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I wrote the ad. Holy cow, I didn't expect to be #1 on Hacker News. Will answer any questions. Here's one you might ask: Why? I'm pushing 60 and I've attempted

by ccleve 5y ago

I wrote the ad. Holy cow, I didn't expect to be #1 on Hacker News. Will answer any questions. Here's one you might ask: Why? I'm pushing 60 and I've attempted to interview for developer jobs over the last year. Got nowhere despite 40 years of experience. Getting really, really tired of this industry's attitude toward people like me. Based on questions below, I'll give a bit more. Earlier this year I had a personal referral into Facebook for a developer position. They do hiring centrally. A very young person in the HR department spoke to me, put me in the central database, and apparently shopped my experience around to a number of different groups. No takers. No one wanted to interview me, so the application died. Never did a tech assessment. So now I've started a new group, and I expect this thing is going to generate a lot more money than any work at Facebook ever would. So Facebook did me a favor. Still, it rankles.

MattGaiser 5y ago
What is it that happens? Do you get to the interview and then they see your grey hair and treat you like Grandpa? Do they just not call you for an interview at all? Is it the leetcode and focus on the specifics of very new and flashy tech that is the problem?
- ccleve 5y ago
  Don't even get to the interview stage. My tech skills never got assessed.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Damn. I have no great experience and can get interviews in a day or two. And everyone I talk to complains about no experienced tech people.
    - beepbooptheory 5y ago
      How do you get interviews in a day or two with no great experience??? These days, I just feel lucky to get an email rejection back at all
      - MattGaiser 5y ago
        I mean I don’t have brand companies. I worked for the government and a quasi tech startup. Not sure how I can get calls so quickly, but they aren’t FAANG level interviews either. Small startups and desperate corporates mostly.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      That's because what they really want is a 20-something that has 10 years (or more) of experience.
      - bradknowles 5y ago
        I’ve had recruiters basically ask me for exactly that. I had twenty years of experience at the time, and they wanted someone who was exactly like me with all my skill and knowledge, but ten years younger. I never responded to them, but they have been the butt of many jokes since.
  - Mattiusly 5y ago
    Same with me. I'm to the point that I'm going to create an alternate resume that only lists experience of less than 8 years, instead of 30+, and use a very old photo of myself on socials.
    - hondo77 5y ago
      Yeah, I truncated the experience section and for education I removed the years of attendance.
    - ido 5y ago
      I'm only 38 and I already do that (my first job as a developer was at age 18).
    - vidanay 5y ago
      8 years would only be 40% of my current job tenure.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    Same here. I've sometimes wondered if getting a newly minted college degree would work to bypass the age filter.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  All of the above. That's why I am no longer interested in working for anyone else. They can also be fairly insulting in tone. I guess us oldsters are too "thin-skinned" for today's hyper-competitive world. We make unreasonable demands, like being treated as humans. We're supposed to ignore mortal insults. Maybe it's just like a hazing ritual, where we are supposed to prove we are willing to abase ourselves for the corporation. Work environments are also completely centered around the needs and desires of younger folks. In many cases, it's not deliberate, but these are companies that are run by people in their twenties, and staffed by people in their twenties, so the sample population is a bit...homogenous. Perks are designed to entice younger folks (like hiking and skiing offsites, no weekends, Friday night happy hours and pub crawls, free beer and food, open-plan, "hip" offices, Urban locations, T-shirts, no short-term disability, etc.). The recruiters are just plain rude. They ghost me, almost immediately after finding out that I'm older than 35 (a lot older). Very different, from when I used to look, before my last job. The LeetCode tests are "Young-Pass Filters." They generally cover topics that people fresh out of college would nail, and I know that many engineers spend countless hours, practicing LeetCode (maybe while they are supposed to be writing non-leet code for their employers). How do I know it? Because I keep getting notifications, when they post their results on LinkedIn and other places. I've learned that if I see a binary tree test, I might as well look elsewhere. I have been writing shipping code, since 1987. I seldom encounter the neat little problems that I see in whiteboard tests. Just yesterday, I was dealing with some weird threading/memory leak issues; and those are a blue-assed bitch to debug (spoiler: I fixed them). Every single day, I have big, nasty problems that need to be fixed, and every single day, I fix them; often by designing good, robust, high-quality frameworks, modules, and applications. Device I/O problems are fun, too. The most unfathomable thing, is people directly and unapologetically, ignoring my portfolio. I have a big one. Real big. I know that it isn't that special, because I see bigger and more impressive ones, all the time. There's a lot of really talented, experienced developers, with years of work, open to perusal. These folks are looking to hire critical-path talent, responsible for the lifeblood of their products, pay us six figures, and then they deliberately ignore resources that could tell them more about us than twenty hours of interviews. People could make the "hire or ignore" decisions, simply by reviewing the portfolio. They wouldn't even need to call me on the phone, or let me know they were interested, in any other way. Complete stealth. But, like I said, I'm not particularly interested in rejoining the "rat race." This forced me into an early retirement, and I'm fine with that. I work harder, these days, that I ever did, and it's a joy.
