10 ms·

I've worked with two types of older engineers: 1) Ones who keep up their skills 2) Ones who don't The former are a treasure trove of knowledge and skills, an

I've worked with two types of older engineers: 1) Ones who keep up their skills 2) Ones who don't The former are a treasure trove of knowledge and skills, and provide substantially more value than anyone junior ever could. Going through so many computing eras gives a higher-level way of thinking about abstraction, or understanding computer architectures. They've hand-tweaked assembly, C, Java, and when they're now doing JavaScript or Python, they understand all the layers of metal underneath. They've gone through flow charts, structured, functional, object oriented, and all the variants there-of. They've written high-speed algorithms to draw lines with pixels, to ray trace, and are now coding GPGPUs. The latter are liabilities, bringing in 1980-era best-practices. They're working on some legacy BASIC or COBAL system from the seventies, and surprised they can't find a new job when that's upgraded and they're downsized. I've rarely seen #1 and #2 mix. They're very different crowds, and in very different types of companies. My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I'm doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years if I do occasional deep dives. Basically, I dive headlong into whatever is the newest, trendiest stack, and get a product out using that, deeply learning all the deep things behind it too. That's what works for me. YMMV.

codegeek 6y ago
I agree in general but "skills" are not the only valuable commodity. Real experience matters and I personally feel a lot of so called experienced veterans are more like "1 year of experience 10 times" instead of "10 years worth of experience". So that is another challenge with people who have been in the industry for a while.
Loughla 6y ago
I am fascinated when the #2 group pops up to say there is age discrimination in coding - when you dig into it, the problem is about skills and not age (although I cannot really speak to ageism in the tech sector). Every other professional career requires you to stay up-to-date in your professional skills and knowledge to stay relevant in your field. Why would coding/tech in general be any different?
- smeyer 6y ago
  Just because there are older folks struggling to find jobs after not keeping up skills doesn't mean there isn't also ageism, and it can become problematic when everyone disregards the ageism by saying it's all just meritocratic and skills based. I think there are lots of younger developers in the hiring process who start out with a bias of assuming older developers have atrophied skills. Then when that bias makes it harder for older developers to find jobs, the younger developers say "ah, well that's meritocracy for you".
  - mcbishop 6y ago
    Beautifully said. Ageism is real.
- hiram112 6y ago
  This isn't true at all. Think of other professionals - lawyers, doctors, professors, etc. A doctor specializes in one aspect - surgeon, anesthesiologist, ER, GP, psychiatry, etc. They might pivot once in their career, but most of them don't, and they're able to find employment as long as they're able and willing. I know several lawyers, and most of them had to specialize by their early 30's if they ever want to make decent money - family law, real estate, employment, personal injury, whatever. Again, the older the lawyer, the more seniority they have and higher they can bill at most firms. How many professors in academia do you know that have experience teaching in multiple schools, e.g. business, engineering, social sciences, etc? Not many, usually they have a very narrow niche. The problem with the tech industry is mostly due to offshoring, the rapid (and pointless) pace of new frameworks and tech that's mostly due to shifting dominant players, and the naivety of most software engineers who've been unwilling or unable to organize and create some sort of protective barrier similar to every other industry (teachers or cop unions, AMA, legal bar, UAW, etc.). And again, because this is HN, the majority of developers are not worried that they won't be making FAANG salaries with sweet equity and stock options into their 50's. They're worried that they'll be training their 25 year old replacements from Bangalore at the typical mega bank or insurance company, left with only sporadic temp gigs and 6 month contracts at half their salary and with 15 years left before Medicare kicks in.
x87678r 6y ago
I see a lot of 40/50 year olds doing Java/Python/C++ development with CICD unit testing skills that are handy programmers without knowing much about JS/ML/k8s. To me that puts them right inbetween your #1 and #2.
- walkingolof 6y ago
  From your comment I get the feeling that you think Java/Python/C++ is something obscure legacy tech along the lines of Basic/Cobol.
  - meddlepal 6y ago
    Makes me wonder how old previous commenter is too if they have that view. Ageism is rampant in this industry.
    - stevehawk 6y ago
      It’s actually some what ironic considering how much SV pushes for diversity and inclusion.. unless you’re over 40.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - robbyking 6y ago
        I'm 42, and until recently worked for a well known tech company in San Francisco. Most of the time I didn't feel like I was the only person over 30 in the room, but after moving to another city and starting to work on a truly age-diverse did I realize how unbalanced my previous team was. My current team has a good mix of industry experience and excitement for new technologies, which makes planning both effective and exciting.
        meddlepal 6y ago
        Part of the problem is that SF is just so damn expensive... it's going to self-select for people that can afford to live without the additional burden of a family and that tends to be people <30.
DrBazza 6y ago
Definitely agree - at my last employer, there were 3 of us in our 40s. Their skill set could be best summarised by "the year 2005": Subversion, MFC, and C++03.
- arethuza 6y ago
  I suspect that in 15 years people will be saying the same about K8s, possibly JS if Wasm takes off and I suspect ML will a fairly niche area.
- arp242 6y ago
  So? Subversion works fine; nothing wrong with it. Are you now a bad developer if you focus on actually getting stuff done instead of spending time migrating to a new tool?
