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Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
- SQL2219 8y ago"young people are just smarter" Mark Zuckerberg
- butterfi 8y agoI've often wondered how Zuck is going to feel about that quote in the long run.
- abritinthebay 8y agoThat implies he can recognize hubris. So far that’s not been a theme.
- bigiain 8y agoAlso Zuckerburg: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks So "young people are just smarter", and "anyone at Harvard is a dumb fuck"...
- alexanderdmitri 8y agoYeah but that was from when he was young and not as smart.
- Arbalest 8y agoMore like, young people have a good smart to self worth ratio, making them easier to exploit.
- taneq 8y agoNot necessarily self-worth - when you're just starting out and you have no track record, no matter how good you know you are, the rest of the world won't believe you until you've proved yourself. So you start wherever you can.
- Arbalest 8y agoA fair point. So either a feeling of a lack of self worth resulting in reduced assertiveness, or just being rebuffed a bunch.
- notacoward 8y agoAnd what brilliant things were you saying in 2007? Yeah, that was an asinine thing for him to say, and insulting to . . . well, to people like me. I'm 53, and I happen to work at Facebook on the strength of things I've learned in the last 11 years or so. I dare say many of the people around me, including those who hired me, might have learned a thing or two as well. Maybe those who want to champion the idea of life-long growth and learning could make their point some way other than bringing up a quote from 2007 as though it represents current belief.
- gaius 8y agoAnd what brilliant things were you saying in 2007? If Zuck had said “whites are just smarter” or “men are just smarter” he would not have gotten away with it then and it would not be forgotten or forgiven now. It’s a valid point because it illustrates ageism is considered acceptable even today.
- notacoward 8y agoHe might not have gotten away with it then, but it wouldn't be harming him much today. It might well have earned him a cabinet post or "senior adviser to the president" role in the current administration.
- gaius 8y agoit wouldn't be harming him much today Oh it would. Eich is still feeling the fallout from what he did in 2008. Rightly or wrongly is up to you, but nevertheless we see that people have long memories.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't introduce recycled flamebait for the millionth time. It never leads to anything new. We're looking for thoughtful reactions, not mechanical reflexes.
- butterfi 8y agowow, I'm not sure how good the article is, but my browser threw a hairball trying to load that page. Rarely do I see a page fail as hard as this one did. Has Wired just collapsed under the weight of ad trafic nonsense?
- qubax 8y agoNot just wired. Almost every news site. Ad block, update your host file, etc. Ever since forbes had viruses/malware for ads a few years ago, I don't visit a news site without protection.
- incompatible 8y agoI'm using an adblocker, all I get is a brief flash of something and then a blank page. Maybe I'm too old for Wired now.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoAh, not just me then. I assumed it was some GDPR block as wired UK works fine. Via outline: https://outline.com/mGVbG6 https://outline.com/mGVbG6
- TomMckenny 8y agoIndeed. And there are two calls to JSON.parse() with about a meg of text. I'm clearly much to old to understand why.
- randcraw 8y agoIt happens to me too, even after I log in as a subscriber. Clueless. With the arrival of Conde Nast and the departure of Anderson, WiReD truly has lost the last of its mojo.
- wishinghand 8y agoI use an adblocker and tried turning it off. No dice either way. Some Javascript bug is causing it to happen when I check the `console.log()` output. Luckily Wired is slow enough that I can refresh the page and hit the 'pause' button in the debugger and then read the content. Funny that the links don't work if you hit 'pause' too soon.
- burlesona 8y agoGood article. It’s kind of scary to me that “old” in tech means 40.
- abritinthebay 8y agoOnly because as people get experience they end up in the “Engineering Manager” role & such. Plus there’s a GLUT of fresh grads joining each year.
- taneq 8y agoYeah, I think part of the issue is the horribly broken career progression model that most companies seem to use. Graduate -> Software Engineer -> Senior Software Engineer -> Team Lead -> Non-Technical Manager (???) Then again, unless a company is scaling at the same speed as your career, you're eventually (probably before 40) going to hit a wall where there's no higher level for a tech person to go, because there are no bigger problems to solve. If you want to earn more money or get more recognition, you're going to need to move to another company which can offer harder challenges.
