7 ms·

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 o

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.

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.