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You’re How Old? We’ll Be in Touch

• dijit 10y ago
  I don't see many old sysadmins in companies I've worked in. Even fewer older developers, I have a slight worry that this career path has an affinity for youth- which I won't have for much longer. So this is disheartening to read.
  • aswanson 10y ago
    Tech fields have an inherent disuse for seniority. Beyond five years, no one gives an f how long you have worked with a given toolchain/language. It's the hunger games. Medicine, finance, law, accounting...rightly or wrongly respect decades of experience. Tech is Logan's Run. Plan accordingly.
    • greenyoda 10y ago
      Knowing a language or toolchain isn't all you need to be a good developer. Knowledge of how to build maintainable, secure, reliable, scalable and usable systems is something that you get with years of experience (and frequently comes from making mistakes).
      • aswanson 10y ago
        And most employers don't care about those stated value adds. It is what it is.
        • greenyoda 10y ago
          A company that's a startup building an MVP for a consumer app might not care if its software ever works reliably, or will be maintainable in five years. But if you're a bank, or a big on-line retailer, or a company that sells enterprise software - a business where you or your customers push billions of dollars of business through a software system - you definitely do care.
          • aianus 10y ago
            > But if you're a bank, or a big on-line retailer, or a company that sells enterprise software - a business where you or your customers push billions of dollars of business through a software system - you definitely do care. Funny, those companies have the least reliable, performant, and maintainable code.
            • grogenaut 10y ago
              citation needed
              • im_down_w_otp 10y ago
                Visa
                • grogenaut 10y ago
                  Okay where's your citation of a startup that is all about engineering excellence and not about shipping product?
                  • im_down_w_otp 10y ago
                    Cruise
              • flukus 10y ago
                Experience. The worst horrors I've seen have been in the finance sector. I'm currently working on one where the developers don't know transactions exist. And millions of dollars of transactions daily are coordinated by users emailing inline csv files.
                • aianus 10y ago
                  I'll add an experience with a bank that could only accept ACH batches via ActiveX control in Internet Explorer. Oh, and a brokerage that actively prevented password managers from pasting passwords into the login form.
        • flukus 10y ago
          They care, they just don't know they care, until they do.
      • sidlls 10y ago
        True, but companies don't care about those things, really, even in the supposedly developer-centric Bay Area. Just browse through any jobs thread or board, even (especially) the "Who's Hiring" HN thread. You're going to see a lot of "We're looking for an X developer" or "we're looking for a developer with Y years of experience in Stack X." Employers, even supposedly knowledgeable tech centric ones, routinely think the learning curve for a new stack or language is so great that they just can't risk even screening someone without specific experience.
        • WWLink 10y ago
          It's because most of the who's hiring on HN posts are small 2-3 people startups that desperately need a new programmer.. yesterday. They're not a team that can afford to bring someone up to speed, even if that person is amazing in programming other things. Which is really unfortunate.
          • sidlls 10y ago
            It's unfortunate and also a terrible business model. In those cases it's clear the business isn't mature or ready enough to actually hire human beings, in my opinion. Not that I'd agree with their conclusion about who they need to hire anyway. There isn't an experienced developer out there who can't pick up the frameworks and languages (exceptions exist of course, e.g. for quirky languages like brainfuck or paradigm shifts like procedural to functional) these CRUD-by-other-names shops use within a week, and if their business is that close to failure without developer help they can't afford to be picky.
          • mark-r 10y ago
            It isn't just the new startups. Hiring managers believe that the best indication you know how to do what they need done is to have done it before. And their vision of "done it before" is unfortunately very narrow.
    • RachelF 10y ago
      Also younger workers are lot cheaper and don't have families, so you can work them longer hours. Older techies have wised up.
      • jpindar 10y ago
        And you've bought right into the ageism.
      • flukus 10y ago
        I see the opposite more often. Younger people have stuff to do after work. It's the guy with a wife and 3 screaming kids that wants to work long hours.
        • bryanrasmussen 10y ago
          I think both hold true. The young can do a good crunch week that the old can't because of responsibilities, the old will some times have home situations that allow them to put in more overtime consistently.