maerF0x0 5y ago
I wonder what you attribute the ageism towards? I wonder what actual or perceived traits trend with age that hiring managers are trying to avoid? I'll venture one idea-- Once you have enough experience you start to be able to see the emperor has no clothes situations. Not being naively positive about everything can be interpreted as being overly negative (at least in the bay area). Funny enough it might just be the "negative" ones are more accurate (Depressive Realism) .
- cmiles74 5y ago
  When I'm feeling generous, I would guess the company doesn't want to spend the money required to compensate people with that level of experience.
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    Or ungenerously, they think all engineers are interchangeable and don't realize there may be a difference in code quality between different levels of experience, so why not just get the cheapest ones you can.
  - ido 5y ago
    As a 38 years old who has worked as a software developer since age 18...I'd say software developer salaries really plateau long before you're 60. You make "senior" after about 5-10 years of job experience, and not everyone makes principal or director (or CTO).
  - jpindar 5y ago
    Which is in itself a kind of prejudice, assuming I'm going to demand more money.
  - pirate787 5y ago
    That's not the issue, as an older dev I'm willing to work for the industry standard wage. Sr. Engineer is Sr. Engineer.
- conductr 5y ago
  My experience is it has everything to do with the non-work part of work. Diversity isn’t really the goal, the goal is building a team who has fun happy hours, eats breakfast lunch and dinner together, off-sites with passport, knows the latest beers/whiskey/alcohol du jour. There’s a reason you don’t see many 30 year old single moms in the sorority. It’s just not a good “fit”.
avgDev 5y ago
Refreshing. Great ad design and to the point. 8/10. I would give it 10/10 if you included compensation range.
- dan10400 5y ago
  I have to agree. The ad was pretty much one of the better I have seen. Not everybody spends their life on FOSS. And a contract-to-hire model should work for everyone.
  - joncalhoun 5y ago
    Many employment contracts prohibit doing additional contract dev work. I agree the spirit of contract to hire is great, but worth noting it won't work for everyone.
soneca 5y ago
Thanks, appreciate qualifying a bit what is considered “old”. I am 41, but only 4 years of software development experience. So only applied for junior positions yet. I don’t think I faced ageism applying to jobs, but I rarely applied to SV jobs (I am not from the US). What do you think is the reasoning people having ageist behavior use to convince themselves they are not bad people? That old people won’t learn, or won’t be “tecahable”, or “manageable”? That old people will be slow somehow? What were you able to grasp from the experiences you had?
- webmaven 5y ago
  You're assuming that the bias is overt and conscious. It doesn't have to be, any more than sexism, racism, or classism do. One looming issue for small orgs is a worry that an older employee will drive up the cost of the company health plan.
  - Dhirvish 5y ago
    Which again touches on a social issue, ageism is the entire point of this thread. The idea that any health company gets to "choose" who costs more or less is dumb. Everyone is young at some point and everyone is old at some point: Fact. So everyone should pay the same at every point throughout their career and everyone should be covered. They did surveys of people in UK about US health care on one of the late shows last year and they were dumbfounded at the basic things their system covered that ours didn't. One example, if you have a baby - which is required for the human race to continue, the health system covers it. It cost my wife and I a total of $10k to have our 2 kids in the last 6 years. That's day 1 of parenting, negative $5k in the hole: WITH HEALTHCARE FROM AN AM LAW 200 COMPANY. And I was a tech supervisor for cripes sake.
fossuser 5y ago
I've also thought this would be an interesting approach, even explicitly. The laws on age discrimination are about discriminating against old people, but not about discriminating against young people. If age discrimination is real, that means that people are not valuing older people properly - they're undervaluing them. You could have roles that are explicitly only hiring people 40+ and that restriction would be legal (at least as I understand it). I think this would be interesting to try.
