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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

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.
    - Jarwain 10y ago
      I notice sometimes I get a little offput when people start off a videogame conversation by asking me what network I'm on. It just sounds/feels a little weird, depending on how it is phrased. It feels more natural if it progresses through asking what games I've played
    - bogomipz 10y ago
      I'm not trying to be harsh but isn't that an odd thing to bring up in a job interview?
      - Domenic_S 10y ago
        Nah, it was the "so when you're outside of work, what do you like to do?" part of the interview. Not like I was whiteboarding code one moment and then all "so, GTA 5, huh?" the next.
        bogomipz 10y ago
        LOL, sure that makes sense. Cheers.
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  This is the equivalent of someone making a job site for black people to get jobs, and saying "be careful not to discriminate against whites!".
  - sjdchid 10y ago
    Except old people are objectively better off in the US. It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 10y ago
      Life tends to compound good and bad choices. Mistakes you made in the last 10 years (student debt) has nothing like the mistakes you can make over 40 years. ex: Making my student debt payments is hard, I know I will just defer them.
    - mattdeboard 10y ago
      I mean we're not talking about Baby Boomers here, chief. There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year). Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and home-buying wasn't terribly different 15-20 years ago than it is now. Still plenty of opportunity to go into incredible debt. And hell, 2016's 45-year-old who bought his first house in, say, 2000, may just have watched his home's value crash in 2006/2007. So maybe just tone it down.
      - beachstartup 10y ago
        > There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. i'm one of these, and i don't consider myself a millennial. anyone who's legitimately used a rotary phone (or even just seen one in use) in a non-ironic way should not be considered a millennial.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  Having been on the flip-side of ageism - being the young person in fields traditionally led / managed / etc by those in their 40s or older - I'm very unsympathetic to this kind of discussion. I had to wade through years of inflated expectations (BA + 5 years experience + tech skills = $35k / year job) and put-downs about actually understanding technology ("We old people do the important work, you just make it look good") that I'm rather bitter and sometimes it shows. Well, turnabout's fair play, and this is, without question, an example of it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - pc86 10y ago
    I'm barely 30 so don't take this as some graybeard being snarky, because I too waded through years of bullshit in my early and mid 20s. A. Turnabout is not fair play; two wrongs do not make a right, especially when your wrong is to discriminate against people other than those who may have discriminated against you B. Inflated expectations != discrimination C. Discriminating against someone because they are too old is illegal; discriminating against someone because they are too young is not (both are equally wrong). D. "I'm rather bitter and sometimes it shows" - Get over it.
    - 6stringmerc 10y ago
      What I'm getting at is that A. isn't really a problem at all - if one doesn't have the marketable skills to "win" a job then pointing at any one issue (age, in this case) is simply coping / self-serving, because what I meant by turnabout is that "do unto others" is a principle that the world doesn't run on and thinking otherwise is naive whether 25 or 65. It is completely discriminatory in B. when the only people who could possibly meet those inflated expectations can not logically be under the age of 30. I've seen this far too often to dismiss it as occasional - it is/was systemic. It's the burden of the accuser to claim they were discriminated against because of age, and as we can see, there's no qualms with making lots and lots of articles and "think-pieces" out of the hypothesis. Sometimes "older" workers have unreasonably inflated senses of skills and/or worth, and can't take the ego blow, so, off to coping (see A) above. Haha thanks for the armchair therapy with D., it's worth every penny from your barely 30 perspective.
wodenokoto 10y ago
> 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. All I see is a form to post job-ads, and nowhere to look at them.
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  Working on that right now!
- the_arun 10y ago
  Like the way the site is setup using Google Forms.
  - johnwheeler 10y ago
    Thank you - I'm posting the jobs manually and using scp to sync the site.
kelukelugames 10y ago
I find it weird we consider over 30 old when legal protection doesn't kick in until we are over 40.
- robohamburger 10y ago
  Even without the legality, it is super weird. If someone told me I was old at 30 I would laugh :)
  - initram 10y ago
    My spouse is a dancer. They generally retire at around 30 yrs. old. (And by retire, I mean find a different job because you aren't going to retire on a dancer's salary.)
    - groby_b 10y ago
      Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Or leotard, really :) It's amazing if you can even live as a dancer. Usually, there's a second job. (I worked in CS in parallel to the dance thing. And at some point looked at the pay checks :)
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > My spouse is a dancer. They generally retire at around 30 yrs. old. The varies a bit depending on the kind of dance, but, yeah, people who can stay in dance much longer than that (and, really, people who can make a decent living in it at all, even below that age), mostly do so as dance instructors, choreographers, etc., with their own dancing (if its even something they directly get paid for at all) sort of an adjunct and means of advertising the other parts of what they do. There's something much weaker in technology (not just in computing) in the worker -> manager push, where people who don't jump that divide by a particular time start being seen as less desirable as workers. But its brutal in dance (and only partly due to the actual physical requirements of performing the movements.)
    - robohamburger 10y ago
      I suppose there are many aspects in regards to aging. The concept of young vs old I suppose is a strange cognitive shortcut to apply when what you really care about is fitness at a particular activity. All the more reason to dispense with it! I am curious, did they need to retire because they no longer possessed whatever it took to dance, or was it because people in their industry assumed they no longer could, or simply because they needed a more lucrative job?
sctb 10y ago
We've updated the link from https://software-dev-group.org/2016/09/15/old-geek-jobs-fighting-ageism-industry/ https://software-dev-group.org/2016/09/15/old-geek-jobs-figh... to the homepage for now. If the blog post comes up, we can change it again.
- omouse 10y ago
  It's up, it should have caching? Guess that isn't working right for them. lol
sfrailsdev 10y ago
Of course I'd point out that not every older developer has been a developer all along. A number of people move to software development as a second career, (or as a first career after a series of less career oriented jobs).
- alttab 10y ago
  The Stanford educated 20 somethings would see you as inferior for this track record. Night school? You old grandpa....
biocomputation 10y ago
I'm not sure if you're religious, but God bless you if you are! If you're not, then many thanks for doing this. I've already shared this with at least six friends.
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  Thank you so much! I'm cranking away on the site right now and have a backlog of jobs I need to input.
omginternets 10y ago
>Check out https://oldgeekjobs.com/ https://oldgeekjobs.com/ if you’re over 30. 30 is old now? Ha! Joke's on them, or indeed anyone who would have wanted to hire me at 25.
rachkovsky 10y ago
Your site needs a favicon.