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    Considering the company is down to its last couple of developers and can't attract new ones because of the old technology stack, it's definitely a problem.
- smsm42 6y ago
  Is "subversion" a skill (unless we're talking about spies ;)? It's just a tool. I've used it. I've used cvs, git and other stuff too. If I had for some reason to work in a company that uses some other tool to handle their code repos, I'd learn it in a month or so (less if it's organized logically). It's like saying "driving a Honda Civic" is a skill - driving is a skill, Honda Civic may be what you're driving right now, and next week you may need to drive a BMW, and being able to do both is what I'd call a skill.
- glouwbug 6y ago
  I guess, but those tools alone build powerful fast software, and those programmers are solving problems which translate well to any field requiring problem solving. The software world may change rapidly, but a React / Git stack is no different than a C++ / Subversion stack when both jobs require programmers to solve hard, complex problems.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I'm doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years And that's the problem with software engineering vs other white collar careers. For example, my accountant friend is expected to be trained by their employer in the latest accounting practices and law frameworks and does't devote 1-3 months per year of their personal time on open source accounting projects to learn the latest legal framework for fun, that would be crazy for him. Same for my friends in architecture, dentistry and law. Their employers pay them to learn and gather the expertise needed for their future in the firm. Whereas, as a software engineer, very few companies(at least in Germany from my experience) will invest into their existing workforce to train them on the job for the future language/framework they will plan to use and instead seek to let them go once their expertise is no longer valuable and hire someone already experienced in the needed stack then repeat the cycle several years/decades down the road. That's why here you're expected to transition to management as a career progression, as IC roles are not really valued at old age unless you've dedicated your free time to coding and I don't know about you guys, but I'd prefer to spend my free time with my kids and exercising outdoors instead of coding to make myself employable in the latest stack.
- Nursie 6y ago
  > Whereas, as a software engineer, very few companies(at least in Germany from my experience) will invest into their existing workforce to train them on the job Maybe I've been fortunate, but in the UK and for a couple of years in Australia, I have had employers (and later clients for my contracting business) who have been happy to throw me at projects far enough outside my comfort zone that I keep learning and stretching my muscles. I feel at the top of my game (much of the time).
- caymanjim 6y ago
  My anecdotal evidence does not match your anecdotal evidence. I'm approaching 50, and I've had about a dozen jobs in tech starting in my teens. I've never worked anywhere that didn't allow on-the-job time for learning, and the majority of my employers have both actively-encouraged it and financed it. I also learn on my own, for fun, as my career started as a hobby and still interests me, but the vast majority of my education has been paid for during normal work hours. I also actively seek out new and interesting technology when switching jobs, and I switch jobs when things stagnate. It's what you have to do in tech, regardless of your age. If you stay too long at a company that isn't advancing your career, you're going to go stale. This isn't specific to tech either. How many mechanics, lab technicians, chefs, marketing people, stock brokers, architects, lawyers, etc. could find a job today if they hadn't learned anything in 20 years?
gedy 6y ago
I agree with this, the nuance is though that many interviewers are convinced they filter out the #2 with their pet CS quiz questions with no regard for experience or what the company actually needs. Not talking FAANGS, this is smaller companies reaching out to recruit senior devs they supposedly need.
_qulr 6y ago
> They're working on some legacy BASIC or COBAL system from the seventies, and surprised they can't find a new job when that's upgraded and they're downsized. Wow, exaggerate much? This doesn't describe the vast majority of "older" workers, it's just another disappointing stereotype and expression of ageism.
CharlesRoberts 6y ago
>Ones who keep up their skills To get a rough idea of the value of up-to-date skills vs apparent age, let's consider a hypothetical: If both a 50 and 24 year-old graduate from the same coding boot-camp, do they have equal odds of being seen after the first interview? (let alone actual employment) And how big is the difference in probabilities? I also note that desktop games are primarily coded in C++/C. If hiring is skill based then we would expect that industry to be zealously recruiting older engineers.
- Zenst 6y ago
  Sadly from experience, HR will blindly screen them out and speil the usual "overqualified" excuse to not progress. That they regularly do and get away with. Had situation exactly like that once and I bypassed HR straight to manager who lambasted HR, got interview and the job, still got shafted by HR who messed up salary, lied about rise and generally made my life hell with pettiness and bullying for want of another way of putting it. That is along with one person in HR taking my side and telling me what her manager was upto and next thing, that person was gone. So yeah - HR causes many of these ageist issues when it comes to the situation you outline.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Boot camps aren't "up or date skills" but to the extent that 24 year olds are getting hired off them would still support your point. Why do you assume young people don't learn C++ to work on games? They do to work on web servers. The AAA in AAA games refers to media content, not the game engine. Game programers are a trivial fraction of the C/C++ industry.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    24 year olds aren't getting Senior or Mid-Level Dev salaries. They know the new hotness and are cheap -- that's good enough.
- jonfw 6y ago
