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I'm over 40 and I've been continuing to get more work than I can handle by staying up to date on my tech skills. Maybe that professional headshot I never got wo

I'm over 40 and I've been continuing to get more work than I can handle by staying up to date on my tech skills. Maybe that professional headshot I never got would help, though.

boto3 10y ago
amen to that, older engineers would require higher salaries (due to the need to support family, to pay mortgage, etc.), and would not be able to put in the same number of hours. So if you can't demonstrate that you provide more values than the younger guns, why would an employer want to hire older engineers?
- refractiveco 10y ago
  In theory the more experience you have the fewer hours you would need to put in. You've solved all the common problems engineers face 10 times before.
  - new_hackers 10y ago
    This. I've found the need to be a 60+ hour hero means that you don't really know what you are doing. The guy who goes home early on Fridays, that is the guy who knows his stuff.
    - minipci1321 10y ago
      > means that you don't really know what you are doing. Or spending too much time in the calls instead of doing the damn thing. Or counting handling the email client as work hours.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  They won't require older salaries if they can't get a job elsewhere, only because their skills are in demand and useful.
- spoonie 10y ago
  I'm sorry but having higher costs is not a good reason to ask for a higher salary. You can be young and still have a family and mortgage. An employee would be foolish to ask for a raise just because they bought a house.
lijason 10y ago
Although age bias is a thing in the Silicon Valley, this seems to be the main takeaway from the article at least on the engineering side. It's talking about engineers having to "learn new coding languages" or "retrained themselves to build mobile apps or do big data". Yes, clearly it's important to keep skills relevant and not just depend on the same job and the same company with the same skills being employable, at the same or higher pay, a decade later.
albertop 10y ago
So when you talk about women in computing industry, you advice them to get a good professional headshot?
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  No. I advise them to become as good at what they do as they can, if they happen to ask me for advice. Otherwise I avoid pontificating. If you're insinuating that I'm some sort of tech sexist, to be frank, you can fuck right off. You know nothing about me or my situation.
  - wott 10y ago
    He didn't write anything like this.
  - albertop 10y ago
    It looks like you have not guts or think it is not proper to give that advice to women. Why do you think is fine to do it for older people?
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      I'm sorry, I have no idea what you mean.
- falsestprophet 10y ago
  In many European countries it is expected to include a photo with a CV.
api 10y ago
In my experience older devs really fall into two categories with a pretty sharp division between them. One group has continued to learn and keep up with their skills. These developers are extremely skilled and experienced and can in many cases be far more productive than younger developers with more shallow knowledge. What they lack in appetite for workaholism they make up for in ability to do more with less work and avoid fads and dead ends. They also tend to have a deep conceptual understanding of the entire stack all the way down to the metal, which younger developers often lack unless they're the super-prodigy type. The second group decided at some point that they knew all they needed to know, and they've gotten really rusty and out of date. When coupled with higher salary demands and less time flexibility, this latter group really are at a huge disadvantage vs. younger developers in the labor market. Here's the trouble and the source of a lot of the age bias IMHO. The first group are seasoned black belts and are exactly the kind of devs you want if you are doing seriously deep ground-breaking stuff or if you want quality. In other words if you are really innovating. Ideally you'd probably want a mix of really experienced devs with a lifetime of experience and younger devs that might bring some new perspective, but you'd certainly want at least some of the former on the team to keep the latter from chasing fads and implementing badly thought out junk. Problem is that most work isn't this. Most work is CRUD-slinging and prototyping and cobbling ready-made modules and services together. That kind of work does not require the deep experience or skill set of the first group. In other words: seasoned "black belt" developers are over-qualified for most mainstream programming work. Now throw in the fact that your over-35 developer wants a higher salary, likely has kids and actually wants to see them, etc. It just makes sense for a lot of shops to recruit cheaper younger developers right out of school who have a lot of time on their hands and who know how to do standard types of work with the latest tools vs. older more expensive developers who know everything and can implement exotic algorithms and close to the metal stuff you probably don't need.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  The second group decided at some point that they knew all they needed to know, and they've gotten really rusty and out of date. How do you know this? Have you been in a good position to evaluate the performance of many older devs? If so, how much diversity in languages/environments is in your sample? Most of the negative attention I've gotten from younger devs in work settings has been in the form of constant interruptions for me to use keyboard shortcuts. 1) It's very disruptive to the discussion at hand. 2) It's never been an actual problem. 3) It's always couched in impatient and negative emotional tones. 4) It makes it harder for others to follow what you are doing, if you are always concentrating so hard at going fast. 5) It's always seemed like a pointless attempt by young people to seem like fake hackers on TV. Chris Granger famously observed that programmers who said "I never use the mouse" use it about 50% of the time they're actively programming. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995235
pmoriarty 10y ago
I'm personally sick of keeping my skills up to date (ie. learning whatever the trendy tech of the week happens to be), and I'm kind of burnt out on the whole tech scene in general.. actually burnt out on it long ago, but I keep working in the field because I don't have the training in anything else, and really don't have much motivation to put in the enormous amount of effort it will take to switch careers at this point. Genuine enthusiasm is what I think a lot of younger people have over older people. After getting enough experience, I just really can't get very excited over the whole mobile craze, or IoT, or yet another f'ing scripting language, or automation, or what have you. I do admit I got excited about VR for a few months, but that wore off fast, and would probably have worn off even faster if I had worked in VR and was immersed in it 12 hours a day, every day for years on end. Some people can somehow keep their enthusiasm for tech their whole lives, and it never gets old for them. I envy those people, but I have many other interests, and my interests tend to change relatively frequently, and I just can't keep a single-minded focus on just tech (or anything else) for very long. That's why working in tech is just a job for me. If I wasn't paid, and paid very well for it, I'd just keep it as a hobby. I don't think it's just tech for me either. I think I'd feel about any profession the exact same way. After a while, I just get bored and want to move on to something else, something completely new and different.
- minipci1321 10y ago
  I perfectly hear what you mean. It used to be that working on a dynamic team (with member of different age) would be a big source of motivation. But nowadays with remote working and teams spread all over the world (and managers and business units having different agenda sometimes), this seems to fade away, hard to find anyway. What is left? Somehow I have grown to hate an unfinished job -- a failed, or a late, or simply a clunky product. I can't help but think that I've put in it days of my life that I count much more thoroughly now than I used to. Another source -- I hate to fail people who puts trust in me, and they tend to do this more now than when I was younger. Funny enough, people's managers in companies I have been don't seem to understand these motivational factors. In yearly career-development meetings, I absolutely had to provide a "proof of motivation" by coming up with a "career path" leading somewhere.

