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Why Ageism Never Gets Old

• grabcocque 9y ago
  Silicon Valley, in particular, has always seemed to me to fetishise the pseudo-legendary brilliant young school leaver overachiever superstar. Anyone who hasn't burned out by the time they hit 40 is clearly either lazy or an underachiever, and therefore not the sort of person we would want to hire. The Valley's most cherished myths are amongst some of the most societally detrimental. (Disclosure: I'm 40 and work in tech. This sort of thing gives me waking nightmares.)
• jeremyjh 9y ago
  > In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three. This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Yes there are new languages and frameworks we have to learn, but if we apply any effort (and we've stayed current over the years) that happens really quickly because we're just integrating all the knowledge we already have around a new set of features.
  • BatFastard 9y ago
    60 year old dev here. I have been living on the cutting edge of tech for 30 years, and I have many scars to prove it. New is usually not better if you actually want scalable, maintainable, and monetizable results. I disagree that many area's of my knowledge has a half life. My deep understanding of network protocols hasn't aged. My deep understanding of SQL and NoSQL databases hasn't aged. The principles of distributed systems haven't changed, but they have been given more tools. When, where, and how to optimize hasn't changed. Debugging, naming, and design whether it be functional or OO hasn't changed. Sure there are new tools and methods, but I say the fundamentals are the same.
    • FussyZeus 9y ago
      More to the point, in my experience training more than a few college grad devs, what I look for in hiring isn't any particular language or technology, I look for someone who knows how to think like a programmer. That's something incredibly hard to teach, but if you can find someone who already has the thought processes in place for how to turn intent into code, that's 90% of your training done right there, and the remainder can happen largely with googling, stack overflow, and good code review from more experienced devs. I'm not knocking coding bootcamps or colleges, I've had hires from both. I'm moreso saying that the idea that a programmers skills are isolated to the code they currently can write is a little shortsighted.
    • SmellTheGlove 9y ago
      > Sure there are new tools and methods, but I say the fundamentals are the same. Absolutely. Folks need to get their heads around software engineering as a practiced discipline. Your education is about the fundamentals of how you think and approach, even if the tools themselves change over time.
    • ataturk 9y ago
      Oh man, how do you even do it? I'm 44 and looking for the door! My motivation to put up with the same bs year in and year out isn't there anymore. The pay isn't worth it, either--if I could find some "no load" type role at half my pay I'd be gone tomorrow. It doesn't help my outlook that sites like this limit me to only 2 comments per hour because of the way I cast this whole industry in such an unfavorable light. Dog eat dog.
    • pizza234 9y ago
      This is a sensible perspective, but the job market is actually the opposite of sensible (in a way). Paradoxically, the (again, sensible) attitude that fundamentals are the same with a different coating, will distantiate one from chasing the latest fads... which is actually what the [majority of the] market looks for.
      • user5994461 9y ago
        The job market for database and networking skills is pretty different than the market for web apps. There are places where you get a job because you want to rewrite everything, and places where you get a job because you didn't suggest to rewrite anything.
  • Swinx43 9y ago
    This mythology leads directly to horribly created software that will either ensure many terrible security breaches in the future or the continued proliferation of "magic" throughout a product. One of the issues is using the word "engineer" for any of the brogrammer types. an engineer in any other proper engineering discipline does not become worthless with age, their experience actually counts for something. Somehow we have confused people who stitch together software from pieces of "magic" that they do not understand with engineers. The work I did in my 20s cannot even begin to compare with what I am doing today in my 30s. Those years of experience really makes a massive difference. It is time people are honest about ageism and simply states the real reason they prefer fresh grad or 20-something brogrammers. It normally boils down to those people being willing to work longer hours for less money. At least in most of the cases of ageism that I have seen.
    • Harvey-Specter 9y ago
      > One of the issues is using the word "engineer" for any of the brogrammer types In Canada the term 'engineer' is regulated at the provincial level, and a person can be prosecuted for labeling themselves as an engineer if they are not registered and licensed with their province's engineering association. For example in Ontario in order to join Professional Engineers Ontario and call yourself an engineer you must meet strict academic and work experience requirements[1], pass an ethics exam, and pay a yearly membership fee. Everyone who graduates from an accredited engineering program in Canada has to take an ethics course and has these rules drilled into their heads. I know I did. But then I graduated and half the people I run in to at hackathons and conferences did a two week bootcamp and have "Software Engineer" in their job title, and proudly introduce themselves as such. I call myself a software developer because although I have a software engineering degree I'm not registered with the PEO and it wouldn't benefit me if I was. [1] http://www.peo.on.ca/index.php?ci_id=1848&la_id=1 http://www.peo.on.ca/index.php?ci_id=1848&la_id=1
      • vonmoltke 9y ago
        Canada, along with a couple other nations I do not recall, is an outlier in this respect. As an American EE degree holder who has been employed as an EE in the past, I think the attachment of "engineer" to shitloads of titles just to fluff them up is ridiculous. However, I think the Canadian position is equally ridiculous in the opposite direction.
  • Nursie 9y ago
    I've worked in C, embedded and server-side, for about 15 years of my 17 year career. Companies I've worked with recently are having trouble finding C-capable developers, particularly C developers who have the first clue about 'modern' developments like CI and CD, or git. C is a language invented in the 70s. If you kept up with thread APIS when they became usable in the late 90s you could quite easily have had a 40 year career in one tech stack, and be looking at a bit of consultancy by now (if you haven't moved in to management or other areas). So even without keeping current on frameworks and languages, the idea that knowledge becomes obsolete in our field after just a few years is wrong. You do need to keep an eye on wider trends and newer tools, but still. That said, there is still ageism in this arena. And I'm breaking out because, really, there are better things to be doing in 2017 :)
    • BatFastard 9y ago
      Such as?