- intended 8y agoYour last line is the single point of failure for this whole issue. The various systems, incentives, lies - ALL, arise from the growth paradigm. That paradigm depends on more cheap, energetic fresh meat arriving out of college/recruiters every year. Fresh grads cost less, have relatively more energy, fewer ties, and probably better cognition responses. They lack experience, but that's a solvable problem. The question to ask is this: Why WONT there be work place discrimination, when younger, cheaper candidates show up every day? System incentives are not in favor of growing old in tech. And whats laughably worse about this is that humans are TERRIBLE at making out correlation from causation: people will eventually associate youth with tech work, so an OLD person doing tech - will be tagged as an outlier and assessed on that. (And Firms would NEVER admit that its just easier for them to ignore work place equality issues in favor of "fit" and "cultural match")
- kokey 8y ago
- Cacti 8y agoIt's not complicated: the costs of software development are almost entirely in labor. As long as that remains true, older people will be at a severe disadvantage simply because they cost 2-5 times as much as a new hire. Once Moore's Law slows down (or whatever we want to call the current golden age we're seemingly still in), this will change, but until then you're just fighting against exponential growth.
- abritinthebay 8y agoIf you don’t factor quality of code/architecture in there, then yes. But that would be folly long term.
- virmundi 8y agoFrom being on HN for years, folly is ok for a lot of VC backed startups. "We know Ruby! Let's do everything in that!", said the team at Twitter. Then performance took a nose dive since the language was known at the time to not scale. Now it's Java or Scala.
- abritinthebay 8y agoAbsolutely! Short term a startup will make a lot of fuckups - that’s a good thing, it’s learning! But once the product is set having sane architecture and good code quality often become a deciding factor in being successful - because they allow you to iterate faster & outmaneuver your competition. Sometimes you can get away with it for longer, but eventually you’ll grind to a place where you need to fix these things and it’s easier to do earlier.
- marcinzm 8y agoTwitter is arguably successful so why would you consider their decision to be folly? It worked for them. Startups have limited resources. If you devote them to solving tomorrow's problems then you'll be beaten by someone who devotes their resources to solving today's problems.
- 8y ago
- anoncoward111 8y agoAs a salesman who is constantly told he is "too young" and is habitually underpaid/fired, I can tell you that age discrimination is both real and highly arbitrary. If anybody out there can see the value in having an enthusiastic customer advocate, rather than just another sales guy, please do reply :)
- godzillabrennus 8y agoI know a lot of folks hiring. Happy to pass your resume around. Email me: Hn (at) strapr (dot) com Also check out Albert’s List on Facebook. There are a lot of non tech jobs posted on there.
- anoncoward111 8y agoThanks so much for writing, I will email you shortly!
- scruffyherder 8y agoIt sure is. I can remember always being too young. Being too young to go to after hours drinks. Too young to rent a car. Too young to do so much. Funny thing is when you are old enough, people won't tell you.
- ThJ 8y agoThe tendency to promote people out of engineering and into management is probably down to the bottom line. At some point, an engineer's economic worth plateaus, and the only way to justify a bigger paycheck is to have him offload the upper management. Managing people is extremely time consuming. Time spent on managing people is time not spent on closing deals, maintaining business relationships, securing investments, etc, so it becomes extremely important to delegate.
- nbm 8y agoWhy not just hire a (hopefully) good people manager? It's hard to find good managers, but it's also not entirely likely that your best IC engineer is going to be a good manager naturally either. Whereas you know they're good at what they're doing now. If they're not going to find a way to be more worthwhile, just don't pay them more. If they find a way to be more worthwhile (teaching, coaching, setting standards, whatever), then pay them more.
- 3rdAccount 8y agoYou need to know the domain in complex fields. In my area, the non engineers have no clue what is going on and are almost dead weight. The high output engineers now in management aren't always the best at managing people, but at least they make good decisions and don't slow the rest of us down.
- kaspm 8y agoI think this is a good general point. Looking at management as "just hire a good people manager" is too myopic. It takes many things to just be a good "people" manager - empathy, high bar setting, ability to negotiate compromises. And that doesn't include the _other_ skillsets a good engineering manager has: understanding the time tradeoffs of the team, delivery management, ability to resolve technical stalemates, ability to communicate effectively up, down and across to ensure people are coordinated, work is non-duplicative and efficient. Being an engineering manager is not a "black hole" for old people who don't program, it's a completely different technical skillset. A good one produces quite a bit more value to the company than _most_ single engineers can. Not because they are bad, but because writing good software requires lots of good engineers working together.
- markbnj 8y ago> Team social events shouldn’t require physical prowess or alcoholic excess—so forget paintball and bar crawls. As a 57 year-old backend engineer I would like to keep the bar crawls, thanks.
- commandlinefan 8y agoIf anything, I have 24 years of experience to pass on to the younger generation.
- Latteland 8y agoOf drinking. I am in the same boat.
- gaoshan 8y ago49 frontend dev here and the occasional happy hour is one of the things I look forward to most.
