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The Brutal Ageism of Tech

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Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#181

Post by jeffdavis »

nahname wrote: post #104
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…

>I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Are you sure you are not committing the same ageist judgement here?

There are two kinds of reverse discrimination:

One is an active reverse discrimination that is attempting to tilt the balance back (often enforced with some kind of law or policy). This has all kinds of well-known problems (that arguably are larger than the benefits).

The other is a more natural reverse discrimination that comes from collecting the missed opportunities of your competitors. If your competitors reject candidates for frivolous reasons, then it's easier for you to hire qualified people. I think this is what the parent comment was doing, and it doesn't strike me as a problem.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#182

Post by bengotow »

daveqr wrote: post #7

Guess what, there's a lot of software being written by people not in their 20s in places like Kansas City, Boston and Nashville. The world doesn't revolve around Silicon Valley.

Nashville represent! I build mobile apps for a living and I love that the environment here is diverse and creative. Walk into a coffee shop and you see people talking, writing, and socializing - not bent over their identically sticker-covered Macbook Pros.

As an iOS dev here, you can expect to make 85-100k and spend < $1000 / mo on rent. There's also no state income tax, so you get a 9.6% bonus right off the bat. Not too bad if you ask me!

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#183

Post by bengotow »

aceperry wrote: post #140
gamegoblin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yyyyep. Step into one of Walmart's cubicle farms in Bentonville, Arkansas and it's mostly middle aged folks hacking away in C# and VB.

Interestingly, the Walmart Lab in the bay area is a big promoter of html5, javascript, and all of the latest web tech.

Yeah - they've actually got many people using NodeJS. http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/24/why-walmart-is-using-node-...

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#184

Post by Kerrick »

gamegoblin wrote: post #19
daveqr wrote: post #7

Guess what, there's a lot of software being written by people not in their 20s in places like Kansas City, Boston and Nashville. The world doesn't revolve around Silicon Valley.

Yyyyep. Step into one of Walmart's cubicle farms in Bentonville, Arkansas and it's mostly middle aged folks hacking away in C# and VB.

Or step into somewhere like my workplace in downtown St. Louis, a skyscraper built in 1911 renovated into modern offices.

The bootstrapped, 6-year-old former startup I work for is filled with people from their 20s on up past 50s making, selling, and supporting Software as a Service, with the developers hacking away at a RESTful API and Ember.js apps. Plus, we share the building with Kickstarted startups like Pixel Press, VC-funded startups like TrakBill, etc. and we're a couple blocks from an incubator + coworking space with 80 startups at every stage.

Being away from Silicon Valley doesn't make you automatically boring, or a cubicle farm, or even full of old people

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#185

Post by tluyben2 »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #178
mwfunk wrote: post #108

I dunno. I can think of three ways in which an older developer might have a hard time finding a job: (1) If someone doesn't keep up with currently relevant technology, they will find themselves without the job skills that employers are looking for, regardless of whatever other qualities they may have. This isn't ageism. (2) If someone works at the same place for 10+ years, getting raises every year and becoming more…

What do you think 1) really is, though? Do you think "keeping up" with 100 different mvc frameworks that do roughly the same thing is "keeping up?" That seems to be what that code phrase is usually used to mean. Are younger programmers not as easily accused of this or worse than not keeping, not knowing enough fundamentals? The whole notion of keeping up with technology change in programming contexts sometimes seem s…

You are right, but unfortunately some of the misinformation (or maybe it was like that in the beginning?) about the Google hiring process made it to other companies, so the hiring process focusses on a lot of detailed knowledge about Rails 4 even though you may have a ton of Rails 2 experience and after that you did 5 years of full-time Lift, you might still not get the job because you are not 'current'. I think it's rather a lot of bullshit and actually the reverse is true as well; I see programmers who learned and used a specific thing, like Rails 4 having issues picking up anything else well. Yet people hire them because they 'kept up'. Have fun with that in a few years :)

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#186

Post by gamegoblin »

Kerrick wrote: post #184
gamegoblin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yyyyep. Step into one of Walmart's cubicle farms in Bentonville, Arkansas and it's mostly middle aged folks hacking away in C# and VB.

Or step into somewhere like my workplace in downtown St. Louis, a skyscraper built in 1911 renovated into modern offices. The bootstrapped, 6-year-old former startup I work for is filled with people from their 20s on up past 50s making, selling, and supporting Software as a Service, with the developers hacking away at a RESTful API and Ember.js apps. Plus, we share the building with Kickstarted startups like Pixel Pr…

Wasn't saying it was. Actually, we have a YCS13 company here in Northwest Arkansas (DataRank).

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#188

Post by michaelochurch »

The ageism culture doesn't come from programmers. Young engineers (I am one) venerate the badass older programmers. It comes from the business people who've colonized us.

Business is full of degenerate narcissists, and the one thing narcissists can't stand is age, though it awaits us all.

Because we've been colonized in recent years-- the R&D culture that used to characterize programming has been replaced by closed allocation and commoditization and project-management bullshit-- by business people we've lost our culture, and they've imposed theirs on us. That's where the age discrimination comes from.

Ageism is also to their benefit because it puts this shitty time pressure on the young, encouraging them to work ridiculous hours and make unreasonable sacrifices that they think will help their careers (but often do the opposite). Whether young or old, we all get screwed by the ageism culture. Young people get abused because they're convinced that opportunities will dry out in 5-15 years, and older people get demoralized and pushed out of the industry for no good reason.

The best way to fight it is to point out the dynamic that causes ageism: chickenhawking. Read this-- http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-th... -- and be enlightened. The truth about what is behind ageism is embarrassing to the purveyors of it, and knowledge should be multiplied.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#190

Post by waveman2 »

musesum wrote: post #106

Maybe I'm an outlier; I'm a 55+ engineer working at a mobile startup. Maybe not; 20% of Google's employees are >55, according to a Kissmetrics chart. But, who knows maybe the 55+ crowd at Google consist of only geniuses and janitors. I see an old/young tradeoff between pattern recognition and fluid intelligence. Maybe why some older developers show less enthusiasm for the next really "awesome" idea is that is really…

> maybe older developers have a blind spot towards opportunities that have failed in the past

Yes. A lot of things have to come together for something to work. Something can fail many times before succeeding. A little irrational optimism can be a good thing. Hitting the ground running at the exact moment is very challenging.

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