      • Nursie 9y ago
        Honestly? I've had more fun coding Java (8) and Python lately, for server-side stuff. I'd also like to get paid to do some Rust and/or Go at some point. It's all subjective, of course, and partly I'm just bored of doing the same thing for so long.
    • ryandrake 9y ago
      > Companies I've worked with recently are having trouble finding C-capable developers, particularly C developers who have the first clue about 'modern' developments like CI and CD, or git. As is always the case when a claim is made about "companies having trouble finding developers" of some sort: Are they actually having trouble finding developers despite offering top-of-market salary, remote work and gold plated benefits? Or are they the usual "we think we offer above average salary with great benefits!" companies who get no interest from developers and conclude there's a shortage?
      • Nursie 9y ago
  • icebraining 9y ago
    Even languages and frameworks don't change that much outside of certain niches. Django and Rails have been around for over a decade. Go, a "new" language, is eight years old. I've been working for 5.5 years with a Python-based platform called Odoo (purely by chance of employment) and I don't see it going away any time soon. A colleague of mine also recently got a very good offer for helping maintain a codebase in Informix-4GL.
    • Clubber 9y ago
      C# has been around since 2002. 15 years. It's changed quite a bit since it's introduction. C# is just a wee tot compared to C.
    • eeZah7Ux 9y ago
      This is besides the point. Smart companies hire engineers that understands principles and concepts. Hipster companies hire by buzzword of the year. Stay away from those.
    • ams6110 9y ago
      I think you have that backwards. It's inside certain niches that people are still building stuff in Rails and other decade(s)-old frameworks. Now it's node.js and react, to name a couple of examples. By 2020 something else will probably be the hotness. By 2025, those frameworks will still be around, running established systems, but won't be very interesting to any new developers.
      • icebraining 9y ago
        Even Node.js will be nine years old next May, and it's just a runtime for a 22 year old language.
  • henrik_w 9y ago
    I think the "half life of knowledge" misses so many parts of what makes a SW developer good. Sure, there are new languages, libraries and frameworks to learn and keep up with. But the fundamental parts of programming don't change - it is still sequences, loops, if-statements. Also, quite a large part is independent of the language - how to break the problem down into parts, thinking through the scenarios that can occur, good naming, consistency in the small and large. Not to mention everything else that isn't programming per se - domain knowledge, talking to people, negotiating, in which order to develop things... More details on what I think makes a good dev: https://henrikwarne.com/2014/06/30/what-makes-a-good-programmer/ https://henrikwarne.com/2014/06/30/what-makes-a-good-program... and about programmer knowledge: https://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/ https://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/
    • fjsolwmv 9y ago
      Remember when we were all becoming functional programmers and we put loops and if-statements behind us?
  • madengr 9y ago
    Yep, that engineering half-life is so much bullshit. Electromagnetics hasn’t changed much in 120 years. Maybe a new transistor topology comes out every 20 years.
  • hawkice 9y ago
    Also draws a poor comparison between e.g. a 20-years-experience coder who was writing C++ until a year ago and someone fresh out of college whose been writing node.js nonstop in the three years since getting their degree. There may be one you have more fun playing ping pong with, but (and I say this as a youngster myself) the professional choice is the one where the value for dollar is best and the code is something you won't dread maintaining.
    • zbentley 9y ago
      > the professional choice is the one where the value for dollar is best and the code is something you won't dread maintaining. That's very true, but might not necessarily favor either of your two examples. The choice between "20yr C++ veteran and 3yr node coder" is not always obvious or clear-cut, and the quality differential does not, in my experience, clearly favor either side based on that information alone. I've seen people who left school and coded like crazy for a few years on flaky and fad-oriented stacks--because that was where they could get employed in a hurry with zero experience and a lot of debt. I've seen those people emerge from those environments with an incredibly solid understanding of software design principles and how to do things professionally while balancing time/money/legacy/human/etc. concerns. They learned those lessons not by refining their craft over 20 years of working on an old stack, but in just over 2 years of working on a stack where every day they had to ask their "rockstar" colleagues questions like "Why is this simple thing so hard to do? Why do you keep writing the same kind of bug over and over? What alternatives exist to these tools/strategies?" and not getting good answers. These folks didn't code much outside of work, but they did read about other tools/practices in their free time. By the time they left, they learned excellent techniques (and professionalism) out of acute, concentrated discomfort at what they were made to work on, even while everyone else was taking shots of the piss and calling it brandy. (And yes, I've seen people in that same situation internalize the cancer and become "X. It's the future!" zombies.) And I've seen 20+ year veterans who were extremely proficient in a very few (one or two) methodologies, who tried to apply those methodologies to everything--even use cases where it didn't make sense, confused their colleagues, and directly induced bugs ("Making a chat app prototype/mockup for management next week? JavaScript doesn't have CORBA support? Let's write low-level TCP code in Node so we can emulate CORBA using a library I'll write for you. Thrift is too new, I don't care if it's already supported; WebSockets are the 'wrong model'; you need a proper brokered architecture for this . . . proof of concept . . . wait, why is my TCP reading code corrupting data because of off-by-one errors in my read loop?"). I've seen very senior programmers whose "breadth" of tools understanding consisted of re-implementing very specific design patterns from e.g. Java or C in a dozen languages, rather than learning to use the tool that was correct for the job. I've seen extremely experienced people whose expert understanding of a few things concealed intense insecurity about their knowledge in other areas, and who defensively tried to fit many square pegs in round holes--anything from "we need to use this email collaboration tool I'm super good at that everyone (happily using $other_solution already) has never heard of", to crazy implementations of object/factory patterns in functional languages, to bizarre architecture review and management practices. These people were all competent, and very experienced. They were also scared--not of learning new things, but of being inferior in any single way to their colleagues, even after decades coding. That's a shame, since those folks had the most to teach others, if they'd taken time to have a sense of perspective and/or face their fears. (And yes, I've seen people with that experience be refined into amazing teachers and stellar coders over the years--people who could get deep understanding of a totally unfamiliar tool in a week, be teaching others to use it in two, and be teaching others when not to use it in three.) TL;DR the choice is not that simple. But I haven't seen a clear correlation either way between time-spent-in-industry alone and professionalism or output quality. Every industry has old deadweight and young cocky rockstar-wannabes.
