With age comes wisdom. There is no shortcut.
It's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
11–20 of 60 posts
Re: Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
#12Be discriminated against, fight five years in court and get a $90K payout. Where's the win exactly?
The win is in getting at least one of these bastards a penalty.
Re: Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
#13In the post-mainframe era, tech centric companies have learned to age discriminate by shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble, typically laying off those older workers and/or turning around and hiring younger workers who are pre-trained (or willing to and cheap enough to be trained) in the new platforms. Sometimes the platform vendors themselves help their customers…
> shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble
But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
Re: Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
#14Re: Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
#1550ish here. If I'm ever looking for a new job again [hopefully never!], I'll be sure to dye my hair and drop dates from my job history.
Re: Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
#16In the post-mainframe era, tech centric companies have learned to age discriminate by shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble, typically laying off those older workers and/or turning around and hiring younger workers who are pre-trained (or willing to and cheap enough to be trained) in the new platforms. Sometimes the platform vendors themselves help their customers…
> shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
Most people who have been in industry a long time, have great skills when it comes to picking up new platforms. Granted, sometimes we can be jaded when new stack Foo claims to have all the same hotness as stack Bar did back in 2003.
When I have encountered age discrimination, it is usually because the org wants young gullible people with "passion" who put up with horrid working conditions, broken tech stacks and whacked out business models. The last thing they want is someone that has seen this three times and can point out the needless churn to support a CTO that doesn't know what they are doing.
Re: Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
#17In the post-mainframe era, tech centric companies have learned to age discriminate by shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble, typically laying off those older workers and/or turning around and hiring younger workers who are pre-trained (or willing to and cheap enough to be trained) in the new platforms. Sometimes the platform vendors themselves help their customers…
> shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
If you program with any regularity, learning new languages usually gets easier as you age.
Re: Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
Most people who have been in industry a long time, have great skills when it comes to picking up new platforms. Granted, sometimes we can be jaded when new stack Foo claims to have all the same hotness as stack Bar did back in 2003. When I have encountered age discrimination, it is usually because the org wants young gullible people with "passion" who put up with horrid working conditions, broken tech stacks and whac…
> Granted, sometimes we can be jaded when new stack Foo claims to have all the same hotness as stack Bar did back in 2003.
True, although I wouldn't characterize it as being "jaded" as much as that experience makes the bullshit much easier to spot. And, generally speaking, the more experienced the dev, the lower the tolerance they have for bullshit.
Re: Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
If you program with any regularity, learning new languages usually gets easier as you age.
So much this. Once you learn a particular programming paradigm (functional, OOP, etc.), the differences between languages in that paradigm are mostly syntactic, and learning a new syntax is pretty easy.
And there are only a small handful of different paradigms. If you've been developing long enough, you've probably become competent in most, if not all, of them.
Re: Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
#20In the post-mainframe era, tech centric companies have learned to age discriminate by shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble, typically laying off those older workers and/or turning around and hiring younger workers who are pre-trained (or willing to and cheap enough to be trained) in the new platforms. Sometimes the platform vendors themselves help their customers…
> shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
Sure, you can learn new platform X well enough to be productive in probably a matter of days, but you can’t manufacture 3 years of experience with platform X unless you lie about it. And many job postings expect you to not only have years of experience with platform X, but also significant experience with particular database Y and cloud service provider Z.
How did you get your first job for each new platform that you learned? Let me guess—you knew somebody who helped you get your foot in the door. (Am I wrong?)