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On Getting Older in Tech

• sparrish 10y ago
  I've found out how to sidestep agism - work for yourself. Build it in whatever 'old' language you want, bring value, and profit. Now I get to sit on the porch and yell at the youngin's "Get off my lawn!"
• sean_patel 10y ago
  > Want an example where the programmer codes in something other than “antiquated” RPG? How about HTML5, JavaScript, and C#? With all due respect, Sir -- and I understand I will be in your shoes in 4 decades -- the site you've built, using HTML5, JS, Grails, Groovy and what not I presume - kettlerusa.com - has the look and feel of a 90s website (think the whitehouse.gov * unders Bill & Gore's administration), esp. that ugly green "Free Shipping" button at the bottom right. The site's also not responsive / mobile friendly and gives several "rookie" invalidations, errors when run through common web validators. I didn't even get to performance testing. So... is there some truth to what Zuckerberg said (and I am no fan of his BTW). Personally I don't think Old(er) people are any less smart than younger people. But I do see time and again that Old(er) people have a hard time (or are not putting effort into) understanding and implementing current tech trends in terms of UI, Usability, best practices etc. Thoughts? * EDIT 1: Found the Whitehouse.gov homepage from the 90s. Funny that Whitehouse.gov posted it as a "throwback" but this wouldn't be anything I would be proud of if I was the President in this Web Era lol. => https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/10/23/throwback-thursday-look-back-white-house-website-20-years-ago https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/10/23/throwback-thursda... EDIT 2: Why is everyone down-voting me? Do you all really think the UI is great? And that a mobile-unfriendly site is ok in 2016??? EDIT 3: OP's site kettlerusa.com has crashed now. Shows that it was ill prepared for a traffic surge (from HN). Also implies caching and scaling was not addressed. So how does show that this old programmer has "kept up to date"? Caching is very basic.
  • chubot 10y ago
    My thoughts: "Current tech trends in terms of UI" are generally antithetical to usability. Speed is an important aspect of usability, and web sites and mobile apps are as slow and unresponsive as they've ever been. Like security, performance is a holistic concern; it cuts across layers abstraction (your "stack"). Because even good software is so layered these days, a younger programmer is less likely to have visited enough areas of the stack to form good mental models about performance. On looking at the site you point out, I think it could use some CSS changes, but that's usually in the domain of design and not engineering.
    • sean_patel 10y ago
      > Speed is an important aspect of usability. Agreed. But I couldn't bring myself to get past the ugly UI and get to performance testing, bundling / minifications, async calls etc.
      • ljka98 10y ago
        Well the site (kettlerusa.com) has crashed now...
        • sean_patel 10y ago
          There you go. Made my point, despite the downvotes from the Politically correct HN readers.
          • Aloha 10y ago
            You size the hosting for a site for whatever you expect to have, not google scale - to do anything else is a waste of money/resources.
          • fzzzy 10y ago
            Please post your dynamic site that can survive getting to the top of hn.
          • sctb 10y ago
  • GuiA 10y ago
    There is no truth to what Zuckerberg said - the guy has said many idiotic things in his life, and this one ranks near the top. You're picking the author's website as an example, but it's a single datapoint - not representative of anything. Many younger people code much worse things, and many older people code much better things. I'm slowly reaching 30 (agh), and I refuse to work in any team that doesn't have any members above at least 40. In all the teams that I've worked in, having people in the team (not necessarily management) who have been around for more than a few decades has always been extremely valuable. My best managers have been a man in his 50s, and a woman in her 60s. My worse managers and colleagues have consistently been too young and too inexperienced and too cocky.
    • sean_patel 10y ago
      > but it's a single datapoint Thanks. But isn't your experience with very old managers also a single datapoint, or at best, a dozen datapoints?
      • GuiA 10y ago
        I have a few hundred data points of coworkers in my career at this point (maybe even low thousands), and the number of "out of touch old guy" I've encountered pales in comparison to the number of "arrogant clueless young guy" I've had to bear. (interestingly enough, I've had many good female colleagues, a few great ones, and no terrible ones)
        • tclancy 10y ago
          >I've had many good female colleagues, a few great ones, and no terrible ones) Pretty much the same here. It's a disappointing confirmation of the idea to survive a woman has to be twice as good.
    • rmason 10y ago
      If I was to meet Zuckerberg I'd quiz him on that quote and ask him, did you A/B test that? If he did boy would he be in for a surprise ;<).
    • 10y ago
  • blatherard 10y ago
    In the absence of other information, I'd chalk that up more to the client. This is a shopping site for the US arm of a German manufacturer. Cutting-edge design was probably not of high importance to them. Also, I don't see any claims by this person that they were a designer. What your criticism reads like is a pretty good example of how things like ageism, sexism, or racism sometimes play out. Take something, find some fault with it, exaggerate its significance, and ascribe the source of that fault to an immutable characteristic of the person involved.
    • gregmac 10y ago
      > In the absence of other information, I'd chalk that up more to the client. That is my first thought as well. Spending time optimizing it for performance may not be worthwhile for the client. Likewise, hosting it in a way that can scale to several times the traffic may not be worthwhile. This is something you learn with experience. If you deliver a site that's super-fast, with deployment of the latest serverless architecture with the newest UI framework released this week.. but you didn't have time to put in half the catalog, the client is not going to be happy at all. There are also clients that insist on certain specific things that may not fit with your artistic vision (specific graphics, colors, logo, text, layouts, icons, etc). You have to balance how hard you push back with how much you want to risk pissing off and/or losing the client.
  • emblem21 10y ago
    Google's landing page. Your argument is invalid.
  • Treblemaker 10y ago
    What is the objective measure of "ugliness"? I found the site to be well-organized and intuitive. In less than ten seconds I understood what kind of products they were selling, how to buy them, and how to find out more about the company. As a _user_ the site was _effective_. Oh, and free shipping for orders over $40! Knowing this up front (because my attention was drawn to it) could very well influence my buying decision.
  • Clubber 10y ago
    The site looks fine. I can easily pay $0-$10 to get a super nice HTML5 site that would look great because it was made by a professional designer, then tweak it a little to make it look somewhat unique in a 10th of the time. Eye candy sells, but it is cheap. Most people would be better suited concentrating on back end abilities; it's generally a much more valuable skill set.
  • dang 10y ago
    I don't think we'd better start identifying look-and-feel of websites with programming skill. One thing I've noticed whilst becoming older as a programmer is what pleasure I take in certain sorts of what people call "rookie" errors.
    • johnwheeler 10y ago
      > is what pleasure I take in certain sort of what people call "rookie" errors. Can you provide an example?
      • dang 10y ago
        Such examples all have troll power so I might need a dispensation.
        • dredmorbius 10y ago
          Dispensation offerred.
          • dang 10y ago
            Ok! Well some that come to mind are (a) short variable names; (b) not bothering to encapsulate state or lock things down into modules; and (c) tables for layout. I don't do these things because they're 'rookie mistakes', of course, just like I don't order whipped cream for dessert but might like it as an extra. I enjoy the feeling of lightness that comes with naively doing what's easy, as opposed to the weight of preconceptions that in practice impede the work.
  • psranga 10y ago
    Looks fine to me. Ikea's site looks similar (to my eyes at least), btw. And nothing like the 90's whitehouse site. There's a lot of niche sites that get the job done without following all the latest "trends". More power to them. Function over form FTW.