- tedmiston 8y agoI love paintball. You can definitely play without physical prowess — plenty of people sit in the back of speedball fields to "spray or pray" or call out upstream opponent positions to their team. Likewise with the woodsball setting even more so. It's much less physically demanding than one might think... you can be successful at recreation level without running. I've never been athletic but I was stable able to play local tournament-level paintball. I'd love to have it as a company outing.
- YoloGenZ 8y agoIt's "spray and pray" old man, not "spray or pray" lmao.
- meddlepal 8y agoThroughout my career I've always loved drinking with the older (45-50+) engineers. Lots of great war stories and unfiltered bits of context and history around why things are the way they are. I'm going to be that old engineer sooner rather than later. So yea, I agree... let's keep that going.
- Aloha 8y agoI'm in the opposite of this situation, I'm among the 10% of the youngest employees in the company, when around 60% of the company will be retiring within a decade. We're also in one of those high cost housing markets, and while I'm very well paid comparatively to others in my particular part of the technology sector - its still not enough to buy a house, or settle down - but they're somewhat unsympathetic when I talk about things like, working from home, remote working, etc, I generally get a blank stare. So, there is a corollary here, make sure that pay and benefits are attractive to employees of all ages, not just one group.
- afpx 8y agoIf it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t until I was 30 that my wife and I had enough for a downpayment for a house. When I graduated, my salary was $40k. And, 3-bedroom houses, in my economically-attractive, but not extravagent, area were around $300k. Rent for a 2br was about $1000 / month, so saving $60k took quite a few years. Of course, several co-workers had well-off parents who bought them their first house (lucky them), but for many of us, we just had to pay off debt, and save, and save, and be confident that it would work out. It took a while, especially considering the two recessions, and it felt like it would never get better. But, it eventually did. So, although I don’t know your particular situation, I’m confident that people in their 20s today will eventually prevail. The difference is that the younger generation is enormous, and all of those people buying houses at the same time puts demand pressure on prices. But, it will work out.
- tjr225 8y agoLol. My wife and I are 30 and we've still got 50k worth of student loans...
- Aloha 8y agoIt does, I can afford about 300-350k, which buys me a postage stamp size condo. I'm 35, the nearest house I can afford is about 30-40 miles away - I cant touch something for less than 500k, in that radius.
- CalRobert 8y ago
- rmason 8y agoI think my advantage is that I've seen more engineering cycles. New problems can sometimes be solved quicker by the hard fought for knowledge gained solving older ones. Mark Zuckerberg famously said young people were just smarter. In my generation it was Abbie Hoffman who said not to trust anyone over thirty. They were both wrong.
- drdeadringer 8y agoWhat might be "right"?
- dijit 8y agoHaving a diverse set of perspectives on a problem. Young turks full of energy, old cynical farts who have seen failure and can pick out the signs.
- crispyambulance 8y agoWTF: "an Old" Is that supposed to be "millennial" lingo?
- Andrex 8y agoIt's not supposed to be; it is.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoI've even seen older people pick it up. It's a good syntax.
- jonhendry18 8y agoI mostly see older people use it in online contexts that are perceived as predominantly younger. "As an old ..."
- flukus 8y agoI think old is a gender now.
- rdiddly 8y agoSomebody's trying to fit in and say what they heard somebody else say. Thence are these things born and propagated. This one takes an adjective and makes it a noun. Sounds more like 1950s lingo (a black, a white, a gay etc.) but with the illusion of freshness with its being applied to old people for the first time. Call me a rude, but it's a sucky. At least "old person" acknowledges they're a person.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jonhendry18 8y agoI think it's more a simulation of an older person using awkward youth slang. At least, when I see it, it's usually an older person saying something like "As an old I really don't get this fashion for tattoos that look like someone scribbled random doodles all over you."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- b0rsuk 8y agoMake a bet and invest in a new, upcoming technology like Rust. If Rust takes off big, you'll have a head start on teen programming wizards.
- raesene9 8y agoThis is true and also helps keep you fresh. Personally I got involved in containers and container security 4 years ago and so even at my advanced age (44) I'm involved in what is a pretty hot topic at the moment. I also recognize that I need to keep investing in my technical development as I go along.
- jasonkester 8y agoA good way to age-proof yourself is to start your own business. In the dozen years I've been running my SaaS products, despite being Old during that entire timespan, nobody has ever so much as asked me my age. Let alone discriminated against me because of it. And I've been "Consulting While Over 30" for nearly 20 years now for individual clients. None of which have ever held my lack-of-inexperience against me. Granted, I've done fine during my occasional forays back into traditional-ish employment with respect to the whole "ageism in tech/you're never gonna work again" thing. But if that ever did start to happen, I wouldn't worry about it happening so much to the entrepreneurial side of my world.
- cimmanom 8y agoNot everyone has an interest in or aptitude for the additional work needed to run your own business - from marketing to account management to accounting.
