Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#171

Post by polartx » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

makecheck wrote: post #56

I think that age is correlation, not causation. What’s really happening is two things. First, companies typically don’t like paying people lots of money (even if they are great at blowing millions on other mindless things). Second, these companies do not understand that their unwillingness to hire expensive people is causing months of bug-chasing and monkey-patching in their products. When your organization is under…

>I think that age is correlation, not causation.

Agreed. I started working in tech when I was 22--now I'm over 30. I've never witnessed old-age discrimination. What I have witnessed are start-ups, built on newer tech, (AWS over on-prem, nosql over relational, etc), passing on candidates whose last reference book was the Data Warehouse Toolkit and still want to be called WebMasters.

The law of the tech industry is when you stop learning--at any age, you lose market value.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#172

Post by jamiek88 » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

sAuronas wrote: post #107

nedsma wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great story. Also, I believe that geek fellows here and HNers shouldn't be concerned about switching jobs, as they're immersed in this industry all over their heads. It's folks who do coding just for living and don't really want to invest in new technologies, or have early stopped trying out new things that might have more issues finding new prospects.

Thanks. I got into the industry with the expectation that I would launch a startup. Yet, I starting really writing code and decided that I wanted to do something really novel and killed my original real estate domain related ideas. Once you learn to write code you realize how weak your ideas really are. Since I love coding so much, I don't mind improving as a dev because novelty and quality my ideas seem to be improv…

How did younger started? Did you go back to school or use online resources etc?

I'm really interested in hearing more of your story.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#173

Post by beachstartup » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

mattdeboard wrote: post #142

sjdchid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except old people are objectively better off in the US. It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.

I mean we're not talking about Baby Boomers here, chief. There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year). Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and ho…

> There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now.

i'm one of these, and i don't consider myself a millennial.

anyone who's legitimately used a rotary phone (or even just seen one in use) in a non-ironic way should not be considered a millennial.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#174

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:52 PM UTC

vemv wrote: post #91

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it hurts, you're doing it wrong :) I haven't had a stressful deadline in a very long time. Indeed, I've been weeks or months ahead in almost all cases. I've used that time to get a jump on integration, or help others get a jump on their schedule. By the time I'm ready to ship, the only thing between me and proper operation is disinformation from others. Now, granted, that's annoying to some people. But just consid…

It's an interesting point of view! For me, age 24, I'd see it extremely difficult to keep the same pace when I'm 50. Maybe I can do the same stuff, but slower. So by then I wouldn't feel 'discriminated' if someone hires a more energetic, available candidate.

You don't work the same pace when you're 50. But you get a lot more done.

You don't write the bugs you did at 24 - which means you don't have to stay up all night trying to find them. You don't produce the crummy designs you did at 24, which means that you don't have to spend two weeks fixing them. You know the library functions when you're 50, so you don't have to write your own code to do the same thing. And so on. You spend less time typing, but you still produce more value.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#175

Post by groby_b » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

employee8000 wrote: post #126

fatdog wrote: post #92

Can someone state honestly and pseudonymously why they don't hire oldz? Speculating I would say: - chose younger hire because cheaper and can be moulded into company specific role. - younger candidate more easily managed by less experienced (cheaper) manager. - wants to keep culture "pure," and needs kids to drink kool-aid. - values power and control over less experienced technically acceptable candidates. - get extr…

I'm in my 40s. I interview frequently and the problem with most devs over 40 is that they are slow or dont keep up with technology. I interviewed one guy in his 60s who went to school at MIT for his phd. I was excited. And then when it came to the coding exercise not only was he using perl, which had no relevance to our stack (which he was informed about) he took 3x as long to complete the question. I interviewed ano…

Note: JSON is just like XML in that it's a horrible data interchange format ;) And if "knowing JSON" is a key skill you interview for... You possibly might want to ask different questions. Unless you repeatedly build the same thing - see below.

Any decent developer, no matter their age, should be able to figure out what JSON is in about as much time as it takes to have a coffee. If they can't do that, you have a real problem.

> as a hiring manager why take the risk when someone already has the knowledge?

As a hiring manager: Because we're not redoing already solved things, we solve new problems. The person with the knowledge holds the advantage for a few months. And then the person with the problem solving skills catches up. Of course, if you keep building the same type of app over and over - which is fine, and equally necessary - those months are never made up for, and experience matters more than problem solving.

