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No Country for Old Developers

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Re: No Country for Old Developers

#71

Post by mzz80 »

meowzero wrote: post #61
_qulr wrote: post #6

"But skills can beat ageism" I dislike this typical response, because it comes close to blaming the victim, and indeed many people do blame the victims of ageism, attributing stereotypical attitudes to them. Imagine claiming "skills can beat racism" or "skills can beat sexism". No, nothing beats discrimination, because it was never based on the existence or absence of skills. Rather, prejudiced people take one look a…

I'm a software engineer in my 40's. I also worry about ageism. I don't want to victim blame. There is probably discrimination. But I think the older developers have some responsibility in defeating ageism. I know a few SWEs who are older than me. They are already feeling the burnout of learning the new languages, frameworks, technologies every 3-4 years. Some of them are set in their ways thinking, "why would you nee…

If an engineer with 20 years of experience is intimidated by a new grad then that’s not ageism, and not what this thread is about. If a new grad performs better then there is literally no point in hiring that engineer. They don’t bring anything to the table and there is no room for growth. If you’re in your 50’s then ideally you’d be at least a principal engineer at a big tech company by then.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#72

Post by pc86 »

user5994461 wrote: post #46
pc86 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay). This isn't ageism. People do leave jobs they're underqualified for at a much higher rate. And if the salary band for a given job is £50-75k and you require £85k then why would they interview?

The cheapest companies in London pay around 90-100k base, which is quite respectable. Your concern would be valid if the pay was really low but it is not. There are few companies that will significantly top that. Sure, an employee might leave to Google for the money... if only Google had an office in London and they could get an interview and pass. It's not like it's going to invariably happen over the next 6 months.…

My point wasn't about the pay figure exactly, just that if you want more money than they want to pay, that's not ageism it's wanting more money than a position is worth to someone.

> companies refuse to hire them (I don't know if that's ageism but that's certainly something)

What is it then? Nobody is owed a job as a human right, and companies are under no obligation to hire a specific person.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#73

Post by Overtimegoal »

I'm 61. Been paid to write software for 42 years. I make it a point to add a new technology with every project. Currently that's Vuejs. Next one will be Blazor based, I think. It's the way I keep my skills up to date and myself hireable. I'll never retire cause even if I stopped working for others, I'd still be writing code for myself.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#74

Post by duxup »

derbOac wrote: post #69
yodsanklai wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you were eventually hired. I used to work in academia as a professor and the occasional older students were always a joy to work with. And usually, they went along perfectly fine with the other students (at least with the more mature ones). It's a shame that we have all these educational resources available but practically most people don't have access to it. I'd love to spend a couple of years learning a ne…

I had the same experience with older students. They always had a certain perspective that was lacking with the younger students. I wouldn't say they were harder working, or less harder working, but I think they took things in stride a bit better, and were better with time management. They also tended to be coming from some other areas first, and so understood bigger picture issues a bit better.

When I worked in networking I often had the new folks / interns sitting next to me for a while.

Discussions about 'pick your battles' and other similar ones were the most common.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#75

Post by UncleMeat »

meowzero wrote: post #61
_qulr wrote: post #6

"But skills can beat ageism" I dislike this typical response, because it comes close to blaming the victim, and indeed many people do blame the victims of ageism, attributing stereotypical attitudes to them. Imagine claiming "skills can beat racism" or "skills can beat sexism". No, nothing beats discrimination, because it was never based on the existence or absence of skills. Rather, prejudiced people take one look a…

I'm a software engineer in my 40's. I also worry about ageism. I don't want to victim blame. There is probably discrimination. But I think the older developers have some responsibility in defeating ageism. I know a few SWEs who are older than me. They are already feeling the burnout of learning the new languages, frameworks, technologies every 3-4 years. Some of them are set in their ways thinking, "why would you nee…

There are two very different versions of this.

People who refuse to learn any new tech or tooling while on the job will find fewer and fewer positions. That's fair. The key thing is that there is a second group, that doesn't know the trendy technology and would be able to easily learn on the job but doesn't get hired because they didn't learn it on their own time. Failing to hire the second group is a problem.

I've never encountered a skilled engineer that couldn't pick up a new language/framework/architecture/workflow/process relatively quickly.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#76

Post by bilbo0s »

drchopchop wrote: post #68
meowzero wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software engineer in my 40's. I also worry about ageism. I don't want to victim blame. There is probably discrimination. But I think the older developers have some responsibility in defeating ageism. I know a few SWEs who are older than me. They are already feeling the burnout of learning the new languages, frameworks, technologies every 3-4 years. Some of them are set in their ways thinking, "why would you nee…

>Besides skills, I think it comes down to your attitude and how you relate to your younger co-workers Also an engineer in my mid-40's. This is key. You need to be the "cool" dad in the room, and someone people can go to for hard/difficult problems. You also have to stay relevant and keep your skills up to date. Talk about the great ramen place near your house, not how you had to solve Y2K problems with COBOL 20 years…

I don't know man?

