Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

oldgeekjobs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 391 posts

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

#321

Post by alttab »

sfrailsdev wrote: post #217
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…

Of course I'd point out that not every older developer has been a developer all along. A number of people move to software development as a second career, (or as a first career after a series of less career oriented jobs).

The Stanford educated 20 somethings would see you as inferior for this track record. Night school? You old grandpa....

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

#322

Post by alttab »

pc86 wrote: post #189
daxfohl wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? What evidence supports this conclusion? Because in the deluge of this style of post on HN lately, the most common counter has been "well we elders know the game so much better". Sounds exactly like sports. Yes you can pick up new skills and what-not, but "the game" has changed and the kids at a very fundamental level "get it" and you don't. > having read The 100 Year Life Okay.... > it's clear to me that in 20…

> Old-school coders are the best there are. Looking at all the programmers I've worked with I see zero correlation between age in skill. None in either direction. You assertion that programming is an NFL-style career is one devoid of any merit of substance. There is no time clock on a programmer's career the way there is in any professional sport.

He's saying it's highly paid and skewed to the young. Statistically, thus isn't false.

It also gives those who fit the profile to think about the bigger picture, which can't hurt.

But I'm a manager now so feel free to ignore my advice.

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

#323

Post by commandar »

alttab wrote: post #320
chetanahuja wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And the south isn't bigoted in the ways many people assume." Only if there was some sort of a "survey" on people's attitudes in different parts of the country. Perhaps people with competing ideologies would represent one side or another and then the general public would decide to pick one of those choices to represent the majority view from that area. This way we'd actually know what a majority of the population in…

What people believe isn't always what people DO. When I lived in Texas for 7 years I was surprised to find that Texans can make fun of "beaners" and then respect their work ethic and hire them over "lazy white people who want to get paid more." It's a mix that requires. A different lense that most don't have. I grew up in liberal DC, and then went to texas. I'm now up north again, but my view of the south has changed…

I just want you to know that you've highlighted my point far better than I did.

From the responses I've gotten, I feel like people think I'm saying the south doesn't have very real problems with race. It does. But the daily reality is much closer to what you're describing.

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

#324

Post by michaelcampbell »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #294
m103forme wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently moved back to the area from NorCal. Initially, 40% of my income was going to rent for a studio on the outskirts of Boulder. It's insane. Now I live with my SO and thankfully that's down to around 15%. I can't even imagine finding a place to buy now.

Someone call the CDC. Whatever California's got appears to be contagious.

I believe most call it "demand".

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

#325

Post by jauer »

esaym wrote: post #228
cellularmitosis wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is changing somewhat now with the advent of WISP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov... My parents are just about to install an 80' tower on their rural property, because a local WISP is the only unmetered option available. I feel like the cellular revolution has really crippled itself by virtue of nearly all "cellular wifi hot spot" plans being data capped to some number of GB per mont…

My experience with a local WISP was so-so. Perhaps there are better technologies now, but what mine used was a white labeled version of the Motorola Canopy PMP (point to multi-point) I was told 8mbs down and 2mbs up. That worked great for about 6 months and then it started to degrade month by month. I assume as more people subscribed to the service. By the end of 3 years I was only getting about 2mbs down and 700kbs…

WISP quality is very uneven. It's rare to find one that has the right combination of business acumen, network engineering, and rf engineering to run successfully...

IME when correctly configured Canopy is one of the most robust last mile fixed-wireless systems on the market (though LTE may change that), but it has to be configured correctly.

The main feature of Canopy is GPS synchronization of tx/rx timeslots so you can reuse spectrum. A lot of WISPs bought it for that and then never changed settings because they didn't understand how the sync worked and didn't want to change a setting that alters timeslots and break sync. Never mind that there is a built-in calculator to help you figure that out...