  • johnwheeler 10y ago
    Does it escape you that you're on HackerNews? It's not the pinnacle of design by any stretch of the imagination, yet here we are...
    • Aloha 10y ago
      Function over form.
  • Aloha 10y ago
    It's a shopping site for a manufacturing concern, how should it look? It seems functional, I can find products on it, what else does it need?
  • sidlls 10y ago
    I didn't downvote you, but your claims (and Zuckerberg's) about the intelligence and aptitude of us old folks (I'm not even 40 yet) are just absurd. As regards UI, usability and the like, your comment is highly subjective and entirely unsubstantiated. And your comment in your third edit is just as absurd as your notions about old folks: the site's author(s) likely never intended the site to be part of, e.g., a HN surge. A good number of the application backends I've written were never meant to be exposed to that kind of surge, and I didn't design these backends to handle that kind of surge because it wasn't necessary. That you think it is demonstrates more about your lack of understanding of engineering fundamentals than it does about old folks' ability to learn and adapt.
    • sean_patel 10y ago
      > but your claims (and Zuckerberg's) about the intelligence and aptitude of us old folks (I'm not even 40 yet) are just absurd. I never made this claim. OP's post makes this claim.
  • jcoffland 10y ago
    > I understand I will be in your shoes in 4 decades So you're 17?
• johnwheeler 10y ago
  It makes sense to plug https://oldgeekjobs.com https://oldgeekjobs.com I've taken a small break from working on it, so the traffic has died down some, but feel free to post your tech jobs for free for the time being.
  • dantaylor08 10y ago
    If you're looking for help, drop me a line. As a young(er) engineer, I live in terror every day of what may come down the road.
    • johnwheeler 10y ago
      That's kind of you Dan. Yep -- I remind myself that ageism is the one form of discrimination that eventually affects everyone. There might be more...I dunno, but it keeps me on mission. I run a Medium publication at https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com. If you've got writing chops, I'm looking for contributors. That goes for anybody. Thanks again.
      • pryelluw 10y ago
        I would like to help you as well. Ill ping you on Twitter.
        • johnwheeler 10y ago
          Feel free to e-mail if that works better. john@johnwheeler.org
          • pryelluw 10y ago
            I got in touch through twitter but will email you tomorrow morning. :)
      • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
        What kind of contributions are you looking for?
• JTenerife 10y ago
  Younger people are not smarter. They might learn faster new things. On the other hand, older people understand related new things much better as they already have a large context (experience). The biggest difference of my current self (44) to my younger self is that I did spend much more energy in my projects when I was younger. I created results much faster at the cost of limited consideration. Now, I can still burn for a while, but not as long as when I was younger.
  • cft 10y ago
    Young people: 1. Learn faster (better memory) 2. Can keep their attention focused longer. Number 1 actually becomes a bane with old people: my relatives over 70 actively developed an active reticence to learn anything new: I even theorized that they are instinctively protecting the limited amount of functional short term memory for vital tasks.
    • peteretep 10y ago
      > Learn faster (better memory) And yet, when I needed to learn XSLT (and then React), I was able to simply inhale it in one go because of my experience of similar technologies and functional programming, which come about from having been doing this quite a while. Younger and quicker developers took a lot longer over it and to find their feet because there were many new concepts there for them. As you get older, there's less to you haven't already learned.
    • thaw13579 10y ago
      Let's put aside the unsubstantiated claims about biology (and old doesn't mean 70 yrs in this context). Jobs that rely heavily on attention span and learning speed can also quickly get boring and unfulfilling--the more experienced folks probably know to steer away from that.
  • vacri 10y ago
    I find that - very broadly speaking - old guns are better at strategy and young guns are better at tactics. The energy and interest of the young lead them to find the local maxima more readily, and the experience of the old help you find the real maxima rather than the local. Or put another way, young'uns will get you out of the rabbit-hole more quickly, but old'uns will take you down fewer rabbit-holes. Both mindsets work well together. YMMV, caveat, caveat, caveat, etc, roughly speaking, &c
• paulsutter 10y ago
  Elon Musk is 45. Does that make him old? Doesn't seem to slow him down. edit: just saying limits seem artificial, that's all
  • sean_patel 10y ago
    I don't know. But in his case, how does it matter? He's at the top. No-one can be "ageist" on him. Clients or Vendors maybe, but I double at that level, a Company would decide to not hire Elon Musk's Company or his minions because of Musk's age.
  • randomdata 10y ago
    How much hands-on tech involvement does Musk actually have in his enterprises? I imagine his focus is on business, leaving the tech for the tech professionals that are hired by his businesses.
    • anondon 10y ago
      > How much hands-on tech involvement does Musk actually have in his enterprises? From multiple interviews, Elon has stated that he spends the majority of his time on engineering and design problems, and very little time on business, PR.
      • wcummings 10y ago
        PR BS & founder worship. If he wasnt spending time on PR he wouldn't be doing interviews
        • anondon 10y ago
          > If he wasnt spending time on PR he wouldn't be doing interviews There's a difference between spending minimal time and no time at all on business, PR aspects. > founder worship I only stated the facts. Where is the worship?
          • 10y ago
• latchkey 10y ago
  Not a bad post at all and it definitely hit home for me. I'm 43 and have been doing professional development for 20 years (actually 20 years). I moved permanently to Saigon just 1.5 months ago. I'm teaching the Pivotal software engineering process (agile / extreme) to a 100 person consultancy full of really smart ~20 year olds who didn't know or understand process at all. I keep up on all the latest tech and I have a youthful mind and body (most people think I'm in my 30's). I'm the oldest guy in the company and the only American here. This has quickly lead to a lot of personal mentoring on many levels, not just software, but life in general. The culture in Vietnam is strong and my team wants to learn from me. It is very exciting and new for all of us. It has been an amazing experience so far and I look forward to the future. The best additional advice? Just be nice. It is so simple. The culture here is to never raise your voice or get mad in public, so I've taken it to the other extreme and I just smile and laugh a lot. Even when the servers are melting down. Viet are shy and have poor personal communication skills. By being friendly and nice, they have learned to trust me and that has opened up them up a lot. It has infected my entire team and improved moral almost over night. Being older has a lot of advantages. I'm loving my 40's way more than my 20's. Cheers! =)
  • bitxbitxbitcoin 10y ago
    Thanks for your inspirational story. It seems there is hope if you are willing to step out of your comfort zone.
    • latchkey 10y ago
      Thanks! I don't even know what my comfort zone is anymore. =)
  • tmaly 10y ago
    That is the same in the Philippines. Public shame is a big no no. You always want to handle things in private.
  • 3131s 10y ago
    Some pretty sweeping generalizations about the culture after only 1.5 months. I live in a country neighboring Vietnam and there are similar perceptions of the culture here, yet in my experience these ideas are baseless and often ingrained in expats well before ever learning the language or sometimes even before entering the country.
• eanzenberg 10y ago
  Yes! The most important thing I learned in academia is to never stop learning and to always push yourself to never get stale. Learning doesn't stop at high school, college or grad school.
• rifung 10y ago
  > let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30 I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very much like to hire senior people as well but they're much harder to find. I wonder how much of what he said is true vs ageism. On the other hand, I wonder how much of a natural bias there is against older people if they have to go through the same interview process because it felt like a mental marathon to me. Although the interview only lasts a day it took a couple days for me to recover.
  • mathgenius 10y ago
    Did they give you a job offer?
    • rifung 10y ago
      I did! Why do you ask?