  What I've heard about game development (correct me if you disagree) is that it is typically higher demanding or lower paying than gigs in other fields. What I've heard is that it's only worth being in that industry if you're passionate about it. I think older engineers will trend towards less demanding or higher paying industries, and are less likely to have as serious of passions towards gaming
seneca 6y ago
The problem is that there is an undue burden put on those in group 1 to prove they are not group 2. Imagine an engineer walks into an interview. It's a young person, you think nothing of it and you go on with your normal interview. Now a different engineer walks in, and he has grey hair and some wrinkles. You feel the need to dig into whether they're in group 1 or group 2, in addition to your normal interview. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if we were talking about how there are two groups of women and one of them is a liability a lot more people would be setting off alarms.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Given the process of interviewing I think that burden is on anybody who attempts to go through the process of interviewing to a degree, young or old, male, female, or non-binary no matter the color or creed. A normal interview should dig through the qualities of 1 and 2 - although in practice many are downright insane powertripping prejudices that a stranger couldn't possibly know like filtering based upon if they follow arcane, arbitrary and archaic fashion "rules", or if they write a thank you letter afterwards.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  People do think that about women, but it usually goes “Is this the kind of family-centered woman that will be on perpetual maternity leave and not pull her weight?” It’s very hard to do anything about it even if we acknowledge that it happens.
maps7 6y ago
> They're very different crowds, and in very different types of companies. This is not a fact. I've seen both of your types in the same company. Let's not reduce people down to "you're either this, or this". It's not a good way of thinking. People are more complex than that and have different things to offer.
blaser-waffle 6y ago
> I've rarely seen #1 and #2 mix. They're very different crowds, and in very different types of companies. This has been my experience, too. Generally, the closer to doing technology as the main offering -- e.g. network engineers at an ISP, or developers at a code shop -- the better and more technical they are. Once you get into the Enterprise, where they're handling specific apps and frameworks, they tend to get stuck in patterns and whither. That's not to say you can't be an old grognard doing COBOL at a niche code shop, but when the tech itself is the offering you find much more technically competent seniors.
pmiller2 6y ago
Any thoughts on how to identify companies where people from group #1 work? I'm thinking of this from both a mentorship and a future employability aspect.
octetta 6y ago
Can you provide metrics for the number of people you've seen in each of these two categories? Also I'm curious about what age demographic you're in and how long you've been in the industry. Hoping that I don't sound combative asking this, I'm just really interested in your perspective.
- woofie11 6y ago
  I won't go into personal specifics, but I'm mid-career. I've been through a few companies, and made it as high up as C-suite in a smaller company, and director-level in a bigger company, before finding I prefer senior IC, tech lead, advanced development, or research roles. Of the companies I've been to, most were highly-tech focused (and pretty elite teams), but one was a large, distinctly non-tech company (with mainframes, even, and not the modern types, running legacy algorithms). I ran a small skunkworks team there. I can't give great statistics, aside from saying that at the tech companies, people tended to fall into the category of older is better. Senior engineers were senior. At the non-tech company, people tended to fall into the category of older is obsolete. The tech team was there for the paycheck. They worked 9-to-5, maintained a healthy work-life balance, and kept fairly boring systems running. The work they did was really outside of the company's core competency. It just needed to be done, and someone needed to do it. If layoffs ever came, I'm not quite sure who would hire them, though. It was culture shock for me. It wasn't specific to this one company either, but to the industry (we had pretty close contacts with both collaborators and competitors). This company was industry-leading, actually.
RobRivera 6y ago
I can agree with the methods described in the latter part of this post. There is no right or wrong, but as I began trusting the process of simply deepdiving for deepdiving sake, I found my core muscles maintained. Being able to grok and push in a short time is a valuable asset.
blub 6y ago
That's just your wishful thinking. Here on HN I've seen both people that stayed up to date complain about discrimination and interviewers say that they expect older developers to bring more to the table - i.e. if one is a decent older developer they will be disadvantaged when competing with a decent younger developer which has learning potential.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  Yeah, the issue as an older developer with age discrimination is not that you are entitled to some credit for years of experience when say, you haven't been using Java since college, but that you can't be hired on the same basis and salary as a new grad who has no experience either. Despite having demonstrated many times your ability to learn in the past. It's easy to stereotype people who have unrealistic expectations based on entitlement because of their age, but past a certain point, a lot of employers will reject a older candidate even at the same price as a new one on the assumption that they can't learn any more. Of course, if you are employable, you don't bang your head against the wall, you go and do something else. Like any kind of discrimination, if they were forced to accept you, it wouldn't make the culture palatable. It reduces your opportunities though.
notacoward 6y ago
All too often "keep up their skils" is code for "learn what I think is important" and says more about the speaker's (in)ability to know what's important than about actual skill. That's how ageism creeps in - not intentionally but through lack of awareness of one's own bias.

