4 ms·

100% agree, it's not the physical age so much as it's the perception of age (and all the framing/baggage that comes with it). Note: this also applies to person

100% agree, it's not the physical age so much as it's the perception of age (and all the framing/baggage that comes with it). Note: this also applies to personality - if you give off a "grumpy old person" vibe, or are far off the mark culture-wise, you're gonna have a rough time.

deleted 6y ago
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marcus_holmes 6y ago
I'm over 50, and this is the killer. Not only for others, but also to avoid personally. It's very, very easy to get into a "grumpy old fart" mindset, where anything new or changing is dismissed out of hand. I've had to fight hard to stop this from happening, and it's still my first response to anything new. Having said that, there are sometimes good reasons for dismissing something new. But only after taking the time to understand it and why everything else thinks this is cool. If I'm interviewing a 50+ for a job, I want to see evidence that they haven't fallen into Grumpy Old Fart syndrome. The converse is also true - if I'm interviewing someone younger, I want to see evidence that they're not caught up in tech fads. Too many times I've seen good tech thrown away because it's not in the hip-and-happening language/framework/platform/etc. And there's a lot to learn from the mistakes of the past ;) And having some idiot kid explain to me why Mongo is soo awesome and SQL is obsolete gets tiring fast [0]. But to be honest, I'd be worried if I had to interview for a role. It'd be a sign that my network wasn't where I'd like it to be. Keeping that up to date is as valuable as keeping the tech skills sharp. [0] example at random cough
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Having said that, there are sometimes good reasons for dismissing something new. But only after taking the time to understand it and why everything else thinks this is cool. Yes, there's a fine line between applying experience to understand and explain why something has been tried 10 times before in the industry and the 11th time is not going to be a charm--and, as you say, routinely dismissing anything that even peripherally echoes something that didn't work last time even though a lot of things are different now.
- SaltyBackendGuy 6y ago
  > And having some idiot kid explain to me why Mongo is soo awesome and SQL is obsolete gets tiring fast. Just an observation. This statement might fail the "Grumpy Old Fart syndrome" test. The kid's _probably_ not an idiot and it might be a good time to educate the lad with real life experience and references to data to support your experience.
  - baq 6y ago
    mongo is good if you don't use it for much and i'll refer to any of aphyr's analyses. i imagine whippersnappers don't read these. i personally won't touch a database which hasn't been in aphyr's private db hell. only a few gray hair, too.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    To be honest, I can live with people being keen on Mongo. I kinda get the enthusiasm for it - schemas are a pain in the neck. It's the "SQL is obsolete" part, coming from someone who never bothered to learn it, that gets me every time.
    - poplarstand 6y ago
      Offering my two cents as an idiot kid working with a posse of late career SQL DBA's: SQL isn't obsolete, but it's awfully tiring to deal with folks who treat it as the end-all be-all of data tech. The project I'm working on right now has a few dozen stored procedures stapled on to a Hadoop cluster because none of the industry veterans trust this new-fangled "Spark" technology. When the quarterly schema changes come around, the entire environment has to be redone so as to accommodate the hard-coded SSIS ingestion pipeline.
- dustingetz 6y ago
  > kid ... tech fads The two times I was called a fad-chaser (literally) was adopting Scala in 2012 and React.js in 2013. AFAICT, that's the label boomers use to dismiss the people who are making progress. Getting the company to use Reactjs in particular drove a huge increase in quality, velocity, and recruiting.
  - collyw 6y ago
    I have been fixing bugs in our React front end. Its a bloated mess. It may make writing code faster, but tracking down bugs afterwards seems to be far more complex.
jasonv 6y ago
I'm near the age group being discussed here... I think about how variable people from high school can look when they hit you up on the social networks. The "presenting" age range of people from my graduating class feels spread across about 30 years. Some people look 30s-ish, and some people have definitely lived a hard life (all sympathies for people who haven't had a kind journey).
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Yep, I remember a guy at our ten year reunion, we were only twenty-eight mind you. He went from jock to George Costanza look-a-like in that short time!
  - mcv 6y ago
    One of my friends was also completely bald by 27. I'm 46 now and these past few years I've been growing a tiny bald spot at the back of my head. It's weird how big those differences are, and therefore even weirder how much we are judged by them.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      Yes, though it wasn't just baldness. He had the glasses and clothes to match too.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

