22 ms·

Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

• tjic 10y ago
  I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world. I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places. I live in NH, on a farm and work (mostly) remotely. I've got a network of contacts, I get pinged w requests for contracting work, I do the job, I get paid. No one asks me about my age (45) or judges me because of it. Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots.
  • SadWebDeveloper 10y ago
    Problem with your solution is that you already now people, if you don't you have to rely on websites like freelancer that pretty much are the same as paid-to-win-the-bid in modern mobile video games and it's sad when people all over the world bid really low those making the website effectively racist regarding devs that to this for living instead of side jobs.
    • tjic 10y ago
      Knowing people happens after 20 years in the industry. It may very well be that the best way to kick start your career is to move to SF or some other big city. So be it. I did the first 20 years of my career in the Boston area. I have no idea what you mean about websites being racist. For picking lower cost developers? It seems odd to call people who give work to people in other countries "racist". Isn't doing that exactly the opposite of racism?
      • SadWebDeveloper 10y ago
        Just try to win a project on any modern "freelancing" website and you will understand... personally i used to make solid money on Rent-A-Coder even before getting my CS degree and when they sell us to Freelancer, i started losing bids and the great bids were "closed" to only accept bid "first world developers" (ie US Developers) or limited to people that already paid for the website membership to get in so pretty much any bid today had like 20 indian developers working for 5c/hour.
        • tjic 10y ago
          Re-read my statements above. I'm telling you not to use those websites. Move to the city, make contacts, do good work.
        • debaserab2 10y ago
          So why not pay for a membership if it gets you access to more exclusive contracts? Or establish relationships with people instead of lowest common denominator platforms and let the quality of your work sell itself? Word of mouth and personal recommendations are worth more than how many stars you are on a platform.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • tjic 10y ago
      Also, the way to compete with someone who's charging $10/hr for crappy code is to do what they can't or won't do: * be an excellent communicator * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. * be a whole stack developer * manage "up". Think of things before your manager does, alert the manager to dangers and problems, give expert advice, avoid the problems. Managers love people who solve the total problem; they hate people who solve one very very narrow niche problem and then leave them (the manager) dealing with a leaky bag of shit. Saying "well, that wasn't in scope!" does not make them happier about holding the leaky bag. I guarantee you that no one bidding $5/hr and working on a timezone 12 hours away delivers this. So, to recap: 1) work in a city when young 2) make contacts 3) be good at what you do 4) manage up ; solve the REAL problem Do that and you'll have lots of work and make good money.
      • witty_username 10y ago
        timezone 12 hours away from where? US?
        • spoonie 10y ago
          SE Asia/Australia are 8-16 hours ahead of either Europe or the US.
      • bluetwo 10y ago
        Yep. Yep. Yep. Agreed.
      • jnbiche 10y ago
        > * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. * I agree, and I hate it. What happened to the days when I could just be productive? Now, I have to spend hours "working as a team" (ie, socializing) on Slack. I hate it so much that I've dramatically cut down on the work I do. It's not that I'm asocial, it's just that I don't want to be exchanging memes when there's work to be done. I want to do the work, and do it well, so I can spend time with my wife and kids. Work for work, socializing for after work. Even with IRC, it didn't use to be like this. What happened? For the record, I'm not talking about being responsive, or good communications. That's critical. I've always responded to client emails within 2-3 hours (I break up my day into 3 email checks). But I find it impossible to get much done with teams that expect me to hang out in Slack or Hipchat all day long. But the younger kids love it. Maybe they code and chat at the same time, I don't know. I can't do it. Doesn't anyone just hire people to do a job anymore? Are even contractors doomed to spending their days "meshing"?
    • bdunbar 10y ago
      Everyone knows someone. Build on that. You work with people. Those people know people. They know other people. Someone says 'I need a good PHP guy' and a guy in the network replies 'I know a guy, SadWebDeveloper - here is his email address'. Boom: you have made contact with someone who wants to hire you. Join the Whatever User Group in your area. Go to the meetings - introduce yourself. Be a presence on their mail list. Boom: more networking contacts. This is a really good example. TJIC and I have talked on the internet for -years- via email and twitter and blog. A customer of mine mentioned she was looking for a local developer (Los Angeles) but couldn't find anyone who met even her minimal standards. I said 'Hey, I know a guy', he lives 8,000 miles away, he's about a hermit and a half, and he knows his sh*t' and a few weeks later TJIC got some months of work and everyone was happy. And now, here we are, talking. Maybe I can be converted to a networking contact. You never know, hunh?
      • mhurron 10y ago
        > Everyone knows someone No they don't. And your solution to not being stuck with closed and insular groups is join some closed and insular groups so that your name can be passed around as one of the group.
        • tjic 10y ago
          If you want to be miserable and ineffective, you can be. All you have to do is set your mind to it. ...and you're doing a great job so far!
          • drdeadringer 10y ago
            mhurron has a valid point and it is worth considering beyond him//her "doing a great job so far" being "miserable and ineffective".
            • SyneRyder 10y ago
              I downvoted mhurron, I found it a fatalistic response that isn't constructive or helpful. Even if you feel you don't know anyone, you have to put effort in to meeting people. Here's three ways I got remote work before I knew anyone: * I emailed a band I liked whose song was featured as Demo Of The Month in a magazine, asking to buy all their CDs. We kept in touch, and months later they asked me for some (free) advice about setting up their website. Later again, one of their friends was looking to hire someone & they recommended me - I worked remotely for them for 10 years. * I wrote a script in PHP and made both a free version & a paid version, then mentioned it on a forum. I got a handful of sales, but one of those customers liked the code quality so much they asked if they could hire me for contract work. That work was done remotely too. * I went to a blogger conference overseas & before I went I made a Twitter list of all the attendees, read their tweets and made online friends with a few who I found interesting. I met some of them at the conference, and one of them I kept in touch with for a year after the conference. We grabbed some coffee when they visited my city, I mentioned I was having a slow work period, they mentioned they needed someone technical, and we worked together for a couple of years. Again, mostly remote work (though I did fly to their offices every few months). Instead of being negative, plant the seeds now. Start making friends, keep those friendships alive, keep letting people know what you do, keep creating proof that you're good at what you do (even if it's your own projects). It's a long process and it still won't guarantee you work, but it will give you a much better chance of offers coming your way. That's what worked for me anyway.
    • witty_username 10y ago
      How is the website racist?
    • ASalazarMX 10y ago
      "making the website effectively racist regarding devs" Just so your communication skills improve, discrimination is not the same as racism.
      • Noseshine 10y ago
        On this different topic: I got a lot more relaxed about language after reading numerous books by linguists (because that is their attitude, they just watch what is going on). In this context, I think the train has left the station (as we Germans say, "der Zug ist abgefahren") and "racist" now indeed has a new much wider meaning in public discourse contexts. It now seems to include "being different", in not necessarily clearly defined ways, the exact nature of the differences are to be taken from context. I could just yesterday or today read about "racism" in a Guardian article about an attack on a Polish immigrant somewhere in Britain, who certainly wasn't of a different race [0]. However, I'm very relaxed about it - everybody knows what is meant. Also, a shift in meaning in some context does not mean the stricter meaning of the word is lost! The exact same people who may use a word loosely in one context use it with its strict meaning in a different one. If you start talking about biology this will happen. Words and language are extreme flexible, and such a change is not the end of the world. I think their is some justification: When the word is used in such wider meaning it's more about the effect, not the cause. My motto for language is the same as in programming: Be as lenient as possible with input - but be strict about output. In the language context that means I won't criticize when I actually clearly understand the meaning, but I myself try to use the right expressions, grammar, punctuation, etc. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/12/polish-man-attacked-beaten-gang-20-teenagers-leeds-racially-aggravated-assault https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/12/polish-man-a... (sub-headline: "...they are treating incident ... as racially aggravated")
        • kafkaesq 10y ago
          "...they are treating incident ... as racially aggravated" The term is used because the person being attacked was thought of as being of a different "race" by their racist attackers (and because that's the reason he was attacked; bot for being non-heterosexual, or for being a fan of the wrong football team). Not because one is in agreeance with the alleged "racial" distinctions (in the mind of the racist). BTW: der Zug ist abgefahren In English one would say "the horse has left the barn."