Ultimately, you hire for the jobs you need to fill. For my part, I'm happy to take anybody who understands CS and is able to learn over somebody who already knows my tech but is stumped by new problems. (No matter the age)

YMMV.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#176

Post by AStellersSeaCow » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

sjdchid wrote: post #57

whamlastxmas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the equivalent of someone making a job site for black people to get jobs, and saying "be careful not to discriminate against whites!".

Except old people are objectively better off in the US. It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.

Yeah, this. There is ageism out there, and it happens younger in tech than in other industries, but it's far less of an issue than all other forms of hiring discrimination I can think of.

I've been a part of hundreds of interviews for dozens of engineering positions at a variety of companies and organizations. While I have witnessed clear-cut ageism with qualified older candidates, it's with the distinct minority of older candidates, and typically only with borderline ones. Compare to even the most qualified female candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of sexism, or non-Asian minority candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of racism^.

So I won't deny that ageism is a problem but - in the case of white dudes - it's the jolt of a sudden uphill at the end of a couple decades of easy slightly downhill coast. Compared to continuous vertical climb that women and non-Asian minorities have to put up with in engineering, it's a pretty modest problem that the affected have both ample time and opportunity to prepare for.

^- The tech industry isn't, at least in my experiences, blatantly racist/sexist these days. Anecdotally, women and minorities have an easier time making it through HR/recruiter screening. It's a more subtle and pernicious effect in tech interviews, where correct answers are overscrutinized for flaws and even marginally incorrect answers are blown out of proportion. Never seen this with older (white/Asian, male) candidates.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#177

Post by omouse » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:55 PM UTC

sctb wrote: post #120

johnwheeler wrote: post #3

Hi Everybody, I'm the creator of the site the down blog in the OP links to https://oldgeekjobs.com . I developed it as an MVP last night in one hour. The blog looks like it's getting crushed under load, so here's the content of the post: Check out https://oldgeekjobs.com/ if you’re over 30. In the software development industry it’s hard to get hired when you get past 35 and are still “just a developer”. Employers loo…

We've updated the link from https://software-dev-group.org/2016/09/15/old-geek-jobs-figh... to the homepage for now. If the blog post comes up, we can change it again.

It's up, it should have caching? Guess that isn't working right for them. lol

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#178

Post by larve » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #4

tjic wrote: post #2

I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world. I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discri…

Problem with your solution is that you already now people, if you don't you have to rely on websites like freelancer that pretty much are the same as paid-to-win-the-bid in modern mobile video games and it's sad when people all over the world bid really low those making the website effectively racist regarding devs that to this for living instead of side jobs.

I never had any problem finding serious gigs on freelancer.com. Advertise your rate (in my case 70-100$/h depending on the technology), without bowing down to the $10/h bids. Just the fact that you can write a grammatically correct sentence in your bid, with a few questions showing that you know what the problem is about, is enough to get you a solid gig. If people don't hire you because you are too expensive / think they can get away with a cheaper bid, you don't want to work for them. Now, there are obviously a lot of great programmers living in places with lower living costs, but they are already buried in projects anyway. I usually find a good "day" gig in about 1-2 h on freelancer. Do two or three of those, with clients who turn out to be solid, intelligent and paying promptly, and you most probably found a reliable pipeline of work.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#179

Post by damaru » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 6:03 PM UTC

But don't ageism always happened to be reverse? I still roll my eyes when a early 20's try to sells me idea of marketing - and although you can have a lot of good ideas at that age, you still don't have life and work experience that is needed to go trough massive amount of stress or unknown situations. I think it's fine that kids who run new business don't want old folks in there. It's a bit of a return of the balance. If you're too old to get hired, how about starting a new business with other oldies?

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#180

Post by mattdeboard » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 6:05 PM UTC

beachstartup wrote: post #173

mattdeboard wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we're not talking about Baby Boomers here, chief. There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year). Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and ho…

> There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. i'm one of these, and i don't consider myself a millennial. anyone who's legitimately used a rotary phone (or even just seen one in use) in a non-ironic way should not be considered a millennial.

Why?