codegeek 6y ago

I agree in general but "skills" are not the only valuable commodity. Real experience matters and I personally feel a lot of so called experienced veterans are more like "1 year of experience 10 times" instead of "10 years worth of experience". So that is another challenge with people who have been in the industry for a while.

Loughla 6y ago

I am fascinated when the #2 group pops up to say there is age discrimination in coding - when you dig into it, the problem is about skills and not age (although I cannot really speak to ageism in the tech sector). Every other professional career requires you to stay up-to-date in your professional skills and knowledge to stay relevant in your field. Why would coding/tech in general be any different?

smeyer 6y ago
Just because there are older folks struggling to find jobs after not keeping up skills doesn't mean there isn't also ageism, and it can become problematic when everyone disregards the ageism by saying it's all just meritocratic and skills based. I think there are lots of younger developers in the hiring process who start out with a bias of assuming older developers have atrophied skills. Then when that bias makes it harder for older developers to find jobs, the younger developers say "ah, well that's meritocracy for you".
- mcbishop 6y ago
  Beautifully said. Ageism is real.
hiram112 6y ago
This isn't true at all. Think of other professionals - lawyers, doctors, professors, etc. A doctor specializes in one aspect - surgeon, anesthesiologist, ER, GP, psychiatry, etc. They might pivot once in their career, but most of them don't, and they're able to find employment as long as they're able and willing. I know several lawyers, and most of them had to specialize by their early 30's if they ever want to make decent money - family law, real estate, employment, personal injury, whatever. Again, the older the lawyer, the more seniority they have and higher they can bill at most firms. How many professors in academia do you know that have experience teaching in multiple schools, e.g. business, engineering, social sciences, etc? Not many, usually they have a very narrow niche. The problem with the tech industry is mostly due to offshoring, the rapid (and pointless) pace of new frameworks and tech that's mostly due to shifting dominant players, and the naivety of most software engineers who've been unwilling or unable to organize and create some sort of protective barrier similar to every other industry (teachers or cop unions, AMA, legal bar, UAW, etc.). And again, because this is HN, the majority of developers are not worried that they won't be making FAANG salaries with sweet equity and stock options into their 50's. They're worried that they'll be training their 25 year old replacements from Bangalore at the typical mega bank or insurance company, left with only sporadic temp gigs and 6 month contracts at half their salary and with 15 years left before Medicare kicks in.