    • larve 10y ago
      I never had any problem finding serious gigs on freelancer.com. Advertise your rate (in my case 70-100$/h depending on the technology), without bowing down to the $10/h bids. Just the fact that you can write a grammatically correct sentence in your bid, with a few questions showing that you know what the problem is about, is enough to get you a solid gig. If people don't hire you because you are too expensive / think they can get away with a cheaper bid, you don't want to work for them. Now, there are obviously a lot of great programmers living in places with lower living costs, but they are already buried in projects anyway. I usually find a good "day" gig in about 1-2 h on freelancer. Do two or three of those, with clients who turn out to be solid, intelligent and paying promptly, and you most probably found a reliable pipeline of work.
  • sprocket 10y ago
    I'm in a very similar situation; I live on a island in western Canada, on a farm, and contract remotely. I don't have the extreme cost of living like our nearest city (Vancouver, BC), and being remote, no one cares about how old I am, they care that I can get the job done.
  • daxorid 10y ago
    Seconded. I operate out of rural Arizona and travel to California (where my business is located) as needed. Thirty second commute, time with my family, and the opportunity to interact with people whose lifestyle concerns actually seem grounded in reality. You couldn't pay me enough to live in a place like SF.
    • nicobn 10y ago
      Ditto that. I also live in AZ. I'm curious; where in rural Arizona are you based off ?
      • daxorid 10y ago
        I am in Apache County.
  • rdtsc 10y ago
    > Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. I like that quote. Copied it to my notes for future reference. To expand more on the topic, I wonder if remote workers are a good way to bring some revival for smaller rural communities. I visit some of those places and many have a beautiful setting, everyone knows each other, there is a sense of a community. It is quiet. There is probably a tipping point where if enough companies would hire remote workers, people won't be afraid to move to such communities. Currently many (including me) even if they do remote work, would probably be hesitant to move, because if they have to jump ship, they know there is a smaller chance of getting remote work again. So staying closer to a tech center seems like a better option.
    • beachstartup 10y ago
      it's happening more and more as the 90s and 00s veterans get older and want more land/space/whatever. the recent trend in insane housing prices has definitely accelerated it, just from my circle of anecdotes.
    • norea-armozel 10y ago
      If I could get a reliable car so I could get to a metro when I needed to see an endocrinologist I would definitely do my work remotely from a rural community. I know that parts of Kansas have FTTH (it's not gigabit but it's reliable and has no datacaps) which are very cheap to live in. Edit: It looks like Nex-Tech now offers gigabit internet. It's around $200 a month with cable and phone but to be fair it's rural Kansas. I use to pay $65 for their 10/5 when that was the mid-tier Internet only package. So they've really improved their service.
      • bigtex 10y ago
        I have business class internet in a rural community in Tx. Advertised speed in 10/2 but I usually get around 20/2 for $100/month. It is fixed wireless.
        • sfifs 10y ago
  • tentakull 10y ago
    Working in SV, quite honestly the best member of my team is >40 (I'm in my late 20's). I don't understand ageism at all, experience really makes the job easier and I value that wealth of knowledge as a more junior dev
    • 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
      The best team composition is an age of ranges, spanning 20 years- eg: early twenties to late 40s. (I wouldn't turn down an engineer older than that though, of course). And ranges of experiences. You need diversity to refine the ideas before committing them to code. Often the younger guys are faster at producing features, but produce lower quality code while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it. Both is a good combo. I think a lot of the startup failures of really early stage startups might be due to the entire team being exactly the same age and right out of college. So they make mistakes that have been made many times before. Put another way there are many mistakes that can kill you and the more experience you have on your team the better you are at identifying them-- but you have to have innovation and new ideas too. Which is not to say that any of these sets of characteristics are exclusive to a specific age -- this is just generalizations.
      • groby_b 10y ago
        > while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it It's the older women who rock both architecture and quick execution. :) ("I'm sorry, but you opened the door, counselor") Age does not immediately confer advantages or disadvantages - we just often use it as a proxy for "experienced", "more methodical", "slower", "inflexible", "good mentor". (Your pick here) All of those are independent of age. Please don't compose a team by age. (Speaking as an older person. I bring a lot of things to the table, but my birthdate isn't one of them)
        • 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
          You can't have 30 years of experience when you're 20 years old. You're unlikely to have 15 years experience when you're 20 years old, and you're certainly going to have a different perspective when you're more years into programming, which has good and bad aspects. Like I said, you want diversity of ages. I'm in my late 40s, I work with 20 year olds and 30 year olds and a guy whose even a fair bit older than me. Hire the best people first, then make your team diverse, both across thinking and across ages and across everything else. But there's a synergy I've noticed more than once when pairing a 40ish with a 20ish. OR even a 20ish, 30ish and 40ish three person team. I'm obviously not (and it should be clear in the above message) calling for quotas, but it's a good goal. Homogenity reduces ingenuity.
  • cmbaus 10y ago
    Like there are no bigots in NH. When I lived in Central NH I had a long hair and almost got run out of town for being a "fucking long haired hippie"
    • hour_glass 10y ago
      Haha mind if I ask where you were?
    • tclancy 10y ago
      Well sure, Central NH. Or Northern NH. Or Western NH. But down here on the Seacoast . . . well, that's why I live away from everybody too.
    • madgar 10y ago
      When I lived in central NH there was someone who lived in the town who proudly drove a white sedan covered in racial epithets using magic marker and scratched into the paint. A hangman's noose was scratched into the trunk along with the phrase "linch all n* * * *rs". Naturally that's just the most extreme example; far more commonplace was casual ignorant small-talk generalizing about "the blacks"/"the coloreds"/"the hispanics" in gas stations/convenience stores/the barber/etc. And the soft bigotry of low expectations absolutely permeated an area where people could and did go months, years without seeing a nonwhite individual in person.
      • ncarroll 10y ago
        I have often had the urge to hang numbers. They are problems looking for a place to happen. Letters, on the other hand, are always ready for a chat. ;-)
        • madgar 10y ago
          The asterisks got eaten in my post, fixed that. To be clear, there were no asterisks on the car. And it wasn't funny.
          • 10y ago
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • wyager 10y ago
    Absolutely agreed. Having lived all over the US, it seems to me that the places that are the most discriminatory and insular in practice are those that pride themselves on being inclusive in theory. NYC and SF have huge cultures of identity politics, with the end result that it's very clique-dominated and exclusive. NYC also has a very money-oriented social stratification. On the other hand, if you go to rural Montana, this sort of thing doesn't exist. The only "cliques" that exist might be e.g. what church you go to, but I was never judged negatively for not going to church. They just don't have the population density to be that picky about social circles, even if they wanted to be.
    • marmot777 10y ago
      Sad but true.
    • bogomipz 10y ago
      I don't agree, NYC and SF are vastly different. Most of the articles about ageism that have surfaced lately are about ageism in the Valley. For the most part this stuff doesn't fly in New York City.
  • darrmit 10y ago
    I work from home four days a week and commute one day - usually around 2 hours round trip. I get paid less at this job than I would if I was willing to commute to the city where my office is located. But I consider the mental and emotional benefit of not having that daily grind to be worth more than the wage gap. I greatly prefer to slow pace of country life after a day working, whether at home or in the office. The technology industry is stressful enough without the added stress of city dwelling, in my opinion.
    • bigtex 10y ago
      This is my same exact scenario as well. I have free range animals and occasionally a rooster will be right next to my office window and start crowing while on a call. I could make much more if I took a job in the city but that would be a 2 hour commute everyday. I get to have lunch with my family 4 days a week.
  • stcredzero 10y ago
    San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places. The rapidity with which people flip the idiot bit on you, due to puddle-shallow signalling in the Bay Area really takes my breath away. - The sound of keys clicking in a phone interview automatically means you are Googling the answer in an interview. Never mind that you are a dynamic language programmer and you are writing a 10 second scriptlet to answer the question. - The mention of anything that sounds "audiophile" automatically means you are a terrible douche who naively believes in all of Monster Cable's woo. No need to actually evaluate what you are saying through knowledge of physics. - You must subscribe to the magical powers of [insert paradigm/language here] or you are a dirty mudblood who's simply too dim to appreciate the magic. (Don't say anything like, "Soft factors, like how well your team works together, swamps the effect...") - You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks, or you obviously never covered the topic. This isn't even to mention weird prejudices and half-baked knowledge about older technologies. It's as if people didn't understand that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 is also a parody of programmers misunderstanding of technology.
