111–120 of 341 posts
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Older workers are also more savvy. They understand things like the fact that if you're working 80 hours a week for $120k you are actually making $60k.
I get your point but that's not the best way to make it.
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Is the potshot on jQuery and PHP really necessary? I know enough people where I live making six figures (low COL city) with PHP, SQL and jQuery that I don't think they're ready to sunset.
This unfortunate obsession with new and shiny in the Valley is why we have to learn lessons like the benefits of relational databases over and over. Most of the new stuff isn't improved, it is simply different.
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The primary reason for the median age in Google and Facebook being so low is that the median age for programmers is low Are you sure you have the cause and effect going in the right direction? It could be that the median age for programmers is low precisely because of ageism.
So I'm staring down the bore of my 40th birthday. That means that I graduated college in 1999. When I was looking at colleges (in 1995), many of the colleges that I looked at didn't have a computer science department. Many of the ones that did, had had that CS department for less than five years. My class ('99, again) had twice as many CS majors as did '98. '00 had twice as many CS majors as '99 -- because this was t…
The world was shifting away from mainframes to the web, and from C++ to more dynamic languages like Perl or Javascript.
And today, while it may not be the only center of the tech world, you can still make a good living writing websites in dynamic languages. There's been a lot of incremental change over the last 20 years in that space, but it was incremental, and while all my experience of Visual Basic script in a multi- website may not technically be directly impacting me to, the fundamental loop of development hasn't changed all that much. It's still "make change, reload page, see if it's fixed now". If you really know your stuff and you've got the right framework set up properly, now the page reloads automatically. Viva la progress. (OK, yes, that's sarcasm, but still.)
I mean, I wrote my first XSS vulnerability 20 years ago, and developers still churn them out by the dozens today. There's been less change than you'd like. (Yes, there are technologies that make them much harder to write... now, please use them! Please!)
A lot of mobile development looks to me to be awfully similar to 1990s-style Windows development, too. New language, new frameworks, a lot more JSON, sure, but there are 1990s developers whom you could teleport to the present and have them start mobile development and they wouldn't be very lost. (Once they got over how many times more powerful the phone is than the platform they just left, anyhow.)
The "young tech hotshot" stuff is really just a senescent meme rapidly approaching its expiration date. This last year I met someone who is as close to being a young tech hotshot as I've seen in the last five years, really great guy... and I was giving him Haskell tips.
I'm still cautiously optimistic that the ageism in tech will just naturally dissipate. As evidence I would point out that once upon a time, 40 would not have been approaching the hill, but over it. If the deadline moves forward by about a year per year, it'll just go away.
Their resumes are longer, their skills can be older, some of the companies they've worked for might not even exist anymore. It's even more important to be able to search/narrow down/focus your decades of experience/accomplishments to those that matter in this new ageist landscape.
And the truth is, you've probably done whatever SV recruiters/managers say you require. You've been the self-starting, chaos riding, new tech stack conquering machine. You've lived at the cutting edge. It's just not on your resume, and you don't bring it up in interviews because you haven't been that person in a while and all your (maybe) recent job search experience is in displaying the breadth and length of your career.
It's tough.
It seems clear to me that age is just a state of mind. Some people act old and are cautious fucks that recoil from change. Others try very hard to appear as if they "get it", though they obviously don't, and the fact that they're trying so hard ends up looking pathetic to me.
Then there are the ones who don't give a fuck, and they are the best. I think they're the ones who are truly the wisest, and their vitality is infectious, they don't "seem" old.
My point is this: if you're 40 years old and are all butthurt that no Silicon Valley company wants to hire you, your butthurt only proves that the company was right not to hire you in the first place.
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Is the potshot on jQuery and PHP really necessary? I know enough people where I live making six figures (low COL city) with PHP, SQL and jQuery that I don't think they're ready to sunset.
It is relevant to the discussion because that's not a fresh skill set. Anyone not moving on from those technologies at this point should be concerned about their future in the industry. Maybe they can find jobs now, but without learning something new they won't in the future.
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All of those things are great, but you're assuming your manager and peers will value them like you do. I see this type of thinking applied to an issue in a way that results in people becoming increasingly irritated. Silicon Valley wants to hear "yes yes yes", not reason why you think XYZ solution won't work.
Exactly: the ability to detect bullshit more quickly is unfortunately an ability not appreciated by many companies. It isn't just SV that has this problem. Those that tend to thrive in these environments past 40 are those who have instead learned play the imperfect system aggressively for their own benefit.
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Craft beer in portland just means "more hops." I call it crap beer. Fully agree with your post, just felt like griping about "craft" beer here.
On that note, why are there so many new IPAs in PNW? I like IPAs, but I doubt most people want them.
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It is relevant to the discussion because that's not a fresh skill set. Anyone not moving on from those technologies at this point should be concerned about their future in the industry. Maybe they can find jobs now, but without learning something new they won't in the future.
Tell that to all the COBOL programmers making serious money.