    • cpprototypes 10y ago
      And this is why software today is in such a sad state. Managers think it would be great to have an army of young engineers who don't question and just do what they're told. But any leader surrounded by sycophants will eventually fail. Management often doesn't realize that they really need the senior engineer who has the experience and confidence to say "NO". Because that engineer is the one who will prevent the project from collapsing under the weight of scope creep and tech debt.
      • FLUX-YOU 10y ago
        > Because that engineer is the one who will prevent the project from collapsing under the weight of scope creep and tech debt. That's the shitty thing: there's enough work that doesn't cross the threshold that requires you to pay for technical debt. Otherwise, a lot more managers would be getting burned by it. There's no electric shock when they hit the wrong button. Even if it isn't a "big boom" moment where you can't deliver some huge new feature because of bad architecture and lose a lot of potential money, the little payments are written off to the younger generation to actually rebuild the thing because they have energy/time to burn.
        • dasil003 10y ago
          There's not really a single threshold though. I think the shittier thing is that software is just an incredible market for lemons. Even us programmers ourselves don't really know how good we are, and there is no way to accurately compare all the problems we faced with the problems we avoided. So forget about non-technical management, they could be paying twice as much for someone who takes 10x as long to deliver a feature and never have the first hope of getting a clue. Or they could hire someone who is demonstrably fast but paints the whole system into a corner where the next critical business feature requires a complete rewrite. Experience is no silver bullet, but it generally goes a lot further than non-technical tea-leaf-reading or junior dev shotgun programming.
      • hughperkins 10y ago
        its possible to be experienced and not say no you know? the opposite is also true... the trick really is not saying yes or no, but understanding what your boss really wants, and offering a realistic way forward to achieve that.
    • borvo 10y ago
      Here we go again, getting confused between SFO/Startup Bro culture and the majority of the productive software industry.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • aswanson 10y ago
        Nah, take a look at the general listings for anything from embedded to .NET to the javascript library de jour. You'll see the magical 5 year number pop up across the board for a reason. I've never worked in the SFO/brospace. Strictly old-school, east coast, precambrian hardware environments. Rules still apply.
    • skybrian 10y ago
      I realize this is an outlier but you see a fair number of older folks at Google (though they aren't the majority).
    • bootload 10y ago
      "Tech fields have an inherent disuse for seniority. Beyond five years, no one gives an f how long you have worked with a given toolchain/language." For front-end work maybe, lower down the stack, five years might not be enough to handle the more important things like the corporate RDBMS. A few grey hairs to oversee the youngsters is quite the norm the closer you get to the real value and money of organisations.
      • WWLink 10y ago
        Also embedded software, aerospace software, medical devices. Those job listings always ask for at least 5 years of experience, or 10 - and that's not for a senior position at all.
        • aswanson 10y ago
          I work in embedded. Unless it's for some god-awful DOD job, they don't put a premium on experience beyond five years. Even then, they don't put that much of a value on anyone in the non-managerial ranks experience beyond 10 years.
    • mahyarm 10y ago
      There is a younger streak in small VC startups, and an older streak in the larger AppFaceGooSoft streak of companies as people tend to realize that the EV tends to be better for the typical employee at the larger ones.
  • nhebb 10y ago
    If the Bureau of Labor stats are to be believed, the software industry workforce has doubled every fives years. Assuming new entrants to the field are younger, industry growth is the probably largest factor in the age distribution of programmers. As a 52 year old who's starting a new job search this week, I'm crossing my fingers on that logic.
    • Swizec 10y ago
      Another factor is that as time goes on, some people exit coding and go into management. The older the cohort you're looking at, the more pronounced the effect becomes since more people have had the chance to churn.
  • rawnlq 10y ago
    People working in tech also tend to retire early or start doing their own thing due to their salary.
    • sotojuan 10y ago
      Do they really retire early though? I always hear people in forums saying how they'll save up and not have kids to retire by 40 but never meet anyone that has done that. I really doubt most programmers that don't go into management and didn't win the startup lottery retire much earlier than other careers.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • pyre 10y ago
        Several early Microsoft employees retired by 30, IIRC. Not necessarily an industry-wide thing through.
