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The Brutal Ageism of Tech

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Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#151

Post by jayd16 »

Maybe I'm just some young punk but I have a clear picture of the "old man" engineer I don't enjoy working with. I will say when you were born has very little to do with what makes you that old man, though.

I'd say its the "I'm too old for this shit", attitude. If you want to get in early and leave early that's fine but If you don't put in extra hours, there will be decisions made when everyone else is in the office and you went home. Then you bitch and moan like its ageism but they're asking the team to conform to their hours and that's just not going to happen.

Plus there are plenty of people who have the "I've been doing it this way for XYZ." Don't tell me innovation stopped when you got the Sr. in your title. If you're coding in Java and refuse to type your collections, I hate you.

If you click with the team and have gray hair, I'll love to learn from you.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#153

Post by tsotha »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #111
tsotha wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Had they instead spent that six months re-tuning old talents, sending out the occasional resume, and building stuff, that seems to get people hired regardless of age. There are two problems with that logic. The first is if you have only six months of experience doing something your pay is likely to reflect that. Second, look at it from an employer's perspective. You can hire a twenty year old or a fifty year old. Th…

I'm not sure I see this: > The first is if you have only six months of experience doing something your pay is likely to reflect that. My experience is building things has very little to do with the current frameworks and languages. Building a payroll system with a NoSQL back end and an AWS front end is "different" than building the same with an Xwindows client and an Oracle back end, but the things that may a payroll…

>That however is what sounds like actual age discrimination...

And? What is this article about? Do you think it's productive for older guys to cry about age discrimination when they can't find a job? All I'm saying is you play to your strengths when you're looking for a job, no matter what your situation is. And being an older guy with just a handful of years in a brand new technology is playing to your competition's strengths.

Companies that wouldn't hire an older guy as an Android programmer for $35/hr will shell out $300/hr for that same guy to teach an in-house six sigma class for two weeks. So be the six sigma guy. Does it make sense? No. Does that matter? Again, no.

>But if you assume work performance based on age, gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation, you will always be doing it wrong.

That's all very nice and totally irrelevant when you're the one looking for a job instead of the one doing the hiring.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#154

Post by phil21 »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #149
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. Wrong question, I think. Talent does increase with age, at least if the developers in question actually care enough to stay current. [1] I don't think it gets better by orders of magnitude, though -- the mythical 10x-20x programmer starts out as a 5x+ programmer. I know I was already at least that much better than…

I think this more or less nails it. I'm not a programmer, but I have hired a few in my day. My best hire I've ever made was out of high school, and this kid blew away any developers of any age by 3-5x easily. He now is 15 years along his career (long since moved on - I can't afford him), and working for Google.

He's going to be great when he's 60 years old, because he's great at what he does, passionate, and lives for learning new technology.

The only difference is that yes, he will not be working those crazy hours.

You do have one mistake in your post though. While yes, a single developer who is 5x more productive than another programmer is worth more than 5x as much - for a small team that may not matter as much as you think. As a business owner, I would want to hire you, but I also need another developer who can "keep up" so I have business continuity should you quit/get hit by a bus or something. This is worth a considerable amount and I would not be willing to hire you vs. hiring 3 lesser developers to get the same job done. It would be too much of a risk.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#155

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

aortega wrote: post #139
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…

Not so much. I'm 35, started programming at about 10 in my TI99-4A, typing games from magazines, etc. the usual stuff. No way a 40 year old guy have more experience than me in general programming, unless he was working at Microsoft or IBM at that date, and surely they are about less than 10000 of those guys in the world. Of course there are 40 year olds that may have way more experience than me in a specific language…

>No way a 40 year old guy have more experience than me in general programming

I started programming toys in 1979. [1] I started programming "modern" computers in 1981. I was selling games when I was 15 in 1983. My "real" professional experience started in 1987 with a contract to write a video game from a major publisher.

So yes, it's not hard for someone to have "more experience" than you in general programming.

[1] I had one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#156

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

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…

>Experienced people have learned a set of platonic causations that they apply to pattern matched situations.

Good developers do use pattern matching. But good developers just use it as a way to come up with ideas, and they use their experience to judge the ideas.

There's no such thing as "bad experience", just poor reasoning skills. And mostly people will improve their reasoning skills over time. Unfortunately, not always.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#157

Post by x0x0 »

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…

You say talent, I say a lack of tolerance for bullshit and asshole driven development (ADD). ADD is the boss who waits until deadlines are nearly here to drop work on you (he said he does it because he thinks last second pressure creates better work. I think it creates unnecessary stress and sloppy work. Quit that job with a quickness). Or perhaps it's just the willingness to stand up and say, "Your bad planning is not my problem". Of course there are real emergencies occasionally but the vast majority of last second panics are completely preventable by competent people. Long hours shouldn't be a regular requirement.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#158

Post by pvdm »

Taek wrote: post #85
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)…

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…

How old are the creators of Golang and Haskell ?

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#159

Post by sanxiyn »

mbrubeck wrote: post #113
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…

The software industry has been growing rapidly in recent decades, and the growth has been concentrated in a few geographic areas. So employers in those areas (especially Silicon Valley, and also smaller hubs like Seattle and Boston) have to recruit a lot of their workers from other regions, as their job openings grow faster than the "organic" growth of the local worker population. Theory: This importing of workers ha…

After some search, "Disruptive decisions to leave home: Gender and family differences in expatriation choices" seem relevant, and you can crawl citations from there.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#160

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

phil21 wrote: post #154
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The question we should be asking is why talent doesn't seem to increase with age as much as we'd like. Wrong question, I think. Talent does increase with age, at least if the developers in question actually care enough to stay current. [1] I don't think it gets better by orders of magnitude, though -- the mythical 10x-20x programmer starts out as a 5x+ programmer. I know I was already at least that much better than…

I think this more or less nails it. I'm not a programmer, but I have hired a few in my day. My best hire I've ever made was out of high school, and this kid blew away any developers of any age by 3-5x easily. He now is 15 years along his career (long since moved on - I can't afford him), and working for Google. He's going to be great when he's 60 years old, because he's great at what he does, passionate, and lives fo…

>This is worth a considerable amount and I would not be willing to hire you vs. hiring 3 lesser developers to get the same job done. It would be too much of a risk.

This is a fair point, but consider that having the expert work on it to start with, even if the expert leaves at some point, would mean you have a far more maintainable code base than if you'd started with three junior developers.

Probably the best answer is a compromise: Get the expert to put down the "bones" of the project with the understanding that they would commit to training a (less expensive) project maintainer (or a team of them). EDIT: Also have the expert screen your maintainer(s) so you don't end up with idiots. :)

The value of having good code to start with can't be overstated. There are times when I've come in and told people that they should start from scratch than try to maintain their pile of garbage code created by junior developers.

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