  • Spooky23 9y ago
    The people pushing this viewpoint are self-interested Vinod Khosla’s quote is missing a punchline — “Young people are just smarter” [except for me]. The only timeless ageism thing is the willingness of old men to schnooker young turks into things, whether that is getting blown up on a battlefield for king and country or getting exploited to make guys like Khosla money.
    • throwanem 9y ago
      You'd think someone who writes for such an august publication would be a little less of a chump, wouldn't you? (ETA: Unless you're familiar with the output of such publications, I suppose, at least enough so to validate the "Gell-Mann amnesia" concept firsthand. I can't say they serve no useful purpose - one doesn't care to contemplate packs of feral journalists roaming the streets, shaking down sundry passersby for tweed and elbow patches - but really, one is well advised not to take them overly seriously.)
      • matt4077 9y ago
        One would expect people to have some familiarity with the concept of "half-life" before accusing others of being chumps.
        • throwanem 9y ago
          I do, but I have to confess I'm not all that much seeing the degree of applicability that would seem commensurate with such a trenchant response.
  • jonahx 9y ago
    > This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Not only is the claim "now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three" an unhelpful mythology, it's laughably incorrect to the point that I can't imagine anyone knowledgable espousing the view with a straight face. It stems from, on the one hand, "software as popular culture," which is a great way to choose bad tools, and, on the other, the conflation of surface knowledge (the syntax of a new language, the API of a new hot library, etc) with deep knowledge (design principles that transcend language, the ability to evaluate a library based on those principle, etc).
    • ams6110 9y ago
      > Not only is the claim "now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three" an unhelpful mythology, it's laughably incorrect It's narrowly referring to the "framework fads" that do seem to sweep through our profession on about a three-to-five-year cycle.
      • jerf 9y ago
        Yes, but when Framework B goes sweeping through the world, Framework A doesn't actually go anywhere. People keep working with it. If software engineers actually burned down all the old code every three years and literally everybody had to learn this new thing in order to do anything at all, this claim would make sense. But it's all additive. Even as we here on HN are shrieking and hooting about Framework B and the way it shines a unique light on the world of programming and how no thinking person could possibly resist its charms, thousands of people keep chugging along on Framework A for years afterwards. In no small part because they've heard it before, and remember that somewhere around the 2 year mark of Framework B's run you can expect well-written and cogent articles about "Framework B Considered Harmful", "Framework B Is Permanently Ruining An Entire Generation Of Programmers", "Why I'm Switching Back To Framework A And Regret Ever Listening To Hacker News" and "Oh Shit, I Bet My Business On Framework B And All My Developers Have Turned Into Feral Wombats And They're Biting Me Ow Ow Ow".
        • 9y ago
  • emidln 9y ago
    I'm 31 and I've been hacking software professionally for 15 years. I've debugged issues in the last month that I couldn't have done 5 years ago with 10 years experience, let alone when I was 21. As I grow more experienced my responsibilities increase in both breadth and depth.
  • markshead 9y ago
    > and we've stayed current over the years I think this may be the key.
  • notyourday 9y ago
    If you are 40 and you are still thinking about your skills in terms of "i can code", then I have very bad news for you. There are hundreds of people who can code just as good as you who are younger which means that they are going to replace you because you are just not that good or that irreplaceable. Is there a way out? Sure: 1. If you actually are that good of a software engineer, start a My Code As Service company - it is the "402 PAY_ME_A_TRUCKLOAD_OF_MONEY" response. There are gobs of companies out there that pay gobs of money for rock star performers because there are just not that many of them. 2. Create - or buy - your own lifestyle business. You will never make millions of dollars but you should be comfortable. 3. Stop pretending that coding matters. Start managing those that produce code. Being a technically competent manager is a great way not to get fired.
    • mgbmtl 9y ago
      Yep, but perhaps to phrase differently: once you get to a certain point, you build a reputation and business network. People usually want to work with you because they know what to expect (in terms of professionalism, code quality, etc). There's also value in that, whether as a programmer, manager and/or consultant.
    • davidgay 9y ago
      If you are 60 and just won the Nobel prize and you are still thinking about your skills in terms of "I can win a Nobel prize", then I have very bad news for you. There are hundreds of people (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/age.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/age.html) who can win Nobel prizes at ages younger than you. Or: this argument is meaningless because it's assuming more supply (of someone like you) than jobs (and perfectly informed employers for that matter).
      • notyourday 9y ago
        I'm not seeing those winning Nobel prizes complaining about them being fired from a job because they are old.
