Well it might change a lot as suddenly number of coders in their 40s goes up.
Do you have any data demonstrating this will happen?
It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
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Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
#12This is idiotic. People over 40 trade one set of skills for another (source: I'm over 40). You lose short-term memory, can't juggle too many things simultaneously, and aren't always up to date on every latest fad. But what you gain is fantastically valuable: intuition, abstract thinking, systems thinking, ability to detect patterns in large systems, ability to notice that certain problems have been solved in a different field, and lots more.
As I grow older, I notice these changes, and while I do regret not being able to remember IP addresses after switching to a different window (get a larger monitor, or just copy&paste), I am very happy with the overall shift.
Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
#13I don't know about the Silicon Valley, but I'm in the Silicon Forest (Hillsboro/Portland Oregon) and this market seems to be very merit driven. You can be 80 years old and get a job if you can do work. Maybe you can't get a job at fart.IO building an API for some craft beer BS but at many mid to large companies 40 is still an average.
The last 4-5 companies I've been at value bullet points over anything else (for what that's worth). If you're 40+ and coming in showing off your PHP skills, JQuery or WinForms experience you'll get dumped, but the same goes for the 23 year old with that skill set.
My advice is always the same for developers my age: Keep with the times! If you aren't passionate enough about this work to continue learning and advancing on your own time get out. Go do something slower paced. Don't expect the industry to change.
Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
#14The best explanation I've seen for this is when you're a young engineer with little experience showing knowledge of a framework or technique is a huge plus. For someone with a ton of experience not knowing something is shown as a minus.
For interview processes trying to avoid false positives a negative mark will hurt you much more in the final sum.
So the bar is set differently for two candidates applying to the same position. I'm sure it doesn't account for every aspect but certainly seemed to explain some of it.
Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
#15Well it might change a lot as suddenly number of coders in their 40s goes up.
Indeed! The primary reason for the median age in Google and Facebook being so low is that the median age for programmers is low [1]. The reason for this low median age? There are more young programmers than old because it's an expanding field!
Though I must admit that the evidence points to current significant age biases in the hiring of these companies. The most successful older software developers I've come across have established themselves as experts in their field. They have successfully predicted their given technology would be successful or pioneered it themselves. I guess the frontend developer practice of changing stacks every six months has some merit.
1. http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#deve...
Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
#16I'm over 40 and I've been continuing to get more work than I can handle by staying up to date on my tech skills. Maybe that professional headshot I never got would help, though.
amen to that, older engineers would require higher salaries (due to the need to support family, to pay mortgage, etc.), and would not be able to put in the same number of hours. So if you can't demonstrate that you provide more values than the younger guns, why would an employer want to hire older engineers?
Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
#17"I had it good and now I don't have it good and I don't know what to do about it" is a fairly formulaic structure for a human interest story, and while I really loathe human suffering, it's also hard for me to sympathise with the subjects in stories such as this one. > “If you’ve worked at a large company for 10 years and get laid off, chances are your skills are six generations behind,” says Jonathan Nelson, chief e…
For the life of me I have a lot of trouble feeling sorry for their plight, and wish them all the best of luck packing up their possessions, their savings, and moving to a place they can afford, like Mississippi or Indiana.
Someday, perhaps I might ponder whether I should feel sorry for you, and wish you the best of luck packing up your possessions, your savings, as you move to a place you can afford, like Mississippi or Indiana.
A lot of 20-somethings treated me like "bantha pudu" in interviews. I can empirically say that I had never faced such unprofessional rudeness before I moved to the Bay Area. I had never had such mistaken and hasty accusations that I was lying. I had never had people simply blow me off for a phone interview. Never before have I had to try so hard to avoid negative stereotypes in a professional setting. In my time in places like Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, those things were all limited to social settings.
To quote a song from the 60's, if we're all so open and progressive, why am I "picking up that funny vibe?" (To be fair, this isn't everyone in their 20's around here. But the population isn't zero by far!)
Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
#18Well it might change a lot as suddenly number of coders in their 40s goes up.
Do you have any data demonstrating this will happen?
I guess they assume, like I do, that the current set of coders will continue to age. Will the current 20 year old coders shun 40 year old candidates in 20 years?
Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
#19I'm over 40 and I've been continuing to get more work than I can handle by staying up to date on my tech skills. Maybe that professional headshot I never got would help, though.
Although age bias is a thing in the Silicon Valley, this seems to be the main takeaway from the article at least on the engineering side. It's talking about engineers having to "learn new coding languages" or "retrained themselves to build mobile apps or do big data". Yes, clearly it's important to keep skills relevant and not just depend on the same job and the same company with the same skills being employable, at the same or higher pay, a decade later.
Re: It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley
#20I'm 24. Guess I should buy a shitty condo in Hayward with a 15 year mortgage so I'm paid off when the age discrimination kicks in. 40+ year old engineers with prop 13 equity or rent control - I'm jealous.