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This is an AWESOME idea and I totally appreciate both Tim's original article on the subject and your efforts on this job site. As a CTO I have long appreciated

This is an AWESOME idea and I totally appreciate both Tim's original article on the subject and your efforts on this job site. As a CTO I have long appreciated real world knowledge and experience over inexperienced, cheap, eagerness. Our employee's are all 30+, most have families and I believe that leads to well balanced and focused employee's. That is not to say I would not hire a younger employee but with age comes the kind of experience you need when building a new company quickly. To be honest the "we work hard and play hard - we are a family" line would have put me off of a role even in my early 20's. Just because I want to work hard, it doesn't mean I want to always be hanging out with a team, I want a life as well. I actually think that the ageism in tech is a result of it being a young industry. As more and more dev's go grey the problem will resolve itself. One final note I have seen here and on other places - The why not become a CTO or Start your own company suggestion is fine for those that want to but there are a large number of developers who actually _love_ being a developer and have no interest in moving up into management. That's great and I hope that as the industry matures people realise that being a developer for your whole career is a choice and not a failure.

peterbonney 10y ago
> I actually think that the ageism in tech is a result of it being a young industry. As more and more dev's go grey the problem will resolve itself. Tell that to devs who worked in the dotcom boom, or the PC boom before that.
- amcrouch 10y ago
  Perhaps then the issue is that all developers see a path to management as the only way to progress their career and in actual fact there is only a minority of developers who love their job enough to want to do it for their entire career?
  - other_herbert 10y ago
    I think this is true of a lot of devs... I have seen friends who who have gone into management because they didn't really love coding.. I've been doing this stuff since I was 9 and don't ever want to stop
    - amyjess 10y ago
      Yep. I know a guy who, in his late '20s, decided that he wasn't going to be able to keep up as a coder in the long run, so he jumped to management. As long as I've known him, he's always been the kind of person who cares more about maximizing how much money he makes than any kind of job satisfaction.
      - amcrouch 10y ago
        Not all of us feel like that. I actual care more about the product and how it's built, the standard it is built to and the processes used to build and manage it. Any manager that's worth working for still codes. Once they code no more they care more about process and profit.
  - peterbonney 10y ago
    Many, but certainly not all. The best developer I know started his career writing software for the original Macintosh in the 80's. He's still primarily a developer. Here's the important question: how many twenty- or thirty-something startup founders hear that and think "dinosaur who writes GOTO statements" (false), versus "awesome hacker who has been constantly seeking out the newest technologies for 30+ years" (true)?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - amcrouch 10y ago
      That is an interesting point. Once again I say in a start up I want experience. I want developers that can deliver with minimal management and who GTD rather than work twice as long to deliver tightly coupled, dependency riddled, fashionable code. Also another point to your comment. If the founders are 20 or 30 something, is that why they are only hiring 20 or 30 something developers. It's their contacts in their network, previous co-workers and friends. Perhaps the issue with start ups in that not that higher percentage are started by 45-50 somethings. Hence it would be interesting to see the split of developers ages compared to the co-founders age.
lj3 10y ago
> As more and more dev's go grey the problem will resolve itself. The problem with that is the rate at which young devs leave the industry before they turn grey. Some go into management, some go into business for themselves, some burn out completely, but I'm betting most won't be able to compete at the higher levels and will get squeezed out. As those devs at the bottom age up and are expected to move up into more technically complicated senior roles, they'll find themselves overqualified for the roles they've gotten good at (building product features using framework X) and underqualified for the more technically complicated roles (designing compression algorithms, for example).

peterbonney 10y ago

> I actually think that the ageism in tech is a result of it being a young industry. As more and more dev's go grey the problem will resolve itself. Tell that to devs who worked in the dotcom boom, or the PC boom before that.

amcrouch 10y ago
Perhaps then the issue is that all developers see a path to management as the only way to progress their career and in actual fact there is only a minority of developers who love their job enough to want to do it for their entire career?
- other_herbert 10y ago
  I think this is true of a lot of devs... I have seen friends who who have gone into management because they didn't really love coding.. I've been doing this stuff since I was 9 and don't ever want to stop
  - amyjess 10y ago
    Yep. I know a guy who, in his late '20s, decided that he wasn't going to be able to keep up as a coder in the long run, so he jumped to management. As long as I've known him, he's always been the kind of person who cares more about maximizing how much money he makes than any kind of job satisfaction.
    - amcrouch 10y ago
      Not all of us feel like that. I actual care more about the product and how it's built, the standard it is built to and the processes used to build and manage it. Any manager that's worth working for still codes. Once they code no more they care more about process and profit.
- peterbonney 10y ago
  Many, but certainly not all. The best developer I know started his career writing software for the original Macintosh in the 80's. He's still primarily a developer. Here's the important question: how many twenty- or thirty-something startup founders hear that and think "dinosaur who writes GOTO statements" (false), versus "awesome hacker who has been constantly seeking out the newest technologies for 30+ years" (true)?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - amcrouch 10y ago
    That is an interesting point. Once again I say in a start up I want experience. I want developers that can deliver with minimal management and who GTD rather than work twice as long to deliver tightly coupled, dependency riddled, fashionable code. Also another point to your comment. If the founders are 20 or 30 something, is that why they are only hiring 20 or 30 something developers. It's their contacts in their network, previous co-workers and friends. Perhaps the issue with start ups in that not that higher percentage are started by 45-50 somethings. Hence it would be interesting to see the split of developers ages compared to the co-founders age.

lj3 10y ago

> As more and more dev's go grey the problem will resolve itself. The problem with that is the rate at which young devs leave the industry before they turn grey. Some go into management, some go into business for themselves, some burn out completely, but I'm betting most won't be able to compete at the higher levels and will get squeezed out. As those devs at the bottom age up and are expected to move up into more technically complicated senior roles, they'll find themselves overqualified for the roles they've gotten good at (building product features using framework X) and underqualified for the more technically complicated roles (designing compression algorithms, for example).