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The Brutal Ageism of Tech

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Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#121

Post by gaoshan »

nostromo wrote: post #81
zomgbbq wrote: post #55

I'm a 40+ engineer in the NYC metro area and I've never felt more in-demand in my life! I think it boils down to a simple idea: computer-science is a dynamic field and THE FUN PART is that you need to always be learning. There are still some colleagues my age who still wax about the days of writing JCL for their mainframe jobs and never evolved past the 80's and perhaps they gave a bad name for others who built on th…

That's reassuring, but... What's the average retirement age in the US? 60? And here we are consoling ourselves about still being in-demand at the ripe old age of 40.

Keep in mind that most of us aren't earning pensions and our 401Ks are earning peanuts so retirement at 60 effectively means "living on social security and whatever you managed to scrape together". Retirement will mean poverty for a great many people, I fear.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#122

Post by jared314 »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #107

Perhaps the question we should be asking is why talent doesn't seem to increase with age as much as we'd like. Let's assume for a minute that the age bias is important and useful. Why is that? More importantly, what could we do to facilitate an increase in creativity or productivity or 'talent' over time? The fact that we don't has a huge impact on the kinds of things society achieve. I don't think it's correct to ju…

> The question we should be asking is why talent doesn't seem to increase with age as much as we'd like.

This question has been answered many times before. People are re-solving the exact same problems with a new framework, platform, or language every two to five years, sometimes less. The "solved problems" never seem to stay solved.

Alan Kay had a good point when he said the last 25 years (now 35 years) have been more about pop culture than actual engineering[1].

[1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#123

Post by msandford »

kansface wrote: post #115
mgkimsal wrote: post #110

How much overlap is there between the types of companies in this article and the typical "we can't find anyone qualified to hire!" company? I suspect it's not total, but there's probably some overlap. I can't wait until these 22 year olds of today hit their 40s and they reap what they've sown. Zuckerburg said "younger people are just smarter"? Certainly there's a degree of hubris in youth that you don't lose without…

I don't think this anecdote really illustrates your point. One day, some naive kid will actually be stupid enough to solve this problem. For that matter, I would guess a large number of highly successful startups solve exactly these sorts of problems. pg calls these schlep problems- http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html . I agree, this is not a cut and dry space.

Sure, that's true. But he'll actually DO THE WORK rather than simply HOPING others will do it for him. AirBnB founders went around doing non-scalable things. The founders of the aforementioned company did not. So in a way the ancient, decrepit person was right. Maybe not exactly, but sorta.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#124

Post by kansface »

erddojo wrote: post #30

These stories are starting to wear thin. The people in SF/SV building apps are mostly in their 20s-30s. The people building cool technology are mostly in their 40s-50s.

I'm not sure how you'd define cool shit, but we have actual data for scientific breakthroughs by age: see http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/big-breakt....

|The authors examined the high points of the careers of both great inventors and Nobel-Prize winning scientists, and they found that the late 30s were the sweet spot for strokes of genius

The gist is that this number (38ish) has been slowly creeping up over the past century; it is generally higher in those fields which require a synthesis of huge amounts of knowledge (experimentalists) and earlier among theorists. Notice that essentially no one has done anything groundbreaking in their 50s (yet).

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#125

Post by ArkyBeagle »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #107

Perhaps the question we should be asking is why talent doesn't seem to increase with age as much as we'd like. Let's assume for a minute that the age bias is important and useful. Why is that? More importantly, what could we do to facilitate an increase in creativity or productivity or 'talent' over time? The fact that we don't has a huge impact on the kinds of things society achieve. I don't think it's correct to ju…

I don't buy any of that. Look, there's a known thing here. It's called "the youth culture" brought to you by cigarette advertisers in the 1960s. It's now being continued and expanded on by the present class of online media companies. Well outlined in "Generation Like" on PBS frontline, it's clear that this is a continuation of a completely anti-demographically supportable belief system.

There's no empirical evidence for it. Yeah, there's a couple of half-hearted graphs of Einstein-level breakthroughs. But is that really the model here? Some guy builds a master work, a once-every-100-years theory; it's a bit much to expect him to top himself.