- foobarian 5y ago
  How awkward would it be to have the 35+ requirement be outlawed. Would certainly be interesting to read those legal arguments. Edit: I meant 35+ not 40+. Updated.
  - TheDong 5y ago
    It would be quite tricky to outlaw. It's perfectly legal to have "years of experience" requirement, so for example you could have a requirement of: "Communication with spoken language is a valuable part of the job. We require all applicants to have 35+ years of experience speaking one or more languages". That's practically a requirement that you're 40/45+ without ever mentioning age.
    - gmadsen 5y ago
      That seems like a court case at least. You would need to prove there is any difference in language skill from someone with 15 years versus 35 years, otherwise it is just an age requirement superficially disguised as a needed skill requirement
      - bachmeier 5y ago
        > That seems like a court case at least. For what? Youth is not a protected class. Discriminate against them all you want. > You would need to prove there is any difference in language skill from someone with 15 years versus 35 years, otherwise it is just an age requirement superficially disguised as a needed skill requirement Age discrimination is different from other discrimination cases. It's really hard to win, for instance[1]. The company doesn't have to prove anything. The worker would have to prove that it was explicit age discrimination. For other types of discrimination, like race, the only thing that needs to be shown is differences in outcomes. [1] https://www.nextavenue.org/what-it-takes-win-age-discrimination-suit/ https://www.nextavenue.org/what-it-takes-win-age-discriminat...
II2II 5y ago
Other good qualities of your ad: it is clearly written and provides an idea of what the position involves. I wish more companies took this approach while advertising openings.
Mattiusly 5y ago
Agism is so bad in this industry. Thanks for writing that ad, it's brilliantly worded!
cjohnson318 5y ago
I worked at an electric autonomous car company in the Bay Area (not that one) that was crawling with 22 year olds slinging code every which way. Periodically a bug emerge that the younger generation couldn't get their head around. Invariably one of the older guys (in his 50's or 60's) would spend an afternoon looking at it, fix it, and then yell at all the kids in the room. I was somewhere between the two age groups and it was hilarious to watch.
- api 5y ago
  I've seen this too, and I really wonder why there is such an age bias toward straight out of college kids. Having some is fine but the whole industry seems heavily biased in that direction. I suspect it's rooted in the historic youth of computer aficionados back during the early-mid PC era in the 1970s and 1980s, and a cargo cult idea that youth was the ingredient that made this stuff happen. Instead it was the other way around. The youth of the participants was a product of all this stuff being so new. Now that the PC revolution is almost 50 years old there are tons of people who know computers very well in all age groups.
  - klardotsh 5y ago
    I'd venture a guess that (especially in SV/venture tech startups in general) that bias also comes from young folks not having many/any external commitments, so may be easier to get to work longer hours - someone with a family probably can't pull a 60 hour week as easily as someone living in a microstudio with few other cares in the world, yeah?
    - gabereiser 5y ago
      Absolutely this. It's easier to force younger coders into a slave-like work environment, complete with beer on tap, foosball tables, and other amenities to get them to live at the office to constantly work on the product(s). I can't say it's like that everywhere, but most startups are _designed_ to take advantage of their workforce to quickly "move fast and break things" looking for their market fit.
krumpet 5y ago
I'm 47 and strongly considering jumping from marketing to front-end dev. I have experience with development so I'm not starting from scratch, but I'm definitely not a pro level developer. I'm fine with a drop in salary, but your comment sure worries me about finding ANY job. That being said, it has been my dream to be a developer for years. I even studied Math, CS and Mech Eng in college. But, sometimes life takes you in unexpected directions. No gain with no risk, I guess...
- beebeepka 5y ago
  I started at 31 or about a decade ago. Never managed to get past a single 20 something with the power to hire people. Not a single time. On the bright side, I never had to deal with the environment that breeds such young know it alls. These places usually pay very little and simply inflate positions. Trust me, as an old geezer, you don't want to be on a team of 21 olds. Especially if some of them will have power over you
  - krumpet 5y ago
    Appreciate the comment. I'm definitely not chasing startups full of youngsters. I'm way, way beyond having any desire to work for FAANG type companies. I just want to write code and get out of marketing (which has been good to me, but never my passion). I recognize I'm taking a risk making this switch, but I also can't see myself sticking with marketing much longer.