Getting 5-20% packet loss upstream indicated they were doing something terribly wrong. Perhaps they screwed up timeslots and the AP received interference from other APs causing errors when listening for your SM, perhaps they didn't add control frames after their subscriber count significantly increased, or they simply oversubscribed the AP. The most widely deployed Canopy version (gen2 PMP100, came out in 2004 and still widely deployed) could handle up to 10Mbps down & 4Mbps up. Selling 8M/2M plans on that platform is a bit ambitious but unfortunately all too common.

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

#326

Post by flukus »

eric_h wrote: post #283
sidlls wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't about "exclusive" but the very first time a "data structures and algorithms" question ever appeared in an interview I had was in the Bay Area, after having spent 10+ years on the east coast. Prior to that interviews focused almost exclusively on design patterns (not just OO, but general architecture), project experience, and language specific questions where appropriate. I've been here a while now so I have n…

> conflate academic computer science with software engineering Which is mind boggling. I took an introductory "software engineering" class in (a reasonably prestigious) university ~15 yrs ago which was ostensibly about learning how to use the right tool for the right job, and one of the assignments was to build a web application in C++! Perhaps the intent of that assignment was to show that it wasn't the right tool,…

Would modern c++ with a decent framework be that bad for web development? I imagine you'd have to do a bit more wiring due to the lack of reflection etc, but that isn't an insurmountable problem.

Edit - There a quite a few frameworks out there. This one seemed quite nice: https://github.com/ipkn/crow

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

#327

Post by gozur88 »

fredgrott wrote: post #279
gozur88 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the company's perspective the job has to be one for which the company can reliably measure your output. If you're doing data entry for medical records the company can easily count the number of patients you've finished, the number of pages, even the number of keystrokes. But for a developer working from home the company can't tell the difference between a bug that took three days of plugging away to find and one…

BULLSHIT! I can damn well see when a issue has been entered in a bug tracker and when the bug has finally been marked fixed with the commit listed in the bug tracker.. So can everyone else including managers

BULLSHIT!

I can easily check the code in at the end of my television spree.

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

#328

Post by flukus »

gozur88 wrote: post #258
derekp7 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there are companies that think nothing of hiring offshore workers to replace local jobs. Sometimes within the same organization. Why is it that a company will require you to either be on-site, or in India, but nowhere else?

From the company's perspective the job has to be one for which the company can reliably measure your output. If you're doing data entry for medical records the company can easily count the number of patients you've finished, the number of pages, even the number of keystrokes. But for a developer working from home the company can't tell the difference between a bug that took three days of plugging away to find and one…

> But for a developer working from home the company can't tell the difference between a bug that took three days of plugging away to find and one that you knocked out in twenty minutes before binge watching House of Cards on company time.

I'm more productive this way. Having something like House of Cards on in the background provides enough distraction that I don't get distracted by other things, like HN. But if I were to do this in the office I doubt it would go over well.

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

#329

Post by flukus »

Torgo wrote: post #104
rdtsc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. I like that quote. Copied it to my notes for future reference. To expand more on the topic, I wonder if remote workers are a good way to bring some revival for smaller rural communities. I visit some of those places and many have a beautiful setting, everyone knows each other…

It's still hard to get good Internet in many rural-ish areas, which makes this really hard. I tried, multiple times. We were supposed to get a modern "rural electrification project" in the 90s for broadband, but cable companies stole the money, aided and abetted by Congress.

Do we need good internet? Most of the time we're dealing with text (code, email, irc) etc. It seems like most of the work could be done over dial up with the occasional trip to somewhere with faster internet.

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

#330

Post by ocdtrekkie »

brlewis wrote: post #312
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…

Could it simply be that we hear the most tech career horror stories from the Bay Area because that's the place with the most tech careers? I'd be as hesitant to make generalizations about a place as I would be to make generalizations about an age bracket.

No, because 90% of tech jobs are outside of the Bay Area, but probably 90% of the tech job drama is in the Bay Area.
Post reply on HN