x87678r 6y ago

I see a lot of 40/50 year olds doing Java/Python/C++ development with CICD unit testing skills that are handy programmers without knowing much about JS/ML/k8s. To me that puts them right inbetween your #1 and #2.

walkingolof 6y ago
From your comment I get the feeling that you think Java/Python/C++ is something obscure legacy tech along the lines of Basic/Cobol.
- meddlepal 6y ago
  Makes me wonder how old previous commenter is too if they have that view. Ageism is rampant in this industry.
  - stevehawk 6y ago
    It’s actually some what ironic considering how much SV pushes for diversity and inclusion.. unless you’re over 40.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - robbyking 6y ago
      I'm 42, and until recently worked for a well known tech company in San Francisco. Most of the time I didn't feel like I was the only person over 30 in the room, but after moving to another city and starting to work on a truly age-diverse did I realize how unbalanced my previous team was. My current team has a good mix of industry experience and excitement for new technologies, which makes planning both effective and exciting.
      - meddlepal 6y ago
        Part of the problem is that SF is just so damn expensive... it's going to self-select for people that can afford to live without the additional burden of a family and that tends to be people <30.

DrBazza 6y ago

Definitely agree - at my last employer, there were 3 of us in our 40s. Their skill set could be best summarised by "the year 2005": Subversion, MFC, and C++03.

arethuza 6y ago
I suspect that in 15 years people will be saying the same about K8s, possibly JS if Wasm takes off and I suspect ML will a fairly niche area.
arp242 6y ago
So? Subversion works fine; nothing wrong with it. Are you now a bad developer if you focus on actually getting stuff done instead of spending time migrating to a new tool?
- DrBazza 6y ago
  Considering the company is down to its last couple of developers and can't attract new ones because of the old technology stack, it's definitely a problem.
smsm42 6y ago
Is "subversion" a skill (unless we're talking about spies ;)? It's just a tool. I've used it. I've used cvs, git and other stuff too. If I had for some reason to work in a company that uses some other tool to handle their code repos, I'd learn it in a month or so (less if it's organized logically). It's like saying "driving a Honda Civic" is a skill - driving is a skill, Honda Civic may be what you're driving right now, and next week you may need to drive a BMW, and being able to do both is what I'd call a skill.
glouwbug 6y ago
I guess, but those tools alone build powerful fast software, and those programmers are solving problems which translate well to any field requiring problem solving. The software world may change rapidly, but a React / Git stack is no different than a C++ / Subversion stack when both jobs require programmers to solve hard, complex problems.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

>My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I'm doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years And that's the problem with software engineering vs other white collar careers. For example, my accountant friend is expected to be trained by their employer in the latest accounting practices and law frameworks and does't devote 1-3 months per year of their personal time on open source accounting projects to learn the latest legal framework for fun, that would be crazy for him. Same for my friends in architecture, dentistry and law. Their employers pay them to learn and gather the expertise needed for their future in the firm. Whereas, as a software engineer, very few companies(at least in Germany from my experience) will invest into their existing workforce to train them on the job for the future language/framework they will plan to use and instead seek to let them go once their expertise is no longer valuable and hire someone already experienced in the needed stack then repeat the cycle several years/decades down the road. That's why here you're expected to transition to management as a career progression, as IC roles are not really valued at old age unless you've dedicated your free time to coding and I don't know about you guys, but I'd prefer to spend my free time with my kids and exercising outdoors instead of coding to make myself employable in the latest stack.

