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No Country for Old Developers

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Re: No Country for Old Developers

#2

Post by amiune »

I'm 37 I thought I was too old but I decided to start all over again. Took some courses from Coursera about Deep Learning and last month started competing in kaggle and similar competitions sites. I earned 7k dollars but the most important is that I'm learning a lot like if I was in the university again, I think I'm learning even faster.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#5

Post by swozey »

amiune wrote: post #2

I'm 37 I thought I was too old but I decided to start all over again. Took some courses from Coursera about Deep Learning and last month started competing in kaggle and similar competitions sites. I earned 7k dollars but the most important is that I'm learning a lot like if I was in the university again, I think I'm learning even faster.

I'm 36 and have not once experienced blatant ageism. I keep my skills current and have pivoted my career many times when things got less interesting or I could tell the market was falling off. I went sysadmin>neteng>syseng>SRE and will have to pivot in 4-5 years again, probably, once some other culture-breaker has hit distributed systems for the 3rd time in my career.

Now, I don't have kids so you might go "hey you've got so much free time" - I'm also a 36yo engineer with 10+ years of experience. Most of the positions I take nowadays allow me AMPLE time (as in months) to do research and learn new systems before deploying them to production. I almost never study or work at home these days. A LOT less than in my 20s when I worked in startups.

I just went through a few months of interviewing, what did every company want out of me at this "age" (experience)? They wanted a strong desire to mentor and cultivate teams. I've worked with a lot of older engineers who aren't happy to do this, and that's a huge problem and something majorly wrong and undesirable in tech.

FWIW I will not ever consider the 30s or 40s old. I am working with a lot more 23-25yo developers now and feel like half of my skillset is bridging communication between zoomers and gen-x bosses. They love learning and its incredibly rewarding helping them grow their careers - something that I never got help with when I started in the toxic tech world of ~2008.

I'm a lead/staff IC, not a manager, fwiw.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#6

Post by _qulr »

"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 at you, see your gray hair, and make assumptions about you, and you can't beat your hair color any more than you can beat your skin color.

Well, you could try to dye your hair and get plastic surgery, but again that has nothing to do with skills.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#8

Post by danielscrubs »

amiune wrote: post #2

I'm 37 I thought I was too old but I decided to start all over again. Took some courses from Coursera about Deep Learning and last month started competing in kaggle and similar competitions sites. I earned 7k dollars but the most important is that I'm learning a lot like if I was in the university again, I think I'm learning even faster.

I don’t want to be a downer but don’t you think it’s just way easier to learn now because we have so many great resources available to us?
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