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I’m ethnic East Asian so there’s this funny thing where I can look older or younger depending on how I do my hair and other things. Yes I have noticed it in a
by lambdasquirrel 7y ago
I’m ethnic East Asian so there’s this funny thing where I can look older or younger depending on how I do my hair and other things.
Yes I have noticed it in a disturbing number of cases. The easiest way to slide past in tech interviews is to look young and answer “stupid.”
But even more than that, there’s this uncanny valley where you’re not young enough to be young, but not old enough that people realize you have had seen things go well, and seen things go sideways. It’s uncanny because I find that I have to fight to be recognized or respected in ways that people of European descent (who’ve made it over the hump) don’t have to.
All-in-all, there’s a weird denial of age-related things going on in tech.
- jpindar 7y agoThere's a post right here in this thread that says (only barely paraphrased) "That’s not ageism, younger people really are better".
- dlphn___xyz 7y agoif you cant up-skill then tech isnt a good field for you regardless of age
- lambdasquirrel 7y agoI don’t know why this got downvoted. This is a legitimate concern. You can up-skill for sure. But whether you can be recognized for it, versus treated as the outsider, is another thing. You can have all that skill but it confers no leverage. As Walter Bright pointed out, skill doesn’t mean anything if there’s an industry-wide groupthink biased against age/experience.
- dang 7y agoWhat post is that?
- jpindar 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252697 ('Better' meaning better from the point of view of an employer).
- dang 7y agoMy guess is that you misread it. To my ear it sounds like an instance of the "young people are easier to exploit" genre, which is one of the most common responses people have on this topic, and definitely not a defense of ageism.