    • InclinedPlane 10y ago
      > "You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks" This kind of thing is the worst in interviews. Like getting asked some fill-in-the-blanks question on the pillars of OOP or to define some random bit of jargon or what-have-you. That coupled with the "have you seen this question before" interviewing is just infuriating.
      • vonmoltke 10y ago
        I just took the TripleByte assessment for Mixpanel and over half of it was this kind of shit. Worse, they threw in multiple-choice design questions. No, I would not use any of the complicated sets of things you presented me in this case, and do not think any of them is the right answer.
        • stcredzero 10y ago
  • aantix 10y ago
    >Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. You hate where people are close-minded so you're _sticking_ with the countryside..? It's possible that NH countryside is different than the other small towns I've visited, but I have zero data points on that. Another discussion, another day. I lived in SF for five years and performed a couple of hundred interviews for the companies I consulted with. Software engineers have the capability to produce millions of dollars in profits with the right product. People can quickly get over prejudices if they think you will be able to produce that million dollar product. Keeping up with the startup Jones's is about relevancy. No one wants a senior engineer barking at them babbling about how "Smalltalk did the same thing 20 years ago and now we're just reinventing the wheel!". Do yourself a favor in the interview; do a bake off of old style vs new stack implementations. Compare and contrast. It shows your vast knowledge. And it quickly graduates you from grumpy old programmer to a mentor for the entire team. New web/mobile based companies start all the time in SF, and with each new fresh start comes the chance to wipe the slate clean and choose a newer stack that may provide a competitive advantage. Reactjs with redux right now, but probably something different in a year. New companies. New choice of stacks, all the time. The tides change quickly in SF. If you've been turned down by a Bay Area startup, I guarantee it's much less to do with your lack of skinny jeans or because you have some grey hairs.. P.S. Also, you're a consultant. You obviously have an understanding of client relationships. Understand that your clients in SF are going to skew younger. One of my best friends was the CTO of a startup where the founder was 20. He was 45. You may have a team of fresh-out-of-Berkley-engineers and that's it. If you're not comfortable in a mentor setting, you may also get rejected. At a later stage in your career and with a young team, you're expected to contribute more than code.
    • DominikR 10y ago
      > Also, you're a consultant. You obviously have an understanding of client relationships. Understand that your clients in SF are going to skew younger. One of my best friends was the CTO of a startup where the founder was 20. He was 45. This is only true for startups and other companies that have small budgets or need cheap labor. If you are going after the high paying contracts you'll quickly learn that being 45 or older is often an advantage if you have the necessary experience. (not just technical skill but also social skill) These corporations aren't going to allow a 25 year old consulter to come in and take lead of a team or a product. (except if the person shows truly remarkable skill) If they hire young consulters it usually means they want someone that is cheap to hire and easy to fire.
  • draw_down 10y ago
    > Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots. Mmmhmm, right. Anyway, I don't think anyone is saying that it's 100% impossible to find tech work if you're 45. I'm sure there is work, and I'm also sure it's the case that Bay area tech is different from elsewhere. But one of those differences is what gets produced- nobody is designing the iPhone outside of SF Bay, to put it bluntly. And it's important that work at that level is not age-discriminatory. I'm 35, just started at a Bay area company, one that makes really nice products and has some of the best designers anywhere. And I can already see it coming, so many of the people I work with are 25-27. The people who founded this company are a good bit younger than me. The grey hairs are people like the general counsel. Sure, nobody asked my age, and I look younger than I am anyway. But still, I see it coming.
  • blakeyrat 10y ago
    The "Bay Area scene" is also pretty bad at figuring out that a lot of their problems only exist in the Bay Area. Although they're doing a heck of a job importing their horrible toxic culture up here to Seattle.
    • biocomputation 10y ago
      I wish I could upvote this 1,000,000 times. This is absolute truth!
    • geebee 10y ago
      I am curious, though, when you say "they" are importing their horrible toxic culture, who are you referring to? Not individuals necessarily, but are you referring to all San Franciscans, including those who were priced out of their childhood neighborhoods and are looking for somewhere else to live?
      • milcron 10y ago
        Valley CS geeks, of course.
    • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
      Don't forget Colorado. Texas is taking longer but obviously a larger area will take longer to pollute if you do it at a fixed rate.
  • bogomipz 10y ago
    Interesting. Someone else recently mentioned remote working being a great antidote to age bias. Contract work also seems to avoid a lot of nonsense. There's a real irony that tech in "liberal cities" is provincial and close minded and you are avoiding that by being in the country on a farm.
  • SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
    It's the rural countryside around here that put up gigantic Trump posters on their farms, so unless you're talking about some other definition of bigotry, I don't you can generalize "rural" as "not bigoted." Also: I have never had trouble getting jobs in the Bay Area, though I moved before I turned 45. I did however work with people who were late 40s/early 50s and engineers, so I didn't see a huge age prejudice.
    • Zpalmtree 10y ago
      I'd rather keep politics off here, but implying trump=bigoted is a rather SF view :^)
      • SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
        Trump makes bigoted statements. It's not a debate or a "view". It's just a fact.
  • jondubois 10y ago
    I'm 27 now. My biggest fear is to not succeed in my career by the time I turn 40. The idea of having to give up working on my startup goals after 20 years of continuous failure is in itself terrifying enough - But combine that with the fact that I might be penniless; forced to join a mega-corporation to become corporate cattle. ... In a company filled with arrogant lucky people in their 20s bossing me around. I couldn't take it. I fear the next generation. I think MY generation is already so arrogant - We severely underestimate the value of experience. I was one of the few people lucky enough to learn that lesson early though. I once worked with a lady (a software engineer) who was in her early 40s and she always said that she never really cared much about her work. She always left work on the dot. I was 21 at the time and I had been working like crazy since I was 14 but even back then it was clear that she was a much better software engineer than I was. For me, my career was the center of my life; for her, it was just a way to pay the mortgage. In spite of what the media tries to tell us; 7 years of obsessive, passionate labour is not more valuable 22 years of 'bare minimum' labour. That's how valuable time is.
  • brlewis 10y ago
    Could it simply be that we hear the most tech career horror stories from the Bay Area because that's the place with the most tech careers? I'd be as hesitant to make generalizations about a place as I would be to make generalizations about an age bracket.
    • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      No, because 90% of tech jobs are outside of the Bay Area, but probably 90% of the tech job drama is in the Bay Area.
  • LargeCompanies 10y ago
    Me too happy to work for the fed in the mid Atlantic region where the pay is almost as good as the valley and the age ranges from 30 to 65.
  • deleted 10y ago
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• johnwheeler 10y ago
  Hi Everybody, I'm the creator of the site the down blog in the OP links to https://oldgeekjobs.com https://oldgeekjobs.com. I developed it as an MVP last night in one hour. The blog looks like it's getting crushed under load, so here's the content of the post: Check out https://oldgeekjobs.com/ https://oldgeekjobs.com/ if you’re over 30. In the software development industry it’s hard to get hired when you get past 35 and are still “just a developer”. Employers look down on you because you’re too smart, or they think you’re too stupid because you never wanted to be a manager. Employers will use the excuse of “culture fit” to exclude you and get you out of the hiring pool. You’re too smart to be tricked into working 60 hours a week for zero equity and zero bonuses. You’re too smart to be working on a legacy code base that has low quality and will hurt your future career prospects. Employers know that which is why they love to hire fresh faces out of school and under 30s; give tech companies your young and naive to burn them out and make them piles of cash. You’re experienced enough to avoid that demoralizing burning out. Check out https://oldgeekjobs.com/ https://oldgeekjobs.com/ because there may just be a job for you, a place where you won’t be discriminated against just because you’re getting older and wiser.
  • morgante 10y ago
    Be careful to not discriminate against young people either. Assuming developers in their 20s are naive and underpaid is just as insulting as attitudes towards older developers. This isn't necessarily an indictment of you. I'm just a little sick of people stereotyping younger developers on Hacker News when the truth is that most of us get great value for our time and are well aware of the choices we make.
    • kelukelugames 10y ago
      Hi I'm 32. I noticed some candidates show visible displeasure when being interviewed by younger interviewers. I know many interviewees and interviewers who have experienced this.