      • mathgenius 10y ago
        You left the ending off your story! Nice ending too.
        • rifung 10y ago
          Haha! I didn't feel it was relevant to the comment but thank you! I'd rather be a math genius though! Maybe one day I'll be able to at least study some more math
  • 100pctremote 10y ago
    His reply couldn't sound more scripted
    • 10y ago
• WalterBright 10y ago
  An interesting thing happened to me in college. As I progressed through it, I found I learned more complex stuff with less effort. A big part of it was I was able to see what was important to learn and not waste time on irrelevant things. As I get older in tech, I have a similar experience. Of course, one can go too far and think everything new is irrelevant :-)
• ChicagoDave 10y ago
  Age will matter more in a loose job market (more people than jobs). In a tight market as it is today, your skills are front and center, not your age. That said, the OP is correct. You're only as good as your last two years and even that's pushing it. If the tech changes, you have to adapt with it. I'm 53 as of yesterday (the 8th). I started with PDP-11's in the 80's, then VAX's, then PC's, BASIC at first, then C, then Visual Basic, then ASP, then C#/ASP.NET, and now I'm deep into AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, Redshift), NodeJS, AngularJS 1.x/2, ReactJS, and I'm still learning new technology all the time. A lot of developers will transition to management and it's on my mind, but I'm also still drawn to solving problems at a code level. And there's always new toys to play with like Angular and React. Now we have .NET Core and all of its interesting avenues. If you actually care about being a good developer, you will continue to work. As long as there are jobs. Nothing will help you if the job market contracts. Then I do believe hiring becomes age-oriented with us older dev's labeled "over-qualified".
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >Age will matter more in a loose job market (more people than jobs). In a tight market as it is today, your skills are front and center, not your age. You'd be surprised. The original post (TFA) gives the median age in major companies for example and it doesn't work like that there.
  • gaius 10y ago
    Age will matter more in a loose job market (more people than jobs). In a tight market as it is today, your skills are front and center, not your age. The fact that people are still claiming there is a shortage of tech workers, demonstrates that that isn't true. The industry wants young, cheap workers who come ready made with the trendiest skills, then it wants to ditch them rather than retraining or allowing them to accrue seniority, and hire new ones, who will work 80 hours a week for free soda and "stock options"...
    • linkregister 10y ago
      What companies fit this mold? Do you work at one or worked at one in the past?
• lisper 10y ago
  One of the things that has made me old (52) and crotchety is that I learned Lisp very early in my career. That gave me the ability to see that 99% of "new" technologies were really just poor re-inventions of (parts of) Lisp. Even today, Common Lisp -- despite (or, as some would argue, because of) the fact that it hasn't been officially updated in decades is still not only a viable language but one of the best choices for many applications. But no one knows it because it's not the shiny new thing, and even young people still can't seem to get their heads around the fact that the parens are a feature, not a bug. And that makes me grumpy sometimes. The good part was that I was able to build a very successful career while not having to suffer nearly as much pain as many of my contemporaries. The bad part is that now it's hard to find people to collaborate with. :-(
  • bogomipz 10y ago
    Out of curiosity what flavor/dialect of LISP do you recommend? Common or something else?
    • lisper 10y ago
      I like Common Lisp, and Clozure CL in particular, but it doesn't really matter all that much. The cool kids seem to be using Clojure (with a J, not a Z) nowadays. Pick whatever works for you.
  • fulafel 10y ago
    Isn't there a good big comnunity in Clojure now?
    • lisper 10y ago
      Depends on what you count as "big". If you look at languages used on github, for example: http://githut.info http://githut.info Clojure is doing OK (better than Common Lisp), but not great (worse than Haskell and Emacs lisp).
      • mVChr 10y ago
• desireco42 10y ago
  Related to fitness. I never went to the gym. However I was working on fitness related site for some years and as a lead there, I wanted to be reflection of this site I cared much about. So I did what I like, walk and running up the stairs. Whenever there are stairs, I would run up them. Now, again I am not super fit, but I don't lose breath, everyone else kind of does. This gives me great pleasure. I am older developer, it is getting hard, I will not lie. But, I am on top of latest technologies, enjoy my work, I am pain in the but.
  • prefect42 10y ago
    Perhaps I'm a simple creature, but running up stairs is one of the greatest pleasures in life ;-)
• pfarnsworth 10y ago
  Well, if the author is almost 60, it probably won't matter which career he's in, he would likely suffer from some sort of ageism. It doesn't matter if you're a programmer, or in finance, or working at Costco, if you're getting close to 60, most people will be skeptical as to whether you can really work as well as a 25 year old.
• toolslive 10y ago
  about the value of experience, I had it explained to me like this: If you see a toddler running after a ball that rolls under a coffee table, bending over to go under the table and to pick up the ball... You know what's going to happen next. That's experience. There are just different balls and coffee tables.
• gumby 10y ago
  Ageism is real in the Vally but it can cut both ways. In my current company we did a SWOT analysis and one of our advantages was "many old farts, and many former colleagues friends". Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us but it's really valuable if you have already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime. And in your 50s you're probably an empty nester, and can easily put in a 50+ hour week when necessary (which it often is, but not all the time, in a startup) and get more done in 40 hours than the squirts do in 60+. You need a mix of ages and backgrounds. A bias to youth is as bad as a bias towards time-in-grade, or any other such bias.
  • bbcbasic 10y ago
    > Yes, if you haven't been using AWS and GPGPUs you will be of minimal use to us > already made a bunch of mistakes on someone else's dime. What is it with this industries lack of interest in investing in people yet demanding so many hours that you can't learn anything new at least nothing deep. Why not just make everyone a contractor but pay them appropriately as a result.
    • gumby 10y ago
      I guess I phrased that poorly! I meant battle scars are important: not everybody will have them (some will acquire those scars in the future). In other words, experience is important. Sometimes experience gets in your way ("No, a scripting language will be too slow for this") and other times it saves you a huge amount of grief ("Really, we had better plumb that now, it will save us a lot of pain down the road"). Not sure I suggested many hours (quite the opposite) or not learning anything new.
      • bbcbasic 10y ago
        Maybe it wasn't phrased as intended, but my point is few companies are willing to take someone on just because they haven't done tech X even if they are seasoned in tech Y which is broadly similar and have all of the communication, team working, leadership, problem solving and domain skills. Because they need to "hit the ground running". The flipside is that of course employees don't hang around along in IT as they need to keep moving to gain the experiences they need to make their CV look reasonable. So I guess it is perpetuated on both sides.
• known 10y ago
  Great post; You should focus more on Consulting jobs;
• soham 10y ago
  Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process. In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job. You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial, healthy, nice and culturally sensitive are necessary and useful things to keep your job after you join, but the gatekeeping itself is biased on the other side, which reduces the intake to a trickle.
  • hvidgaard 10y ago
    I'm not sure it's because the interview favors faster minds. When you're 25, and good at what you're doing, there is a good chance you simply don't see what a 40 years old have to offer. Never mind that the day they turn 40 themself, they'll be able to brig far more value to the table because they have 15 years of additional experience. If there is noone with 20 years of dev experience within the company, there is noone to speak up for this, and the cycle continues.
  • neeleshs 10y ago
    Why do you think often faster coders are younger? With many more tricks up their sleeves, a more experienced coder will be faster. Or are you saying compared to literally older people, but not experienced?