marcus_holmes 6y ago

I'm over 50, and this is the killer. Not only for others, but also to avoid personally. It's very, very easy to get into a "grumpy old fart" mindset, where anything new or changing is dismissed out of hand. I've had to fight hard to stop this from happening, and it's still my first response to anything new. Having said that, there are sometimes good reasons for dismissing something new. But only after taking the time to understand it and why everything else thinks this is cool. If I'm interviewing a 50+ for a job, I want to see evidence that they haven't fallen into Grumpy Old Fart syndrome. The converse is also true - if I'm interviewing someone younger, I want to see evidence that they're not caught up in tech fads. Too many times I've seen good tech thrown away because it's not in the hip-and-happening language/framework/platform/etc. And there's a lot to learn from the mistakes of the past ;) And having some idiot kid explain to me why Mongo is soo awesome and SQL is obsolete gets tiring fast [0]. But to be honest, I'd be worried if I had to interview for a role. It'd be a sign that my network wasn't where I'd like it to be. Keeping that up to date is as valuable as keeping the tech skills sharp. [0] example at random cough

ghaff 6y ago
>Having said that, there are sometimes good reasons for dismissing something new. But only after taking the time to understand it and why everything else thinks this is cool. Yes, there's a fine line between applying experience to understand and explain why something has been tried 10 times before in the industry and the 11th time is not going to be a charm--and, as you say, routinely dismissing anything that even peripherally echoes something that didn't work last time even though a lot of things are different now.
SaltyBackendGuy 6y ago
> And having some idiot kid explain to me why Mongo is soo awesome and SQL is obsolete gets tiring fast. Just an observation. This statement might fail the "Grumpy Old Fart syndrome" test. The kid's _probably_ not an idiot and it might be a good time to educate the lad with real life experience and references to data to support your experience.
- baq 6y ago
  mongo is good if you don't use it for much and i'll refer to any of aphyr's analyses. i imagine whippersnappers don't read these. i personally won't touch a database which hasn't been in aphyr's private db hell. only a few gray hair, too.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  To be honest, I can live with people being keen on Mongo. I kinda get the enthusiasm for it - schemas are a pain in the neck. It's the "SQL is obsolete" part, coming from someone who never bothered to learn it, that gets me every time.
  - poplarstand 6y ago
    Offering my two cents as an idiot kid working with a posse of late career SQL DBA's: SQL isn't obsolete, but it's awfully tiring to deal with folks who treat it as the end-all be-all of data tech. The project I'm working on right now has a few dozen stored procedures stapled on to a Hadoop cluster because none of the industry veterans trust this new-fangled "Spark" technology. When the quarterly schema changes come around, the entire environment has to be redone so as to accommodate the hard-coded SSIS ingestion pipeline.
dustingetz 6y ago
> kid ... tech fads The two times I was called a fad-chaser (literally) was adopting Scala in 2012 and React.js in 2013. AFAICT, that's the label boomers use to dismiss the people who are making progress. Getting the company to use Reactjs in particular drove a huge increase in quality, velocity, and recruiting.
- collyw 6y ago
  I have been fixing bugs in our React front end. Its a bloated mess. It may make writing code faster, but tracking down bugs afterwards seems to be far more complex.

jasonv 6y ago

I'm near the age group being discussed here... I think about how variable people from high school can look when they hit you up on the social networks. The "presenting" age range of people from my graduating class feels spread across about 30 years. Some people look 30s-ish, and some people have definitely lived a hard life (all sympathies for people who haven't had a kind journey).

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Yep, I remember a guy at our ten year reunion, we were only twenty-eight mind you. He went from jock to George Costanza look-a-like in that short time!
- mcv 6y ago
  One of my friends was also completely bald by 27. I'm 46 now and these past few years I've been growing a tiny bald spot at the back of my head. It's weird how big those differences are, and therefore even weirder how much we are judged by them.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Yes, though it wasn't just baldness. He had the glasses and clothes to match too.