    • epalmer 10y ago
      Outside of the startups and fast growth companies there are a lot of "tech" jobs where people makes careers out of it. The jobs might not be sexy and might not pay top dollar but also don't churn employees nor require long work weeks. My opinion is HN readers are skewed towards the former, not the latter. I am getting ready to start year 11 at a University. I am 62 years old, make a good wages, but not too dollar. I manage a small web team and I get to write Java, Python, and bash. I also get to do log file analysis with splunk which I love.
    • ishbits 10y ago
      This probably only applies to various pockets like Silicon Valley or New York. For the most part, developer salaries aren't that great. I'd be much better off had I become an accountant, or perhaps even a plumber running my own business.
      • hiram112 10y ago
  • GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    > I don't see many old sysadmins I've known plenty.
  • coldcode 10y ago
    You have to understand that people like me (35 years experience) are rare not just because people don't hire us, but there were 100 times fewer programmers back then and many have switched to management or moved on since then too. What happens 35 years from now of course I have no idea, I doubt 100% of all people will be programmers. The key is staying at the leading edge of whatever you are doing which of course keeps getting harder as the width of programming gets wider. The thing I miss most is being able to do everything and not be so specialized.
    • hoodunit 10y ago
      This is what makes me wonder, is there actually a steep age bias and drop-off of older developers or are we just living a demographics change? I'm guessing there are far more developers today than ten or twenty years ago. When those developers age, will we see a more natural age distribution?
      • loeg 10y ago
        > When those developers age, will we see a more natural age distribution? Yes. You also have to keep in mind that developers get paid a lot of money compared to most workers. Many can afford to retire early, and do.
  • kordless 10y ago
    Any company which allows it's employees to discriminate on age isn't worth your time spent being sad about not working there.
    • derwiki 10y ago
      But when it happens a few times, you feel sad that you can't seem to get _any_ job.
  • contingencies 10y ago
    don't see many old sysadmins ... well, how many do you actually see anyway? Usually they're invisible. Secondly, the profession of sysadmin is disappearing fast with automation, and older and more experienced people have probably ridden that wave somewhere else already.
    • wyclif 10y ago
      "DevOps" is the new sysadmin.
      • HillRat 10y ago
        More precisely, "DevOps" is the new way to pretend we don't need a sysadmin. It usually doesn't take long for me to wish for a greybeard with a background in debugging kernel drivers.
  • ubernostrum 10y ago
    FWIW one of the factors in choosing my current employer (I'm not "old" by any other industry's standards, but starting to have some visible grey in my hair) was how many of the people I met there who were older/more experienced, married with kids, etc. Which is nice. People care about work/life balance, have been around the block a few times so there's less stereotypical startup attitude. Also some of the best in-office conversations with co-workers I've had.
    • mahyarm 10y ago
      I worked at a startup company where they were a bit grayer than the typical, but still didn't have great work life balance.
  • dba7dba 10y ago
    Of the 3 Linux admins that were above me last decade or so, none are still in the industry. One went into medicine, one went into real estate, and the last I believe became a firearm instructor. None had passion for Linux or sysadmin per se. It was just a job they could get with enough pay and lifestyle (stable location, hours etc) they wanted. When they got older, they simply moved onto different jobs that they thought could pay them more or enjoyed more. I do wonder, how the job market of linux/sysadmin will shape out in 20 years...
    • wyclif 10y ago
      It already is shaping out. It's called "DevOps."
      • calgoo 10y ago
        As a sysadmin with 10+ years of experience moving into development, I agree. The only issue with DevOps is that unless you have a good CS or programming background, you need to spend a few years studying up on coding, coding tools etc. A lot of companies looking for DevOps are asking for Senior Developers etc instead of senior SysAdmin experience. I have however seen one or two companies starting to hire both too balance the knowledge but this might just be experienced managers :)
  • Animats 10y ago
    Are there still sysadmins? Or is everybody loading containers into the cloud using an orchestration system now?
    • kowdermeister 10y ago
      Definitely, but they are called DevOps now :)
  • di4na 10y ago
    Just so you know, i am a young apprentice in an IT department. The official average age of developpers here is 41... I can count the employees under 30 in my two hands. Could probably even count the one under 35... So the opposite exists too...