    • Noseshine 10y ago
      I don't think the assertion has any basis in objective data in the first place but is based on a personal feeling. I don't see the value of trying to discuss reasons for something that only "exists" based on spurious subjective personal claims?
    • nsxwolf 10y ago
      Young coders can code that 10,000 line bad idea they had really fast, while older ones can recognize that a problem isn't new and avoid the 10,000 lines altogether.
• gesman 10y ago
  I worked at IBM Research where one of the top experts in malware research was a 60 y/o guy wearing a big copper bell hanging on the rope and he was diving into assembly level code like a water. Smart companies want smart solutions to tough problems. Assuming that solution is coming from certain audience, like age/race/gender based is a recipe to failure. Smart companies are after smart people. Who cares about anything else.
• sleepingeights 10y ago
  "You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty? They take them out and shoot them." - Primer (2004) One of the biggest killers of sedentary professions is heart disease, which is the number one killer in the US. People who work at Microsoft have told me they give free soda, sugared "juices" with artificial flavors, coffees and teas for free to their employees. These all are sources of heart disease, but the young engineers drink it up like a lost caravan in the desert. It's likely not that different in any of the other areas as well. The cost for ailments such as heart disease is known to be one of the most expensive in the US. It requires extensive testing, support, medications and visits to the doctors and hospitals. Considering the extremely high health care costs the US enforces, this places a huge dent on insurance premiums companies pay as well as accommodation, etc. These companies want them out before they have to pay more premiums on health-care and other factors related to health, age, seniority, etc...
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• blauditore 10y ago
  Out of the software devevelopers I know, only a few percent are 40+, so my sample set isn't very reliable. But from what I've seen, the average (or at least median) skill set was better for younger people, where the best ones I've met are in their 30s. My assumption is that there has been a point where software/CS started booming and people started getting degrees in that field. Among the 40+ devs I know there's a higher percentage of carreer changers, and with a few exceptions those have been generally less skilled.
• blub 10y ago
  I don't find this post inspiring, I find it sad. It's partly self-encouragment, part PR. The fact that it even exists is proof that the author is facing some issues, no matter how confident they would like to appear. That recipe to stay current looks tiresome. Listen to two podcasts, two webcasts, subscribe to four magazines, teach courses, go to one conference per year, blog regularly, read blogs, follow the latest web trends. Your reward: you are still employable. And why is it that most older people answering on these threads are so passionate about learning and about new technologies and the latest and greatest javascript frameworks. Do they really enjoy having such ephemeral knowledge and basically competing with anyone that's finished a bootcamp or not even that? It all seems fake. Like they're trying to put on a brave face while at the same time being scared and trying to convince themselves that all this new and shiny tech that they work with is awesome. Why not have an honest conversation instead of pretending that learning some thing or another will make everything ok in the end?
  • daemonk 10y ago
    I kinda agree in the sense that I think that a lot of the tech jobs out there are not "difficult" in a way that requires years and years of experience to perform reasonably well at. So maybe someone older should look for jobs that suit their abilities rather than a job that, as you said, anyone who went through a bootcamp can perform. Hopefully with age comes some kind of niche specialization or skill that can't be obtained easily.
    • mgkimsal 10y ago
      "Hopefully with age comes some kind of niche specialization or skill that can't be obtained easily." The big issue I've seen played out multiple times is a hiring manager, dev lead or anyone making a hiring decision not being able to tell the difference between what requires experience/skills/specialization and what doesn't. It leads to the all-too-common situation of people with required-experience being passed on in favor of the (generally younger) "hey, this person can definitely do it - they know all this computer stuff!" (slight exaggeration). It gets even more complicated when the person without the required skills tries to bluff their way through (deceptively or just out of sheer desperation).
• nnain 10y ago
  Young software developers scope out the projects (time required to develop a project) very differently from older engineers. Seems like the industry has forgotten the role of the QA engineer! With experience, you know that you need time for architecture, risk planning and putting things in production. I see younger engineers quoting 1-2 months to just about every project; just earmarking enough time need to put together some frameworks and write a basic code. Cloud technologies and new frameworks definitely do make building projects easier. But scaling up a product is still not very easy and casual usage of several new frameworks, comes back to bite very often. I just hope people stop being so hurried about seeing the first cut of their products. That itself would fix some issues around this topic.
  • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    This won't change. They've convinced themselves that it is best to move fast always.
• ash 10y ago
  Article mentions "RPG" many times: "RPG back-end", "RPG developer". For those who wonder what it it (like me), it is not a "Role Playing Game", it is IBM RPG language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG
  • IshKebab 10y ago
    "First appeared: 1959" and it looks it. I don't think the author is doing himself any favours by going on about such an archaic language!
    • inimino 10y ago
      ...and that's exactly the attitude the author is pointing out.
      • IshKebab 10y ago
        No, the author is actually saying that that attitude is fine. His point is that you need to keep learning and doing things that are relevant today, not learn today's technology and then stick with it for the rest of your career. > I could tell you about all my accomplishments over three decades, such as replacing the use of a System/3 punch card system with the AS/400, writing a Cobol debugger, or…. Ah, I’m boring you. What you do care about are things I did in the last two years. RPG is only relevant today in the same way Cobol is.
        • inimino 10y ago
          The feeling your comment conveys is not "keep learning". The feeling is that by talking about "archaic" stuff, the author isn't "doing himself any favours", i.e. he makes himself sound old. That's actually his point. Someone who has seen a technology mature and develop over decades, seen the hype trains come and go, projects succeed and fail, might be a bit wiser than someone fresh out of Stanford. He might have some ideas about how to build maintainable systems after working on some that are older than most developers. If you don't see it, that's on you, not on the author for mentioning his particular "archaic" specialization.
• JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  This cuts both ways. As a young founder and manager, I must be extremely conscious of hiding my age. Without knowing the number, my team is fine. Once they know all hell breaks loose, at least for a while.
• metafunctor 10y ago
  It just struck me that Zuckerberg is starting to get too old for himself.
  • tclancy 10y ago
    And in a few years he will be touting the value of people right around his own age. It's human nature and one of the most valuable things about getting older (while continuing to learn) is to be able to see that kind of thing and value insight from anyone, not just the people who look exactly like you. Harder to learn if you build up an empire of people who look exactly like you.
• andrewclunn 10y ago
  Get a job in an industry that uses tech, but isn't itself pure tech (healthcare IT for example). Then your years of domain experience matter.
  • karmajunkie 10y ago
    This is some of the best advice in this thread. There are definitely domains within technology where experience is a key ingredient, but the best insurance against age bias is a deep understanding of technology coupled with a deep domain you have experience in.
• blacktulip 10y ago
  Any language is superior to JavaScript.
  • whostolemyhat 10y ago
    Oh, give it a rest with this shit. Literally every thread where Javascript is mentioned, even in passing like this one, someone feels the need to pop up with the 'Javascript is terrible' meme. I get it, lots of people don't like Javascript, but this comment adds absolutely nothing to the discussion and just drives people away from HN since the same negativity and tired one-liner gets churned out over and over again. If you absolutely must tell the world that you don't like JS, at least be interesting or actually list your reasons so there's something to discuss.
  • metafunctor 10y ago
    No. JavaScript, the core language, is OK. Sure, there are warts, like this, lack of a good module system, and weird type coercions. Most of the bad rap JavaScript gets is because it lives in the browser, and the DOM, with all the cross browser issues that come with that. It's not all JavaScript's fault. In fact, most of it is definitely not JavaScript's fault.