I'm over 40 and I've been continuing to get more work than I can handle by staying up to date on my tech skills. Maybe that professional headshot I never got would help, though.

boto3 10y ago

amen to that, older engineers would require higher salaries (due to the need to support family, to pay mortgage, etc.), and would not be able to put in the same number of hours. So if you can't demonstrate that you provide more values than the younger guns, why would an employer want to hire older engineers?

refractiveco 10y ago
In theory the more experience you have the fewer hours you would need to put in. You've solved all the common problems engineers face 10 times before.
- new_hackers 10y ago
  This. I've found the need to be a 60+ hour hero means that you don't really know what you are doing. The guy who goes home early on Fridays, that is the guy who knows his stuff.
  - minipci1321 10y ago
    > means that you don't really know what you are doing. Or spending too much time in the calls instead of doing the damn thing. Or counting handling the email client as work hours.
tonyedgecombe 10y ago
They won't require older salaries if they can't get a job elsewhere, only because their skills are in demand and useful.
spoonie 10y ago
I'm sorry but having higher costs is not a good reason to ask for a higher salary. You can be young and still have a family and mortgage. An employee would be foolish to ask for a raise just because they bought a house.

lijason 10y ago

Although age bias is a thing in the Silicon Valley, this seems to be the main takeaway from the article at least on the engineering side. It's talking about engineers having to "learn new coding languages" or "retrained themselves to build mobile apps or do big data". Yes, clearly it's important to keep skills relevant and not just depend on the same job and the same company with the same skills being employable, at the same or higher pay, a decade later.

albertop 10y ago

So when you talk about women in computing industry, you advice them to get a good professional headshot?

oldmanjay 10y ago
No. I advise them to become as good at what they do as they can, if they happen to ask me for advice. Otherwise I avoid pontificating. If you're insinuating that I'm some sort of tech sexist, to be frank, you can fuck right off. You know nothing about me or my situation.
- wott 10y ago
  He didn't write anything like this.
- albertop 10y ago
  It looks like you have not guts or think it is not proper to give that advice to women. Why do you think is fine to do it for older people?
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    I'm sorry, I have no idea what you mean.
falsestprophet 10y ago
In many European countries it is expected to include a photo with a CV.