    • blub 9y ago
      Coding does matter, but most companies can only extract a limited amount of value from code, due to various dysfunctionalities in how they operate. Being a good coder in such a company could be problematic, because they won't be able to recognize ability or benefit from the difference in skill to an average coder. These companies will treat programmers poorly, will try to save costs, outsource, etc. I don't get why you claim that younger people will replace 40-somethings. It's not like the older devs will break outside of the warranty period.
  • legohead 9y ago
    I wish companies saw it this way. My company is downsizing and I've been interviewing like crazy. 5 years ago when my tech stack was hot I had to fight off companies, now I feel they are just humoring me. I make it clear in my cover letter that I am capable of picking up new technologies and languages with ease, which if you look at my resume and my personal projects on github is pretty plain and obvious -- I have 15+ years of professional experience in multiple languages and using all kinds of technologies. But they look at my current job/tech stack and say "hey, you don't match ours. sorry". I even applied to dozens of jobs in the HN Who's Hiring, got a couple phone interviews, and nothing past that. I finally got a job at a place that was using my stack and wants to convert it to something more modern. This has definitely been a strange interviewing experience for me. I'm nearing 40 and have to wonder if ageism is becoming an issue for me.
    • dep_b 9y ago
      Lie on LinkedIn about knowing Python after doing one simple Django project 1). Watch the desperate recruiters fill your inbox. 1) actually I didn't lie, people I knew just kept +1'ing Python on my LinkedIn profile because I talked about it sometimes while I was doing a one off project in Python
    • lovich 9y ago
      I'm under 30 and I've had the same experience. Every place I've applied to felt like they had a checklist of hundreds of items and a no on any of them was an instant disqualification. Even at places where I had a friend recommend me and could find out their reason for not giving me an offer, there was no consistent reason and it was usually just one person saying no so their team sat for 6-12 months looking for people. It's like every business is now completely terrified by a wrong hire and will only take the "perfect candidate" but at market rate
      • bitcrusher 9y ago
        This has been my experience as well; It's as if every company is looking for a unicorn programmer... when their domain isn't any more or less unique than any other domain. One of the "interesting" side effects is that it seems like interviewers are starting with the assumption that the person interviewing is an idiot who knows nothing and then works from there. So any slight misstep or misremembering of something puts you the fail box immediately. My theory is that part of this is the broken culture of interviewing that we have as an industry. This "tricky CS puzzle" crap that originated at GOOG and MSFT is so prevalent that it's nigh impossible to actually succeed. More than once, it's obvious to me that the people DOING the interviewing couldn't pass their own interview...
  • matt4077 9y ago
    I belief that sentence to be broadly correct. First and foremost, it is making a comparison more than an absolute statement of fact. And (without having first-hand experience), it doesn't seem obviously wrong to say that someone who left for an extended vacation in 2014 would have more surprises waiting for him today than a mechanical engineer who did the same from 1926 to 1929. Note also that the statement is also talking about the "half life", indicating an understanding that there is a part to expertise that is less susceptible to aging. One can criticize that the concept of half life is misapplied, because the underlying process isn't stochastic, i. e. that half of knowledge will not again half in another half life. But then one would be splitting half hairs, which of course is one of the engineering skills that never go out of date.
    • throwanem 9y ago
      It wouldn't be wrong to say that I took an extended vacation from early 2015 to mid-2017, if not from the industry entire, then certainly from modern fullstack dev - spent the time working with best-of-2008 because reasons. Coming back, there weren't all that many surprises. I went from first exposure to ES6, Babel, Webpack, protobuf RPC, and Kubernetes, to shipping, inside a month. And I am not in any way special. So I hope I might be excused for feeling I have some basis for the statement that I think you're vastly overestimating the scale of the issue here.
  • breakyerself 9y ago
    Kids playing with building blocks that adults made trying to find a configuration that strikes pay dirt. If everyone over 35 in the tech industry disappeared the world would come unglued fast.
  • kafkaesq 9y ago
    This sort of mythology is NOT helping. Unfortunately it's partially valid. Job ads in particular are (presumably for a want of some other way to whittle down the pile of incoming resumes) considerably biased towards frameworks and gizmos that have been around 3 years or less. Yes there are new languages and frameworks we have to learn, but if we apply any effort ... You'd think a lot of these places assuming we're all utterly incapable of "learning", they way they phrase some of these requirement lists.
• amelius 9y ago
  I always love to hear about cultures where old people are the most respected of a society. I think such cultures are happier, because they ensure that the future looks bright, no matter how old someone is. But ... such cultures might be in conflict with the information society we have built.
  • zaarn 9y ago
    Not really. Ageism seems largely concentrated on the Silicon-Valley style society. As far as I am concerned, ageism does not exist at my workplace. Old engineers, even software engineers are looked for because they bring possibly valueable experience. The simple truth is that ageism is a result of not valuing the lessons of an experienced engineer because they're not up-to-date enough.
    • geomark 9y ago
      "Ageism seems largely concentrated on the Silicon-Valley style society." I saw ageism many years ago at a big aerospace firm in the L.A. area. It was understood and even outspoken that young engineers would get the call to work extra hours and weekends if needed, as well as the occasional graveyard shift when a unit was in thermovac testing. Older engineers were not usually called upon become they had "paid their dues" as young engineers. Colleagues at other big aerospace firms said is was pretty much the same for them. Ageism for sure, in hardware development, and not in Silicon Valley.
      • zaarn 9y ago
        And I'm sure the older engineers will be more likely to be called upon when the situation demands experience, no? I fail to see the harm in "discriminating" a bit against the younger engineers by having them collect more experience.
        • geomark 9y ago
          Having done my share of babysitting units through thermovac I can say with some authority that the main experience is in personally observing the effects of sleep deprivation and mind-numbing boredom.