    • entropy_ 10y ago
      At least as far as I'm concerned, the biggest wart of all is variables that are global by default. That just makes no sense at all...
      • whostolemyhat 10y ago
        But this was fixed with strict mode; this is like criticising Java for not having generics, even though generics were added ages ago. You can still assign/use global variables in the browser, but like the parent says, this is the browser's fault - having to accept old and badly-written code for compatibility reasons.
        • 10y ago
• wobbleblob 10y ago
  Oh cool, he made a webshop with an RPG backend. I last did that about 15 years ago, it looked just as awful, and just like him, I was so proud of my achievement at the time, that I couldn't see what an abomination it really was. It's a pity, that customer deserved better. I totally believe age discrimination is real, and the Corgibytes author hits the nail on the head with: > Only as Good as Your Last Two Years of Accomplishments > Kent Beck has suggested that, with consistent use of pair programming, the capabilities of programmers don’t differ much after two years of experience. Experience in our field rots away at an amazing rate. I don't think it's as short as 2 years, but if you're still regularly using techniques you mastered 10+ years ago, you're probably falling behind. I don't think lawyers, doctors or stock brokers have this problem.
  • smokestack 10y ago
    I doubt that a lawyer, doctor, or (especially) investor could survive more than a year without constantly investing time in learning about their field.
    • wobbleblob 10y ago
      Yeah, but what you've learned doesn't effectively rot away at the same rate. Old diseases don't go away, people don't develop new organs as they discard old ones.
    • GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      Doctors now have to do 'continuing education' and many of them got pretty upset about that and / or were grandfathered out of the requirements.
• delegate 10y ago
  Take acid and go to crazy festivals if you want to stay young. No really, do it once at least. You need to bathe in youth from time to time in order to experience it - it's fantastic. Of course you need to keep up to date, try to use your wisdom to understand which technology/language is going to survive the test of time. For example, C/C++ is going to stick around for a while; make sure you're up to date (C++ 14 and C++ 17). Pick technologies with a steep learning curves, don't try to compete with 20-year olds doing Javascript Bootcamps - go five steps deeper. Broaden your horizon - read poetry, listen to all kinds of new music, watch experimental movies, travel around, talk to foreigners, eat weird food. Study physics and philosophy, psychology and economy. Have lots of sex - your wife will love you again :) You have kids ? Great! Learn from them - everything. Try to teach them what they study at school - see if you can figure out a better explanation. Notice how much new stuff you learn about the subject, about yourself and your kid! We're all getting old(er) every day - as we age this process seems to accelerate - and one day we will be no more. But inside us lives the kid, the 20-year old, the 30-year old. It's still there, it can still be crazy and fun, we just need to remember to go on a date with our younger selves. All the rest will follow. At least that's what I'm telling myself :)
  • mattbettinson 10y ago
    I'm young but this was invigorating to read.
  • qznc 10y ago
    > use your wisdom to understand which technology/language is going to survive the test of time I usually use statistics. If you select a random point on the lifetime of something. There is a 50% chance, that you are closer to the middle then either start or end. Thus: Always assume you are roughly in the middle of the lifetime. In other words, if some technology is only one year old, assume it is dead in another year.
    • mysterypie 10y ago
      That's a great rule of thumb. You should give it a catchy name so people remember it. When I don't have good insight into whether it's worth my time to learn some new tech, I'm going to try to apply this rule.
• epalmer 10y ago
  I'm going to apologize ahead of time. this might be a ramble. 63 year old white guy with little hair and a lifelong beard that is now white. A tad overweight as well. I feel for so many people expressing angst about ageism. I've seen it elsewhere but not where I work now. I suspect that at the faster growing companies and companies in tech centers, mostly on the coasts, see more pronounced ageism. My last job was at a bank in Richmond VA and there was clear ageism in IT when I got their. I moved to compliance from IT for two years and I was very successful and never observed ageism. At 53 I moved to a web development manager and developer role in Higher Ed. I took a gigantic pay cut, if you factor in bonuses and options to work in Higher Ed. But I got to send my oldest to college at a selective school for free. A $200K after tax benefit. I don't look back. My life is so much better now with a 40 hour work week and being in control 100% on how we architect our web and backend eco-system. I spend more than 40 hours because I love learning but I choose when, where and what I learn and work on after 40 hours. I read these comments from people that are 36, 40, 40+ and shake my head. That is not old. 63 is not even old. I plan on working till I am at least 67. I love my job and I especially love the people I work with. I find these days I spend less time coding and I end up with better applications because I think through the design before coding. I'm going to ask around in Richmond VA and see what ageism exists in industry here and report back. Keep learning, try as hard as you can to stay in shape and engage in critical thinking. Good luck to each of you in staying employed and staying happy.
  • heymijo 10y ago
    "I find these days I spend less time coding and I end up with better applications because I think through the design before coding." ^A golden nugget buried in an insightful ramble.
    • spydum 10y ago
      Definitely, but key is to actually THINK, and reason about it, not just worry/stress about it! Great irony also is that I've seen teams try to be agile, which they seem to think means code > design.. Often ends up poorly.
    • FroshKiller 10y ago
• oliv__ 10y ago
  Life is ageist.
• qznc 10y ago
  > I’m only as good as what I’ve accomplished in the last two years This implies no more salary increases after two years?
  • tclancy 10y ago
    No, not at all, just that interviewers are totally uninterested in anything older than about that date. I've been in the industry for 16 years, the last 9 on my own as a consultant and have been kicking the tires on some full-time jobs in the last couple of months and it's definitely eye-opening: they really only want to talk about what I've just worked on and trying to use examples from anywhere else in those 16 years is met with suspicion. Some of the hardest problems I solved were when I was limited to ASP and Access. The fact I didn't build the thing in Mongo and Clojure doesn't mean I can't use those technologies. Some of it is the impedance between "technical" recruiters who are really just looking for you to say certain keywords and some of it is the age gap between older devs and the developers who are typically interviewing them. I have a resume that's good enough to get me in the door at a few places you've heard of this time around but it was also turned down flat without more than a recruiter call at other places where my current experience exactly matched the tech they were asking for. I can't help wondering if they saw "16 years of experience" and either thought "too old" or "too expensive". I have considered doing a little A/B testing on that.
• LargeCompanies 10y ago
  It's ok to get older in the tech industry as a whole just not in spaces like are Silly Valley and or places that are trying to be such and draw that crowd. The best place in tech for older is a govt. job where age skewers older and you may even be a minority amongst your fellow laid back/no drama, hard working Indian co-workers. The pay is more then good too!
• andriesm 10y ago
  I'm 39, ageism is real, but I'm gonna tell you to quit whining grow a pair, and what the hell is wrong with you if you cannot sell your strengths, wisdom and experience? (BTW: just so it's clear I apply this same rule to everyone - this is the same advice I would give to any discriminated group, whether women in tech, people of color, Jewish or Asian or whatever group that find themselves on the victim side of discrimination) Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. Be razer clear what your value is. Almost every one will have some or other circumstance where some trait of his/her counts against himself, that is life, but these are merely speedbumps on the way, not show stoppers. If you can't overcome bias at one specific company or in one specific country, move or do whatever YOU can do to solve it. Crying aint gonna fix it.