      • Domenic_S 10y ago
        At 34, I interviewed at $BIG_SV_CO with two late 20s engineers. Not a huge age gap. In the discussion portion of the interview I asked if they were on xbox, ps4, battle.net, etc -- because I like to game occasionally in my spare time. They seemed almost offput by the question, as if they thought I was trying to force commonality or making assumptions about them. I dunno, it was weird.
• SixSigma 10y ago
  Meanwhile in another thread [1] California Today: San Diego Struggles to Keep Its Young Tech Talent [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12506131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12506131 [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/us/california-today-techies-san-diego-bay-area.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/us/california-today-techie...
• SadWebDeveloper 10y ago
  The sad part is that when you reach that age (31 here) is you start looking at the "new trend" (ex Angular, React and NodeJS) as unnecesary and the "new devs" that doesn't have any experience on making and maintaining long term projects (> 5 years) look at this as the holy grail technology and if you aren't using that technlogy it means you aren't as efficent as the "new guys" so you either migrate to management (which sucks), change industries or became a private just another entrepenur.
  • gramstrong 10y ago
    I think it goes both ways. If you're new to development, you're soaking up any and all information to a fault. It's an exploratory phase. If you've been around a while, it's easy to become stale. How many trends do you let go by before you're ten iterations behind the trend that sticks?
  • throwanem 10y ago
    I'm considerably older than that, and would argue from experience that the mistake is in regarding everything new as just another fad. Often it's good to wait a while and see how things play out with a new technology before deciding whether to invest in it. But you don't want to fall into the bad habit of making such evaluations on prejudice, rather than merit.
    • bphogan 10y ago
      Exactly. Use your experience to judge a technology on merit. Does this solve a pain point in a new and interesting way, or is it the same approach in a different language?
  • lloyd-christmas 10y ago
    http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/Angular-JS http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/Angular-JS That's a pretty big chunk of the internet for a "new trend". My boss is in his 50s and he was the one who started us using node. Every month without fail, he repeats the words of his manager in the 90s: "Java is a fad. We'll all be using c++ again in a year". Don't be that guy.
• vemv 10y ago
  You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end. If you are a young programmer and your salary merely covers your costs of living (including leisure etc), it seems to me that you need a plan.
  • tjic 10y ago
    I've been a coder. I've been a manager. I've owned a firm that had 15 employees. Of all of these, I prefer to be a coder. I'm just 5 years away from 50, and let me tell you: not only do I want to be a developer at 50, I want to be a developer at 70. Being a developer means getting paid good money to work on problems that are perfectly suited to my INTJ / spergy personality. There's nothing else I'd rather do with my (work) time.
    • kyled 10y ago
      What did your firm do?
      • tjic 10y ago
        I owned two businesses: * SmartFlix.com (dvd rental business) * Heavyink.com (comic book ecommerce)
    • steveax 10y ago
      I'm 5 years on the other side of 50 and similar story. Did 8 years in the game industry, 3D and technical art, then as a co-founder of a small (22 employees at height) game studio, coding since then. Still love it - and yes I have a plan :-)
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • santaclaus 10y ago
    > You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end. Why not? One of my favorite coworkers ever was over 50 and he still seemed to very much enjoy coding.
• ArtDev 10y ago
  When you are young you can get by as "just a developer". Luckily, for most of us, you end up honing into a specific technology given enough time. Employers are willing to go great lengths to find the right kind of experience. Combine this with 100% remote jobs and you don't need to worry about getting old in this industry.
• JohnLeTigre 10y ago
  I'm no quiche eater, I will code until I die
  • throwanem 10y ago
    Perhaps you mean "quiche"? A guiche is a genital piercing. It would be an odd thing to eat.
    • JohnLeTigre 10y ago
      lol thanks :) now fixed
• alex-yo 10y ago
  Well, a funny thing, I'm not old, I'm just 37. In my country I need to work for the next 30 years to retire. However companies don't want to talk with me about getting a job regardless my 14 year of commercial experience. Sometimes I hear during an interview "oh, you did so many things, I wish I could have the same experience". And then I don't get this job. And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point where they ask me for the money. I'm thinking about starting my own company with my own products. This will be much harder, but it's better to have this kind of job than none. And I just stopped replying to the job adverts with "young team".
  • marxama 10y ago
    No joke, I'm 31, only 2-3 years ago the companies were all over me, I would get offers right and left. Now, not so much, I've noticed a pretty huge difference.
    • pacomerh 10y ago
      So you're saying you post your age in your profile?. This has no correlation
      • marxama 10y ago
        I usually mention it in my cover letter. I wouldn't want to work in a place that discriminates based on age (or on any other factors, for that matter)
  • wott 10y ago
    > And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point where they ask me for the money. Same (a bit older now but it started at the same age). I don't care about the salary: it is always more money that I can spend while working, and at the same time I am not going to get from any honest job the kind of money needed to do what I'd like . The only time I got an interview, the guy wanted me to fill a leader/manager position. I had not applied for it, I had not written I wanted such a position, I had explicitly described the grunt work I wished to to. But that would contradict his mental model: "But... with your age, your experience, we thought you'd be a leader". Well, that's not what I wrote, that's not what interests me, that's not what I am good at. Impossible to pull this idea out of him. For other applications, I don't know since I get no answer or off-topic answers sent by human robots fresh out of school. So I can just make hypotheses, like too many experiences abroad that doesn't fit the mould of my country, in too varied domains, with studies in different domains, and of course 'why on earth am I not a manager at my age'. I was recognised (at my own surprise) as a top guy in my previous job but I don't get a single chance to (at least try to) demonstrate it again. So, basically, after only a quarter of the carrier our leaders now expect us to do, we are trashed.
• gshakir 10y ago
  Come work for the government. Help to save tax payer's money and get paid well. Yes, the pace is slow but you can get lot accomplished in-between things.
  • asimuvPR 10y ago
    Post or email more info? :)
• enrmarc 10y ago
  Last time I read about age discrimination in software development, 40 (years) was the number. Now it seems it's 30. In 5 years I suspect that anyone above 25 will be considered "too old" for this profession. Not so crazy if you think about it: right now, 30-year-old people have about 8 years of experience (assuming a 4-year degree) and, as this post suggests, are being discriminated. Now, imagine an 18-year-old guy that study a year (code camps?) to become a software developer and after that starts to work as one. At 25 he would have 6 years of real world experience (let's assume this guy likes the profession so he taught himself while working, in order to compare both developers). Who has more chance to be hired (under the assumption that age discrimination is still a thing in 2021)? 2 more years of experience doesn't seem too much and a 25-year-old guy seems to be more suitable to be tricked into working 60 hours a week for less money. Update: grammar fix.
• inputcoffee 10y ago
  Sometimes I suspect we go from being too young and inexperienced to being too old and over-qualified without going through the Goldilocks sweet spot in between.
• Pica_soO 10y ago
  I think it would help alot to build the same stock of myths about old guys, who where let go and then had a come back on the youngsters. Most of this social machine is build from self-propelling myths, so if you would keep that up, agism dissolved.
• exstudent2 10y ago
  I think a good path, not often discussed, is for older developers to dedicate some portion of their time developing side-projects that can create a passive (or not so passive) income stream. Being "old" gives you a lot of time to try various ideas. Eventually some should stick if you're truly pushing your skills; not just programming skills but product/marketing skills as well.
• eranation 10y ago
  Could be just me but it seems to me that for some jobs (Architects, tech leads) in enterprise-ish industries (Big data / Java / Spring / Cloud) they look (at least from job posting) for ridiculous years of experience. I for one (nearing my 40's) didn't see any problem landing any job (non SF area, mostly Java/Scala/Spring and Spark/Hadoop on AWS). I get tons of LinkedIn recruiter spam, and it's easy to tell my age from my work/education history. I did feel really a bad vibe interviewing for a couple of SF based startups, got rejected once for being "to enterprisy, won't fit our startup culture". I think it was because I mentioned using an IDE, God forbid. So it might be a big issue in some cultures / areas. I don't see it in the Enterprise world at least.
  • clifanatic 10y ago
    > they look (at least from job posting) for ridiculous years of experience Yeah, they want 20 years of experience. But they still won't hire anybody over 25. Start young, kids!
    • AstralStorm 10y ago
      Actually we did, but nobody is hiring for C64 Basic and assembly anymore.
