Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Country for Old Developers

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 94 posts

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#41

Post by yodsanklai »

duxup wrote: post #29

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…

I'm glad you were eventually hired.

I used to work in academia as a professor and the occasional older students were always a joy to work with. And usually, they went along perfectly fine with the other students (at least with the more mature ones).

It's a shame that we have all these educational resources available but practically most people don't have access to it. I'd love to spend a couple of years learning a new field.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#42

Post by duxup »

yodsanklai wrote: post #37

I just got a SWE job offer at a FAANG and I'm in my mid-forties. I took the exact same interviews as anybody else. They've also been contacted me regularly for the last three years. My age isn't written on my resume, but they can easily infer I'm in my forties. My guess is that recruiters don't care as long as they think you have a chance passing the coding interviews. I realize that older developers are slightly unc…

>I realize that older developers are slightly uncommon,

I wonder if that is really the case or not.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#43

Post by watwut »

unishark wrote: post #30
_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…

> 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.

It assumes that everyone is lazying around basically.

Because of people are not lazying around, no, you can not just work twice as hard. Because you are already working hard, exactly as your competitors do. No people can't double their hard work every time they are treated unfairly. Not if they were actually working in the first place.

That goes for ageism, sexism, racism, whatever-ism we talk about.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#44

Post by mojuba »

The most dreadful thing in this industry to me is this: how many years of experience do you have?

  1
  2
  3
  4
  5+
That's it. Fin. More than 5 doesn't matter.

The truth is that the difference between 30 years and 5 years of experience in a particular field can be as big as between 1 and 5. I just want to ask, does anyone in the industry really care about this fact? Does it matter to any company out there? Have you ever seen a job posting that has say 20+ years of experience as a minimum?

As someone with 30+ years in the industry I'm constantly worried that nobody really really needs a coder with so much under their belt anymore. That nobody sees the value in a smaller codebase with fewer bugs and more minimalist and robust architectural solutions.

Dear industry (apart from some maybe very specific niches such as OS kernels, compilers and such), do you really care about the old experienced devs?

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#45

Post by rossdavidh »

I started coding professionally in my mid-30's. I am in my early 50's. If I have ever been discriminated against because of my age, I am not aware of it, and don't care because I've always found work.

Now, I should mention that I did switch a few years back to doing consulting/temporary positions, although sometimes these "temporary" positions last over a year. This means two things: 1) I buy my own healthcare insurance (I recommend using healthsherpa.com to help do that), so it could be that employers don't worry about my age because they don't have to pay for my insurance 2) I am forced into a position of having to learn new things every year, whether it's a new industry or a new library/framework or a new language or whatever. This means I cannot become unwilling to try new things.

I do think it's true that you need to not activate the "he's too old to do new things" alarm bells, by being very circumspect about criticizing new trends. But this is probably a healthy habit to cultivate anyway; give the new trend a chance, at least.

Also, there is a difference in the respect given to older programmers relative to other industries. In most fields (e.g. doctor, lawyer, banker, even engineer) as you get older, you become higher status and your opinions are given greater respect. In programming, your opinion is worth about what anyone else's is. So, if you think that after programming for decades your opinion ought to be given more weight than the 23 year old's, you're in the wrong industry. But, I think the best teams have both young and old programmers, and it's healthy to be in a team where young people are willing to speak up and disagree with you.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#46

Post by user5994461 »

pc86 wrote: post #23
user5994461 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The cheapest companies in London pay around 90-100k base, which is quite respectable. Your concern would be valid if the pay was really low but it is not. There are few companies that will significantly top that.

Sure, an employee might leave to Google for the money... if only Google had an office in London and they could get an interview and pass. It's not like it's going to invariably happen over the next 6 months. It's far fetched from the company to assume that.

In the meantime the candidate is out of a job because companies refuse to hire them (I don't know if that's ageism but that's certainly something) and the company gets no work done because it's understaffed.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#47

Post by buckminster »

duxup wrote: post #42
yodsanklai wrote: post #37

I just got a SWE job offer at a FAANG and I'm in my mid-forties. I took the exact same interviews as anybody else. They've also been contacted me regularly for the last three years. My age isn't written on my resume, but they can easily infer I'm in my forties. My guess is that recruiters don't care as long as they think you have a chance passing the coding interviews. I realize that older developers are slightly unc…

>I realize that older developers are slightly uncommon, I wonder if that is really the case or not.

This probably is true. The industry has been growing quickly for decades so there will naturally be far more people with ten years' experience than thirty years', say. Most people who enter the industry are young, so you would expect the demographic to skew young.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#48

Post by trevyn »

mojuba wrote: post #44

The most dreadful thing in this industry to me is this: how many years of experience do you have? 1 2 3 4 5+ That's it. Fin. More than 5 doesn't matter. The truth is that the difference between 30 years and 5 years of experience in a particular field can be as big as between 1 and 5. I just want to ask, does anyone in the industry really care about this fact? Does it matter to any company out there? Have you ever see…

If you have more than 5 years of experience, you should know the industry and not be paying much attention to formal job postings.

Similarly, companies do not typically hire for those positions through public job postings.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#49

Post by anonuser123456 »

duxup wrote: post #42
yodsanklai wrote: post #37

I just got a SWE job offer at a FAANG and I'm in my mid-forties. I took the exact same interviews as anybody else. They've also been contacted me regularly for the last three years. My age isn't written on my resume, but they can easily infer I'm in my forties. My guess is that recruiters don't care as long as they think you have a chance passing the coding interviews. I realize that older developers are slightly unc…

>I realize that older developers are slightly uncommon, I wonder if that is really the case or not.

I think it’s a perception. I’m a youngster in my business unit (500 engineers) at a spry 39.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#50

Post by mori876 »

anecdote: after 10y as a software engineer I came back to the academy to accomplish a PhD. Recently, I applied to a research intern position at Facebook and got the response:

"we only get people with less than 6 years experience for this position"

(My inside referrer got the response, as a job applicant I got not reponse)

Post reply on HN