• blahman2 9y ago
  How about y'all stop complaining about everything
  • sctb 9y ago
    Would you please stop posting like this, read the guidelines, and then comment civilly and substantively? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • blahman2 9y ago
      It was a substantive comment,and I agree I could have been nicer. The negative emotional overtone was a part of the message
• christofosho 9y ago
  I really hope that the ageist title was on purpose.
• barrkel 9y ago
  As the bulge in older people progresses and ageism becomes worse in an irrational way, it may make sense for older people to come together and form companies of their own, focused on selling to older people, who, of course, have the wealth (if not always the income).
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    You bring up a good point: Despite older people having all of the wealth in the world (and likely a great deal of the income), few startups seem to be courting them as customers. Everyone's target end-user seems to be that mythical 15-25 year old middle class Ideal Consumer.
    • barrkel 9y ago
      I'm less certain older people have such a big chunk of income (from labour, at least). A lot of wealth is tied up in real estate and pensions. Not everybody climbs all the way up the pyramid to make the big bucks; but people do accumulate assets.
    • eicossa 9y ago
      Could it be because older people are also going to be much more unwilling to try something new ? Noophilia seems to be a feature of youth.
      • CaptSpify 9y ago
        I don't have any numbers on this and would welcome any, but it seems true. How many young people are willing to sign up for $how_new_website_of_the_week vs older people? My personal experience is that older people realize that the website will likely disappear within the next 2-3 years, so they ignore it until it actually catches on. Younger people seem willing to sign up for anything new. How many young vs old people used myspace or facebook when they first came out? How many young vs old people use instagram, whatsapp, etc ? Once again, I have no numbers, but I'm guessing it's heavily skewed towards younger people.
• YeeHawGeddyUp 9y ago
  Well, I am 37 and in my Junior year of a Computer Science degree. I'm not gonna lie, this freaks me out a bit. I do live on the east coast though, hopefully that will help some.
  • throwanem 9y ago
    So do I, and I haven't fallen foul of it yet.
  • zafka 9y ago
    I graduated at 36 ( 21 years ago) Admittedly, I very wisely picked the best time in history to pick my major(Computer Engineering, and that was because there was no local school offering chem Eng. and I saw a physics student playing with fractals and thought, "wow that's cool") Of course, I am pretty sure that kind of mind set is why I do ok, I have always been fascinated with just about everything which makes learning fun.
  • dep_b 9y ago
    Good move, LinkedIn doesn't show your age but does show the year you graduated. I have a customer where my bosses are 20somethings that were a bit surprised when they met me IRL and saw a guy late in his 30's walking in. Graduating in 2012 really helped I guess. I'm thinking about getting a master sometimes. Graduating in 2012 makes you look like you're an old person in ten years doesn't it?
  • acuozzo 9y ago
    I'm not kidding here… If you're eligible for a clearance, move to MD or VA and work for a DoD contracting company. I'm 29, but most of the people I work with are 40-60+. Ageism simply doesn't exist here and the salaries (6+ figures for new grads) and benefits are excellent.
    • logfromblammo 9y ago
      If you don't want to live in the DC Metro, you can also move to any city adjacent to a major military base. Huntsville, NW Florida, San Diego, Clarksville, Waukegan, Ft. Worth, etc. Salaries are lower, but traffic is better.
• tyingq 9y ago
  A good way to counter this is to become an expert in some combination of "something old + something (somewhat) new". Like knowing bog standard java well, but also knowing how to deploy/use it in AWS well. Or being a C expert that also understands git in a deep way.
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    Or just pick a good technology going forward. Experts in C and Java are still in demand. There's no urgent need to branch out from those core competencies (well, C devs should probably have some C++ skills too). Old+New is an interesting and likely beneficial career plan, though.
    • maxxxxx 9y ago
      "pick a good technology going forward" That's hard to pull off though. Who knows which technology will go out of fashion in a few years? It may become fashionable again a few years later but int he meantime you will have a hard time.
      • humanrebar 9y ago
        > Who knows which technology will go out of fashion in a few years? Tech that is in heavy use and has been in heavy use for a decade is much more likely to be around in two years than tech that was invented two years ago. If the older tech were to decline, rarely would it drop off the face of the earth quickly. It would more gradually shrink in market share.
        • maxxxxx 9y ago
          I used to be a hardcore C++ guy., Going was really good until around 2004 or so and then suddenly nobody wanted C++ anymore. That lasted a few years and suddenly demand picked up again. It's definitely a gamble with factors that are outside one's control
    • stevenwoo 9y ago
• jasode 9y ago
  First, ageism is not just a SV phenomenon. For example, see the very young White House aides in Clinton, Bush, & Obama administrations.[1] Second, the tech companies that have a reputation for favoring 20-somethings will still hire older workers for certain positions. - Even though Mark Zuckerberg said, "younger people are just smarter", he hired an "old" person like Sheryl Sandberg to be COO at age ~38. - Bill Gates was ~32 when he hired Dave Cutler age ~46 to architect and develop Windows NT. - Google hired Eric Schmidt ~46, Guido van Rossum (Python) ~age 49, and Peter Norvig in his 40s - Netflix hired Adrian Cockcroft in his mid-40s The SV companies will exhibit "reverse-age-discrimination" for executive management and architect positions. Why? (And the obvious answer is "experience".) But then, why is "experience" not valued for the non-architect programming positions? We actually do discriminate against young people for many roles. I leave readers to sort out why we value experience selectively for different situations. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15350873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15350873
  • slavik81 9y ago
    > First, ageism is not just a SV phenomenon. For example, see the White House aides in Clinton, Bush, & Obama administrations. And the office of the president itself. The minimum age is 35.
