12 ms·

I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. Inexperienced young programmers working 2x the hours do not

by jwr 10y ago

I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. Inexperienced young programmers working 2x the hours do not necessarily produce Output That Works (I know, I've been one myself). Sure, not every company will realize that, but then again, you don't necessarily want to work for every ping-pong table company, either. Cultural fit and all that.

uola 10y ago
Honestly, even as I'm getting older, this isn't at all obvious to me. Someone with five years solid experience with web development might very well be far more effective than someone with twenty years experience of working in corners of large companies with various technologies, especially when you consider the expected salary. I think it good that people are talking about these things, but sometime it seem like people think it's a big conspiracy, rather than a factor of how the ecosystem and market looks.
- dfsegoat 10y ago
  I am with you on this - it is what causes me a lot of anxiety but what also drives me to at least know about "all the shiney things" that the new breed of engineers basically come equipped with standard.
- curun1r 10y ago
  I came to this realization a few years ago. I found that while my judgment was still improving, my output wasn't and my ability to think through problems wasn't where it used to be, especially when it came to the tiny details. So I moved into management. It allowed me leverage my strengths while putting me in a situation where my value wasn't determined by my raw output. It sucks going to all those meetings, but it honestly made me enjoy the programming I did do considerably more than I did before. The programming I did do for the team was all prototype work with new technologies that either I or the team felt could help us out...short 2-3 hour projects whenever I could fit them into my schedule. But everything was new and I wasn't implementing things I'd done a ton of times before. In the end, I don't think this is a satisfying answer. There just aren't enough managerial jobs for all the old programmers and a lot of them can't handle the meeting workload of that kind of position. But I still suggest it on an individual basis because it's a chance to put all that experience to work programming at a higher level. Instead of linked lists you're dealing with fresh-out-of-college devs who know their big-Os by heart and can crank out code at a frightening pace. But you still need someone to ensure the overall design doesn't suck. To read over what they're producing since there will always be some crazy mis-step that they make from time to time. You still need someone who has seen a project evolve over multiple years to know which decisions will become problematic down the road. The young guys can't do that. And while it's been an adjustment to learn to find satisfaction without typing out the code myself, I've learned to enjoy the launches (both product and career) in a way that's more fulfilling than my time as a full-time coder was.
  - ianai 10y ago
    What's your answer for the general? Not that you know but areas you suspect.
  - jimbokun 10y ago
    How does a programmer go about moving into management?
    - curun1r 10y ago
      Ask. I had a conversation with the VP of Eng where I told him that's what I wanted, asked if it was a possibility and what I needed to do to make it happen. He told me what he thought I needed to learn and allowed me to take a couple of hours each week to read, meet with other managers and otherwise prepare. A few months later, when a position became open, he gave me a trial run which converted to perm after a successful month. Most engineering leadership is very reasonable with requests like this provided you are a very strong performer with the respect of the engineering organization. They realize that promotions from within are morale boosters and developing a reputation for nurturing talent is an amazing recruiting tool.
- czep 10y ago
  If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? If you were wrongly convicted and awaiting a death sentence, would you pick a 22 year old attorney fresh from law school to defend you? If you have a field full of tomatoes that needs picking, do you save a few dollars an hour hiring the young guy at minimum wage who is healthy, has no family, and will easily work beyond maximum hours without reporting it, or do you hire the older tomato picker who needs a higher salary because of his kids and can't work more than 7.5 hours a day because of his bad back? So are we law and medicine or are we tomato pickers? I had always thought of engineering as the former but sadly the more articles I see on how "culture fit" discrimination works, maybe we've commoditized the industry into a low wage manual labor job.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    > If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? Rationally one would care about the outcomes, and the number of times would merely make us more certain about the outcome. Relative to the two scenarios you showed, programming is usually more like tomato picking—nobody is going to die or be injured because of a bug or failure to deliver something.
    - sharemywin 10y ago
      self driving cars.
    - ojbyrne 10y ago
      Perhaps most of the time that's true, I suspect that a lot of health care is the same. There have been plenty of instances of software bugs killing or injuring people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs
    - pmoriarty 10y ago
      "nobody is going to die or be injured because of a bug or failure to deliver something" You should read through RISKS Digest.[1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_digest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_digest