Nursie 6y ago
> Whereas, as a software engineer, very few companies(at least in Germany from my experience) will invest into their existing workforce to train them on the job Maybe I've been fortunate, but in the UK and for a couple of years in Australia, I have had employers (and later clients for my contracting business) who have been happy to throw me at projects far enough outside my comfort zone that I keep learning and stretching my muscles. I feel at the top of my game (much of the time).
caymanjim 6y ago
My anecdotal evidence does not match your anecdotal evidence. I'm approaching 50, and I've had about a dozen jobs in tech starting in my teens. I've never worked anywhere that didn't allow on-the-job time for learning, and the majority of my employers have both actively-encouraged it and financed it. I also learn on my own, for fun, as my career started as a hobby and still interests me, but the vast majority of my education has been paid for during normal work hours. I also actively seek out new and interesting technology when switching jobs, and I switch jobs when things stagnate. It's what you have to do in tech, regardless of your age. If you stay too long at a company that isn't advancing your career, you're going to go stale. This isn't specific to tech either. How many mechanics, lab technicians, chefs, marketing people, stock brokers, architects, lawyers, etc. could find a job today if they hadn't learned anything in 20 years?

gedy 6y ago

I agree with this, the nuance is though that many interviewers are convinced they filter out the #2 with their pet CS quiz questions with no regard for experience or what the company actually needs. Not talking FAANGS, this is smaller companies reaching out to recruit senior devs they supposedly need.

_qulr 6y ago

> They're working on some legacy BASIC or COBAL system from the seventies, and surprised they can't find a new job when that's upgraded and they're downsized. Wow, exaggerate much? This doesn't describe the vast majority of "older" workers, it's just another disappointing stereotype and expression of ageism.

CharlesRoberts 6y ago

>Ones who keep up their skills To get a rough idea of the value of up-to-date skills vs apparent age, let's consider a hypothetical: If both a 50 and 24 year-old graduate from the same coding boot-camp, do they have equal odds of being seen after the first interview? (let alone actual employment) And how big is the difference in probabilities? I also note that desktop games are primarily coded in C++/C. If hiring is skill based then we would expect that industry to be zealously recruiting older engineers.

Zenst 6y ago
Sadly from experience, HR will blindly screen them out and speil the usual "overqualified" excuse to not progress. That they regularly do and get away with. Had situation exactly like that once and I bypassed HR straight to manager who lambasted HR, got interview and the job, still got shafted by HR who messed up salary, lied about rise and generally made my life hell with pettiness and bullying for want of another way of putting it. That is along with one person in HR taking my side and telling me what her manager was upto and next thing, that person was gone. So yeah - HR causes many of these ageist issues when it comes to the situation you outline.
sukilot 6y ago
Boot camps aren't "up or date skills" but to the extent that 24 year olds are getting hired off them would still support your point. Why do you assume young people don't learn C++ to work on games? They do to work on web servers. The AAA in AAA games refers to media content, not the game engine. Game programers are a trivial fraction of the C/C++ industry.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  24 year olds aren't getting Senior or Mid-Level Dev salaries. They know the new hotness and are cheap -- that's good enough.
jonfw 6y ago
What I've heard about game development (correct me if you disagree) is that it is typically higher demanding or lower paying than gigs in other fields. What I've heard is that it's only worth being in that industry if you're passionate about it. I think older engineers will trend towards less demanding or higher paying industries, and are less likely to have as serious of passions towards gaming

seneca 6y ago

The problem is that there is an undue burden put on those in group 1 to prove they are not group 2. Imagine an engineer walks into an interview. It's a young person, you think nothing of it and you go on with your normal interview. Now a different engineer walks in, and he has grey hair and some wrinkles. You feel the need to dig into whether they're in group 1 or group 2, in addition to your normal interview. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if we were talking about how there are two groups of women and one of them is a liability a lot more people would be setting off alarms.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Given the process of interviewing I think that burden is on anybody who attempts to go through the process of interviewing to a degree, young or old, male, female, or non-binary no matter the color or creed. A normal interview should dig through the qualities of 1 and 2 - although in practice many are downright insane powertripping prejudices that a stranger couldn't possibly know like filtering based upon if they follow arcane, arbitrary and archaic fashion "rules", or if they write a thank you letter afterwards.
dasudasu 6y ago
People do think that about women, but it usually goes “Is this the kind of family-centered woman that will be on perpetual maternity leave and not pull her weight?” It’s very hard to do anything about it even if we acknowledge that it happens.

