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

Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 258 posts

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#71

Post by avip »

moosey wrote: post #60

Everyone here is talking about their skillset, and I'm going to take another direction: appearance and interpersonal skills. There is ageism, yes, but I think a deeper problem is reaction to peoples appearance. If you are late twenties concerned about age, then hide it, starting now. * Always wear sunscreen when you are outside, regardless of race. It prevents skin aging, and you'll still tan and get Vitamin D regard…

So in short the cure for ageism is to try and look younger than you are? No one saw that one coming.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#72

Post by joshuamcginnis »

buserror wrote: post #64
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to work with younger guys as a 1:1 basis I wonder if you can expand on this. As I get older, I find myself and my peers confronted with having to answer to younger, often less experienced, stakeholders. What kind of challenges have these presented for you and how have you adapted? What philosophy or attitude should us aging techies adopt as the gap between our peers widens?

Basically the only rule is: NOBODY (that much younger) will ever know how good or experienced you are. They just can't know. It's impossible for them to be in your shoes, but you CAN put yourself fairly easily in THEIR shoes and work from there... Don't feel underused or misunderstood etc etc even if you blatantly are. You won't be able to change it anyway, just work with what you have, and use your remaining brain c…

True words of wisdom. Thank you kind sir!

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#73

Post by randcraw »

I'm 61. My solution: keep up technically and choose a mainstream topic valued/needed by your company and stay near cutting edge in it (at least relative to the others working there). And develop other skills that are in short supply. Choose subject areas that leverage experience over inexperience: like regulatory compliance, subject matter domain knowledge, knowing what tactics are best with difficult clients or problematic target areas.

Some general skills that I've found help... Excel at speaking (be concise, organized, prioritized, relevant, insightful). Excel at writing and editing (tech-related communication seems notoriously poor at most companies). Excel at presenting (again, too often there's lots of vagaries and hand waving).

If you come across as sharp and tuned in, I've found that it's almost impossible for others to dismiss you. That is, unless they're idiots. So make sure you're not surrounded by idiots. That's rule #1.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#75

Post by ronilan »

moosey wrote: post #60

Everyone here is talking about their skillset, and I'm going to take another direction: appearance and interpersonal skills. There is ageism, yes, but I think a deeper problem is reaction to peoples appearance. If you are late twenties concerned about age, then hide it, starting now. * Always wear sunscreen when you are outside, regardless of race. It prevents skin aging, and you'll still tan and get Vitamin D regard…

The obligatory and timeless “Wear Sunscreen” for those not familiar.

Original text https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-s...

And late 90s pop hit: https://youtu.be/sTJ7AzBIJoI

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#76

Post by evo_9 »

I don't really think the tech stack matters. I'm a dotnet guy for the most part and have been gainfully employed from it for 20 years, hell going back to vb-6, com etc before dotnet.

I get around age discrimination by looking a lot younger than I am. I achieve this by dressing current which doesn't mean trendy, just don't wear that same old sweater to work you've had for 10 years, keep it for family time. New clothes go a long way in this situation. Also don't over dress, that's a huge give-away so no suits.

I also shave my head, but if you aren't losing your locks, good for you though you'll want to consider dying it.

I also workout a ton, eat well/little (restricted calories, etc),take a ton of vits and sups including metformin, NMN and resveratrol to name a few of the more useful and/or exotic items. I thinking being lean, fit and strong also goes a long way toward conveying both youth and confidence that employers are naturally drawn toward.

I mean look when you've been coding for 30 years the problem isn't your abilities, it's how you are perceived by a potential employer.

I'm 51 but most guess my age around 38ish.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#77

Post by kingaillas »

10 years ago I was laid off. I had just turned 40, and was living in an area that didn't have the most robust job market (plus at the time the hiring outlook was terrible in general due to the financial crisis).

After looking locally to no avail... I added a new strategy: apply to various federal government jobs. Benefits include stability (although with the recent furlough maybe that isn't 100% rock solid) and no possibility of the job being outsourced/offshored, etc.

