eventually hired elsewhere, and are doing well.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#30

Post by unishark »

_qulr wrote: post #6

"But skills can beat ageism" I dislike this typical response, because it comes close to blaming the victim, and indeed many people do blame the victims of ageism, attributing stereotypical attitudes to them. Imagine claiming "skills can beat racism" or "skills can beat sexism". No, nothing beats discrimination, because it was never based on the existence or absence of skills. Rather, prejudiced people take one look a…

If you just want to rant against SV, I totally agree. It's certainly not fair, because it basically says you have to "work twice as hard" as they say. But the statement is factually correct. While it would certainly be preferable for society to be the one to change and such that your ageism problem goes away. In the meantime, merit matters, and usable advice for an individual to deal with this problem is by building up their skills. Note that the advice came from a recruiter, not a hiring manager justifying themselves.
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