- sharemywin 10y ago
  I think "older" programmers are more likely to stick around longer. If your looking for someone to fill space so you can brag about the hours your team is putting in and party with while you blow threw a few more of some investors millions go with the young guy. Since, the companies' going to blow up in six month anyway why worry about how long they stay in a job.
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    Honestly I think that might be in the back of these people's heads a bit. "Woo! We're doing what we want, when we want, how we want, this is how work should be! What, you think it would be better if we did things this way because reasons and experience? No, this is how I always wanted to work, fast and loose, I'm the one with the CEO title so this is what we'll do! 6 months later I'm so sorry guys. I have to let you all go, then come up with another idea I can get investors to pump money into so I can hop on this ride all over again and learn absolutely nothing. This isn't true of all startups, but I've seen elements of it at several of the ones I have experience with.
- amyjess 10y ago
  This is one thing that really worries me. I'm in my early 30s, and I'm perfectly content working a mid-level position. I've seen people my age pass me by several times, and I'm fine with that. I'm not good enough to keep up with the really good engineers, and it's probably going to be a long time before I have 'Senior' in my title, if ever. When I'm in my 50s, I'm just not going to be one of those awesome elder coders. My boss is one of those graybeards, and he's awesome, but I'll never be him. I also have less than zero desire to ever work in management (and even if I wanted to do that, I don't have the people skills for it). So I'm seriously worried that I'm going to be unemployable in 10-20 years because companies will all prefer to hire people in their 20s with equivalent skills to mine out of ageism.
  - atoko 10y ago
    If you haven't adapted in 20 years, is it really ageism?
  - verbify 10y ago
    In twenty years you'll be in your 70's. Most people in their 70's are unemployable, no matter the field. If you don't have a retirement plan, then you got to do some extreme saving and lifestyle adjustment (or you'll face even more extreme lifestyle adjustment once you retire). If you do have a retirement plan, you have nothing to worry about.
    - citizenkeen 10y ago
      No, they're in their 30s. They're concerned about their 50s.
      - verbify 10y ago
        Whoops, badly misread that.
andrewchambers 10y ago
I've seen plenty of old developers who fancy themselves experienced who are not efficient too.
crdoconnor 10y ago
>I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. This is a myth. It doesn't count for that much. Programmer productivity cannot be effectively measured even by other programmers and certainly can't be measured by non-technical managers. The fact that you are doing something can be easily verified. The fact that you are doing it effectively at an appropriate speed and quality cannot. There's a lot more trust, salesmanship, snake oil and bullshit surrounding the development of software than most of us would like to admit.
- ChoHag 10y ago
  > The fact that you are doing it effectively at an appropriate speed and quality cannot. Well it can, but not in a way we necessarily like - it's called the marketplace.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    It's called a market for lemons.
    - ChoHag 10y ago
      If "it" is "producing lemons" then yes, you would need a market for lemons in order to guage the production process' quality. Well done, have a cookie. Or a lemon.
- bitwize 10y ago
  If you are correctly following an Agile process such as Scrum, the productivity of each team member can indeed be quantified. You may think it's pure bullshit numbers, but the ratio of story points to hours worked tends to stabilize over time and give management an idea of how productive you really are.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    Absolute bullshit. * A team that is being judged on scrum velocity can simply keep inflating story points to make it look like they're going faster. * A team that is optimistic has a lower velocity. A team that is pessimistic has a higher velocity. * If a story is 8 points that gives no clue as to whether it ought to be a 2 point (if the technical debt accrued by the team were not so high). In practice I've found that it doesn't stabilize either. Of course that automatically means you just "weren't doing Scrum properly".
mgkimsal 10y ago
> We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts It's harder for me to "get stuff done" when then "stuff" is bullshit. There are times when what's being asked for is wrong (stealing code/images/whatever), or a wrong solution to the problem. "Right/Wrong" can be subjective, so I shy away from making those snap judgements until I know more about why something is being asked for, but after a while, you tend to develop a 6th sense for crazy. A 23 year old in their first job will (generally) just plug away at whatever's given them. Older folks generally won't deal as well with bullshit work.
- draven 10y ago
  > It's harder for me to "get stuff done" when then "stuff" is bullshit Same here, I guess tolerance to bullshit diminishes with age. Perhaps it has to do with experience. I cringe when asked to do something that will increase technical debt because I can see what it will be like repaying that debt in the future. Younger me could not see that far.
- bbarn 10y ago
  I see that as a selling point to being more experienced. Intolerance for bullshit is a good trait in many a job.