      • clifanatic 10y ago
        Right, I forgot: 20 years of experience with Angular.js.
  • vonmoltke 10y ago
    Unfortunately, many of those places want someone who grew up in their ecosystem. They replace "too enterprisey" bias with highly-specific laundry lists of skills they are actually serious about adhering to.
• marmot777 10y ago
  That's absurd. Most other industries, people get some respect for experience. I'd understand not hiring someone who had not kept up but people of any age can stop learning. If someone's on top of things, why would their age have anything to do with the hiring decision? Not being "into" the same things is flat out childish.
• makecheck 10y ago
  I think that age is correlation, not causation. What’s really happening is two things. First, companies typically don’t like paying people lots of money (even if they are great at blowing millions on other mindless things). Second, these companies do not understand that their unwillingness to hire expensive people is causing months of bug-chasing and monkey-patching in their products. When your organization is under the impression that “a developer is a developer”, new college grads willing to work for peanuts are very attractive. It takes a good manager to understand that someone’s decades of experience or advanced degree really is worth a lot more money, and not just in the long run. Experienced people have seen more programming constructs in more languages, they have encountered more examples of APIs in more libraries, they have made more mistakes and learned from them, they are more likely to be able to apply suitable algorithms and data formats to problems, and so on. Also, having experienced people on staff actually gives your new developers somebody to learn from.
  • danielvinson 10y ago
    This matches my experiences well. Many of the people I know who are devs in the Bay Area that don't work at Google/FB aren't making more than $80k. The companies pull in grads who couldn't quite make the top companies who don't realize that they will never get a raise or promotion, and many of these people stay for 5-6 years before they realize how hard they are getting screwed. These companies would NEVER hire an older, experienced developer because they know they wouldn't be able to retain them. Its worth noting that I work on a dev team where the average age is about 40 (I am 27). We have multiple members of the team nearing retirement. Having the older guys around makes my job much easier and gives me resources that I wouldn't have otherwise. We are able to keep these guys around because we work on interesting projects, don't work more than 40 hours a week, and have a great manager.
    • ryandrake 10y ago
      > These companies would NEVER hire an older, experienced developer because they know they wouldn't be able to retain them. Not only that, but they don't have to retain them. . There is a large supply of "~20 year olds who aren't quite Google material" lined up to take on those $80K developer roles. The "churn and burn" strategy seems to be working for these companies so why change?
• nedsma 10y ago
  The ageism trend isn't supposed to live on. The average developer in the US (http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#age-country http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#age-...) is 32. To young devs/execs employing someone who isn't close to their age range, may seem as not being the right culture fit. However, there are/there will be so many older developers, companies founded by older folks who will not shy away from their same age peers.
• ravenstine 10y ago
  It's too bad that many of us(in general, not on HN) are too lazy to judge a person based on what they actually offer vs a number attributed to them. People who are 50+ are perfectly capable at learning and writing good code, and it really isn't hard to recognize someone with a sharp mind. However, lots of people allow their minds and bodies to rot as they get older. My parents, as much as I love them, are not very employable at this point(at least not when compared to a younger candidate). They don't get much exercise and spend a large chunk of the day sitting in front of the boob tube. They are smart people, but their ability to learn new things has gone way down, and I have noticed they are a little more gullible than they used to be. Meanwhile, I have friends who are in their 50s and they have the energy, motivation, and learning abilities of someone in their 20s. I wonder if this has something to do with the exercise they get, and the lack of TV watching. The calorie defecit from both those things probably slows their aging a tad too. I think if you want to be programming at age 50, you can easily add years, perhaps decades to your youthfulness by taking some basic care of both body and mind. It may seem like an obvious statement, but most people don't actually do this, and it shows in people my age who have the habits of my parents while also drinking heavily and smoking way too much. It's kind of spooky when I see people who were once youthful looking, in their 20s, quickly start to look like they are in their 40s because they don't really take care of themselves beyond basic hygiene.
  • pc86 10y ago
    I never exercised or ate well, even as a child and adolescent. I look better now at 30 than I ever did at 18 or 20 or 25. Exercise and physical activity are supremely important.
    • ravenstine 10y ago
      I never meant to imply that it was a concrete rule. Everyone's body is different(more specifically their genes). I've known people who ate nothing but pizza and mac & cheese every day and were skinny as toothpicks. Whether or not they will still be healthy in their golden years is a question I can't really answer. I just know that I can't name anyone I've known personally who did even a moderate amount of physical activity(I'm not talking rock climbing or doing tri-athelons) and ate reasonably healthy that deteriorated despite those things. Though as I have also known people who don't seem to be harmed by a sedentary lifestyle, I've known far more people who are clearly affected by such a lifestyle, both physically and mentally. Granted, I am talking about my personal experience and not a scientific study. Also remember that you are 30 and not 50. I did mention how I've seen people essentially become 40 at age 25-30, but I'm sure there are exceptions. There are also some factors that complicate this: - Junk food is defined differently depending on who you ask. Much of what I eat is "junk food" in the sense that it's mostly red meat, fat, cheese, and some fish, yet I weigh 145 lbs and always check out fine during physical exams. Someone can also eat food that isn't commonly considered healthy, but they may also not eat very much of it. The French are a good example of the latter as the common French diet includes lots of carbohydrates and sugar, yet they don't have nearly the obesity problem of America, and it's suspected that them not eating as much of it is a significant factor. (Americans often value quantity over quality) - As I hinted at a few times, calorie intake is actually a factor in how a person ages. If I remember correctly, a 400 calorie deficit slows aging slightly, and it has something to do with activating a protection of the chromosomes during mitosis, but it's not really understood by researchers as to why this happens. Note: This is highly speculative on my part, so keep that in mind. I do suspect that this plays a part in why some people I know age so poorly, and these same people also consume large amounts of food. Please don't just believe what I say, though. :) - Sugar, which added to nearly everything you buy from the grocery store, has been linked to aging in that it causes oxidation in cells causing damage to proteins. I can't remember how the specific process works, but I think you can look up Advanced Glycation End Products and get a better explanation. - Many people have this idea that consuming fats of any kind is bad. They really need to get this bad science out of their heads, but it's a zombie theory that doesn't want to die. I remember being taught about how bad fat was in the nutrition class I had in high school, and it's pretty bogus as fat is needed by the body in many ways, including brain function and synthesizing hormones. You can get away without it for a long time, but I don't think that it's sustainable, and maintaining a low fat diet probably has long-term consequences on cognitive function. I know I've gotten way off-point here in explaining my hypotheses, but my point really was that $AGE != $ABILITY. Someone who is in their 50s could keep up with a person in their 20s, but might be rejected because their hair is too grey, which is sad. The best thing one can do for themselves, if they want to continue their career into their late adulthood, is live both for now and then; eat good healthy food and exercise now, eat good junk food occasionally, and maybe you'll still be coding and jumping into the mosh pit when you're 55. Everyone's body is different, but certain decisions you make will improve your odds of being in better health later on, and those decisions aren't a losing bet. EDIT: It might sound like I'm advocating for some specific diet, but I am really not.
• princetontiger 10y ago
  You know what? I worked for a large tech company (unnamed) a few years ago. There were tons of old people who viewed the younger folks in contempt. It can happen both ways.
  • 6stringmerc 10y ago
    Absolutely; I made my entry in to Fortune XXX level companies by way of my tech skills doing basic things with Word that SVPs & MDs couldn't be bothered to learn, yet were critical to actually driving business. The hostility was palpable sometimes. There were a slim few senior staff workers who genuinely expressed gratitude for filling in for a very large, important skill-set they simply didn't grasp or feel compelled to learn during their professional careers. Being on the same team, I appreciated that, certainly not put-downs and disrespect during the process because of my seniority.