  • LesZedCB 10y ago
    Isn't the point that you don't get a chance to demonstrate your value because you are overlooked earlier on in the process where some hiring manager sees how old you are and decides you aren't "a culture fit" for the company. Even if you being hired will make all us 20 somethings 20x more productive, you won't even get the chance? Ageism, like most *isms, isn't something that you can simply throw individual willpower at. Anti-sexism isn't wont for women with willpower, it's a problem that lies beyond individual power, and requires collective power to combat. > Crying aint gonna fix it I think most people know that. It's because some people still deny or ignore the existence of these discriminations, so it raises awareness.
• gbencke 10y ago
  I get inspired by the japanese Shokunin work ethics, it is well described on the Jiro Dreams of Sushi movie, a explanation can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q78xvcnmIMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q78xvcnmIMw
• solatic 10y ago
  There's a reason why ageism exists in the industry and it isn't because of some undeserved stereotype about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks. 1) Most business-critical projects have long lifetimes. There's a reason why banks are still running COBOL and mainframes, and why Java's continued promise of backward compatibility with every new release is so valuable to companies. 2) Maintaining legacy systems is a bitch. Nobody likes maintaining legacy systems. 3) Therefore no employer wants to hire somebody who writes code which almost immediately turns into legacy code, either because it's not tested, or not written using modern language features designed to make the language safer, etc. 4) Learning to write code in a modern fashion requires continued education. 5) Employers will not budget or pay for this continued education in a no-compete-clauses-are-illegal environment where smart employees will take the training and run to another employer willing to pay for the benefit of another employer which already put in the legwork of investing in that employee. 6) Employees therefore need to spend significant time educating themselves on their own time. This is great for the minority who are computer geeks who treat it as a hobby and it's terrible for everyone else. 7) Most people will not spend personal time educating themselves, because they prefer to invest that time in friends and family. This is all the more true, not less true, after one's children are grown. 8) Therefore they slowly become unemployable as their skill set turns obsolete. 9) Therefore employers have a hard time finding older people who do have that combination of a modern skill set and decades of general industry experience. And it's for the same reason it was difficult to hire any programmers at all in the 90's, because the competent labor pool (then in general and now in the older age group) is basically limited to computer geeks. 10) Continued interviews of older people who did not bother to keep their skill set modern and honed creates a stereotype that old people aren't "smart". It's not a problem that some Chief Diversity Officer at some Big Four company can solve, because they're either going to literally fight human nature (people desiring quality time with their families) or they're going to adapt an affirmative action policy that'll only make the problem worse, as prefer-false-negative hiring policies set up to protect codebases from incompetence get overturned for what's essentially a political reason, breeding resentment.
  • coldcode 10y ago
    "Learning to write code in a modern fashion requires continued education" - what does that even mean? It's like telling someone they need to learn to drive in a modern car. The car is modern, the driving isn't.
• ForHackernews 10y ago
  > After years of scoffing at talk of prejudice in the information technology field... It seems kind of ridiculous that white men won't believe in hiring prejudice/discrimination until it directly affects them.
• uhtred 10y ago
  One of the strongest team members at my workplace, super smart, asks more questions than anyone else, thinks of the stuff the younger guys don't, basically would always want him on my team as he gets stuff done, is an older guy. I think he's prob in his mid 50s. (to be clear, I don't actually think mid 50s is old, but society sometimes suggests it is)
• bungie4 10y ago
  While I believe their ageism in tech. So what. I'm 56, I've been programming professionally for 30+ years. Code is still code. Theirs not much new under the sun at a core level. Consider this, many thousands of lives depend on my ability to write good, maintainable code everyday. I do Alarms, Telematics and 911 Systems. So ageism. ya, it exists. But for every 50 year old coder, theirs 150 under 30 in the business. Its just the way it is. But I know, if I was in the hiring end of the game, I'd drop my dime on the old fart whose got a ton of REAL WORLD experience over some freshly minted grad every day of the week.
• jrjarrett 10y ago
  "I have taken big cuts in salary three or four times in my career. I’m talking 10-20 thousand dollars a year." - HOW can you do that? How does one justify that kind of long-term damage to ever being in a position that you don't have to work? I understand the idea of it; to move into a technology or business with more room for growth, but if you don't have the time in your career to benefit from that growth, how can you do it? If you're in your late 40's, early 50's, with a mortgage and/or children, or that point where you can choose not to have to work anymore is dangerously close. One badly-timed layoff, one forced pay cut and you're stuck. Especially if you're in that age range; the last generation that ever had some hope for long-term employment with an employer, the generation that saw pension plans converted to 401Ks and didn't understand just how much you personally needed to take over funding your retirement yourself. You're dangerously close to having one badly timed layoff or large pay cut snatch the choice of not having to work away from you.
• flavor8 10y ago
  The problem is not age, it's being rusty. Far too many of the over 40 crowd I've interviewed appear to have stagnated. EDIT - to whoever downvoted me, grow a pair and reply instead of downvoting because you don't want to hear reality. I'm a gray beard myself. I've done hundreds of interviews in the past 5 years and know what I'm talking about in this respect...there are far too many programmers who get comfortable in a position and stagnate to the point of not being able to produce.
  • orionblastar 10y ago
    The problem is if you find a problem and be negative about it, you'll more likely be downvoted for it. Unless you give a solution to the problem and find a way to work it out. Like pair up a greybeard with a mentor who will help him/her learn the new technologies, there ought to be hackathons for greybeards or something.
  • sctb 10y ago
    The guidelines ask us not to complain about downvotes in the first place, but we certainly can't go off like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • flavor8 10y ago
      Perhaps you're being too sensitive. The OP is complaining that older engineers have trouble getting a job. I'm suggesting that rusty engineers have trouble, and age may not be a factor. That somebody didn't want to hear it and downvoted me as a result wasn't particularly constructive.
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• timemachiner 10y ago
  I'll probably be ~36 by the time I complete a PhD in CS. Should I be OK in terms of finding jobs at hip companies upon graduation (big 4, etc)? My areas of interest is in ML, algorithms but I'm completely OK with normal software development positions. Reason I'm older is I decided I had a passion for it in my late 20s / wanted to do research, but had to go back to school to take classes before enrolling into a PhD. Hope my age + PhD wouldn't hinder me for software development jobs?
  • AlexCoventry 10y ago
    My experience has been that if you've got the chops, you've got no worries at all. Also, fashion is fickle, but right now you'll have people beating down your door to hire you if you're skilled with ML and algorithms. I am in my 40s.
    • timemachiner 10y ago
      Thanks for your very encouraging words. You really brighten my day. I've always had an interest in theoretics/foundations and believe a strong mathematical backbone leads to better understanding of these fields. I simply couldn't get that working a normal job, so I know I made the right choice to pursue a PhD. Many, many people recommended against it (especially my friends who are pulling big salaries in industry), but for me it was always about the intellectual pursuit.
      • XiaomiFan 10y ago
        If you don't mind sharing, what school are you going to, and what is the area (the more details the better is good)of your research?
  • vostok 10y ago
    In my experience, age is measured from when you finished your education and not from when you were born.
    • 10y ago
• Icedcool 10y ago
  32yr old here. This is interesting to me, coming from times of 28kbps internet where the dude with a huge beard was a tech god. Reading this and reading the posts, I'm aware of what occurs to be a trade off in young/age, in that young can be cutting edge while old tends to have wisdom/smarter about approach/worldlyness. Seems shortsighted to think that young is better.