  • technofiend 10y ago
    If you want to talk front-line production support, dealing with extremely time critical issues whilst remaining calm sysadmins then they skew 35+ where I work. We need guys who can handle the pressure. They're also the guys asking me for lab servers and training so they can keep up with what's coming next. Some people just enjoy the job and learning new things.
• zaidf 10y ago
  I think it is ridiculous that we have a minimum age for presidency but no max. age.
  • Koshkin 10y ago
    There will always be a minimum age for everything. Simply because age is a positive number.
    • karamazov 10y ago
      It's a non-negative number.
      • cperciva 10y ago
        With probability 1, everybody has a positive age.
        • reddytowns 10y ago
          With a probability 1, a randomly chosen real number between 1 and 10 is not 3.
          • cperciva 10y ago
            Yes.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  • chiaro 10y ago
    There should at least be maximum age limits for the supreme court. Pushing people to retain their positions despite entering positions where mental faculties are degenerating for entirely political ends is a horrific outcome. For comparison, judges of the UK supreme court resign at 70/75. Australian judges resign at 70. Canadian judges resign at 75. If the US had rules similar to any of these countries, there would currently be 4 vacancies on the court.
• hirundo 10y ago
  I'm a grey beard who applied to a company specifically advertising for young developers. Got the job without mentioning my vintage. That was six years ago and they still haven't seen my face. I waited a while to gently break the news to them. If you're a technological senior citizen remote work is your friend.
  • RottenHuman 10y ago
    how do you work for someone without them knowing your age? Do you keep that out of your CV? How about credentials and signing your contact? Seems very strange to me.
    • jlarocco 10y ago
      Your age or birth date probably shouldn't be on your CV. Unless you think it's relevant to the job somehow, but it probably isn't. Not only should it not matter, but it's illegal for employers to ask about it or consider it in their hiring decision, so having it right there on your CV puts them in a bit of a tight spot. I think some recruiters will actually remove that type of thing before forwarding it on to the interviewers and hiring people.
      • philsnow 10y ago
        Many people put college graduation year on their resume, and hiring managers reflexively subtract ~20 from that year and aren't wrong 99% of the time.
        • dorfsmay 10y ago
          Interesting! I graduated much later in life, don't put my DOB on resume and I've often been told that they expected me to be younger when they see me - now I get it!
        • cableshaft 10y ago
          One of the few perks of not finishing your degree until much later is the fact that you can put that date on your resume and people assume you're younger. It's expensive, though, considering how much and how fast college tuition has been shooting up in price the past 15 years.
• cpprototypes 10y ago
  Recently I got an email about a job that seemed interesting. It's a well known company that used to be a startup but is now a mature company. I went to the job description page: 8+ years experience, tech stack I'm familiar with, mostly backend work, seems ok so far. Then I get to the last line. Open office, has video games, happy hours, other typical things designed to attract those in their 20s. It's all a hidden message screaming, if you're old, don't apply. And they want someone with 8+ years experience! It's ridiculous.
  • Swizec 10y ago
    o/ 29 year old here, 20 years coding, 13 years of people paying me to code. We exist. I sure hope companies don't have that as a base expectation, though.
    • sp332 10y ago
      That you exist isn't the problem. The problem is discrimination based on age.
      • Swizec 10y ago
        Naturally. All I'm saying that it IS possible to find someone in their 20's with 8+ years of experience.
        • sidlls 10y ago
          Depends on what you mean by experience. I'm skeptical, to say the least. No doubt there are 29 year olds who have been "coding" for 20 years and being paid for it for 13 of them. That's different from having experience.
        • toomuchtodo 10y ago
          8 years of experience? Or the same year of experience 8 times over?
  • ardit33 10y ago
• ben_jones 10y ago
  Disclaimer: The following are existential questions that do not reflect my own beliefs in any way, shape, or form. Why do older people deserve jobs? Why does anyone deserve a job? Are there instances where we as a society accept people NOT deserving a job? How different is age as an attribute compared to: Felons, the mentally impaired, the under-qualified, those lacking physical attributes?
