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The Brutal Ageism of Tech

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Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#321

Post by bluedino »

bsder wrote: post #200
late2part wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> One of the issues that is unpopular to discuss in inertia in constraints. Prove it with some research. The current research shows that people really don't make their best contributions to their field before 35-45. And, to be fair, I see more young people who attempt to hit the screw with a hammer because a hammer is the only tool they have.

>> The current research shows that people really don't make their best contributions to their field before 35-45.

Look at someone like John Carmack - before he was 35 he had done Command Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake 1-3. Guys like Steve Wozniak were basically out of the business by the time they hit 35. Linus released Linux when he was 22, and started git when he was 35. I doubt guys like Marc Andreesen have written much code since they hit 35 as well.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#322

Post by Consultant32452 »

jmspring wrote: post #50
Zenst wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention IBM, one aspect that always bugged me was upto the mid 80's they had a thing about people with beards and was some sort of unwitten policey (never worked for them) that nobody could have a beard and any intervewing with them entailed making sure you had a good shave. I worked with a chap at RAND who went onto work for IBM porting AIX onto the mainframe (least that was the initial project he was joing for)…

At some point, IBM decided catering to wall street was more important than doing real work. Take a look at Cringely's articles on IBM. I've known people that worked as contractors at IBM Almaden and as the transition was occurring, they went out of their way to not end up on the radar -- the impression I got was that management being aware of your project was a risk for being cut. This was even worse for the rank and…

I worked for a company once that had a suggestion box. If you made a non-anonymous suggestion that wound up saving the company money you got 10% of the savings over 2 years. While I was there no one got rich off of it but a few people got some nice bonuses. I don't understand why more people don't do this.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#323

Post by sivanmz »

The fastest way to age is by working 80 hour weeks, living off of pizza, beer and Red Bull, and burning out.

At what point will early obsolescence distort the supply of willing workers and compensation demands?

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#324

Post by Taek »

bitkrieg wrote: post #263
Taek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as an intern at IBM last summer. It seemed like my entire team was a stagnant pool from the 70's. The languages were C and HLASM, 'high level assembler.' None of my managers knew anything about newer languages like Golang or Haskell. We built hash tables by converting strings to integers and then using modulus. They laughed at the idea of a Linux machine being useful as a server. That said, most of the new h…

> We built hash tables by converting strings to integers and then using modulus What's wrong with that?

https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/49550/which-...

We were essentially doing the lose-lose algorithm. It's a functioning hash table but there's a lot of room for improvement.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#325

Post by electronvolt »

Dale1 wrote: post #236
troels wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, programming as a discipline is more like 160 years old.

She was certainly the first Computer Scientist, well that's what I was told in uni!

She was definitely the first person to realize the potential that Babbage's Analytic Engine had, particularly outside of just calculating things. Babbage's design, if I remember correctly, was basically an improvement on a design he initially made to calculate trajectories for artillery teams, and most of his thoughts on what to use his computer for were "calculate (thing)". Lovelace wrote on how the computer could be programmed to solve more complex problems.

I think that it would be a mistake to say that computer science has truly been around for 160 years, though. A few people (there was also an Italian who was interested in Babbage's work, although I'm not sure what his contributions ended up being, if any) does not a field make, and the fact that any progress in it was more or less put on hold until the early 20th century (when mathematicians started working on what you could calculate or construct in a finite number of steps), and you didn't get (untyped) lambda calculus and turing machines until 1936, which is probably the best place to truly start the idea of computer science as a field. (And since you got early devices that were sort of primitive mechanical computers in the late 30s, early 40s as part of the whole Bletchley Park cryptography work by the Brits.)

A very large debate around the turn of the century was if mathematics that you couldn't specifically construct in a finite (or countable) manner were, which became particularly heated after Cantor's set theory work (showing that the real numbers were uncountable) and then things like Russel's paradox (showing contradictions in Cantor's naive set theory if you allowed sets that contained themselves). I'd argue (without firm, researched proof that it was definitely the intent and case) that the spirit of early computer science (lambda calculus, turing machines, etc.), which was concerned with what you could and could not compute with a finite algorithm, came in spirit from those sorts of debates. (See finitism, intuitionism, constructivism, etc. for parts of this debate; traces of it remain in modern day mathematics with some people's concerns about if the Axiom of Choice is a valid or reasonable axiom to have)

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#326

Post by PeterisP »

vonmoltke wrote: post #295
PeterisP wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've switched 10 companies in the last 25 years, then your value contains lots of stuff that was transferrable/common to different jobs; if you've been 25 years in a single tech area, then it's very likely that your key value is in-depth knowledge of that particular area - unless I need that exact area expertise; an employee with 10 different shallow expertises would be more valuable to me than 1 really deep exp…

What about 10 similar shallow experiences vs. 1 really varied experience? That is exactly the false dilemma I was talking about earlier. Changing companies does not automatically mean changing roles, and staying with one company does not automatically rule it out.

