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I had a chat with some recruiters recently and they told me there is no future in the industry for people who are 35+ years old. I'm 33 so I just smiled and wal

I had a chat with some recruiters recently and they told me there is no future in the industry for people who are 35+ years old. I'm 33 so I just smiled and walked away. I later learned the founder of this recruitment company was 26. Young kids seem to think there is no brains in older people. On the other hand I always thought the natural progression for the programmer is to move to higher abstraction level, become lead/coach/consultant... or start something on their own.

Swizec 8y ago
Older people discover leverage on time. It doesn’t matter how good you are, a team of 10 well-managed programmers will always out code you. You can hve higher output per hour, if you do the well-managed part. Or you become a teacher. Make 10 programmers 11% better and you’ve contributed more to the company’s bottom line than you ever could on your own. Or a consultant. In that one highly specialized area where you are king ... well a team of 10 can’t touch you because your pattern matching solves the problem right away. Ultimately the older you are the more you understand that hey, maybe if your work is contributing millions to the bottom line, maybe you should be compensated proportionally and that $150k is a joke? This understanding is a problem for new founders. First of all, they’d like to pay you less moneys and give you kool-aid instead. Team spirit and all that. Second of all, you are likely waaaay overqualified for what they actually need. Makes you hard to keep around and engineering churn is one of the toughest things to work around on a product team. Institutional knowledge is king. So ageism comes about. Because experienced people are both expensive and unnecessary.
qaq 8y ago
If you are 40+ you kinda expected to have a network. We have a dude pushing 70 he would be able to get a new job the day he would let people know he would consider switching a job.
- ghaff 8y ago
  >If you are 40+ you kinda expected to have a network Every job I've had in computer-related tech since the first one out of school came from people I knew and had worked with.

Swizec 8y ago

Older people discover leverage on time. It doesn’t matter how good you are, a team of 10 well-managed programmers will always out code you. You can hve higher output per hour, if you do the well-managed part. Or you become a teacher. Make 10 programmers 11% better and you’ve contributed more to the company’s bottom line than you ever could on your own. Or a consultant. In that one highly specialized area where you are king ... well a team of 10 can’t touch you because your pattern matching solves the problem right away. Ultimately the older you are the more you understand that hey, maybe if your work is contributing millions to the bottom line, maybe you should be compensated proportionally and that $150k is a joke? This understanding is a problem for new founders. First of all, they’d like to pay you less moneys and give you kool-aid instead. Team spirit and all that. Second of all, you are likely waaaay overqualified for what they actually need. Makes you hard to keep around and engineering churn is one of the toughest things to work around on a product team. Institutional knowledge is king. So ageism comes about. Because experienced people are both expensive and unnecessary.

qaq 8y ago

If you are 40+ you kinda expected to have a network. We have a dude pushing 70 he would be able to get a new job the day he would let people know he would consider switching a job.

ghaff 8y ago
>If you are 40+ you kinda expected to have a network Every job I've had in computer-related tech since the first one out of school came from people I knew and had worked with.