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    It's worth noting that the median age of an American is 41. That we're discussing people in that age range as counterexamples kind of proves the point.
    • jasode 9y ago
      >median age of an American is 41. That we're discussing people in that age range as counterexamples kind of proves the point. Don't take my previous post as a complete dataset. It was only coincidence that I happen to list programmers in their 40s off the top of my head. Here are some more in their 60s: - Google also hired Vint Cerf (TCPIP) at age 62. - Amazon AWS recently hired James Gosling (Java) age ~62. - PayPal hired Douglas Crockford (Javascript book author) at age ~57. My point is that SV companies (and other industries besides tech) will actually discriminate against the young 20-somethings for certain roles.
• k__ 9y ago
  A few weeks ago I attended a conference for startups. Met one that was doing R&D projects for big corps and used "young" freelancers for it, "because they know all the new tech!" But what I heard was "because they're cheap!" In my experience, young people won't hire older people, only if they are really cream of the crop. The only companies I worked for that had >40 or even >50 year old people were those with >40 year old directors.
• golemotron 9y ago
  Ageism is exacerbated by technology. Pervasive communications technology has increased the number of choices that we have. We are suddenly all in competition with many more people. That means that superficial signals like age and culture rise in importance just to reduce the search space. It's Tinder-ification.
• throwanem 9y ago
  The idea of professional senescence beginning with the fourth decade of life seems to originate in academia, where publication of original research is the figure of merit for professional value, and does indeed appear, in the aggregate, to peak late in the third decade. But academia is a profession more unlike than like our own. We do, after all, call ourselves not scientists but engineers. While the role of an engineer may include the invention of novel applications or even novel theory, it need not; what we do revolves instead around the application of ingenuity to the solution of real problems, and I see no reason to assume that facility of ingenuity or skill in its application are dependent upon youth. On the contrary, the accrual of experiential knowledge which comes with a long period of practice in the field makes a canny engineer more capable, rather than less so. Not to say that there's no place for genius, of course - but, again, genius is hardly the sole province of youth. And ours is a young field, as the professions go; ours is the third or perhaps the fourth generation in all human history where the phrase "software engineer" has even had a defined meaning, and so it's reasonable to expect we may still be somewhat bound by the traditions of the theoretical fields in which our own so recently originated - we haven't really had time to establish traditions of our own, and the field is something of a free-for-all as a result. Combine all that with one of our preeminent centers of practice by happenstance being a place which has fetishized youth and beauty for well longer than our field's been around - and which has also, separately and for quite a few more years, made an industry of exporting its own culture to our country and the world - and it's not hard to see how we might end up with the kinds of attitudes here under discussion. There is, though, cause for considerable optimism in the fact that Silicon Valley is not the reliable metonym for software engineering culture which it is so often taken to be, whether by the self-congratulatory among its own inhabitants or by those naïve or ignorant enough to believe the hype they expound. Sure - the field was in considerable part incubated there, and largely codified there to the extent it has been codified at all. But that a thing was invented in a place does not give that place an exclusive, permanent claim on defining the nature of the thing. Sure - if you're forty or fifty and you want to work for Google as a software engineer, you're going to have a bad time, not least because you'll probably be interviewed by infants who may find you reminiscent of the fathers in their relationships with whom they are not yet fully past the adversarial phase. But there are many places to work other than Google, and many more preferable places to work and to live than Silicon Valley. There is no reason for anyone, but especially anyone who knows better, to subject herself to the programmer's equivalent of the Hollywood talent mill - often, as we have lately been hearing in the news, complete with "casting couches" for those who happen to suit the sexual fancy of one who happens to hold some power. Come and join us out here in the real world! We'll be happy to have you among us, and you can make a life for yourself here. Believe it or not, we even have some houses that sell for under a million!
• caio1982 9y ago
  I think the reason for tech ageism is simple: generational conflict peppered with historical perceiving of how old tech folks work (being stubborn, "slow" to adapt, too hierarchical and other common views, as all the old folks were baby boomers or something trying to step in tech for the first time, just today). It takes time for this prejudice to fully spread in waves over the years so only recently this ageist view became critical in tech, I guess. It will also take some time for some of the affected old folks and the young ones to realize the current "old" people were actually young enough around the 90s so ageism will slowly stop being a problem in, say, 10 years from now (I believe peek ageism is past us). But perhaps I'm being naive and for lots of 20-somethings out there being over 40 in tech is a career death sentence indeed.
• shkaga 9y ago
  I think it is a mistake to think that ageism only describes a preference for young over old. The exact opposite has been/is the case for many industries in many countries. Ageism is bad, regardless of age.
  • falcolas 9y ago
    I agree, but it is important to make a distinction between ageism and roles genuinely requiring a certain amount of experience. I wouldn't want a college graduate to be the one architecting the infrastructure for our company's golden goose.
• gerbilly 9y ago
  >“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.” I'm less afraid of death than of not fully living my life.
• eptcyka 9y ago
  > With the advent of the cloud and off-the-shelf A.P.I.s—the building blocks of sites and apps—all you really need to launch a startup is a bold idea. With the advent of operating systems and the standard libraries - the building blocks of applications and widgets - all you really need to launch a startup is a bold idea. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about trivialising tech startups - sure there are some which are trivial. At the same time, I don't really like that the venerable idea people are being encouraged even more.