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.
  - Jarwain 10y ago
    I notice sometimes I get a little offput when people start off a videogame conversation by asking me what network I'm on. It just sounds/feels a little weird, depending on how it is phrased. It feels more natural if it progresses through asking what games I've played
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    I'm not trying to be harsh but isn't that an odd thing to bring up in a job interview?
    - Domenic_S 10y ago
      Nah, it was the "so when you're outside of work, what do you like to do?" part of the interview. Not like I was whiteboarding code one moment and then all "so, GTA 5, huh?" the next.
      - bogomipz 10y ago
        LOL, sure that makes sense. Cheers.
whamlastxmas 10y ago
This is the equivalent of someone making a job site for black people to get jobs, and saying "be careful not to discriminate against whites!".
- sjdchid 10y ago
  Except old people are objectively better off in the US. It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 10y ago
    Life tends to compound good and bad choices. Mistakes you made in the last 10 years (student debt) has nothing like the mistakes you can make over 40 years. ex: Making my student debt payments is hard, I know I will just defer them.
  - mattdeboard 10y ago
    I mean we're not talking about Baby Boomers here, chief. There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year). Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and home-buying wasn't terribly different 15-20 years ago than it is now. Still plenty of opportunity to go into incredible debt. And hell, 2016's 45-year-old who bought his first house in, say, 2000, may just have watched his home's value crash in 2006/2007. So maybe just tone it down.
    - beachstartup 10y ago
      > There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. i'm one of these, and i don't consider myself a millennial. anyone who's legitimately used a rotary phone (or even just seen one in use) in a non-ironic way should not be considered a millennial.
6stringmerc 10y ago
Having been on the flip-side of ageism - being the young person in fields traditionally led / managed / etc by those in their 40s or older - I'm very unsympathetic to this kind of discussion. I had to wade through years of inflated expectations (BA + 5 years experience + tech skills = $35k / year job) and put-downs about actually understanding technology ("We old people do the important work, you just make it look good") that I'm rather bitter and sometimes it shows. Well, turnabout's fair play, and this is, without question, an example of it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pc86 10y ago
  I'm barely 30 so don't take this as some graybeard being snarky, because I too waded through years of bullshit in my early and mid 20s. A. Turnabout is not fair play; two wrongs do not make a right, especially when your wrong is to discriminate against people other than those who may have discriminated against you B. Inflated expectations != discrimination C. Discriminating against someone because they are too old is illegal; discriminating against someone because they are too young is not (both are equally wrong). D. "I'm rather bitter and sometimes it shows" - Get over it.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    What I'm getting at is that A. isn't really a problem at all - if one doesn't have the marketable skills to "win" a job then pointing at any one issue (age, in this case) is simply coping / self-serving, because what I meant by turnabout is that "do unto others" is a principle that the world doesn't run on and thinking otherwise is naive whether 25 or 65. It is completely discriminatory in B. when the only people who could possibly meet those inflated expectations can not logically be under the age of 30. I've seen this far too often to dismiss it as occasional - it is/was systemic. It's the burden of the accuser to claim they were discriminated against because of age, and as we can see, there's no qualms with making lots and lots of articles and "think-pieces" out of the hypothesis. Sometimes "older" workers have unreasonably inflated senses of skills and/or worth, and can't take the ego blow, so, off to coping (see A) above. Haha thanks for the armchair therapy with D., it's worth every penny from your barely 30 perspective.