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    It really depends on the politics of the office/team/company you're working with. It can either be seen as a huge plus, or a huge minus.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  > A 23 year old in their first job will (generally) just plug away at whatever's given them. Older folks generally won't deal as well with bullshit work. On the contrary, I've seen far too many 20 somethings that will refuse to do anything that isn't new development.
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
pc86 10y ago
Ignoring the Very Smart Capitalization, I haven't seen any correlation between age and {skill, productivity, intelligence, results}. I've worked with very smart, cutting-edge literal graybeards who could code circles around me, and guys who have been at the same company in the same entry-level or mid-level programming job for 25 years yelling in a meeting about "this damn web shit."
- swsieber 10y ago
  Right - I took the comment to be about working sane hours yields better results than working twice as long... and generally older folks are less inclined to work the 2x hours.
- kyberias 10y ago
  Even though you personally haven't observed any correlation, wouldn't you think that experienced people can make better judgement calls when designing software? Because of their experience (age), that is. Personally I feel like I'm 10x the developer I was 20 years ago. And that is 100% because of the experience and years. One learns while doing you know.
optionalparens 10y ago
I agree more experienced people usually get stuff done and it's generally been my experience. Of course there are always exceptions. The problem I see is that often it is not the output itself that wins, rather the perception around the output. I've seen many talentless people rise through the ranks of companies or start their own just because they were good at bs'ing, marketing themselves, had a certain personality type, and many other things that had little to do with programming directly. Of course some of these things are important and valuable, but many of them are toxic, especially in a software development context. Indeed, we've all observed countless startups that become industry darlings that don't even ever produce real revenue let alone profits. We can argue about what their output actually is, but often it's smoke and mirrors at best, fraud at worst. This all happens often at the expense of progress or another company that actually does produce value, but fails at playing the game properly (same applies to people). But these startups "succeed" at least temporarily because they create perceptions that one day, just with many more millions and many more articles, they will be great and rule the world. Whether it catches up with them or not is something else. Perception is the way so many things in life work, and particularly important to many companies, the stock market. I think there are just so many examples where the belief that if you work hard and do good work does not hold. I personally value these things, but many people do not. It's a complicated topic I could ramble on about forever, but I think we've all been in these situations and had things happen to use like receiving praise for arguably our worst work.
employee8000 10y ago
I hate smug answers like this. I'm old and the young people I work with at Uber are amazing and get tons of things done. Just because you're old doesn't mean you know any better or just because they are young, it doesn't mean they can't get shit done. Pretending that just because you're old you hold some magical advantage doesn't fly. You need to prove yourself every day because this is the industry we are in. And the reasons why young people are more desirable is obvious. They generally have more energy, less time constraints and aren't afraid of change. I work very hard to keep myself current. But it's hard. I have 5 side projects gathering dust at home because after work, commute and kids, I'm exhausted. It's easy to keep up when your only commitments are work and relationship. So it's fairly obvious why younger people are more desirable. As long as companies give us old guys a chance I don't mind. I'm smart and will fight for my opportunities. I don't think I'm entitled to anything. My boss is almost 20 years younger than me but he's smart and cool. At some point this may end but that's just reality. No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > Pretending that just because you're old you hold some magical advantage doesn't fly Experience is not magic, it is not directly a function of age but of duration in the industry. I'm not even tyat old yet, but my experience (aka larger training set) so far allows me to pattern-match/foresee potential disasters way before they appear on radars of more junior devs: and this goes for technology, people and processes. > No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available That's because mining coal is physically exerting. I would hire a 60 year old boilermaker before any 20 year old since I don't want things to go boom. Edit: > just because they are young, it doesn't mean they can't get shit done. With experience, you know which shit not to do
  - employee8000 10y ago
    You're comparing great old people with shitty young people. I know plenty of very shitty old people and a lot of great young people that would invalidate what you said above. And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology, that can code quickly, etc. most just want to keep doing what they're doing and earn a paycheck which is fine but then they shouldn't complain when they get replaced by younger faster models.