- yekepa 8y agoI think a mix is the best. I worked in different teams, but with teams where the age were mixed I felt good and well thought out decisions was made. Young devs are eager to learn and think older devs are in the way for new tech. Older devs have more mature look on life and know more about consequences of different decisions in the long run. Ageism in a company makes it more shortsighted and plain out stupid. They make more mistakes, lose customers more, and make decisions that they regret later.
- gaius 8y agoolder devs are in the way for new tech. Asking those awkward questions like “what problem, that we actually have, does it solve?” And “will it still be around in 3 years? Won’t even you be bored of it in 6 months?”
- WalterBright 8y agoThe correct term is "Auld". "Old" is demeaning and insensitive.
- Angostura 8y agoThe preferred nomenclature is "wrinkly"
- kulu2002 8y agoGood article. I fail to visualise this; tech-people between age group 25-40, who are already at the peak of their career, like some are already CxOs, others are VPs and higher positions in large orgs. What are these people gonna do after say 25-30 years from now? I am sure there would be a high tech professional life cycle something similar to tech product life-cycle. Though this is very subjective phenomenon.
- cimmanom 8y ago20 years at a CXO salary in a reasonably mature organization (not seed or series A) is long enough to save up plenty to retire on.
- DenisM 8y agoI wonder how prevalent the whole ageism thing is. It makes good articles because half the engineers are afraid of it, but how widespread is this? Could be just a dozen isolated cases that the media latches on?
- drtr 8y agoPrevalent. I'm applying for jobs. Hot market. Both I and my peers are finding it much harder than as fresh college grads. A lot of this is structural: Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. interviews ask very easy big-O style algorithmic questions and prioritize speed and accuracy. A lot of us more experienced folk haven't done this in years. We can solve more complex, multifaceted questions, but those aren't asked. It's about speed with things from college. It's important we understand those, and we do, but that crisp sharpness is no longer there. I will beat someone younger on hard problems which also involve threading, distributed systems, customer requirements, memory hierarchies, code simplicity, testability, business requirements, math, etc. but those aren't the interviews. Even ML seem to be spot checks of trendy techniques rather than deeper questions about mathematical maturity.
- DenisM 8y agoIf you spent 4 weeks drilling basic CS problems do you think you will pass the interview? When I look into them I feel like I can pick it back up quickly. On a tangent: which city are you looking in?
- drtr 8y agoI am passing them now, after having gone through a few. I do still make stupid mistakes more than I would have in my youth. Four weeks drilling would definitely more than do it. I think the bigger problem is none of the other skills I have seem to even matter for Google/Amazon/Facebook hiring. I would rather practice those skills and find niche openings which value people like me than do prep for a broken process. Plus I have family, consulting, etc, so I don't want to just drill. I'm not desperate. I could be wrong (no offers yet, but just started on sites so don't expect any yet) but I think I have better options elsewhere. If I weren't actively looking, I wouldn't even consider those types of jobs, and this is the first time in my life actively looking. In other words, Google has no chance of poaching someone like me. I think the word for that is implicit bias or disparate impact. Boston area.
- motohagiography 8y agoBias toward less experienced but highly technical staff seems to be an artifact of the portfolio management style of the investors and board members. Shotgun investments in a space mean shotgun incentives for managers, which yield shotgun solutions from engineering teams, to whack-a-mole product market fit problems - with randomized, exponential returns. Profitable, revenue funded companies are more accommodating to the Olds because things like discernment are rewarded. Mature companies (5+ years) that act like startups are as Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, "dressing their best decade." You can usually tell within 15 minutes of entering an office whether it's a place of growth. Young people are perfect for the former style because they can apply technical know-how without any broader criticism about likelihood of success, strategy, or sustainability. As an old, it can become more difficult to maintain the cognitive dissonance required to thrive in these environments when you have a mental horizon longer than 5 years. I've worked with olds, and the successful ones recognize the story is no longer about them. They recognize that young people are also like a portfolio of long term investments, so they manage it prudently, and the best ones have learned how to get short. If you are still doing startups as an employee in your 40s, you are there for the rush and because you love doing it. We should all admit that working for early stage companies is a lifestyle, not a plan. There is nothing wrong with experienced people. They aren't malformed and do not need correction. Some might need more awareness of what they are involved in, but adopting a "fixer upper," mentality is the beginning of death.
- norswap 8y agoIt's refreshing to see a positive (but nuanced) take for once.
- timerol 8y agoIs there a good word for when a member of a group is biased against the group that they're a part of? > I wouldn’t want to work in a place where management is close to my age without a gold-plated guarantee they share the “Let’s try it and see” outlook of younger companies.