    - beebeepka 5y ago
      If you can safely afford to give it a proper try, and really want to, then go for it. I don't miss working for marketing one bit. Programming is so empowering
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kodah 5y ago
> Here's one you might ask: Why? I'm pushing 60 and I've attempted to interview for developer jobs over the last year. Got nowhere despite 40 years of experience. Getting really, really tired of this industry's attitude toward people like me. Ironically, in the early 2000's it was the opposite. Something did change though because I've seen the problem you're talking about. One thing could be companies, recruiters, or manager looking for CS or CE degree specifically. Someone who is 60 outdates CS and CE. I'd caveat by saying most fresh grads don't actually know how to negotiate algorithms correctly. They leetcode like everyone else before the interviewing process. As I've gotten older I've developed more holistic understandings of some data structures and algorithms, but definitely not all of them. The skill I think I became more adept at was working through the logic of them more efficiently. That's the gift repetition gives though, I suspect. All that to say, if entities are overvaluing those degrees, it's an irrelevant requirement. Another thing could be that most jobs are phrased, "CS, CE, or equivalent experience". As someone without a degree "equivalent experience" at times boiled down to, "Have you worked at a FAANG or on FAANG level problems?" It's a circular dependency unless you spend some time in growth companies or start ups that don't have these hard requirements. Again, it's another useless requirement because you either have the math chops to solve the problems in front of you or you don't. I don't need provenance to tell me that. All that to say, I don't even imagine how old someone is when I'm looking at a resume. Most of my judgement relies on the interviewing process and whether you can negotiate a simple algorithm and some systems design. That's as data driven as I can get it right now, although highly inefficient, but inefficiency is worth the time for quality, imo.
- toadkicker 5y ago
  > "Have you worked at a FAANG or on FAANG level problems?" "I have not, do you have those problems with 10k users too?"
- greenyoda 5y ago
  > One thing could be companies, recruiters, or manager looking for CS or CE degree specifically. Someone who is 60 outdates CS and CE. I'm that old, and I have an undergrad CS degree. CS degrees were already common in the early 1980s.
ren_engineer 5y ago
how do they even know your age? I think it's a pretty common best practice to only list your most recent 2-3 jobs for a 1 page resume and you could just remove your college graduation year to hide that as well.
Rd6n6 5y ago
All the best developers I know are over 40, if not in their 50s or 60s. I don’t understand the stigma. All the young smart programmers I know will be better next year than last year
samstave 5y ago
Annecdote: When I interviewed with Twitter in ~2008/09 the manager asked me about what I thought about my previous experience (I was already ~15 years into my career).. and how it would apply at Twitter I replied: "I've done a lot of neat things in my career, but I love to learn new things and I always hate it when one says "well the way we did it here was such-and-such, thus that must be the correct way" and he literally replied: "thank god, we have hired too many people from Facebook as their first job and they think that just because they did it at Facebook, that theirs is the only way - and they are like 22 years old" --- When I was at FB, I noticed this - too many people wanted to be the Big-Swinging-Dick in whatever area... too much ego attached to their current position... not enough *wisdom* --- Anyway - at 46 - I regret how much time I put into my career (meaning directly focused on work - rather than relationships - as my ~26 years in tech have garnered me nothing but lost relationships because I was too focused on "uptime" -- QUALITY DOWNTIME (in life) TRUMPS TECHNICAL UPTIME IN TECH. --- Now with a ~1.5 year gap in experience... I am floundering looking for something to do, and I lament going to the fricken Nursery to buy mosses, and envy the guy watering them.. --- Anyway - if you need any (previously highly technicals) who are now relegated to PM as opposed to OPs -- I'd love to give you a try.
- ccleve 5y ago
  I wish I could hire non-technicals. The problem is that the product is only partially built. No product means no need for anything other than product at this point.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
As a 58 year-old who has pretty much given up on tech, thanks for doing this. I'd apply, but I have no experience with postgress internals and have never even used Postgress.
candybar 5y ago
You're a borderline public figure in politics and your role in politics seems to have been your primary occupation over the past few years. Does that ever come up in your conversations with tech recruiters? Given these specifics, I'm not sure if your experience generalizes to other old engineers, though I'm sure ageism is a problem for older engineers in our industry.