maps7 6y ago

> They're very different crowds, and in very different types of companies. This is not a fact. I've seen both of your types in the same company. Let's not reduce people down to "you're either this, or this". It's not a good way of thinking. People are more complex than that and have different things to offer.

blaser-waffle 6y ago

> I've rarely seen #1 and #2 mix. They're very different crowds, and in very different types of companies. This has been my experience, too. Generally, the closer to doing technology as the main offering -- e.g. network engineers at an ISP, or developers at a code shop -- the better and more technical they are. Once you get into the Enterprise, where they're handling specific apps and frameworks, they tend to get stuck in patterns and whither. That's not to say you can't be an old grognard doing COBOL at a niche code shop, but when the tech itself is the offering you find much more technically competent seniors.

pmiller2 6y ago

Any thoughts on how to identify companies where people from group #1 work? I'm thinking of this from both a mentorship and a future employability aspect.

octetta 6y ago

Can you provide metrics for the number of people you've seen in each of these two categories? Also I'm curious about what age demographic you're in and how long you've been in the industry. Hoping that I don't sound combative asking this, I'm just really interested in your perspective.

woofie11 6y ago
I won't go into personal specifics, but I'm mid-career. I've been through a few companies, and made it as high up as C-suite in a smaller company, and director-level in a bigger company, before finding I prefer senior IC, tech lead, advanced development, or research roles. Of the companies I've been to, most were highly-tech focused (and pretty elite teams), but one was a large, distinctly non-tech company (with mainframes, even, and not the modern types, running legacy algorithms). I ran a small skunkworks team there. I can't give great statistics, aside from saying that at the tech companies, people tended to fall into the category of older is better. Senior engineers were senior. At the non-tech company, people tended to fall into the category of older is obsolete. The tech team was there for the paycheck. They worked 9-to-5, maintained a healthy work-life balance, and kept fairly boring systems running. The work they did was really outside of the company's core competency. It just needed to be done, and someone needed to do it. If layoffs ever came, I'm not quite sure who would hire them, though. It was culture shock for me. It wasn't specific to this one company either, but to the industry (we had pretty close contacts with both collaborators and competitors). This company was industry-leading, actually.

RobRivera 6y ago

I can agree with the methods described in the latter part of this post. There is no right or wrong, but as I began trusting the process of simply deepdiving for deepdiving sake, I found my core muscles maintained. Being able to grok and push in a short time is a valuable asset.

blub 6y ago

That's just your wishful thinking. Here on HN I've seen both people that stayed up to date complain about discrimination and interviewers say that they expect older developers to bring more to the table - i.e. if one is a decent older developer they will be disadvantaged when competing with a decent younger developer which has learning potential.

perl4ever 6y ago
Yeah, the issue as an older developer with age discrimination is not that you are entitled to some credit for years of experience when say, you haven't been using Java since college, but that you can't be hired on the same basis and salary as a new grad who has no experience either. Despite having demonstrated many times your ability to learn in the past. It's easy to stereotype people who have unrealistic expectations based on entitlement because of their age, but past a certain point, a lot of employers will reject a older candidate even at the same price as a new one on the assumption that they can't learn any more. Of course, if you are employable, you don't bang your head against the wall, you go and do something else. Like any kind of discrimination, if they were forced to accept you, it wouldn't make the culture palatable. It reduces your opportunities though.

notacoward 6y ago

All too often "keep up their skils" is code for "learn what I think is important" and says more about the speaker's (in)ability to know what's important than about actual skill. That's how ageism creeps in - not intentionally but through lack of awareness of one's own bias.