by jwr 10y ago

uola 10y ago

Honestly, even as I'm getting older, this isn't at all obvious to me. Someone with five years solid experience with web development might very well be far more effective than someone with twenty years experience of working in corners of large companies with various technologies, especially when you consider the expected salary. I think it good that people are talking about these things, but sometime it seem like people think it's a big conspiracy, rather than a factor of how the ecosystem and market looks.

dfsegoat 10y ago
I am with you on this - it is what causes me a lot of anxiety but what also drives me to at least know about "all the shiney things" that the new breed of engineers basically come equipped with standard.
curun1r 10y ago
I came to this realization a few years ago. I found that while my judgment was still improving, my output wasn't and my ability to think through problems wasn't where it used to be, especially when it came to the tiny details. So I moved into management. It allowed me leverage my strengths while putting me in a situation where my value wasn't determined by my raw output. It sucks going to all those meetings, but it honestly made me enjoy the programming I did do considerably more than I did before. The programming I did do for the team was all prototype work with new technologies that either I or the team felt could help us out...short 2-3 hour projects whenever I could fit them into my schedule. But everything was new and I wasn't implementing things I'd done a ton of times before. In the end, I don't think this is a satisfying answer. There just aren't enough managerial jobs for all the old programmers and a lot of them can't handle the meeting workload of that kind of position. But I still suggest it on an individual basis because it's a chance to put all that experience to work programming at a higher level. Instead of linked lists you're dealing with fresh-out-of-college devs who know their big-Os by heart and can crank out code at a frightening pace. But you still need someone to ensure the overall design doesn't suck. To read over what they're producing since there will always be some crazy mis-step that they make from time to time. You still need someone who has seen a project evolve over multiple years to know which decisions will become problematic down the road. The young guys can't do that. And while it's been an adjustment to learn to find satisfaction without typing out the code myself, I've learned to enjoy the launches (both product and career) in a way that's more fulfilling than my time as a full-time coder was.
- ianai 10y ago
  What's your answer for the general? Not that you know but areas you suspect.
- jimbokun 10y ago
  How does a programmer go about moving into management?
  - curun1r 10y ago
    Ask. I had a conversation with the VP of Eng where I told him that's what I wanted, asked if it was a possibility and what I needed to do to make it happen. He told me what he thought I needed to learn and allowed me to take a couple of hours each week to read, meet with other managers and otherwise prepare. A few months later, when a position became open, he gave me a trial run which converted to perm after a successful month. Most engineering leadership is very reasonable with requests like this provided you are a very strong performer with the respect of the engineering organization. They realize that promotions from within are morale boosters and developing a reputation for nurturing talent is an amazing recruiting tool.
czep 10y ago
If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? If you were wrongly convicted and awaiting a death sentence, would you pick a 22 year old attorney fresh from law school to defend you? If you have a field full of tomatoes that needs picking, do you save a few dollars an hour hiring the young guy at minimum wage who is healthy, has no family, and will easily work beyond maximum hours without reporting it, or do you hire the older tomato picker who needs a higher salary because of his kids and can't work more than 7.5 hours a day because of his bad back? So are we law and medicine or are we tomato pickers? I had always thought of engineering as the former but sadly the more articles I see on how "culture fit" discrimination works, maybe we've commoditized the industry into a low wage manual labor job.
- witty_username 10y ago
  > If you were having cardiac surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be a year out of med school having done the operation oh 3 or 4 times, or the proverbial graybeard who has done it a thousand times? Rationally one would care about the outcomes, and the number of times would merely make us more certain about the outcome. Relative to the two scenarios you showed, programming is usually more like tomato picking—nobody is going to die or be injured because of a bug or failure to deliver something.
  - sharemywin 10y ago
    self driving cars.
  - ojbyrne 10y ago
    Perhaps most of the time that's true, I suspect that a lot of health care is the same. There have been plenty of instances of software bugs killing or injuring people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    "nobody is going to die or be injured because of a bug or failure to deliver something" You should read through RISKS Digest.[1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_digest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_digest
sharemywin 10y ago
I think "older" programmers are more likely to stick around longer. If your looking for someone to fill space so you can brag about the hours your team is putting in and party with while you blow threw a few more of some investors millions go with the young guy. Since, the companies' going to blow up in six month anyway why worry about how long they stay in a job.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  Honestly I think that might be in the back of these people's heads a bit. "Woo! We're doing what we want, when we want, how we want, this is how work should be! What, you think it would be better if we did things this way because reasons and experience? No, this is how I always wanted to work, fast and loose, I'm the one with the CEO title so this is what we'll do! 6 months later I'm so sorry guys. I have to let you all go, then come up with another idea I can get investors to pump money into so I can hop on this ride all over again and learn absolutely nothing. This isn't true of all startups, but I've seen elements of it at several of the ones I have experience with.
amyjess 10y ago
This is one thing that really worries me. I'm in my early 30s, and I'm perfectly content working a mid-level position. I've seen people my age pass me by several times, and I'm fine with that. I'm not good enough to keep up with the really good engineers, and it's probably going to be a long time before I have 'Senior' in my title, if ever. When I'm in my 50s, I'm just not going to be one of those awesome elder coders. My boss is one of those graybeards, and he's awesome, but I'll never be him. I also have less than zero desire to ever work in management (and even if I wanted to do that, I don't have the people skills for it). So I'm seriously worried that I'm going to be unemployable in 10-20 years because companies will all prefer to hire people in their 20s with equivalent skills to mine out of ageism.
- atoko 10y ago
  If you haven't adapted in 20 years, is it really ageism?
- verbify 10y ago
  In twenty years you'll be in your 70's. Most people in their 70's are unemployable, no matter the field. If you don't have a retirement plan, then you got to do some extreme saving and lifestyle adjustment (or you'll face even more extreme lifestyle adjustment once you retire). If you do have a retirement plan, you have nothing to worry about.
  - citizenkeen 10y ago
    No, they're in their 30s. They're concerned about their 50s.
    - verbify 10y ago
      Whoops, badly misread that.