- ccleve 5y ago
  No one has mentioned it, although it may well be a factor. I think it's not so much the politics as it is that people see other interests and don't know what to do with them. It's as if having done additional things during your life somehow dilutes the main things.
didntknowya 5y ago
we've hired and got many older people working with us (55+). the main reluctance of hiring them is many are inflexible and stuck in their ways. sure they have 20+ years experience but many don't bother to update themselves on new methodology and advances and still expect a significantly higher pay. the ones that do like to learn are definitely an asset with their life experience too and get along well in a diverse team.
nicwolff 5y ago
I'm a 55-year-old Systems Architect at a big media company where I am a highly-valued senior engineer. But a few years ago I too had a personal referral into Facebook for a developer position, and I was invited in for the tech assessment, so I figured, why not see what the process is like, and how resistible the offer is? I pseudocoded simple algorithms on a whiteboard for a 25-year-old for an hour or so, and then never heard from them again. I don't really care, but yeah, it does rankle.
- kenth68 5y ago
  I'm in my early 50s, been programming since a teen and got my A+ and Microsoft system admin certs not long after they first came out. About ten years ago I left a partnership and was looking for work to make ends meet until I found the right job. Had an interview with a company for a tech/sysadmin type position. I was interviewed by a 20 something and one of their questions was how I would diagnose and repair a PC power supply problem. I said does the computer come on? No, I'd replace the power supply and get on to other things. She stopped me and started grilling me how I would know if the power supply is bad or not. I told her I could just look at the computer and tell, especially if it isn't powering on. She was getting a little upset and asked wouldn't I use a tester and check the other components, and I told her there's no need to get that involved when it's just a power supply. Needless to say I didn't get the job.
DarkTrick2938 5y ago
Same boat. I can retire from my current position, had the notion of putting my papers in here, collect my pension, and work someplace else. Jobs I applied to where I'm 100% matched for, I get nothing but crickets back.
snaidamast 5y ago
ccleve... I am now 71 years of age. I retired in 2014 after 42+ years in corporate development. I have developed 3 commercial products in my career and am Still doing development. I have worked through three major eras of computer technologies from mainframes, to LANs, to the Internet. I am also a published technical writer in Europe. Can I get hired today? Not a chance. I took an interview out of curiosity several years ago just to see what was going on in the industry. Even though I answered all the questions successfully, the attitudes of the interviewers were questioning why I was even there since I was in my late 60s at the time. I have written on several ocassions that the entire field went to crap in 2010 when Microsoft changed from ASP.NET WebForms to the ASP.NET MVC paradigm, without continuing to refine the WebForms internals as they had been doing. From what I could see, this move was done to accommodate the new mobile technologies but other than that, the Microsoft Community had completely ignored this new development paradigm as its mirror image was always available from the then known Castle Project. But few showed any interest in this offering. Why would they when WebForms could do everything actually required with a lower learning curve, and substantially less complexity. I worked on one of the largest MVC projects at the time in the United States. I worked with 2 other highly qualified software engineers and quickly saw the attraction of the MVC paradigm. It allowed anyone to break as many rules of project development as they liked, while creating as much complexity as one could want. The project completely collapsed after 3 months (my initial contracted time) for 2 very specific reasons (though we made each of the expected phase deadlines); one, the management had no idea how to handle such a project and as a result, increasingly got into viscous fights with the client the application was being developed for. And two, the MVC paradigm, though providing all the flexibility required, could not provide superior project time lines as a result of its inherent complexity. The WebForms environment and tools would have done the same exact things with much faster turn-around times. However, my 2 colleagues could simply not get their heads out of the sand long enough to see the mistake they had made by adopting such a development paradigm. And to this day, I always wonder why anyone would take up a development technology that added a tremendous learning curve, far more complexity than WebForms ever had, resulting in far more vulnerabilities to attack as a result. I can't blame everything on the younger generations of developers but they were certainly a driving force behind this adoption. Everyone was going to develop the next mobile killer-app. The odd thing is that Microsoft had on one of its web pages that discussed the use of MVC whereby it stated that it should only be used for content and not such things as database intensive applications. Well as MVC continued to get traction, that statement was eventually removed, though the paradigm did not get any less complex. Since the early 2000s, Internet development especially, has been driven by fads emanating from the younger generations of technologists. Some of this is warranted as the industry needs younger people to try out the newer technologies that come along. However, the loss of the senior personnel driven out by younger arrogance combined with corporate greed that exploits such people has had devastating effects on a profession that saw its vital functions and working hierarchies destroyed for the sake of both these factors. No senior engineer worth their salt would have allowed such developments in their organizations seeing them as primarily driving up costs, development timelines, and severely lowering the integrity of the organization's systems. Today, everything is now under attack from the criminal element on the wires, with Cloud operations being