  • zbentley 9y ago
    "I'm an 'ideas guy'; all those details like implementation cost and monetization strategy and stuff are best left to others, so people in my position can have more time to think up the next cool thing!" <finger guns>
• whack 9y ago
  > "Dan Lyons, a fifty-one-year-old Newsweek reporter, gets his first shock when he’s laid off. “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college,” he’s told" I wonder to what extent, the above is the reason behind senior workers having a harder time finding/maintaining their job. It almost sounds like a Keynesian liquidity trap. People expect their salaries to continually grow over the course of their career, but at some point, the value they bring, relative to a fresh-grad, may not justify that salary level. Other industries may sidestep this problem since work output often depends on connections and reputation, both of which keep growing in your 40s and 50s, but engineering is different in that people's abilities grow exponentially in the first 10-15 years, but not as dramatically afterwards. If people were willing to continually update their salary expectations, accept pay cuts when necessary, and signaled this to their current/prospective employers, I wonder if this problem would mostly disappear. As an employee myself, I fully encourage all my colleagues to negotiate hard for every dollar they are worth. But at the same time, I wouldn't begrudge any employer who's trying to get the most bang for his buck.
  • danielvinson 9y ago
    The problem isn't ageism, the problem is capitalism. For a long period of time in the (not too distant) past, one of the the main purposes of a company was to pay employees. Corporations in the U.S. have continually shifted goals to eschew all goals other than raw profit and growth (leading to more profit). It is EXTREMELY rare to see a tech company which offers its employees more than they are worth on the market or spends more money than is absolutely necessary to keep its employees on benefits.
    • jrhurst 9y ago
      >For a long period of time in the (not too distant) past, one of the the main purposes of a company was to pay employees. I don't really disagree with your sentiment, but I don't think that statement has been ever true.
  • jpindar 9y ago
    How do you signal that you'd be willing to work for low pay though? That would look really weird on a resume.
• YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  >> With the advent of the cloud and off-the-shelf A.P.I.s—the building blocks of sites and apps—all you really need to launch a startup is a bold idea. Silicon Valley believes that bold ideas are the province of the young. Well, right now I don't see any "bold" ideas coming out of SV. What I see is everyone doing "X with deep learning", or "Facebook for Y", or "Uber for Z but with deep learning"). That's, like, the opposite of bold. It's everyone trying to milk the same cow before its teats fall off. But even so- there's an obvious survivorship fallacy at work here. If SV is throwing a ton of money at graduates and school leavers to come and work for it in their startups, it kind of makes sense that the successful startups -few and far between as they may be- will be made up by younger programmers. Anyway, older programmers don't have to go to SV and join a startup. There must be millions of companies in the world that use software, most of it legacy- from big corporations to small mom-and-pop shops. Anyone who knows how to debug and refactor can make a comfortable living these days. In fact, "Pourvu que ça dure".
  • discreditable 9y ago
    > What I see is everyone doing "X with deep learning" Agreed. Even Google is guilty. Press releases from them that don't mention "Machine Learning" are becoming rare. "Machine Learning" is the new "cloud" buzzword.
    • nilkn 9y ago
      Google is also responsible for creating many of the success stories for deep learning. So I think this might be a little unfair to them. They created the bandwagon more than they jumped on it, and they've gotten phenomenal results so far in general. (This seems to be a general trend for Jeff Dean's career overall.)
    • ryandrake 9y ago
      I did a little experiment a while ago: I made a two-word update to my LinkedIn profile adding the phrase "Machine Learning" for a week just to see what happened, changing nothing else. Inundation would be a good way to describe the result. Tech hiring is so stupidly trend-following it's not even funny.
• YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  >> Zuckerberg once observed, “Young people are just smarter,” When he's old that will change to "older people are just more experienced". I mean "it will change" as the Seven Commandments changed in the Animal Farm: you won't be able to find the original quote anywhere on the internet, anymore; only the retconned one. Zuck will always have been wise beyond his years. You wait and see. (I exaggerate)
• dkarl 9y ago
  Is it just me, or was there was a generation where it was hit or miss whether they regarded learning entirely new technologies as a routine part of the job? Among people who would be over, say, roughly 60-65 years old right now, it would be pretty cool to meet someone who kept abreast of developments in the field and were excited when they spotted something that could be an improvement on the tech they currently worked with. Those people were exceptional, and they were always pretty smart. The norm was to want to spend the next ten years working on the same thing you spent the last ten years on. I think people younger than that (people under 60 now) have internalized the ethos of always being ready to roll with change. Who moved my cheese, all that stuff. Even if it's hard for them, they at least accept it as fact and give it lip service. It's been a huge cultural shift to an attitude that everyone has to spend their whole lives learning and adapting. That attitude is native for my generation; in school we read about the Rust Belt and the collapse of American manufacturing and we all said, "What was wrong with those people? Why didn't they adapt, move to a different economic sector, and move where the jobs were?" That's the way we were programmed to think. My father's generation understood the Rust Belt differently. They all hoped they would have done better, but failing to adapt was a normal response that they could easily sympathize with. That generation was not on notice to always be ready for change. I think this cultural shift is going to result in a decline in ageism. The older engineers I've worked with in the last ten years have behaved like any other engineers, except they happen to have a lot of experience. Unlike many older people I worked with early in my career, they aren't cranky about their favorite tools declining in popularity. They don't drag their feet learning the team's new tech stack and rationalize their refusal by predicting widespread failure and a mass return to last decade's technology. There was a time when that was the way older people were supposed to act and there was no embarrassment about it. In a younger worker behavior like that could be treated as an attitude problem, but in an older worker, it was tricky, because social norms said they were entitled to act that way. Now the expectations for older people have utterly changed. I can't imagine a 55-year-old engineer pulling that shit in 2017, so there's no reason to be afraid of hiring them.
• dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  If the tech industry wasn't mostly located in SV with all it's housing problems it wouldn't have nearly as much ageism. Of course the 20-something who's running a rat race to pay overpriced rent on a poorly maintained dump with no hope of ever owning real property resents the 50-something who owns the place. Of course that trickles down a little resentment for all "older" people.
  • fjsolwmv 9y ago
    This is utter baseless speculation. Who thinks about how old their landlord is? Why does ageism exist outside of CA?
    • morgante 9y ago
      Ageism flows both ways. I recently had a landlord demand that I get a guarantor for signing a lease even though I make well over 40x the rent (the typical requirement). It's clearly because he (an elderly man) considers me (a young guy in my 20s) untrustworthy/unreliable.
• Bartweiss 9y ago
  > “Those holding more negative age stereotypes earlier in life had significantly steeper hippocampal volume loss and significantly greater accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques." I'm a bit disgusted that the article asserts this is somehow causative - that ageists age worse for some sort of karmic reason. The screamingly-obvious interpretation of that data is that people who see bad examples of aging hold more negative stereotypes. If your whole family has a history of early-onset dementia, you'll probably view aging as a horrible process. And, surprise, you'll probably have rapid cognitive decline just like all the people who shaped your opinion. Just about every age-related form of decline has a major genetic component, and yet Friend insists that fear of aging is 'karma'.
  • matt4077 9y ago
    I'm a bit disgusted that you're asserting that the article asserts a causative relationship when it does no such thing. Here's the paragraph in question & full: Karma’s a bitch: the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging reports, “Those holding more negative age stereotypes earlier in life had significantly steeper hippocampal volume loss and significantly greater accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques.” Ageists become the senescent figures they once abhorred. Nowhere does it imply any causation. The reference to "Karma" isn't the author professing his believe in the cosmic power's intervention to establish justice among the people. It's just a rhetorical devise to highlight the finding.
• irrational 9y ago
  The code I wrote in my 20s was pure garbage. The code I wrote in my 30s was embarrassing. The code I'm writing in my 40s is perhaps passable. I'm hoping that by the time I get to my 60s I will be able to write good code. I'll probably retire just as I'm hitting my peak as a programmer.
  • ChiliDogSwirl 9y ago
    In my 40s and feeling the same. It's the sad irony of life that just as we get truly good at this stuff, we either retire or move into management.
    • swagtricker 9y ago
      So in other words, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." :)
  • myheadasplode 9y ago
    I don't understand this mentality. Don't you think you're being hard on yourself? How do you define "good" code?
  • sliverstorm 9y ago
    A challenge of our increasingly advanced technologies. Some of this we can work around with abstraction, but sometimes I wonder if an extension to productive working years will be a critical step to keep advancing science and technology. The more the existing body of knowledge grows, the longer it takes to study & train up to the forefront of development.
• danjoc 9y ago
  Ageism <-> Burnout Change what you call it and the conversation changes. It depends on the narrative the author wants to push. Those two things are related. The middle age software dev you burned out then tossed aside has the children most likely to be software devs. You spoil your reputation with the kids before they're even old enough to apply at your company. You've also increased the chance that, due to unstable home life thanks to layoff, the kids won't ever become software devs in the future. Then you complain about needing H1Bs. Those things are also tightly related. Zuckerbergs of the world are too immature to see cause and effect. They only see next quarter results while driving society to ruin.
  • ataturk 9y ago
    As someone who has been developing software for many different companies over the past 21 years (and counting) I am discouraging my kids from going into this field. I want them to know how to code and know not to be afraid of electronics as well as curious about what's in the box and how it is trying to shape their behavior. But as a career, software developer for me has only been good for taking a guy from a blue collar family with few prospects and give him (me) a halfway decent living to raise a family on. Had I had better advice before college, there were many better avenues for someone with my abilities. I really feel like I missed the boat somewhere and was just too stubborn to notice, or maybe my personality wouldn't lend itself to other roles, who knows? Anyhow, I am hoping I bootstrapped my kids into a better life trajectory. I'm hoping my kids surpass me and find careers that are more sensible, lucrative, and rewarding.
• Noos 9y ago
  It sounds like we are seeing work become sport, with all the positives and negatives sport has. Maybe seeing it as ageism isn't helpful. Ageism doesn't exist in sport because the abilities you need can and do decline with age. I wonder for all the talk about "I'm just as good" if people really are; it's honestly ridiculous to assume a forty year old is as elastic or is possessed of the resiliency or endurance to keep reinventing their entire knowledge set every few years.
  • garfij 9y ago
    It's been said elsewhere in this thread, but there is a distinct difference between the knowledge you accumulate in years of engineering and the constant cycle of learning the new framework. Anyone can learn a new framework. Making good architectural and design decisions generally takes experience.
• throttledagain 9y ago
  Once again the top comments are about how terrible young engineers are. How about young people stop being ageist when the olders stop talking about what idiots they are. oh, and idiot is the best of it. Entitled, lazy, spoiled millennials. Ruined by their participation awards. Ageism isn't right, but I'm sick of the one sided conversation on this.
• deleted 9y ago
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• elthor89 9y ago
  I never understood ageism. We all get older, fact of life. So why look down on older people and write them off. I wonder how milenials will talk when they themselves turn 50. Maybe they turn the tables and 50 will be the new 20.
• snickerbockers 9y ago
  Why do people who write these stupid articles think it's alright to assume that younger employees are less intelligent based on their age, but not to assume that older are out-of-touch or have misplaced priorities based on their age?