4 ms·

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

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.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      You can't have 30 years of experience in your job when your job didn't exist 30 years ago. You can't have 15 years of experience in [whatever thing] when [whatever thing] didn't exist 15 years ago. Note: 15 years ago = 56k internet, paying by the hour, for the 0.xyz% of select few people on the planet
      - anexprogrammer 10y ago
        Except it probably did. 15 years ago I'd been working mostly online for nearly 10 years. Sure the world was a different place when newsgroups were uucp over a (very expensive) 64k leased line and before the web, but still surprisingly recognisable. Some of the details have changed, the languages, the size of the databases, the devices involved, and a million frameworks for front end have come and gone. Some of the time 20 years experience feels like 4 years experience repeated 5 times with different buzzwords. The same screw ups, the same lack of understanding from missing the same point, the same management wish to do SEO and security later. Or to budget 2 weeks for bug fixing. Now you know 5-10 languages all with good and bad points so tune out most of the zealotry of the latest fashion to try and get to real distinguishing points. All that experience can help a lot. It's far from dead. We can even have the same emacs vs vim argument that happened in 1990.
      - Johnny555 10y ago
geebee 10y ago
I'm not surprised by your comment - I never got the feeling younger developers were the source of age discrimination.

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.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    You can't have 30 years of experience in your job when your job didn't exist 30 years ago. You can't have 15 years of experience in [whatever thing] when [whatever thing] didn't exist 15 years ago. Note: 15 years ago = 56k internet, paying by the hour, for the 0.xyz% of select few people on the planet
    - anexprogrammer 10y ago
      Except it probably did. 15 years ago I'd been working mostly online for nearly 10 years. Sure the world was a different place when newsgroups were uucp over a (very expensive) 64k leased line and before the web, but still surprisingly recognisable. Some of the details have changed, the languages, the size of the databases, the devices involved, and a million frameworks for front end have come and gone. Some of the time 20 years experience feels like 4 years experience repeated 5 times with different buzzwords. The same screw ups, the same lack of understanding from missing the same point, the same management wish to do SEO and security later. Or to budget 2 weeks for bug fixing. Now you know 5-10 languages all with good and bad points so tune out most of the zealotry of the latest fashion to try and get to real distinguishing points. All that experience can help a lot. It's far from dead. We can even have the same emacs vs vim argument that happened in 1990.
    - Johnny555 10y ago

geebee 10y ago

I'm not surprised by your comment - I never got the feeling younger developers were the source of age discrimination.