  • sillysaurus3 10y ago
    There's a moral argument to be made that people deserve jobs because society forces you to work. If you don't work, and you're not independently wealthy, you can't support yourself. Therefore to say people don't deserve jobs is to say they deserve to be out on the street.
    • hiram112 10y ago
      Great answer. And even if you don't buy into the morality bit, those in charge figured out long ago that giving the little people a job, regardless of how pointless or wasteful, is better and cheaper than having to constantly deal with hungry, angry men on the verge of revolt. And if the plebs get too demanding, the owners just push up the price of basic goods like housing, taxes, and food via inflation. So now you think you're doing great, making six figures, but in reality you're worse off than the previous generation while producing twice as much profit for your masters. But at least you're not causing trouble.
  • aristus 10y ago
    Fair question: It's less about why someone "deserves a job" and more about human rights. We are all human beings who deserve equal treatment under the law, including consideration for employment. Older people breathe air and eat food just like everyone else. If it were legal to exclude +65 (or +40) from employment, what exactly are they supposed to do? This fairness argument is complicated by what happens in down economies. Experienced (read: older) people tend to crowd out the younger folks for jobs. I don't know an equitable fix for this, but throwing people out of the workforce for something they can't change doesn't seem right.
  • 10y ago
• deleted 10y ago
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• LargeCompanies 10y ago
  I'm thankful to work in for the federal govt. where mid 30s to 60s is the age range. Also, the pay for fed govt work is comparably to what engineers in Silicon Valley make, but the cost of living is way lower in this Mid-Atlantic city/area. Though if your single and like to mingle with co-workers and make friends your not going to find that working for the fed; most are married and or recently arrived in the US.
  • argonaut 10y ago
    It's good that you're satisfied, but saying that the federal government is comparable to what engineers make in Silicon Valley tells me you don't actually know what engineers make in Silicon Valley.
    • thrkw123456789 10y ago
      I suspect there are some segments that pay pretty well once pensions are accounted for.
      • GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
        They stopped offering the "good" pension to people in 1987.
    • LargeCompanies 10y ago
      hmmm here are some salaries for senior level engineers in San Fran ... They have a wide range... http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Senior-Ui-Ux-Designer-l-San-Francisco,-CA.html http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Senior-Ui-Ux-Designer-l-San-F... Can you make similar in the fed on the low level... Sure(though I don't make that myself) based on your negotiation skills. The higher salaries Seen you can if your a Java developer vs a web developer. Also if your on a long term hourly contract no benefits as a web dev for the fed and with today's climate/demand you definitely can make just about anything in that range.
      • LargeCompanies 10y ago
• beachstartup 10y ago
  we started up when i was 25 and i attribute much of our success to hiring people older than us, by up to +30 years. the benefits go both ways. 30-50 year old engineers don't like working for 40-60 year old career-management dipshits who have never done their jobs before.
• WalterBright 10y ago
  Nobody would pay me to invent a new programming language, so I had to start my own business.
• czep 10y ago
  This is a world where job posts for "Senior Engineer" ask for three years of experience.
  • quantumhobbit 10y ago
    And job posts for "Junior Engineers" somehow ask for the same three years of experience.
    • czep 10y ago
      Squeezed at both ends! At some point I passed from too young to too old, but never got to enjoy the supposed middle period. I remember the struggle of trying to prove myself during my early career and then suddenly found myself in "mid-career" and being pinged by recruiters for entry level positions. Noe, despite my self-confidence, articles such as this make me uneasy for the future. I don't really want to "graduate" to a management job. I love writing code and solving problems. I just hope there will continue to be enough level-headed hiring managers to let me do the job I love.
  • driverdan 10y ago
    We say three years plus for senior engineer. We have people with that experience who are fantastic software engineers and completely deserve the title. You don't need 15+ years of experience to be a good engineer, but it helps.
• hoodoof 10y ago
  When this becomes an issue I'm planning to just leave the industry. Do something else.
• sien 10y ago
  This is a market failing that anyone who is hiring can exploit. I've worked for a guy who hired young, smart guys without much experience who he felt had potential and who also had some 55+ year old developers who he thought could do things. He was one of the best managers I've had. So be smart and realise that people who don't fit into what you expect might find it a bit harder at some places to find a job and that you can get better people if you consider people who were not initially what you expected to hire.