If we look at other fields, like painting, composing, writing, the results are more mixed. Software reminds me more of composing, really. Composers last forever.

Folks, it takes a long time to get good at this. 30 years before the mast and I'm still gaining speed.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#126

Post by [deleted] »

late2part wrote: post #109
Retric wrote: post #8

The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's…

One of the issues that is unpopular to discuss in inertia in constraints. Experienced people have learned a set of platonic causations that they apply to pattern matched situations. When they come into a new situation, if they match patterns that don't quite fit, they'll apply old solutions to situations that are not appropriate. Enders Game is a good allegory for this. It's good to have diversity and meritocratic pr…

[deleted]

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#127

Post by nknighthb »

nostromo wrote: post #81
zomgbbq wrote: post #55

I'm a 40+ engineer in the NYC metro area and I've never felt more in-demand in my life! I think it boils down to a simple idea: computer-science is a dynamic field and THE FUN PART is that you need to always be learning. There are still some colleagues my age who still wax about the days of writing JCL for their mainframe jobs and never evolved past the 80's and perhaps they gave a bad name for others who built on th…

That's reassuring, but... What's the average retirement age in the US? 60? And here we are consoling ourselves about still being in-demand at the ripe old age of 40.

61 and climbing, but that number doesn't tell you much by itself. If you spend your career in SV as a reasonably in-demand developer and have no major life catastrophes, you might easily retire 5-10 years earlier with good money management. Partly depends on what kind of lifestyle you want in retirement, and where you plan to spend that retirement.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#128

Post by [deleted] »

jared314 wrote: post #122
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #107

Perhaps the question we should be asking is why talent doesn't seem to increase with age as much as we'd like. Let's assume for a minute that the age bias is important and useful. Why is that? More importantly, what could we do to facilitate an increase in creativity or productivity or 'talent' over time? The fact that we don't has a huge impact on the kinds of things society achieve. I don't think it's correct to ju…

> The question we should be asking is why talent doesn't seem to increase with age as much as we'd like. This question has been answered many times before. People are re-solving the exact same problems with a new framework, platform, or language every two to five years, sometimes less. The "solved problems" never seem to stay solved. Alan Kay had a good point when he said the last 25 years (now 35 years) have been mo…

[deleted]

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#129

Post by rsl7 »

late2part wrote: post #109
Retric wrote: post #8

The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's…

One of the issues that is unpopular to discuss in inertia in constraints. Experienced people have learned a set of platonic causations that they apply to pattern matched situations. When they come into a new situation, if they match patterns that don't quite fit, they'll apply old solutions to situations that are not appropriate. Enders Game is a good allegory for this. It's good to have diversity and meritocratic pr…

A competent person would understand why the solution did or didn't work the previous times, and thus why it would or wouldn't this time.

What you're saying is that some people don't learn from their experiences. You should focus on finding out if they have. That's worth way more than hoping that this young kid will.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#130

Post by k2xl »

Oh please. This article is just ridiculous. I find it hard to sympathize with any of the characters or to find any semblance of truth in anything that was presented.

Someone gave the same argument to me regarding Y Combinator - They only invest in 22-28 year olds... Which is statistically probably accurate, but here's a question that people don't think about: What do you think the average age of someone who applies to YC is?

The "discrimination" arguments toward older developers made me laugh. The sad thing about this article is that it seems personal - these specific guys that are mentioned were likely just not able to pitch their idea effectively, but blame it on the young kids "seducing" VCs with their "baby faces" and "fresh college degrees."

What, do they think that VC's just go, "Oh you sort of LOOK like Mark Zuckerberg. Take my money."

Just because someone says they "Love your idea" and that it is "Better than others they've seen" doesn't mean anything unless they write a check. My past startups pitched VCs who said this all the time (I was in my early 20s btw) - I used to think we were being discriminated for being young!

Btw, who do you think has a better chance of landing a deal with a large company - a 23 year old fresh out of college or a 50 year old with 20 years of business experience? Do you think that VC's are oblivious to that fact?

"He figured it was only a matter of time before nCrypted Cloud made them both very, very rich. The only thing they were up against was 50 years of accumulated bias."

LOL @ that statement. I've heard the same kind of statement countless times from startup founders of ALL ages.

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