api 10y ago

In my experience older devs really fall into two categories with a pretty sharp division between them. One group has continued to learn and keep up with their skills. These developers are extremely skilled and experienced and can in many cases be far more productive than younger developers with more shallow knowledge. What they lack in appetite for workaholism they make up for in ability to do more with less work and avoid fads and dead ends. They also tend to have a deep conceptual understanding of the entire stack all the way down to the metal, which younger developers often lack unless they're the super-prodigy type. The second group decided at some point that they knew all they needed to know, and they've gotten really rusty and out of date. When coupled with higher salary demands and less time flexibility, this latter group really are at a huge disadvantage vs. younger developers in the labor market. Here's the trouble and the source of a lot of the age bias IMHO. The first group are seasoned black belts and are exactly the kind of devs you want if you are doing seriously deep ground-breaking stuff or if you want quality. In other words if you are really innovating. Ideally you'd probably want a mix of really experienced devs with a lifetime of experience and younger devs that might bring some new perspective, but you'd certainly want at least some of the former on the team to keep the latter from chasing fads and implementing badly thought out junk. Problem is that most work isn't this. Most work is CRUD-slinging and prototyping and cobbling ready-made modules and services together. That kind of work does not require the deep experience or skill set of the first group. In other words: seasoned "black belt" developers are over-qualified for most mainstream programming work. Now throw in the fact that your over-35 developer wants a higher salary, likely has kids and actually wants to see them, etc. It just makes sense for a lot of shops to recruit cheaper younger developers right out of school who have a lot of time on their hands and who know how to do standard types of work with the latest tools vs. older more expensive developers who know everything and can implement exotic algorithms and close to the metal stuff you probably don't need.

stcredzero 10y ago
The second group decided at some point that they knew all they needed to know, and they've gotten really rusty and out of date. How do you know this? Have you been in a good position to evaluate the performance of many older devs? If so, how much diversity in languages/environments is in your sample? Most of the negative attention I've gotten from younger devs in work settings has been in the form of constant interruptions for me to use keyboard shortcuts. 1) It's very disruptive to the discussion at hand. 2) It's never been an actual problem. 3) It's always couched in impatient and negative emotional tones. 4) It makes it harder for others to follow what you are doing, if you are always concentrating so hard at going fast. 5) It's always seemed like a pointless attempt by young people to seem like fake hackers on TV. Chris Granger famously observed that programmers who said "I never use the mouse" use it about 50% of the time they're actively programming. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995235

pmoriarty 10y ago

I'm personally sick of keeping my skills up to date (ie. learning whatever the trendy tech of the week happens to be), and I'm kind of burnt out on the whole tech scene in general.. actually burnt out on it long ago, but I keep working in the field because I don't have the training in anything else, and really don't have much motivation to put in the enormous amount of effort it will take to switch careers at this point. Genuine enthusiasm is what I think a lot of younger people have over older people. After getting enough experience, I just really can't get very excited over the whole mobile craze, or IoT, or yet another f'ing scripting language, or automation, or what have you. I do admit I got excited about VR for a few months, but that wore off fast, and would probably have worn off even faster if I had worked in VR and was immersed in it 12 hours a day, every day for years on end. Some people can somehow keep their enthusiasm for tech their whole lives, and it never gets old for them. I envy those people, but I have many other interests, and my interests tend to change relatively frequently, and I just can't keep a single-minded focus on just tech (or anything else) for very long. That's why working in tech is just a job for me. If I wasn't paid, and paid very well for it, I'd just keep it as a hobby. I don't think it's just tech for me either. I think I'd feel about any profession the exact same way. After a while, I just get bored and want to move on to something else, something completely new and different.

minipci1321 10y ago
I perfectly hear what you mean. It used to be that working on a dynamic team (with member of different age) would be a big source of motivation. But nowadays with remote working and teams spread all over the world (and managers and business units having different agenda sometimes), this seems to fade away, hard to find anyway. What is left? Somehow I have grown to hate an unfinished job -- a failed, or a late, or simply a clunky product. I can't help but think that I've put in it days of my life that I count much more thoroughly now than I used to. Another source -- I hate to fail people who puts trust in me, and they tend to do this more now than when I was younger. Funny enough, people's managers in companies I have been don't seem to understand these motivational factors. In yearly career-development meetings, I absolutely had to provide a "proof of motivation" by coming up with a "career path" leading somewhere.