I'm 50 now, been a software developer for 25 years, still working for the government, and still enjoying it. Projects are varied, I have reasonable latitude in the programming I do (job is ~50% coding, ~50% other stuff), managers understand work/life balance. Yes I don't get stock options out the wazoo and other Silicon Valley style perks but I also have other hobbies and time to enjoy them. There are tradeoffs but overall I'm glad I did it.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#78

Post by neolefty »

effie wrote: post #44
neolefty wrote: post #22

I'm 47, but my kids are reminding me 50 is coming soon! I'm working as a web engineer — not a manager or even team lead — working remotely from the Midwest for a coastal company, and I'm pretty happy with it. All I can say is keep learning, be friendly, and delight in the energy of all you young people. I am not entirely sure why I have been hired, or even whether it was a good idea for my employer. So maybe stay hum…

Could you share some examples of the things you learned but then became irrelevant? I wonder if we could find some pattern to help people avoid learning modern stuff that will have the same fate.

Off the top of my head, things I never implement or use anymore:

* socket listeners

* line drawing

* explicit memory management

* old APIs and libraries

* Perl

* Assembly

And things I rarely use:

* Semaphores & other threading primitives

* XML

* C/C++

Now, knowing these sometimes helps, but the amount of time I spent on them probably doesn't justify the benefit aside from the fact that it was necessary at the time.

And somebody is doing these now — I just find I don't need to, as it's always handled somewhere below the abstraction layers where I work.

An equally interesting list would be the things I use now that didn't exist when I graduated from college in 1996.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#79

Post by thekingofh »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #18

I hire a lot of engineers and it’s always a breath of fresh air to interview someone with 20-30+ years of experience, as long as they stay up to date.

What do you mean stay up to date? From my experience I've noticed that if they dig deep and understand the underlying fundamental concepts of the trade, there's not many programming problems, platforms, or languages, that couldn't be learned in the span of a few days. The longer I go, the more I realize that everything that seems new and fresh was most likely already invented in some capacity before I even wrote my first line of code. I completely understand if they are non flexible and still choosing out of date frameworks or libraries that aren't necessarily used any more, however the ability to compare and contrast frameworks and languages and choose the one based on a deep understanding of the underlying implications seems to me more important than being fluent in the latest platforms.

Re: Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

#80

Post by buserror »

rubicon33 wrote: post #54
buserror wrote: post #20

I'm 49! I've been working since I'm 17 as a developer -- I think the KEY thing is to be valuable, and be able to change quickly BUT not as quickly as the snowflakes. Ignore the fad tech, get a good, serious, bulletproof base in actual computer science -- I mean, LOW LEVEL stuff--, that will help you learn ANYTHING computer related quickly, and continue surfing that wave with whatever tech you fancy might actually be…

The big money question is: How have you managed to stay passionate about your job? I just posted a comment in another thread about burnout. It's very common in our industry. I believe it's due to the Coolidge Effect. Aka, the brains inherent search for novelty. It's a struggle to not look at almost all programming tasks as just some variation of the same problem, if you've been doing this long enough. How do you keep…

I had a bit of a burnout around 2006 -- I had worked my ass off on a fantastically complex framework, the pinacle of years of experience, and it was a joy. It was SO cool. There was an application on top, which was also pretty cool.

And the marketing bods/management and so on more or less dragged the project off track, up to the point I didn't want to work on it at all, I quit, I left my 'baby' and had a hard 6 months where I didn't really want to do anything... Good thing is that I became a pretty competent landscape photographer along the way...

Nowadays, I work a LOT more like a mercenary. I don't mind working on projects that leads straight to the wall -- NOBODY will listen to you, or trust you've seen that 12 times before.

So as far as I'm concerned, I enjoy the work, the architecture, the TECH challenges, and everything which gives me a quick, and I completely ignore the outcome in the end. Sure, if it's a success, whoohoo whoohoo but I no longer put the same amount of 'care' and 'ownership' in what I do. I just let it go, and do something else just as efficiently.

It might sound cruel, but for the like of us who REALLY get a kick from designing/building/implementing stuff, it's actually quite liberating.

I just smile benignly on at the idiots in the room sometimes, it's quite relaxing :-)

Post reply on HN