None of the judgements need to be 100% true - it's not automatically, but if it's noticeably more likely than it is this way, then it's completely valid.

Are you arguing that in that scenario it's more likely that the one-workplace worker really has better experience, or are you arguing that it's possible that he has better experience?

CV-sorting is not a maximization problem, it's a satisficing problem of getting a few good candidates to the interviews at a reasonable cost; which generally requires throwing out 90% of CVs without spending the resources to seriously investigate those people. As long as you have enough qualified candidates, factors that "often are bad, but sometimes are good" equal an automatic forward to the circular folder under HR desk.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#327

Post by tsotha »

bad_user wrote: post #209
saraid216 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I guessed before I started following profile data traces: * bad_user would be based "anywhere outside of Silicon Valley". * You wouldn't be. I was right. (bad_user is in Romania, according to his LinkedIn.) That's not to say it's easy to blow off demands of overtime outside of Silicon Valley either (I've heard horror stories about game companies), but the tech companies that you can do it at seem much mo…

Yes, I'm in Romania, but I've been working exclusively with Sillicon Valley companies and have been working within startup environments for the last 5 years. Being able to say NO is not a matter of where you work, but rather one of actually saying NO. It may not work well of course, your managers and peers might not like that, the secret being to not be at the bottom of the chain - as in, you have to be reliable and…

>Being able to say NO is not a matter of where you work, but rather one of actually saying NO.

That's been my experience. Companies will push and push until you say no. After that they may not give you 30% raises every year, but they're not going to fire a productive employee who refuses to put in long hours.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#328

Post by blisterpeanuts »

There are a lot of comments here about competence of software developers at various ages and levels of experience.

However, the New Republic article was more about technology entrepreneurs who aren't necessarily coders or engineers in the traditional sense.

These entrepreneurs and the VCs who seek them out and fund them tend to have a bias toward youth, because there have been some stunning success stories among the young, as laid out in the article and in many comments here (Torvalds, Wozniak, etc.).

But, the skeptics interviewed in the article argue that these 20-something wunderkinden are the edge cases, not the mainstream. Historically, scientists and technologists have tended to accomplish more in their 30s and 40s and beyond.

In the world of software development, certainly there is a mixture of talent across the age spectrum. There are excellent programmers in their teens and twenties, and mediocre coders in their fifties. But there's a general consensus that experienced programmers in their fifties are better able to avoid some classes of mistakes that twenty-something coders simply haven't had a chance to see yet (but will).

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#329

Post by blisterpeanuts »

njharman wrote: post #292
hnnewguy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hire older people! This is a great anecdote, though I don't fully understand why it surprises people. Most people in their early 20s are still "kids", both socially and work-experience-wise. Give me a hungry 30+ any day.

> why it surprises people It surprises young people. 30+ isn't all that old.

I know. I tell friends who are depressed about being 29 that life begins at 30. From my wizened perspective of mid-50s, I even find people in mid-30s to be somewhat green.

Of course, everything I've done in my life has been late. Graduated college and grad school late, married late, had a kid late. So I'm about 10-15 years behind my age peers and experience-wise have more in common with people in mid-late 30s.

When it comes to having ideas... I feel as though I'm bubbling with ideas these days. Maybe it's just too anecdotal to mean anything, but it seems to me that everyone blossoms in their own good time. There's no such thing as over the hill, until you decide that you're over the hill.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#330

Post by saraid216 »

tsotha wrote: post #327
bad_user wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm in Romania, but I've been working exclusively with Sillicon Valley companies and have been working within startup environments for the last 5 years. Being able to say NO is not a matter of where you work, but rather one of actually saying NO. It may not work well of course, your managers and peers might not like that, the secret being to not be at the bottom of the chain - as in, you have to be reliable and…

>Being able to say NO is not a matter of where you work, but rather one of actually saying NO. That's been my experience. Companies will push and push until you say no. After that they may not give you 30% raises every year, but they're not going to fire a productive employee who refuses to put in long hours.

Eh, my personal experience has been that no one actually asks you to stay late for anything. A couple of people seem to do so without being asked, but if a deadline is missed, the reaction is generally, "Well, let's examine the process for what we're doing wrong. Are we overcommitting? Were the specifications wrong? Are the engineers being randomized too much? Did we change the specs midway through?" Etc. It's never "Oh, you didn't put the extra hours in."

But that's just my personal experience.

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