• sAuronas 10y ago
  Old (40) geek here. I think I have two pennies-worth to share here. I came to the industry at 38. I left real estate development when I couldn't overcome the unemployment history gap in my resume, despite working for KB Home, Toll Brothers and on the largest redevelopment project in Chicago history (Stateway Gardens housing project to Park Boulevard). I was living in the Bay Area at the time I made the transition (finally). I can tell you first hand - the culture fit thing as a means to discriminate is real. I will say that I at least had interviews. Interviewing felt good after not even getting an email for - any - job applied for in real estate. I got a response for - every - job applied for the in Bay (minus FB and Pandora, you guys suck). After 6 months of interviews in the Bay, I gave up (due to cost) and decided to try another market... less than 6 weeks and I had a job in Charlotte. I had my first iOS role at a startup another 6 months after that. Even after the startup coughed me up (thanks again Zomato), I was able to get another iOS job in a month. I won't mention (any other) names but I can say that the culture fit issue doesn't really exist outside the Bay. And to any decision makers out there, you are making a mistake if you assume someone like me can't fit on a team of 18-30 y/o. I fit in so well, in fact, that almost all of my new connections on LinkedIn are these same 18-30 y/o. I have made more friends with interns than I did when I was the age to intern. And my 20 year-old friends have no fear in making fun of my age just as I have no fear in making fun of theirs. We even talk sH$@! about race (oh yeah, I'm also black). The experience has been awesome for me as well as them (I believe). So, the next time you have a chance to hire an old dev who just wants to be a fu$!@E~!! DEV - just hire her.
  • nedsma 10y ago
    What a great story. Also, I believe that geek fellows here and HNers shouldn't be concerned about switching jobs, as they're immersed in this industry all over their heads. It's folks who do coding just for living and don't really want to invest in new technologies, or have early stopped trying out new things that might have more issues finding new prospects.
    • sAuronas 10y ago
      Thanks. I got into the industry with the expectation that I would launch a startup. Yet, I starting really writing code and decided that I wanted to do something really novel and killed my original real estate domain related ideas. Once you learn to write code you realize how weak your ideas really are. Since I love coding so much, I don't mind improving as a dev because novelty and quality my ideas seem to be improving as well. My experience is unusual but I encourage anyone I met to try it because you never know if software development might change your life's trajectory.
• bphogan 10y ago
  One thing that may help is for those with experience to do a lot more teaching and mentoring. A lot of the evangelism of new technology is done by younger, hungry people looking to advance their careers. The more experienced devs sound like complainers. The people I respect and aspire to be are those who are currently in their late 40s or 50s talking about Elm and Elixir. They were the ones in their 30s and 40s telling me Ruby was it. They were right, because they used their experience.
• daxfohl 10y ago
  Half of a coder's value is understanding "unspoken" requirements. In other words, "having experience in the industry". Or "domain-specific knowledge" Back in the day, there were different industries to have experience in. Jet engines, medical devices, etc. Beyond that, nothing had/needed/understood software. For better or worse, it was a pinnacle. These days "the industry" is "teens using snapchat". The further you are removed from that, the less valuable you are as a coder. There are still of course jet engines and medical devices to be built, but (as a statement to our society?) those products and thus those skills are not as valuable as advertising. Even more sadly, this trend is just the start. The current 40's-ish coders have their own industry experience to fall back on. The next generation of coders that will have nothing but 15secOfFame-centric jobs will have nothing to fall back on as younger 15msOfFame-centric things come in. At some point we'll have to recognize coding as an NFL-style career. Get what you can while you can; you'll be a car salesman soon enough. Granted NFL players have 100x the pay plus public visibility that can help them after they retire. None of this matters because the Earth will be sand in 20 years anyway. (Sorry I'm still digesting http://xkcd.com/1732/ http://xkcd.com/1732/)
  • ionwake 10y ago
    dat surprise nihilism at the end
  • highd 10y ago
    I wouldn't say "teens using snapchat" is "the industry", I would say it is "a industry". If you look at the S&P 500, a tiny fraction of the companies there are "social media", and even software-only companies are a small fraction. The social web startup is sexy still because of the romanticism of the Zuckerberg-dorm-room-hacking-to-$B story, but it's a relatively insignificant component of the economy. Jet engines and medical devices haven't become less popular.
    • Animats 10y ago
      That's almost over. Look at YC's latest crop of companies. Only about two are ad-supported. Right now, Facebook and Google are more than half the online ad industry, and that fraction is increasing. There's a network effect - ad space buyers only need to deal with Facebook and Google; beyond that it's not worth the trouble. Twitter doesn't have enough market share and is still losing money. Instagram exited by selling to Facebook. Snapchat and Pinterest are still standalone, privately held, and may not be profitable. We're back to having to make stuff that customers will pay for. That's a good thing.
• rdtsc 10y ago
  If your company doesn't have older geeks or is explicitly excluding them in the hiring process, it is missing out. Having worked in an environment with engineers of all ages, I learned a lot from older experience engineers. Over the years they've seen and accumulated a lot of experience related to how systems work, how code works, domain knowledge. You'll never get that if you hire only college kids. Someone I worked with just retired last year. He was perhaps not like the famous (infamous now) 10x programmer, but he was easily a 5x programmer. Because he learned how to learn better, he was also faster at picking up new technologies as well. Also startups and many companies simply don't want to pay market rate for what an experienced engineer would demand. Also mature people are not as easy to bully and push around. It is harder to force them to work till 8pm every day.
• abz10 10y ago
  I worked at Microsoft Redmond in 2009. They have a private uber like transport system. Around once a week the driver would hand me their resume and ask that I pass it on to my manager. It turns out that many of them had worked in the industry and were trying to get back in. They had a lot of experience and big important job titles etc. Mostly from the 2001 tech boom. That was my wake up call. If I'm not careful someday I will be the one handing out resumes to passengers. So I focused on skills and went into contracting as soon as I could. Now the reason I don't work for startups is that they keep trying to pay me with a mystery box of stock options and I'm not buying it. Another bonus about contracting, apart from the money and flexibility, is that you get left out of company politics. So tl;dr... Life doesn't owe you anything. And I recommend contracting as a career / lifestyle choice.
  • clifanatic 10y ago
    > you get left out of company politics And if you work 80 hours a week, you get paid 2x as much.
    • driverdan 10y ago
      And if you work 10 hours a week, you get paid 25% as much. This isn't a dig at freelancing / contracting. I did it for a while and it was great. But you have to be realistic. Also, billing 80h per week would be near impossible unless you had someone else managing your business for you.
• fatdog 10y ago
  Can someone state honestly and pseudonymously why they don't hire oldz? Speculating I would say: - chose younger hire because cheaper and can be moulded into company specific role. - younger candidate more easily managed by less experienced (cheaper) manager. - wants to keep culture "pure," and needs kids to drink kool-aid. - values power and control over less experienced technically acceptable candidates. - get extra effort and all nighters out of people who think they need "experience." - want to leverage kids love of novelty to react and respond to developments that seem like minor details to people with experience. - younger people have less sensitivity to change. - early stage companies want to reduce exposure to risk from having to re-negotiate once key developer has them by balls. If you are old, present as harmless. The more hippy dippy and spergy you come off as, the less threatening you will be, the more you will disarm clients/employers.
  • karma_vaccum123 10y ago
    Speaking as an "old" (46), most of my colleagues have truly rotted out. The typical HN reader will be given to self-improvement and curiosity...but outside of this bubble many others have to be dragged kicking and screaming.
  • employee8000 10y ago
    I'm in my 40s. I interview frequently and the problem with most devs over 40 is that they are slow or dont keep up with technology. I interviewed one guy in his 60s who went to school at MIT for his phd. I was excited. And then when it came to the coding exercise not only was he using perl, which had no relevance to our stack (which he was informed about) he took 3x as long to complete the question. I interviewed another older person who had no idea what JSON was. "Oh it's like XML, I get it." It makes them look like a weaker candidate when they are slower or less knowledgeable. If you keep up with technology and trends it really makes a difference. It doesn't matter that "I can pick it up quickly" because as a hiring manager why take the risk when someone already has the knowledge?
    • groby_b 10y ago
      Note: JSON is just like XML in that it's a horrible data interchange format ;) And if "knowing JSON" is a key skill you interview for... You possibly might want to ask different questions. Unless you repeatedly build the same thing - see below. Any decent developer, no matter their age, should be able to figure out what JSON is in about as much time as it takes to have a coffee. If they can't do that, you have a real problem. > as a hiring manager why take the risk when someone already has the knowledge? As a hiring manager: Because we're not redoing already solved things, we solve new problems. The person with the knowledge holds the advantage for a few months. And then the person with the problem solving skills catches up. Of course, if you keep building the same type of app over and over - which is fine, and equally necessary - those months are never made up for, and experience matters more than problem solving. Ultimately, you hire for the jobs you need to fill. For my part, I'm happy to take anybody who understands CS and is able to learn over somebody who already knows my tech but is stumped by new problems. (No matter the age) YMMV.