  • hodgesrm 10y ago
    It seems as if there's a moneyball story on tech hiring that has yet to be written.
  • bbcbasic 10y ago
    Or hire remote, smart, Haskell developers from cheap countries.
    • ekiara 10y ago
      Is there a market for remote Haskell developers? I've found a pretty distinct lack of functional developer jobs in my region. Though I was surprised to find a local software company that has specifically recruited several Clojure developers.
      • bbcbasic 10y ago
        That's part of the joke. Lots of devs keen to do Haskell, so market forces reduce the pay of such jobs, especially if they are not expert in nature (typical back/front end stuff). Yet you get someone who took the time to learn Haskell. I watched some great videos from India Haskell meetups, which gives me the impression you can go to one of those and get "cheaper" developers. Not saying they'll work for odesk rates but certainly could be cheaper than a cubicaled SF worker.
  • driverdan 10y ago
    As a hiring manager I always get excited when I have an applicant with 15+ years experience. I really want people with that much experience on our team. Unfortunately very few have gotten even half way through our hiring process.
• jimmywanger 10y ago
  A lot of older programmers seem to think they have 20 years of experience, when they only have the same year of experience 20 times. If you don't keep up to date and current, it's not ageism.
  • flukus 10y ago
    True, but this applies at every experience level, not just older people.
  • sidlls 10y ago
    You represent the other extreme with your comment. Very few software projects have more than two or three years of "experience fertility," for the kind of experience you mean. There's a difference between someone who can't even last a year to get a project from prototype to some semblance of maturity and someone who wants to move on after one to two years when a project reaches the point at which maintenance overtakes new development. What's the difference between somebody who works on four different projects over 8 years for company X and somebody who works on four different projects for four different companies over the same period, in this context?
    • jimmywanger 10y ago
      Nothing different between working at the same company for different projects, and working at different companies. Maintenance work is easy, less time consuming, and frankly mostly requires less effort. If you fall into that trap, and end up maintaining a large system that is slowly becoming obsolete, you're not building up more skills. A lot of older workers (and I am one of them) end up doing that cause that's the easy path, the one requiring no effort at all. And that leads you to becoming unemployable.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • drtse4 10y ago
    > A lot of older programmers seem to think they have 20 years of experience, when they only have the same year of experience 20 times. A lot of younger programmers seems to think they have 3 years of experience, when they only have the same month of experience 36 times. Experience is made up by the experiences you had, if you have never worked in a proper environment or never actually tried to improve your craft, years doesn't matter much. And the myth of "being up to date", it can mean different things for different people. Sadly sometimes it just means that you need to have played with the latest fad that will disappear in a few years. In that case i'd prefer someone that's not up to date but can learn something different and it's used to do things the proper way.
• seizethecheese 10y ago
  Lots of folks commenting here on there not being many older developers around. Well considering there are at least 10x more developers now than there were 30 years ago, and people generally get into it when they're young, this is completely expected.
  • mark-r 10y ago
    It's not about age distribution, it's about the obstacles you encounter when you're older. Even if it's only a desire by that younger majority to be around people who are just like them.
    • seizethecheese 10y ago
      My point is that the distribution of developer ages at your work place is not an indication of age-discrimination, not that age-discrimination doesn't exist.
• Myrmornis 10y ago
  Isn't one way to ensure your continuing relevance to avoid managerial positions? In my experience a lot of older people are less attractive employees because after 10 years of management their skills are very generic and hard to specify.
  • dasil003 10y ago
    YMMV but after almost 20 years I try to keep a foot firmly in both camps and position myself as an early-stage generalist who can also lead and magnify the productivity of the whole team. Managers who aren't technically illiterate suck, programmers who can't see beyond the scope of their own little fiefdom also suck. If you can marry disparate skills from a few different areas you can really work magic in the right position.