the juiciest targets for such attacks. Web sites are poorly designed and long proven implementation architectures have been thrown out the window to accommodate cost reductions and just plain laziness. But everyone just keeps promoting this path. Mostly because our younger counterparts don't know any other way of doing development. Without the guiding influence of experienced, senior professionals, the entire IT industry has been lost to a fantasy emanating out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere with corporate buy-in because it sounds "cool" and it promises to reduce costs in an area that simply tends to be costly when done correctly, though there are ways to reduce these costs scientifically. Young people in our profession are the life blood for taking on the challenges of new tools and software. But they do not have the experience to know what works or doesn't. They do not understand that in general, everything will do the same things that have always been done in our profession and the slight increases in application performance they get from their efforts does not mean that such new techniques are justified in terms of general implementations. But now there is no one to demonstrate this to them. You can see this trend in the differences that the spat between SpaceX (Musk) and Blue origin (Bezos) are bringing out. Despite Elon Musk's idiosyncracies, he has created new industries generating huge profits and his SpaceX company has hired and worked with some very talented engineers. Musk is a highly intelligent man with a double degree in both economics and physics. What is Bezos? As Economics Professor, Richard Wolff stated recently, Bezos is nothing more than a glorified delivery man making an obscene amount of money for coming up with nothing really original. His Blue Origin company appears to be run the same way as his Amazon warehouses, where everything is on deadline, everything is corralled into budgets, and safety is an afterthought. No wonder his top engineers are beginning to leave the company, with some going to SpaceX. Blue Origin has never produced anything to the level's of SpaceX but Bezos insists that he has a right to the NASA contracts for the Lunar modules being developed. The two companies, on the face of it, are like night and day. Our profession is just as much a science as it is an art. But without the science (Blue Origin does not have), you cannot get to the art (SpaceX). This disastrous loss, is just not the fault of the inexperienced younger technicians but instead must also be placed at the doorsteps of our large corporations that threw out our American citizens of all ages to outsource one of our most valuable industrial capabilities, that of software engineering, mesmerized by the ability to cut costs (and corners) at all levels of our profession. And many foreign managers were brought in to do just that making things even worse. GE, the most innovative company in the world in its heyday, was destroyed by Jack Welch as he turned it into a financial operation. Now GE is merely a shell of itself. It no longer innovates because it no longer produces anything. Sears Corporation is another example of American management stupidity. Twenty years ago the board hired a real estate mogul whose intent was to make money by selling off the vast land holdings the company owned, thereby destroying one of the most successful retail outlets in the nation and ruining thousands of lives economically along the way. To understand the need for the experience levels of older technologists, we have to turn to a real life example in our profession. A few years ago a highly competent senior technical analyst at 55 years of age decided she wanted to get experience in the new wave of technologies with the younger and newer technical startups. She resigned from her company where she could have stayed until her retirement and joined a startup. The younger technicians were anxious to tap into her experience levels for development projects until she began to warn them that their approaches would not work. Increasingly, this women was soon pushed aside as she watched one project after the other go down in flames as she had warned these younger professionals that they would. After around a year she left the company and formed her own, now successful business. Unfortunately, the die has been cast and there is little that can be done within established companies. But young people can start anew with worker-cooperatives where there is an emphasis on a 50-50 split in a company's employment practices. Half the company made up of senior personnel and the other half the young tigers. The older people to temper the whims of the young, and the younger people to bring fire into their endeavors. Finally, there is but one bible of software development to be followed, despite the many other publications on the subject; the 1996 edition of "Rapid Development" by Stephen McConnell, which is still in its first edition printing. Every young professional should get a copy of this venerable book that is based upon 35 years of project analysis and research as it will clearly demonstrate that unless one is working in scientific or engineering development endeavors, general development will NEVER change. It can't simply because the axioms to it are like the laws of physics. Not every tool has a a place, software design patterns are solutions looking for problems, and every single development endeavor has an optimal number of people that can be assigned to work on it within an optimal time frame to complete the effort. This is what has been lost to us as professionals and we need our younger counterparts to begin thinking in terms of discipline, structure, and paradigms that have been proven to work by software engineers over so many years... Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer
TimothyByrd 5y ago
Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html http://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html : "Perhaps the reason people have fewer new ideas as they get older [...]" Adam Grant, "Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World", chapter 4 : "When companies run suggestion boxes, there is evidence that older employees tend to submit more ideas and higher-quality ideas than their younger colleagues, with the most valuable suggestions coming from employees older than fifty-five."