• mxuribe 10y ago
  I'm a 42 year old technologist who just got laid off last week, and very much dread age discrimination. Although I'm told that I look about 8 or 10 years younger than I look, it still scares me. And, funny enough I'm about as energetic - or very close to it - as I was when I was 22. Beyond all the great notes that the blog post's author wrote, I think the parts about "exude energy...it’s crucial to be spirited." really hit home with me. Especially now with my current situation, i appreciate this blog post!
• djedipus 10y ago
  I think it’s more about not appreciating experience enough as opposed to discriminating against age. I’m 31 with 13 years professional experience. I’ve worked as an employee, contractor and as a single person start-up. Last year I interviewed for ~10 jobs in SV and I was rejected for all of them. None of the jobs valued my experience enough to consider my asking salary to be worth it. I make ~$300K USD contracting and was willing to take a pay cut to ~$240K to work at a big company and for access to big problems. I found out, via a friend, that one of the jobs I missed out on was due to my asking salary. They ended up hiring a guy with much less experience for ~$120K for the position. A year later and the project failed due to lack of experience costing many millions of dollars. I wanted them to succeed and I know that I could have done it but I’m not going back to $120K - at $300K customers only let you work on important stuff, no busy work. This story gets repeated over and over. There is a culture problem that doesn’t value experience. It’s not my problem because I'll go to where my experienced is most valued; it’s SVs problem because it results in failed projects and wasted money.
  • saiya-jin 10y ago
    this is not specific to SV, or US for that matter. 10x developers don't get 10x salaries of they work for bigger companies that have sort of rigid pay structures for given positions. If you would be having same salary (apart from bonuses) as say some senior executive/CEO, well that won't fly, no matter of your added value or semi-magical skills.
  • saiya-jin 10y ago
    this is not specific to SV, or US for that matter. 10x developers don't get 10x salaries of they work for bigger companies that have sort of rigid pay structures for given positions. You have to work on your own ('in your own company') to have that in 99% of the cases, rest are tiny companies with heaps of cash (how many are those?). If you would be having same salary (apart from bonuses) as say some senior executive/CEO, well that won't fly, no matter of your added value or semi-magical skills. It doesn't matter how rational that might be.
• JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  I think the industry you choose matters. I have done work in the Medical and Transportation industries and the devs there seem to be older. I tend to gravitate towards development where the code simply has to work correctly. This means proven technologies are used as opposed to the new and shiny.
• karmajunkie 10y ago
  I'm always curious whether Zuckerberg stands behind that quote or if he looks back on it today as part of a youthful hubris he regrets today. I know if I look back on my early 20s I remember a lot of similar arrogance that I hope I've shed at least some of today.
• bluetwo 10y ago
  I read a study in the 90's comparing more experienced and less experiences multimedia programmers given identical tasks. In short, it concluded that the more experienced ones took longer to do the tasks, but did them to a higher level of quality. That has always rung true to me, and I see that happening today.
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• ldev 10y ago
  Umh... http://www.kettlerusa.com/?fullSite=&cartId=&division=kettler+usa http://www.kettlerusa.com/?fullSite=&cartId=&division=kettle... The design. The url. Clicked "add to card" - default JS alert popup. Then some HTML pop up showed up saying something about my IP being banned because of BOTNET? What? Now refreshing the page I get a timeout. This is literally the worst eshop I've seen in the past few years. I wouldn't hire a man who made this atrocity and sure as hell wouldn't like working with him.
• riprowan 10y ago
  48 yo here, started coding when I was 14, so that's 34 years of building things. Here's where I'm at. I look back at my career and I can tell you about great projects that I got to be part of, awards and plaudits that I won, big paybacks from projects that went well and literally saved the company. That's all nice to have war stories. But I can't point to any of it and say, "I made that" because - and here's the kicker - it's all gone. Software is ephemeral. One day your client does an upgrade, and then the thing that you spent years building and curating like a baby disappears. It isn't mothballed and put in the basement where visitors can walk by and see it. There's no photo of you standing by the thing that you can hang in the hallway and see every day. Your creation just completely vanishes without a trace. All those years I've also been a musician and recording engineer. I've made a few dozen records none of which amount to anything that anyone else would care about. And all told I'm sure that I earned more money in one year of my IT work than my entire music career. However, here is a collection of my work that I can point to and say, "I made that." It's a creation that I can reflect on years and years down the road. I take much more satisfaction in my musical creations than from my software creations, even though I was much more famous and valued as a software architect.
  • Lambdanaut 10y ago
    Dude. Open source software.
    • xeromal 10y ago
      That can indeed be part of a legacy, but many companies are not comfortable with open sourcing their proprietary software. A lot of exciting work happens in that space as well.
    • myth_drannon 10y ago
      Even jQuery which is one of the most famous open source projects will be forgotten in 10 years or even less.
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• ThomaszKrueger 10y ago
  54 yo here. Although I have a bachelor's in EE, I have been developing software since the beginning of my career. I am not necessarily nostalgic but I sometimes ponder about the real time assembly I wrote for a Telex switch, or the CHILL code I wrote for a telephony switch. All of it pretty much gone, not being produced anymore. Or the Windows 2 GUI written in C, the multi tier apps in VB6 and Powerbuilder. They are gone too. However having participated in these projects give me a lot of perspective, and I notice that nowadays I tend to write less and be more thoughtful. I see others here with similar experiences. Now as for getting old, there is one thing I recommend: get old but never allow yourself to look decrepit. Be always clean, well dressed. Don't complain about your back hurting, or show off the medicines you take. No one likes to be around sickness or weakness, so pretend to be healthy and strong (or try to be, even better). I aim for this reaction - "that guy looks good for his age". This usually helps with ageism, at least in my experience.
• losteverything 10y ago
  "Uncle, What do you think." It's tech.this age thing. Forced out of tech by invention/adoption of cell phone age is worshiped in my jobs today. Like Indians calling seniors "uncle" to show respect. Age is my shield, my platform, my integrity and my perceived knowledge. It's tech
• sh_tinh_hair 10y ago
  Yes,there is ageism but there is also some remnant of meritocracy in IT development and operations (though both the evolution of devops and enterprise agile + ci/cd tool culture will eventually kill that imo). The only way to remain in the IT game at the age of 45+ is to learn constantly and use your aggregate experience to determine what is good and bad and necessary. When most of the 20+ year IT veterans are in set piece environments they enabled or abetted...technological advent and invention is the enemy. All the musings on how great a person you really are contra|outside tech are band-aids on reality. If you make your living in technology: be better than the other guy or be useful to them. That's all there is. Otherwise your days are numbered. We can ramble on about salad days and personal achievement but the younger guys snicker and say 'listen to this fossil' and do their thing. As you would have in their shoes.
• mixmastamyk 10y ago
  It's good advice to keep up to date and in shape, and always have, but unfortunately even that is often not sufficient. Lately potential employers have been expressing surprise that I never went into management. I enjoy developing so was never interested---until I encountered a few truly incompetent bosses in the last few years and rethought my position. So I've read all the classics, such as MMM, Peopleware, etc... but found it is too late to be hired as a manager when you've never managed anyone.
• orionblastar 10y ago
  Getting older in tech, most of the stuff I learned is obsolete: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/184668/readers_throw_other_technologies_pyre/ http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/184668/readers_throw... I'm a legacy software, retrocomputing expert now I guess? Most of the old commercial software has released free and open source versions of itself or someone wrote a FOSS clone or whatever to do the same things. I am 48 years old now, getting close to 50 in two years, and can apply for AARP and get better health insurance through them. I ended up on disability, but been trying to learn new things and keep up with trends and patterns in the industry.