andrewchambers 10y ago

I've seen plenty of old developers who fancy themselves experienced who are not efficient too.

crdoconnor 10y ago

>I wouldn't worry. We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts. This is a myth. It doesn't count for that much. Programmer productivity cannot be effectively measured even by other programmers and certainly can't be measured by non-technical managers. The fact that you are doing something can be easily verified. The fact that you are doing it effectively at an appropriate speed and quality cannot. There's a lot more trust, salesmanship, snake oil and bullshit surrounding the development of software than most of us would like to admit.

ChoHag 10y ago
> The fact that you are doing it effectively at an appropriate speed and quality cannot. Well it can, but not in a way we necessarily like - it's called the marketplace.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  It's called a market for lemons.
  - ChoHag 10y ago
    If "it" is "producing lemons" then yes, you would need a market for lemons in order to guage the production process' quality. Well done, have a cookie. Or a lemon.
bitwize 10y ago
If you are correctly following an Agile process such as Scrum, the productivity of each team member can indeed be quantified. You may think it's pure bullshit numbers, but the ratio of story points to hours worked tends to stabilize over time and give management an idea of how productive you really are.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  Absolute bullshit. * A team that is being judged on scrum velocity can simply keep inflating story points to make it look like they're going faster. * A team that is optimistic has a lower velocity. A team that is pessimistic has a higher velocity. * If a story is 8 points that gives no clue as to whether it ought to be a 2 point (if the technical debt accrued by the team were not so high). In practice I've found that it doesn't stabilize either. Of course that automatically means you just "weren't doing Scrum properly".

mgkimsal 10y ago

> We can actually Get Stuff Done, which at the end of the day is what really counts It's harder for me to "get stuff done" when then "stuff" is bullshit. There are times when what's being asked for is wrong (stealing code/images/whatever), or a wrong solution to the problem. "Right/Wrong" can be subjective, so I shy away from making those snap judgements until I know more about why something is being asked for, but after a while, you tend to develop a 6th sense for crazy. A 23 year old in their first job will (generally) just plug away at whatever's given them. Older folks generally won't deal as well with bullshit work.

