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The Brutal Ageism of Tech

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Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#351

Post by grayarea »

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…

TI99? You pussy. I'm 40 and when I was 10 used to help my Dad build homebrew z80 machines. My first programming was writing a small OS in z80 asm. Helped him build an awesome z280(that was a rare chip) transputer.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#352

Post by csixty4 »

electronvolt wrote: post #325
Dale1 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was certainly the first Computer Scientist, well that's what I was told in uni!

She was definitely the first person to realize the potential that Babbage's Analytic Engine had, particularly outside of just calculating things. Babbage's design, if I remember correctly, was basically an improvement on a design he initially made to calculate trajectories for artillery teams, and most of his thoughts on what to use his computer for were "calculate (thing)". Lovelace wrote on how the computer could b…

I think you're mixing up a couple stories there, but it doesn't really matter that much. Just to fill in the details (and because the alternative is for me to start responding to work emails which I just don't feel like doing this morning): Babbage was concerned about the quality of mathmatical table books, which were used for calculations before we had modern calculators and slide rules weren't mainstream. The figures in them were computed by hand, and some were so bad there was an error on every page, which made them useless for scientific work and dangerous for industrial work. The Difference Engine was designed to print out pages of figures using a little printer attachment.

ENIAC was ininitially put to work calculating artillery trajectories, once the programmers figured out the bug where the shell kept going after it hit the ground (oops!).

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#353

Post by thesz »

Shivetya wrote: post #306
toomuchtodo wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

31 year old here. I already have ~13 years of experience, and I feel like I still have my best work ahead of me.

48 here, I hope I never reach the point where I do not think the same.

I worked with 72 years old man who outcoded me and my colleagues (I was 36 at the time).

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#354

Post by tripzilch »

leothekim wrote: post #274
skrebbel wrote: post #219

Anecdotal: I'm a part-time CTO (long story) of a startup. I'm 30 myself. We hired 6 engineers in total up until now: three interns in their twenties, who're very smart and motivated but also inexperienced; two programmers with a few years of professional experience who can get to real decent (well written, unit tested, etc) code on the first go; and 1 guy of over 40. When hiring, I was very skeptical of the guy over…

s/older/experienced/. Grey hair does not engender wisdom.

What about grey comments?

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#355

Post by lttlrck »

thesz wrote: post #353
Shivetya wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

48 here, I hope I never reach the point where I do not think the same.

I worked with 72 years old man who outcoded me and my colleagues (I was 36 at the time).

I am 39 and I would love to work with someone like that. I would learn a thing or two and it would give me hope :-)

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#356

Post by aortega »

laurasbadideas wrote: post #348
aortega wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. You're talking about 1989, right? In 1983, there were 443,000 computer programmers and 276,000 "Computer s…

Damn thats a lot. I recon I had my numbers a little wrong.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#357

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

aortega wrote: post #342
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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]…

>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. Do you know how many people were doing that? you are way over estimating the amount of people in the world with your experience.

> over estimating the amount of people

You said "No way a 40 year old guy have more experience than me". To disprove an absolute statement you only need one example.

That said, a significant fraction of my friends from those days were doing similar things. I won't deny that I'm particularly good at programming, but all of those friends could also claim more experience than you.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#358

Post by pbiggar »

gaadd33 wrote: post #171
pbiggar wrote: post #116

More for the rest of us. If you're too old for most startups to look twice at your resume, apply to CircleCI: https://circleci.com/jobs . We value experience, and our backend is even written in Lisp [1]. [1] As we all know, all greybeards use Lisp ;)

Do you guys use Weblocks or Clack or something similar?

We use Clojure (I'm informed that Lips-with-a-capital-L might mean something different than that, in which case I apologize for my lack of purity and bad nomenclature.)

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#359

Post by lispylol »

zomgbbq wrote: post #91
lispylol wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the job market like when you graduated from university? Do you think it's easier for you to get a job now than it is 10, 20 years ago? Just curious to hear your thoughts.

When I graduated from college, it was 1994. Most people who were making good money at the time were Unix C programmers so that's what I did out of school. Honestly, I felt more ageism because I was young at the time (contrary to this article) than than I ever do now as a 40+. I was getting paid a relatively low salary and was expected to work insane hours. My accountant friends were probably making more money out of…

> Honestly, I felt more ageism because I was young at the time (contrary to this article) than than I ever do now as a 40+. I was getting paid a relatively low salary and was expected to work insane hours.

Interesting! Was it ageism or was it because you were inexperienced? This is tricky because I feel like even if younger developers are discriminated against based on their age, they might be less likely to attribute it to ageism. If this is true then I wonder if older developers are for some reason more likely to blame ageism for their career ills instead of skill obsolescence, hence making ageism seem like something that mostly affects the older devs...

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#360

Post by tsotha »

saraid216 wrote: post #330
tsotha wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Being able to say NO is not a matter of where you work, but rather one of actually saying NO. That's been my experience. Companies will push and push until you say no. After that they may not give you 30% raises every year, but they're not going to fire a productive employee who refuses to put in long hours.

Eh, my personal experience has been that no one actually asks you to stay late for anything. A couple of people seem to do so without being asked, but if a deadline is missed, the reaction is generally, "Well, let's examine the process for what we're doing wrong. Are we overcommitting? Were the specifications wrong? Are the engineers being randomized too much? Did we change the specs midway through?" Etc. It's never…

In the mid '90s I had a job working in a company doing logistics software. Every Friday about 2:00 my manager would come around and say "We're really behind on our delivery, so the team is coming in tomorrow for a half day. I'll buy everyone pizza for lunch."

On Saturday, of course, things wouldn't go as expected. Many times we were still there at midnight, and he came around asking us to stay for just one more hour so we could help test the latest build. Then there were more problems, so he'd ask us to come in on Sunday. For just a half day.

This happened probably three weekends out of four the first year I was there. It got to the point people were taking Friday off because they figured each hour of vacation was actually worth three hours.

So I came to the realization it was either put my foot down or find another job, so one Friday I went into his office and said "Don't even ask me to come in on a weekend. Ever again." I thought it might cost me my job, but that was the end of it.

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