• karma_vaccum123 10y ago
  I'm 46 now and holding out until I get to 50, at which point I fully intend to promote myself to employers as a token they can put in their diversity promotional material they promote as an antidote to criticisms.
• employee8000 10y ago
  I'm in my mid 40s and have not had any problems getting interviews and job offers. It might depend on your attitude and your skill set. There might be a time when my age will become a factor but not yet. I've more than accepted that kids half my age are very talented and I need to prove my worth. Boy there are 26 year olds that I work with that are so mature and intelligent that it makes me worry. But my experience does buy some benefits, namely in how careful I code and being able to spot architectural and code issues well before most of my coworkers. Meanwhile I'm spending 1-2 hrs every night reading and programming and learning new tech so that I don't fall behind. And it's not easy to do this, believe me but if it keeps me employed then I have to do it.
  • nul_byte 10y ago
    Thats very much the same approach I take. As long as I can keep learning and expanding what I know, I don't think I will go to wrong.
• futureproofd 10y ago
  What geezer configured this webserver? Link is down >:(
• whybroke 10y ago
  I wish companies would post a spread of their developer ages on their careers page so we would know which ones not to waste time with. Because mere lip service about hiring solely on merit, even if the hirer somehow believes they are, really just wastes everyone's time.
• GrumpyNl 10y ago
  Started coding 35 years ago. Started some great companies in VRS(40 employees ), later internet(30 employees). Never left coding. Said goodbye to it all and became a freelance programmer. Love what i'm doing and i will still be coding in the future.
• jknoepfler 10y ago
  As someone who entered the industry at ~32 and was immediately hired into Amazon to work on a team in AWS where I am around the median age, I find this conversation peculiar. The job I worked myself through a second college degree with was on small software team that was all older than myself. I went on a round of interviews recently and got an offer from all of them... I definitely don't feel like I'm going to expire in 5 years. Then again, I won't be an "SDE II" or whatever I am now in 5 years, I'll have started a business, gone into consulting, or gone back to school for a Ph.D (pick 2?). So I don't know. I have yet to hear anyone I've worked with say something ageist or fearful about age at work. Everyone is very cheerful about their careers. And to be clear, I'm very, very blunt with management and co-workers about work-life balance. I work 35-40 hours a week when things are slow and step it up when things get hot two or three times a year. I think it's irresponsible to work more hours (it stunts growth, limits productivity, and makes me unhappy). I don't think that ageism isn't a problem, I guess I just haven't seen it. Then again I've always been sort of disgusted by gaggles of squirming kids, so I've probably self-selected where I've tried to find work. Why in the hell would anyone want to move to SV in their 40's+? That's like going to a college party to make friends or find a romantic partner in your 40's... the prospects are much greener and more attractive elsewhere. This whole conversation strikes me as very odd.
  • biocomputation 10y ago
    >> I don't think that ageism isn't a problem, I guess I just haven't seen it. It can be difficult to see it for what it is because its most common form is as a bias, which can be very difficult to discern, even within ourselves. ( Daniel Kahneman and many others have done amazing work about unconscious / barely conscious biases ). I never saw it when I was younger because I didn't think about it; I didn't even know that it was something I should be thinking about. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit, but I've felt it myself. I remember when I was still very young, maybe 20 years ago, we had a "much older" guy join my team at work. At first, I felt a pretty strong internal resistance to working with him, never mind that he was brilliant and deeply experienced... he didn't even play videogames! But he was funny too, and he taught me a hell of a lot. He managed to give me advice that really helped my career, plus he knew tons about money and credit and investments. It took me quite a few years to realize that the 'internal resistance' I felt was solely due to his age. It's a good thing my Mom taught me to respect my elders. Those lessons have served me well.
• mateo411 10y ago
  I suppose senior means something different on this job posting board.
• PaulHoule 10y ago
  Funny, I know a lot of greybeards who stay in San Jose because they can afford to. They bought their house when prices were a lot less, and thanks to Prop 13 their taxes are low.
• mattkevan 10y ago
  The person who wrote this is 37. Imagine how much harder it is for a Guy I know. He's in his early 60s and has been looking for a job for over six months. Every interview he's had goes really well until they realise he's not 23. Then it's all 'Err, we want someone less technical.' Or 'Err, you're too technical for the role.' This is someone with over 40 years industry experience, from designing and building mainframes to working on cutting-edge image processing, to managing teams of engineers and more. Incidentally, if anyone knows of a role which may be suitable for someone like him he'd be really interested.
  • martinshen 10y ago
    Interested. Can you shoot me an intro at Martin@smartcar.com ?
    • mattkevan 10y ago
      Thanks for your reply! I've just sent you an email.
• 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
  Unlike most engineers I want to be a manager. But it seems there is no opportunity for that. It seems that the non-engineers who are in the executive positions want non-engineers to manager engineers perpetuating the problems startups have. There are few engineering management positions listed. The few I saw in the bay area resulted in excluding me because of my age (Stripe, I'm looking at you.) It's frustrating to keep being pushed into individual contributor roles and then have low quality engineering managers hired in above you. (And I know I can do it because I end up leading teams all the time, they naturally form a round me. The members of the team are very happy with me- I have no authority but I end up leading them anyway.) So I think the route for "old" folks is blocked also by the desire of non-engineers to make engineering management be done by non-engineers.
  • GFischer 10y ago
    I did a Masters in Management of Technology, that opened up several recruiting opportunities. I ended up not getting a management position however (they're extremely hard to get here in Uruguay), I believe it was because, like you, I didn't have a formal management position (I did end up having a lot of informal authority at my last job, and I've already won a lot of trust at my current one 3 months in).
  • nul_byte 10y ago
    One good route to more senior / management roles is to be an architect. The problem with that though, is your spend more time with your node in microsoft powerpoint, then you do in an IDE.
• gavanwoolery 10y ago
  This is a good start (in fact I debated doing something similar after seeing all the recent articles on ageism). But I think more than this, people need to understand why experience counts. Here is my opinion on the matter: You can hire somebody young and they will probably be willing to work longer than an older person and probably get the job done sufficiently well, at a cheaper rate. For many one-shot jobs, this is fine. But if you want to build something at scale, and have it be maintainable, and reduce your long term technical debt, you should get someone who has fought these battles before and understands the best way to take them on. I'm speaking from the same experience that many others will: when we look at our younger selves, we realize how little we knew about organizing and maintaining a large project. Even as I age, I realize the me of just 3 years ago was relatively naive with regard to certain high-level tasks. So, its not just about the hours you put in, how fast you can do competitive coding, and so forth. It is about the more nebulous parts of coding, the larger scope, the organization of a complex system. There is only one way to learn these things, the hard way: lots of time, lots of scars, etc.
• damaru 10y ago
  But don't ageism always happened to be reverse? I still roll my eyes when a early 20's try to sells me idea of marketing - and although you can have a lot of good ideas at that age, you still don't have life and work experience that is needed to go trough massive amount of stress or unknown situations. I think it's fine that kids who run new business don't want old folks in there. It's a bit of a return of the balance. If you're too old to get hired, how about starting a new business with other oldies?
  • serge2k 10y ago
    > I still roll my eyes when a early 20's try to sells me idea of marketing Why should I hire someone who would treat other employees this way?
• bogomipz 10y ago
  Is "cultural fit" a euphemism for age bias now? This is not the fist time I have her it used in this unfortunate context in the last few months. I feel bad that this happened to this person but I applaud his idea and hope it gains traction.