draven 10y ago
> It's harder for me to "get stuff done" when then "stuff" is bullshit Same here, I guess tolerance to bullshit diminishes with age. Perhaps it has to do with experience. I cringe when asked to do something that will increase technical debt because I can see what it will be like repaying that debt in the future. Younger me could not see that far.
bbarn 10y ago
I see that as a selling point to being more experienced. Intolerance for bullshit is a good trait in many a job.
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  It really depends on the politics of the office/team/company you're working with. It can either be seen as a huge plus, or a huge minus.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
> A 23 year old in their first job will (generally) just plug away at whatever's given them. Older folks generally won't deal as well with bullshit work. On the contrary, I've seen far too many 20 somethings that will refuse to do anything that isn't new development.
- mgkimsal 10y ago

pc86 10y ago

Ignoring the Very Smart Capitalization, I haven't seen any correlation between age and {skill, productivity, intelligence, results}. I've worked with very smart, cutting-edge literal graybeards who could code circles around me, and guys who have been at the same company in the same entry-level or mid-level programming job for 25 years yelling in a meeting about "this damn web shit."

swsieber 10y ago
Right - I took the comment to be about working sane hours yields better results than working twice as long... and generally older folks are less inclined to work the 2x hours.
kyberias 10y ago
Even though you personally haven't observed any correlation, wouldn't you think that experienced people can make better judgement calls when designing software? Because of their experience (age), that is. Personally I feel like I'm 10x the developer I was 20 years ago. And that is 100% because of the experience and years. One learns while doing you know.

optionalparens 10y ago

I agree more experienced people usually get stuff done and it's generally been my experience. Of course there are always exceptions. The problem I see is that often it is not the output itself that wins, rather the perception around the output. I've seen many talentless people rise through the ranks of companies or start their own just because they were good at bs'ing, marketing themselves, had a certain personality type, and many other things that had little to do with programming directly. Of course some of these things are important and valuable, but many of them are toxic, especially in a software development context. Indeed, we've all observed countless startups that become industry darlings that don't even ever produce real revenue let alone profits. We can argue about what their output actually is, but often it's smoke and mirrors at best, fraud at worst. This all happens often at the expense of progress or another company that actually does produce value, but fails at playing the game properly (same applies to people). But these startups "succeed" at least temporarily because they create perceptions that one day, just with many more millions and many more articles, they will be great and rule the world. Whether it catches up with them or not is something else. Perception is the way so many things in life work, and particularly important to many companies, the stock market. I think there are just so many examples where the belief that if you work hard and do good work does not hold. I personally value these things, but many people do not. It's a complicated topic I could ramble on about forever, but I think we've all been in these situations and had things happen to use like receiving praise for arguably our worst work.

employee8000 10y ago

I hate smug answers like this. I'm old and the young people I work with at Uber are amazing and get tons of things done. Just because you're old doesn't mean you know any better or just because they are young, it doesn't mean they can't get shit done. Pretending that just because you're old you hold some magical advantage doesn't fly. You need to prove yourself every day because this is the industry we are in. And the reasons why young people are more desirable is obvious. They generally have more energy, less time constraints and aren't afraid of change. I work very hard to keep myself current. But it's hard. I have 5 side projects gathering dust at home because after work, commute and kids, I'm exhausted. It's easy to keep up when your only commitments are work and relationship. So it's fairly obvious why younger people are more desirable. As long as companies give us old guys a chance I don't mind. I'm smart and will fight for my opportunities. I don't think I'm entitled to anything. My boss is almost 20 years younger than me but he's smart and cool. At some point this may end but that's just reality. No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available.

sangnoir 10y ago
> Pretending that just because you're old you hold some magical advantage doesn't fly Experience is not magic, it is not directly a function of age but of duration in the industry. I'm not even tyat old yet, but my experience (aka larger training set) so far allows me to pattern-match/foresee potential disasters way before they appear on radars of more junior devs: and this goes for technology, people and processes. > No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available That's because mining coal is physically exerting. I would hire a 60 year old boilermaker before any 20 year old since I don't want things to go boom. Edit: > just because they are young, it doesn't mean they can't get shit done. With experience, you know which shit not to do
- employee8000 10y ago
  You're comparing great old people with shitty young people. I know plenty of very shitty old people and a lot of great young people that would invalidate what you said above. And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology, that can code quickly, etc. most just want to keep doing what they're doing and earn a paycheck which is fine but then they shouldn't complain when they get replaced by younger faster models.