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Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

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Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#291

Post by pdimitar »

danellis wrote: post #22
SeanDav wrote: post #3

> "...Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said that young people are more intelligent while speaking to a group of entrepreneurs " I would be fascinated to hear if his opinion changes once he is 40+ ...

They are, aren't they? Doesn't intelligence peak and then drop with age? However, I'm sure it's more than compensated for by experience.

You start investing intelligence and effort where it really counts so I'd say most younger people I worked with are extremely inefficient but hyper-energetic and willing to waste time and energy on insignificant problems.

This is necessary for education of course but it's often times not contributing to a business' bottom line.

More mature people are almost universally more valuable for a business.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#292

Post by nomercy400 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #54
nomercy400 wrote: post #32

As somebody who does interviews for developers in a Java shop, a very blunt view of things: Any coding you've done more than five years ago isn't relevant anymore. I can't remember what I did five years ago. It is probably outdated, replaced or not in use any more. Looking back at my projects from five years ago, I would probably not agree with most of the code, as I've learned a lot of new things. I do care about yo…

> Any coding you've done more than five years ago isn't relevant anymore. I can't remember what I did five years ago. It is probably outdated, replaced or not in use any more. I tend to disagree. Not only a lot of five years old technology is still relevant today, but someone that showed great skills 5/10 years ago has still great potential today.

Yeah, I was a bit too quick with the five years. It depends on the technology. 5 years of Java development you still work with is relevant. Or that great project which really stands out of your normal line of work, I'm really interested in that.

But that two-month project of C++ which you haven't used since 2012 really doesn't matter for me. I will ask about it, and you will tell me "I haven't used that since..". Or that framework you used in 2007-2009, and then died out and which nobody uses today any more, I don't really care.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#293

Post by pdimitar »

Celarnor wrote: post #114
d--b wrote: post #45

I'm 35 and I'm not worried AT ALL that I will be discriminated after I am 40. I think in a way we're the golden tech generation, we screwed our elders by discriminating against them when the industry was in disruption and now we're screwing the younger generation like in any other mature industry. I'm saying "we" as in "my generation", I don't feel I personally took a big part in any of it.

I'm 'only' 28 and I worry constantly about this as 30 gets closer and closer. When you're the oldest developer you have to work much harder to justify still being employed, but not so hard that they start to worry about you jumping ship for 5-10k more. The only people around my company that are around your age are the owners and the directors that report to them.

Stop worrying and jump ship for 5-10k more because it seems you work in a toxic environment.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#294

Post by nomercy400 »

scarface74 wrote: post #183
yodsanklai wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any coding you've done more than five years ago isn't relevant anymore. I can't remember what I did five years ago. It is probably outdated, replaced or not in use any more. I tend to disagree. Not only a lot of five years old technology is still relevant today, but someone that showed great skills 5/10 years ago has still great potential today.

Any coding you've done more than five years ago isn't relevant anymore I've been developing in .Net for 12 years. It's still relevant. I started using Linq with C# in 2008 and using it with Sql Server. Now I'm using Linq with the Mongo driver. JavaScript and Bootstrap are just as relevant today as it was 5 years ago. In 2007 if you knew Java or .Net you were marketable as an enterprise developer. In 2017, you are jus…

Yeah, I was a bit too quick on that one.

Imagine only developing .Net from 2005-2007, would you still be interested in their .Net skills if that person switched to Java and has't touched .Net since?

"Any coding/tech you've done more than 5-10 years ago and haven't touched since, isn't relevant any more." <- better?

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#295

Post by pdimitar »

nickjj wrote: post #117

I'll be 40 in a few years but I give zero fucks about age discrimination. I've found that most people don't really care how old you are as long as you provide them value. But I don't work at a corporation so I guess that puts me in a slightly different position. Instead I record and sell video courses that teach modern development practices. All of that started after I was 30. I guess my point is there's plenty of wa…

Fully agreed. There are myriad of ways to continue to be a viable professional.

For me personally, getting out of the corporate bubble was extremely worth it. So much toxicity gone in an instant.

I now work with people who don't judge me by age, only by what value I create. It's liberating and it feels like you're chest-close to the business side of things where no drama or intrigue exist.