• AStellersSeaCow 10y ago
  I think there's a fair amount of reporting bias in this issue, personally. I'd totally non-scientifically split older (over age 35) engineers into three rough categories. This is not meant to be comprehensive or empirical, it's just mirroring my anecdotal experiences as someone who has been in tech for 20 years: - Average or better engineers. Between the facts that they are competent and have 10+ years of experience, they tend to have zero problem finding and keeping good, well-paying jobs. If they run into ageism, it gets lost in the flood of other offers they're likely to get in the same round of interviewing. - Below average engineers. These may be the source of some of the ageism complaints, but it's missing the forest for the trees. They are a common sight in government/non-profit orgs or old first-mover companies: folks who may have "senior" in their title but have been doing simplistic work on the same outdated project for their whole career. Have trouble finding new jobs when they are inevitably laid off not because of their age, but because they simply aren't good engineers. - Dinosaurs, ie- people who were good or even great engineers ten or twenty years ago, but have not kept their skills and knowledge base current. These are the people who are most likely to be affected by legit ageism, in my experience. A slightly fictionalized representative scenario from hiring a position at my last job, for work on a Java webservice: "Well, the 50-year-old blew through the whiteboarding in textbook C and can concisely enumerate the advantages of different caching policies off the top of his head, but has never used Java, worked on a web service, or used an RCS more modern than subversion. The 25-year-old struggled a bit in the coding exercise and gave an imperfect answer in the theory questions, but his resume has a link to his Github, which includes a RESTful webservice he wrote in Java. And the 50yo asked for the tip of the salary range, about 20% more." I've faced that sort of decision quite a few times, and it's not easy. I could see why the older candidate would suspect ageism played a role if they didn't get the job. But the power is in the candidate's hands to create the better outcome: if the 50yo spends some time familiarizing themselves with marketable modern technologies then they get hired over less experienced candidates the vast majority of the time. On a personal note, in the above scenario we did end up bringing on the 50yo with amazing fundamentals, and he was a total dud - possibly the worst hire I've ever made. Bungled almost every Git interaction, couldn't work in Linux and frequently screwed up deployments, great imperative code but all his architecture was early 90s-style spaghetti. The important takeaway that I tried to stress with the team wasn't that older devs can't learn and shouldn't be hired, just that THAT dev couldn't learn and shouldn't have been hired.
• bikamonki 10y ago
  If I compare my me-now with my me-20-something I would definitely hire my me-now. I am now very productive b/c I've developed high focus, I make less mistakes, I've committed to a stack that solves most problems, I reuse my own code, I can see the big picture b/c I started coding in the mid 90's and I've developed the people/comm skills to actually understand what is required and translate that to code. Experience matters a lot. I would also choose experience when selecting a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, etc. We have a saying in Spanish: más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo ;)
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• tn13 10y ago
  I am 30 and I recently changed my apartment because there were simply too many old people in the complex. I want to live in apartments where there are plenty of girls who just crossed the legal age limit to drink. We all love youth and there is a good reason for why so. But at the same time because we are older and we tend to have more money and control more stuff. Most of the 30 something coders will rise up to the higher positions in next 10 years.
  • emodendroket 10y ago
    > I am 30 and I recently changed my apartment because there were simply too many old people in the complex. I want to live in apartments where there are plenty of girls who just crossed the legal age limit to drink. That sounds like the opposite of what I want so I'd say we don't "all love youth."
• smoyer 10y ago
  The only way to fight ageism is with reverse-ageism ... you can't meaningfully change the overall statistics without "penalizing those young'ins". Disclaimer: I've got an AARP card so I'm obviously on the right side of this discrimination!
• bungie4 10y ago
  Coding a long day in and day out at 55 yrs old, I've been at it for 30+ years. Maintain and upgrade 911/Alarm/PERS/Telematics systems. Self taught. I've never taken a computer course in any school. I do it because I love it.
• arca_vorago 10y ago
  Honestly, I feel like ageism as an industry social thing doesn't properly reveal the details behind why businesses make the decision to get rid of or stay away from the greybeards. In reality, greybeards are harder to manage, command higher salaries, and don't put up will bullshit. Basically, managers want a young pliant fool willing to spend three years putting in 60-70 hours a week before he realize he is fucking himself over. So in this case, I would argue ageism in the industry is mostly about money and business-culture, not techno or geek-culture. One lesson I learned early in life was to listen to the old timers, It applies here as well, we spurn the oldies at our peril, for they learned lessons we have forgotten and are trying to resolve.
• inestyne 10y ago
  Building from scratch since the early 80s. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that i've never really looked at my industry as a young man's sport. Young and dumb get chewed up and spit out on the first funding down-turn, which is about to happen again. They go out chasing shiney things, abused by ivy-leagues, and since they never had it to begin with, they don't come back. Seen it more that a few times so i'm not worried a bit. So if your old and wise and still working congratulations! Maybe look back, if you can remember that far, and realize you've bern employed this entire time doing something you'd do for free if they didn't pay you. Damm I love my job! p.s. Remember the golden rule: Wait for critical mass, hijack, then do the same thing you did last time. :)
• Uptrenda 10y ago
  I wish more websites were this clean and simple. I'm not being sarcastic but its genuinely nice not to have 10 million ads, banners, and tracking cookies load every time I refresh (and nice idea for the website too.)
• dba7dba 10y ago
  Ageism is a clear and present bigotry. Just like racism, sexism, and etc. And ageism was really born in Silicon Valley, of all places.
• gregfjohnson 10y ago
  62-year-old developer here. I was at a small company until it lost funding and went under five years ago. At the age of 57, I was freaking out about finding a new job. Three weeks later, I was hired at my current company. Obviously this is a single data point, an anecdote, etc. However, I have seen the same scenario for several friends my age. The place I work at needs to find and hire exceptionally talented people (embedded software in life-critical medical devices; sloppy or buggy code, someone could die.) It knows it does not have the allure of big names such as Google. So, it does something like the Oakland A's, and plays Money Ball. It goes for the pudgy, dumpy, overlooked players who always seem to get on base somehow. It knows it has no chance at the golden children, the 27-year-old Stanford PhD's who are perfect in every way. So, it casts a wide net, and looks closely at people who might be overlooked by other organizations. I managed to luck into finding a great, well-connected recruiter. He was instrumental in helping me get placed quickly. And, as you've heard so many times you will probably scream if you hear it once more, "networking". A friend who already had a job at my new company put in a good word when I was going through the recruiting process. I heard a great line about mathematicians: "Mathematics is a terrible profession. The only people who should do it are people who can't not do it." There are people out there who feel that way about programming. My daughter teases me that when I retire she knows exactly what I will do: spend more time hacking on open source projects. The core truth of your inner being at some point overtakes you. If you live and breathe to code, if you still secretly wonder why people actually pay you to play all day with computers, you will be fine as you get older continuing to be a programmer. One thing about getting older: You begin to realize, "Now is the time." No more resume padding, no more attempts at strategizing to optimize career moves down the road. No more doing things you hate in order to lay the groundwork for that ineffable special something that seems to beckon from just over the horizon. Older people don't need to be told, "Be honest with yourself, find your passion" etc. Been there, done that. Life will do that to you. Expect that when you are in your 50's or 60's, you will have settled in to what really does work for you. For some, it is software development. For others, it is full-time church work. (My wife.) For others, it is gardening. (A retired former executive I wave to every morning as I'm heading out to work.) Bottom line: You would not want to work at a place that is too arrogant and stupid to consider older job candidates, or that turns its nose up at anyone who does not fit a preconceived template, or that looks to monetize the naivete of young developers. Their loss. They are doing you a favor by passing you over. Screw them.
• Grangar 10y ago
  The sword cuts both ways. Meanwhile I'm 23, working in a webdeveloper job (not in the US, mind you) and housing is completely inaccessible to me. It seems like real estate owners value age over anything. I've been looking for 4 months now, been to 20 apartments, almost every time they chose someone else because they were older... Both sides of the age spectrum have their merits. It sounds idiotic to me to argue that older people have it worse. Maybe in Silicon Valley they do, but I can't see that happening where I live (Netherlands)
• aboonaboo 10y ago
  The fuck is with all these ageism posts all of a sudden
• user5994461 10y ago
  Don't believe the lies a single second. The truth is, it is NOT tough being 3X-4X in silicon valley. What is tough is accepting to put up with startups about to fail, long hours, mediocre pay, little benefits and immature coworkers. That does limit the size of the job market. That issue is faced by everyone, independently of their age. The youngers selves just happen to have lower standards in average
• vaporland 10y ago
  http://www.meetup.com/DenverIPhone/messages/boards/thread/25461812 http://www.meetup.com/DenverIPhone/messages/boards/thread/25...
  • vaporland 10y ago
    "There are tons of federal acts trying to make everyone equal but at the end of the day companies know exactly what they want and will say "their personality doesn't fit the culture" or "their experience isn't a match" when in reality the individual is too old. "