Game theoretically speaking, if a tech worker is older it's best to know what younger workers do not. For instance, an older worker is a good deal more likely to be hired if s/he is able to write the firmware for ray tracing video card hardware than s/he is to be hired for knowing how to write web apps in "cool language of the week". In fact, I'd argue that most of the older tech workers in the situation of being discriminated against, are the workers who spent their careers learning "cool language of the week". A few of them may get lucky and get a job doing something that a 22 year old new college grad can do, but what's the likelihood? Should you bet your family's future on those odds? Even if you get the job, what's the pay likely to be like?

I feel like a lot of tech workers never ask themselves these questions. It's never too early to ask them either, in fact you should ask them early in your career. Getting too comfortable doing things everyone knows how to do will make you decidedly uncomfortable once you hit 35 or 40.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#77

Post by v-erne »

mzz80 wrote: post #71
meowzero wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software engineer in my 40's. I also worry about ageism. I don't want to victim blame. There is probably discrimination. But I think the older developers have some responsibility in defeating ageism. I know a few SWEs who are older than me. They are already feeling the burnout of learning the new languages, frameworks, technologies every 3-4 years. Some of them are set in their ways thinking, "why would you nee…

If an engineer with 20 years of experience is intimidated by a new grad then that’s not ageism, and not what this thread is about. If a new grad performs better then there is literally no point in hiring that engineer. They don’t bring anything to the table and there is no room for growth. If you’re in your 50’s then ideally you’d be at least a principal engineer at a big tech company by then.

So You propose that the future for every developer is either go up or go out? Am I the only one that this reeks of pyramid scheme?

In reality only one in ten can become "principal engineer". But it does not mean that the other nine does not have any skills and should not work in the field.

I have seen this sentiment many times and I'm cannot understand why so many people is blind to the fact that this attitude creates serious systematic problems and is inhuman (because some abstract efficiency takes precedence over well-being).

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#78

Post by cybwraith »

yodsanklai wrote: post #37

I just got a SWE job offer at a FAANG and I'm in my mid-forties. I took the exact same interviews as anybody else. They've also been contacted me regularly for the last three years. My age isn't written on my resume, but they can easily infer I'm in my forties. My guess is that recruiters don't care as long as they think you have a chance passing the coding interviews. I realize that older developers are slightly unc…

Congrats (seriously)!

However, many of the interview tests themselves seem to discriminate for age (or at least, distance from college graduation as a function of time). Like another commenter here noted, its a collection of typically smaller, indirect biases against age that add up on a scale.

Also, being mid-forties isn't too bad as long as you aren't applying to a SV startup. I'd be curious what the result would have been if you were say, 57. Note: 57 is still 10 whole years from social security retirement age.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#79

Post by user5994461 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #54
mojuba wrote: post #44

The most dreadful thing in this industry to me is this: how many years of experience do you have? 1 2 3 4 5+ That's it. Fin. More than 5 doesn't matter. The truth is that the difference between 30 years and 5 years of experience in a particular field can be as big as between 1 and 5. I just want to ask, does anyone in the industry really care about this fact? Does it matter to any company out there? Have you ever see…

Nobody really needs someone with 30 years of general experience because each such person is unique, impossible to completely replace. If you have the level of expertise that comes from real understanding of six different fields attained from five years of good work in them you might literally be the only person with that combination of skills. There are definitely under a 1,000 of you. If you have 30 years of experie…

I don't think there's many technologies that are 30 years old that are still relevant today. Most programming languages themselves are younger than that: Python 1991, Java 1996, C# 2002, go 2012.

C++ and COBOL are ancient enough but niche.

If we look at tools/frameworks, the story is even worse because they were obviously created later (plus some time to gain traction).

I think the industry will slow down and stabilize over the next 20 years. It will be fragmented in different area of expertise, but there won't be another 10 new languages or another internet revolution.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#80

Post by polotics »

meowzero wrote: post #61
_qulr wrote: post #6

"But skills can beat ageism" I dislike this typical response, because it comes close to blaming the victim, and indeed many people do blame the victims of ageism, attributing stereotypical attitudes to them. Imagine claiming "skills can beat racism" or "skills can beat sexism". No, nothing beats discrimination, because it was never based on the existence or absence of skills. Rather, prejudiced people take one look a…

I'm a software engineer in my 40's. I also worry about ageism. I don't want to victim blame. There is probably discrimination. But I think the older developers have some responsibility in defeating ageism. I know a few SWEs who are older than me. They are already feeling the burnout of learning the new languages, frameworks, technologies every 3-4 years. Some of them are set in their ways thinking, "why would you nee…

In my 50's and keeping it up: it's easier to be cheerful when you've seen much much worse, it's easier to take the new hotness with the right amount of curiosity when you've seen the same product in different packaging five times, it's easier to relate to younglings who have passion and curiosity when you have passion and curiosity, it's easier to not get stuck being of a given generation, eg. the Java or C++ crews, when you grew up at a time when things were like now, more in flux than they've been during the 2000 aughts and earlier teens.
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