• markmckelvy 10y ago
  As someone who transitioned to tech from finance, I can tell you that this trend (preferring young workers to old) is not limited to tech. The fact is companies in general are going to prefer younger people for labor. Younger people are cheaper, tend to have fewer obligations outside of work, and are willing to put up with more on the job. As someone getting older and more experienced, you can take this one of two ways. (i) You can try to "learn new tech" and "stay up to date" in an effort to compete with these younger workers or (ii) you can actually listen to the market. And what is the market telling you? Yes, younger workers are more valuable for the aforementioned reasons. But it's also telling you that by the time you are 40 or 50, you should be implementing your own ideas, not someone else's.
• markmckelvy 10y ago
  As someone who transitioned to tech from finance, I can tell you that this trend (preferring young workers to old) is not limited to tech. The fact is companies in general are going to prefer younger people for labor. Younger people are cheaper, tend to have fewer obligations outside of work, and are willing to put up with more on the job. As someone getting older and more experienced, you can take this one of two ways. (i) You can try to "learn new tech" and "stay up to date" in an effort to compete with these younger workers or (ii) you can actually listen to the market. And what is the market telling you? Yes, younger workers are more valuable for the aforementioned reasons. But it's also telling you that by the time you are 40 or 50, you should be implementing your own ideas, not someone else's.
• lliamander 10y ago
  FWIW, I'm still on the earlier side of my career (though certainly not just starting out) and the direction of my learning has been away from fads and towards older, more established technologies. Erlang, Unix, etc. have all been around for many years, and while they do receive active development are still pretty well established and based off of sound engineering principles. I also try and get beyond the hype. REST/HATEOS is cool? What about the things it replaced? What are the edge cases? What was the original design intent? I also read from/talk with older engineers (many of whom I have the privilege to work with) to understand what things were like during previous fads. Ultimately, the problem is about staying marketable while giving fair due to our life outside of work (I prefer the term "unpaid responsibilities" to "leisure time"). I don't claim to have solved this problem, and I still have concerns about what the future holds, but my instinct is that staying on top of fads is a trap that I want to avoid.
• JakeAl 10y ago
  My advice to all is to keep an eye on the ball and understand where you are and where you expect to be every five years and have a plan. If you plan on being just an expert or individual contributor when you are 40 or 50, then expect to have to compete with those in their 20s. Not too easy when a 25 year old has fewer responsibilities at home (like teen-aged children) and can spend their spare time learning the latest fringe technology to make it more mainstream. Also not too easy to fit in culturally unless you have the developmental maturity of a 25 year old. (See my note about The Stakes at the bottom.) Adults with no responsibilities can drop acid and go to Burning Man without consequences. Responsible adults cannot without the risks they take impacting others. (in response to a poster's comment) That's what separates the men from the boys, to coin a phrase. No offense to ladies or others. What I am not hearing in all of these discussions is talk of developing leadership fundamentals. They apply not just to one's job/career but to the individual and all aspects of their life. There's 5 levels of leadership: I. Individual Contributor Self-leadership. Responsible for producing work and getting along with others. II. Expert/Manager Expert Best at what they do. Work on more complex projects. Display a special talent. Design a plan for new products. Further develop their craft. Innovate on projects. Demonstrate readiness to tackle more challenges Manager Managers are tactical, focus on the short term. Lead individual contributors and experts. Develop staff. Focus is on improving upon weaknesses necessary to succeed at being more than an individual contributor or expert. Navigate organizational structures. Maximize talent of team. Think strategically about how team contributes to organization goals. III. Leader of Leaders Leaders are strategic, focus on the long term. Focus shifts to training level IIs on their managing weaknesses. Training and developing (mentoring) experts and managers. Role is critical to the success of an organization. Poor managers have a huge and damaging impact because they leave high turnover and disengagement as well as low morale and productivity in their wake. Refined communication skills up and down the organization, acting as a reliable conduit for information to flow up and down. Develop business acumen. Develop organizational strategy. Develop new leadership opportunities. IV. Leader of Functions/Divisions Maximize the contributions of all groups within the function/division. Strategize the development of the function for the future of the whole organization. Builds a competitive strategy. Ensures long term growth. Mentor and engage direct reports. Build key relationships outside organization. Deepen their intimate knowledge of other functions. Attune to industry and market shaping factors (sector acumen). V. Leader of Organization Manages all functional leaders. Sets the vision and strategy. Ensures future success. CEO Build a team of differing strengths. Empower functional/division leaders. Create a motivating culture. Share the vision of the future. Position to be at front of trends. As you move up 3 things change: - Scope of your view - The Stakes/impact of your decisions - Proportion of management and leadership What skills do you need to maximize your potential? What skills do you need to develop for the next level? Leveling up is growing up. If you don't like or want to be a manager or leader, figure out why not, starting with understanding your emotions and managing your stress and anxiety. This is usually what stifles one's development.
• vorg 10y ago
  > between 2008 and 2010, I was training Java developers at Circuit City on Groovy and Grails. These folk were mostly late 20s and early 30s, and they were just fine sticking with good-old, write-everything-yourself, don’t-bother-with-frameworks, Java. You're assuming Groovy and Grails are better to code in than Java and something like Spring. Grails began as a thin wrapper around Spring. Its business purpose was to chisel market share away from vanilla Spring so its backing company (G2One) would get bought by SpringSource, which eventually happened in late 2008.
• zoom6628 10y ago
  Im closing in on 54. Having an absolute blast in tech now because i bring 4 decades of coding, life, and a number of different jobs to what i do today. And I devote every morning first thing to reading and learning something new - python, azure databases, IPC in C#, C and SBCs, ZigBee. There is so much out there at a price point that makes learning painless and fun. In life i stay healthy as a vegetarian and practice yoga. Look after the body and the mind will largely follow suit but feed the mind with challenges daily and you will notice that you get better over time at a rate the javascript kiddies cant comprehend. Maybe this ageism is jealousy from the kiddies because you think leagues ahead of them, and also jealousy from old managers who cant do anything productive now that their body of knowledge is no longer useful? Food for thought, for someone. I wont be wasting any time to think about it.
• Brian_Bassett 10y ago
  Fantastic article. I am lucky enough to work with Don and he is amazing. Probably one of the most simultaneously brave and curious people I've ever met.
• dwarman 10y ago
  Existence proof. Can avoid ageism. But likely only via competence, creativity, and rep. I've been lucky, I guess.I would add to continuous learning: continuous invention. New stuff in the world, not just new to you. In my case, almost entirely unplanned drunkard's walk of a career that I don't recommend anyone emulates, but it sure has been a wild ride. I'm 69 last month. Started 50 years ago inside discrete component technology mainframes. Done hardware logic design, firewire and Medialink FPGA, datacomms Hard Real Time embedded firmware, synchronous and asynchronous comms protocol design, real time networking design in the Music world (before anybody thought it possible, we showed em!:), created cool 4G visual programming languages, lately Audio DSP inside gaming consoles. Moral: Keep inventing, keeps you young, moreso than just leaning new stuff you won't be using until it is obsolete. A wide T LI profile doesn't hurt either. But that is not an after-thought, it's a side effect of your lifetime of energy and obsessions. Vaguely thinking of retiring when I'm 72 or so. Want to make more music, DSP takes too much time.