wodenokoto 10y ago

> 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. All I see is a form to post job-ads, and nowhere to look at them.

johnwheeler 10y ago
Working on that right now!
the_arun 10y ago
Like the way the site is setup using Google Forms.
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  Thank you - I'm posting the jobs manually and using scp to sync the site.

kelukelugames 10y ago

I find it weird we consider over 30 old when legal protection doesn't kick in until we are over 40.

robohamburger 10y ago
Even without the legality, it is super weird. If someone told me I was old at 30 I would laugh :)
- initram 10y ago
  My spouse is a dancer. They generally retire at around 30 yrs. old. (And by retire, I mean find a different job because you aren't going to retire on a dancer's salary.)
  - groby_b 10y ago
    Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Or leotard, really :) It's amazing if you can even live as a dancer. Usually, there's a second job. (I worked in CS in parallel to the dance thing. And at some point looked at the pay checks :)
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > My spouse is a dancer. They generally retire at around 30 yrs. old. The varies a bit depending on the kind of dance, but, yeah, people who can stay in dance much longer than that (and, really, people who can make a decent living in it at all, even below that age), mostly do so as dance instructors, choreographers, etc., with their own dancing (if its even something they directly get paid for at all) sort of an adjunct and means of advertising the other parts of what they do. There's something much weaker in technology (not just in computing) in the worker -> manager push, where people who don't jump that divide by a particular time start being seen as less desirable as workers. But its brutal in dance (and only partly due to the actual physical requirements of performing the movements.)
  - robohamburger 10y ago
    I suppose there are many aspects in regards to aging. The concept of young vs old I suppose is a strange cognitive shortcut to apply when what you really care about is fitness at a particular activity. All the more reason to dispense with it! I am curious, did they need to retire because they no longer possessed whatever it took to dance, or was it because people in their industry assumed they no longer could, or simply because they needed a more lucrative job?

sctb 10y ago

We've updated the link from https://software-dev-group.org/2016/09/15/old-geek-jobs-fighting-ageism-industry/ https://software-dev-group.org/2016/09/15/old-geek-jobs-figh... to the homepage for now. If the blog post comes up, we can change it again.

omouse 10y ago
It's up, it should have caching? Guess that isn't working right for them. lol

sfrailsdev 10y ago

Of course I'd point out that not every older developer has been a developer all along. A number of people move to software development as a second career, (or as a first career after a series of less career oriented jobs).

alttab 10y ago
The Stanford educated 20 somethings would see you as inferior for this track record. Night school? You old grandpa....

biocomputation 10y ago

I'm not sure if you're religious, but God bless you if you are! If you're not, then many thanks for doing this. I've already shared this with at least six friends.

johnwheeler 10y ago
Thank you so much! I'm cranking away on the site right now and have a backlog of jobs I need to input.

omginternets 10y ago

>Check out https://oldgeekjobs.com/ https://oldgeekjobs.com/ if you’re over 30. 30 is old now? Ha! Joke's on them, or indeed anyone who would have wanted to hire me at 25.

rachkovsky 10y ago

Your site needs a favicon.