To summarize: meritocracy can work but it requires a pretty tight regulation and smaller teams.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#296

Post by alkonaut »

nomercy400 wrote: post #288
alkonaut wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of this but lots of people will go a whole career without massive changes. I do desktop dev and the tech is not very far from where it was when I joined the project 14 years ago. I still change files I changed in 2003. If we found a good developer it wouldn't really matter much whether their skills was from 2007 or 2016. It's not "tech" or "programming" that evolves quickly, it's just a few specific…

True. My point is that if you've worked 14 years on a project, I'd like to know what you've done in those 14 years. Did you upgrade your toolchain, did you upgrade your main language version (eg. java 6 to java 8), did you consider webdevelopment and if so why didn't you change (I'm not pushing for web here, I'm just curious why you didn't follow the trend/hype). And what kind of substantial features/improvements did…

Yes, of course, sure. I mean it's a completely different world then and now (Multi core cpus, High dpi displays, language versions gone from C#1 to C#7 etc). Complete window toolkits swapped out etc. Feature set has probably grown 1000% (E.g. like Word 1.0 to 20XX).

So it's almost unrecognizable but the thing is that someone who was in on the project 10 years ago would be up to speed fairly quickly even though the language jumped 6 major versions and the window toolkit changed etc. And someone who wrote a swing app in '97 could jump on board this C#7 project and be productive immediately. The fundamentals don't change much.

When I look away from Javascript for 5 years I feel like I woke up on another planet.

> did you consider webdevelopment and if so why didn't you change (I'm not pushing for web here, I'm just curious why you didn't follow the trend/hype).

Same reason other heavy desktop apps and games aren't web based. Need the power of the local machine. It's not a db+forms app, it's a CAD+FEM package. There are of course some examples of "cloud cad" now but I doubt it will become mainstream any time soon.

Probably what is the core of the matter here is that the fundamentals of the application isn't the code that makes application tick, it's the domain logic. So while desktop moves slower than web/mobile, apps that are 90% e.g. physics etc moves slower than apps that are thin on logic and deep in presentation such as many web apps.

I suppose if our app was an AI app, then it would be pretty out of date because the domain moved so much in 10 years. But for CAD/FEM it doesn't.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#297

Post by pdimitar »

fsloth wrote: post #66

The best insurance against age is to find some domain, and excel at that. At 40, it's not so good if your top claim in CV is "I know C++ in an out". "I was part of a team delivering product X, Y and Z which produced this much revenue for our company and which provided this and this value to our clients. I'm experienced contributor in domain W, and am comfortable in providing value using technologies A and B." is much…

Best advice here.

Communicating with a lot of non-tech folk and just going out there in the world helped me realize that us the programmers live in our own bubble just like everybody else.

Now that I can express the business value of my skills, I am sought after and I have to turn down offers on a regular basis.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#298

Post by pdimitar »

fecak wrote: post #190

I recruited in tech for 20 years and now I write resumes, mostly for tech professionals. I generally start talking to my resume clients about ageism around 40 as well. I may ask if we want to keep the oldest jobs on the resume (which tend to be irrelevant anyway) or to list graduation dates that reveal age. I go through a quick exercise with clients to show how old they are "on paper", the basic formula being that we…

> Many clients decide not to try masking age, as any company that might discriminate based on age isn't a place they would want to work. I respect that as well.

That's exactly my attitude. I am aware of age discrimination and I am not gonna hide my age. The people who do it aren't pleasant, and work is not only about the money. You have to like your workplace else your life becomes a wide-awake nightmare.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#299

Post by itronitron »

philipov wrote: post #97
humanrebar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to gauge experience I think this could be solved by coming up with a more common vocabulary of tech job titles. In medicine you have technicians, orderlies, surgeons, general practitioners, anesthesiologists, physician-scientists, nurses, physicians' assistants, teaching physicians, and so on. Not to mention all the hospital administrators. They're not all "medical engineers". They don't (at least not to…

I was top of my class at the seminary, and I just don't understand why I never hear back from these jobs seeking a technology evangelist!

someone who excelled at their seminary would probably excel as a technology evangelist as well

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#300

Post by Joe-Z »

fatbird wrote: post #281
scioto wrote: post #115

I'm hitting another 0-year shortly, but I have few worries about my losing my job. The thing I worry about is not having shiny assignments to put on my resume. I haven't seen a shiny assignment in years. That's probably because my employer and I have unintentionally agreed upon my best fit. What do I do? I clean up after the cowboys are gone. We start a new project that has bells and whistles and does nifty cool thin…

I still tell people that my proudest day as a developer was when I deleted 70,000 lines of code that I'd made irrelevant, following a year of incremental refactoring that was consciously leading up to this point. It was, in my mind, an exquisite act of long-term maintenance programming. Older coders know what I mean and grin when I tell them about it.

I just came here from the "Yosemite bolt replacement"-thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529497), where someone linekd the GP.

The company I'm with at the moment has some horrible, horrible code, but there's nothing quit like the satisfaction you get from deleting a bunch of it because you just made it OBSOLETE.

It's gotten to the point where my boss is joking that my favourite programming activity is deleting code. Cheers to us maintainers!

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