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

Is 40 the New 60?

neverworkintheory.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 381 posts

Re: Is 40 the New 60?

#11

Post by myspy »

Employees need to tell employers to f** off with all the overtime, extra work, working on weekends, etc. The video game industry is loosing its creative people for years, the film industry is milking their 3d artists dry, and the normal software companies have unrealistic expectations how long someone should work.

On top of that we have weak seniority ranks. Products and tools are not developed as good as they could be. Topics like security still show that honing products and skills are needed, but this is not happening when we don't build a layer of experts that still want to program and dig into these problems.

Excellence comes with experience and that is only developing over time with making the mistakes and fixing them.

Re: Is 40 the New 60?

#13

Post by xolox »

underdeserver wrote: post #9

What is the Python set module he's talking about?

I think he's referring to the datatype (class) and associated operations (so not a literal Python module that you import, which may be where your confusing is coming from).

Re: Is 40 the New 60?

#15

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jmfldn wrote: post #5

I feel like this comes up a lot and it's something I think / worry about as a developer at the 'old' age of 40. I posted this comment below on a similar thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28294734 Essentially I think this is hopefully a temporary effect of the doubling of programmers every five years for the past twenty plus years. I expect this to level out and thus shift the ratio in favour of older develo…

I'm not so confident that's true. There's seemingly this prevailing attitude in IT that new is always better. The latest gadgets, the latest complicated tech stacks, and the latest languages. Rewrite everything again so it's all fresh and free of 'legacy cruft'. Don't fix bugs, prioritize slapping a new "modern" GUI on it so people don't think it's old. Why wouldn't that same mentality apply to people?

Re: Is 40 the New 60?

#16

Post by MontyCarloHall »

I wonder how much ageism is due to the fact that basic coding skills can really atrophy in senior developers who quit writing code years ago and are full-time architects/managers. I’ve interviewed more than a handful of highly accomplished people with decades of experience as developers and then engineering managers who couldn’t answer extremely basic coding questions (I’m not talking about Leetcode-esque BS, I mean stuff closer to FizzBuzz). Places that are looking to hire senior developers who are actually still proficient coders will of course pass on those people, which can lead to a self-perpetuating cycle of ageism.

I have no doubt that when these people were actually still coding, they could have answered my questions in their sleep. Quitting coding for engineering management really does one a disservice IMO. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with people with decades of experience who never quit coding even as senior managers and their level of competence and productivity is astounding.

Re: Is 40 the New 60?

#17

Post by keyle »

I went to a few interviews during covid. The only companies hiring during lockdowns were startups.

I went to 6 interviews. Every time, I was the oldest at the table, sometimes by 10 years.

The music always went the same... "We need experience, you have a lot of it", 2 weeks later "You don't know React like we do". Best one was "you didn't use an env variable here in the front end".

I've been building the web since 1999. I'm 40. I got a job in a large company, much better pay, WFH most days, predictable timelines.

Re: Is 40 the New 60?

#18

Post by dagw »

xolox wrote: post #13
underdeserver wrote: post #9

What is the Python set module he's talking about?

I think he's referring to the datatype (class) and associated operations (so not a literal Python module that you import, which may be where your confusing is coming from).

so not a literal Python module that you import

That's new in Python 3 (or maybe 2.7). When sets where first added to Python it was a module you imported.

That's a another downside of being an old programmer. Changes that happened 'very recently' also happened before many of your colleagues started programming :)

Re: Is 40 the New 60?

#19

Post by stefanve »

Yeah this sounds familiar. A manager at a company I worked for didn't want to hire a 45+ SE because she might be looking for a job to hibernate till pension. she was highly qualified and a great SE/person.

(after some discussion she was hired and everyone was happy)

Re: Is 40 the New 60?

#20

Post by sodapopcan »

Hey, I’m 40! And I’ve personally seen very little of this in my little bubble. I’m usually applying for rails jobs which, in these terms, is an “old person’s framework” at this point. While being proficient in what would be considered an “old person’s framework” under the terms of this article has actually made things quite easy in my case (there are _tons_ of rails positions out there) I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to be expected to learn at least _some_ of those durned new technologies that keep popping up—-I feel like we should have known that’s what we signed up for when getting into this industry.

Of course, I’m well aware I’m speaking purely im the context of a web app developer.

Post reply on HN