• edoceo 10y ago
  I'm going to start only hiring old (>35) developer. Basically kids rush through their work. I need experienced craft-driven workers who understand the big picture. So I'll swap the young/ambitious language for "mature, well rounded". And it worked! My new UX person is over 40! Best part? Rather than waste time masturbating over the latest CSS "framework" we're crafting lean, responsive, modular front-end code that our own team can maintain and extend without hitting the inevitable "wall" when trying something unique that the FW (at any layer) don't handle. One old, grey beard in place of three up-starts. My time managing is reduced, better quality output, reduced training time. The overall cost to the company is less! FTW!
• damaru 10y ago
  That's one side of the story - I think there is also an imbalance of old folks in higer ranking job, from politics to multinationals, no?
  • collyw 10y ago
    The jobs where experience might be seen as valuable?
  • terrywilcox 10y ago
    It's as if people have to work their way up through the ranks...
• Animats 10y ago
  Jobs for "Digital Natives" from Indeed.com [1] "You’re a digital native with a demonstrated interest in startups, technology, social media, and shaking up industries...." -- Laundry Locker customer support lead. Not exactly a job that requires extensive qualifications. "Digital Native - You can find anyone's email address anytime, search the depths of the web with ease, and possibly format basic HTML without skipping a beat...." - Marketing and social media intern "Are a "digital native" - social platforms, Google, ordering online, etc. are all second nature to you. Upserve is the smart restaurant management assistant..." - Sales position. Must be able to order food online. "Consider yourself a digital native. As an Account Executive, you will be responsible for fully immersing yourself in the clients’ business, products, consumers..." - Young and Rubicam advertising, multiple positions. Gotta keep out those old print media people. We're not talking about understanding the technology here. [1] http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22Digital+Native%22&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22Digital+Native%22&l=
  • vazamb 10y ago
    I feel like "Digital Natives" is a term non-technical, business people (most in entry level positions) use to make themselves feel better about the fact that their jobs don't require any kind of special skill or knowledge.
    • gaius 10y ago
      Its a term popularized by the BBC, they use "digital native" to mean people not old enough to remember a time before the web, and "digital immigrant" to mean anyone older. The fact that "digital immigrants" built all this stuff and "digital natives" are just users of it, is too subtle for their journos to grasp.
      • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        The term has invaded the education system over here in Northern Europe as well, mainly for use by politicians as justification for not putting together proper computer courses in schools: "they're all digital natives, they know how computers work", meaning they can work YouTube and Flappy Bird on a touchscreen.
• MrLeftHand 10y ago
  The common job spec: Have a degree in CS + everything else that is vaguely related to IT. Have at least 3+ years commercial experience in: C/C++,Java,Perl,Python,Javascript,Node,AngularJS,React,Linux,Windows,Mac,Maven,Agile,LAMP,Ruby,Bash,RegExp,SQL,NoSQL,C#,Android,Photoshop,AWS,Swift,iOS,Docker,rkt,UX,UI,Backend, Frontend, Salesforce, CRM, CSM, MVC, Scrum, Waterfall, JUnit, TDD, Cobol, Fortran, BASIC, UML, Git, SVN, CVS, JQuery, Assembly. Fluent in English and three other languages. Good communication skills. You have to be able to explain everything to illiterate shareholders and customers over the phone or Skype. Be proactive and willing to take risks, but only the ones we approve of. Desired is everything else not on the list. Oh, you are 45? Sorry but we are a young dynamic team. We only take people under 25 or androids with 2TB+ RAM and an expandable storage unit.
• shultays 10y ago
  This kinda makes me remember this quote from "Primer" You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty? [to Aaron, who shakes his head] They take them out and shoot them.
• deleted 10y ago
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• ilaksh 10y ago
  Ageism is endemic in Sillicon Valley and it starts at the top. Look at Y Combinator -- the founder basically 'ageismed' himself out of his job and put a kid in charge of the business.
• bogomipz 10y ago
  This is a strange dichotomy: There are voices that are stating there is a serious shortage of highly skilled tech workers in the Valley and as a result the H1B Visa quotas must be dramatically increased and policies amended to allow for foreign workers. There are also regular claims of ageism in the Valley against people who are possibly not only highly skilled but also possess many years of real world, "rubber on the road" experience. Are these two things not at odds with each other?