261–270 of 361 posts
I'm curious when I read these articles: does this also mean making a career switch, or maybe attempting to start a career, in programming post 30 (with or without a degree) is incredibly improbable? Does that ring true to people here?
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…
Working in a bank, not for an editor...
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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…
What's wrong with that?
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Or step into somewhere like my workplace in downtown St. Louis, a skyscraper built in 1911 renovated into modern offices. The bootstrapped, 6-year-old former startup I work for is filled with people from their 20s on up past 50s making, selling, and supporting Software as a Service, with the developers hacking away at a RESTful API and Ember.js apps. Plus, we share the building with Kickstarted startups like Pixel Pr…
So having all the buzzwords is what makes you cool? "RESTful API", "Ember.js apps", "Software as a Service", "sharing the building with kickstarted start ups".
There are two perceived problems with hiring older programmers: 1) Older programmers won't put up with bullshit. They expect to have reasonable goals, be listened to, be compensated fairly, and have a reasonable schedule. They've been around the block enough to identify bullshit and will leave when it starts getting too high. 2) Older programmers really don't always understand the "cool" social crap that teenagers ar…
Then the "problem" should be self correcting assuming the companies which make money survive (which they do), and those which don't focus on making money evaporate (which they do). Or maybe it's not a "problem" if only some companies are doing it, because they value things which the older people don't have interest in, and so the older people self select themselves out by choice. Is there a list of companies which va…
I dunno. I can think of three ways in which an older developer might have a hard time finding a job: (1) If someone doesn't keep up with currently relevant technology, they will find themselves without the job skills that employers are looking for, regardless of whatever other qualities they may have. This isn't ageism. (2) If someone works at the same place for 10+ years, getting raises every year and becoming more…
#3 is against the law in the US.
(I'm also thinking of a friend whose kids have grown up and the house is paid off, so she and her husband are now looking around the startup scene, because they can actually take a pile of risks again.)
Hire old people! They know stuff!
(CoI: I'm 47 :-) )
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Then the "problem" should be self correcting assuming the companies which make money survive (which they do), and those which don't focus on making money evaporate (which they do). Or maybe it's not a "problem" if only some companies are doing it, because they value things which the older people don't have interest in, and so the older people self select themselves out by choice. Is there a list of companies which va…
B2B software vales profit and only profit. A cursory list: http://directory.thesmallbusinessweb.com
For some companies, I'm sure hiring Socrates, rather than Alexander, is more productive.
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Sigh Tech workers. And yes, there's always been some age discrimination. But the explosion of consumer and mobile apps in the last 5 - 10 years (vs B2B apps prior) has really created this issue at scale.
If more founders were in their 40's, would reverse discrimination happen? "So, you lack systems analysis and operations skills and you've only used one flavor of *nix...(phone reminder goes off)...Quite sorry, I have to end this interview early to pick up my daughter from daycare, she's vomiting. Oh, you'll go early to SXSW...is that a new airline?"
Is it illegal for a start up to discriminate against me if I have the technical acumen? Sure. But the hiring person doesn't have to consciously discriminate. It can happen just by placing greater emphasis on the lack of experience in a particular framework when the real reason is that the hiring person just didn't relate to me as a 46 yo in any way.
1. I'm not implying that it's a problem having a large number of 20-something start up founders. People with time and energy to solve cool problems is only a social benefit.
(EDIT: Changed asterisk to 1.)