by ccleve 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

What is it that happens? Do you get to the interview and then they see your grey hair and treat you like Grandpa? Do they just not call you for an interview at all? Is it the leetcode and focus on the specifics of very new and flashy tech that is the problem?

ccleve 5y ago
Don't even get to the interview stage. My tech skills never got assessed.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Damn. I have no great experience and can get interviews in a day or two. And everyone I talk to complains about no experienced tech people.
  - beepbooptheory 5y ago
    How do you get interviews in a day or two with no great experience??? These days, I just feel lucky to get an email rejection back at all
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      I mean I don’t have brand companies. I worked for the government and a quasi tech startup. Not sure how I can get calls so quickly, but they aren’t FAANG level interviews either. Small startups and desperate corporates mostly.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    That's because what they really want is a 20-something that has 10 years (or more) of experience.
    - bradknowles 5y ago
      I’ve had recruiters basically ask me for exactly that. I had twenty years of experience at the time, and they wanted someone who was exactly like me with all my skill and knowledge, but ten years younger. I never responded to them, but they have been the butt of many jokes since.
- Mattiusly 5y ago
  Same with me. I'm to the point that I'm going to create an alternate resume that only lists experience of less than 8 years, instead of 30+, and use a very old photo of myself on socials.
  - hondo77 5y ago
    Yeah, I truncated the experience section and for education I removed the years of attendance.
  - ido 5y ago
    I'm only 38 and I already do that (my first job as a developer was at age 18).
  - vidanay 5y ago
    8 years would only be 40% of my current job tenure.
- webmaven 5y ago
  Same here. I've sometimes wondered if getting a newly minted college degree would work to bypass the age filter.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
All of the above. That's why I am no longer interested in working for anyone else. They can also be fairly insulting in tone. I guess us oldsters are too "thin-skinned" for today's hyper-competitive world. We make unreasonable demands, like being treated as humans. We're supposed to ignore mortal insults. Maybe it's just like a hazing ritual, where we are supposed to prove we are willing to abase ourselves for the corporation. Work environments are also completely centered around the needs and desires of younger folks. In many cases, it's not deliberate, but these are companies that are run by people in their twenties, and staffed by people in their twenties, so the sample population is a bit...homogenous. Perks are designed to entice younger folks (like hiking and skiing offsites, no weekends, Friday night happy hours and pub crawls, free beer and food, open-plan, "hip" offices, Urban locations, T-shirts, no short-term disability, etc.). The recruiters are just plain rude. They ghost me, almost immediately after finding out that I'm older than 35 (a lot older). Very different, from when I used to look, before my last job. The LeetCode tests are "Young-Pass Filters." They generally cover topics that people fresh out of college would nail, and I know that many engineers spend countless hours, practicing LeetCode (maybe while they are supposed to be writing non-leet code for their employers). How do I know it? Because I keep getting notifications, when they post their results on LinkedIn and other places. I've learned that if I see a binary tree test, I might as well look elsewhere. I have been writing shipping code, since 1987. I seldom encounter the neat little problems that I see in whiteboard tests. Just yesterday, I was dealing with some weird threading/memory leak issues; and those are a blue-assed bitch to debug (spoiler: I fixed them). Every single day, I have big, nasty problems that need to be fixed, and every single day, I fix them; often by designing good, robust, high-quality frameworks, modules, and applications. Device I/O problems are fun, too. The most unfathomable thing, is people directly and unapologetically, ignoring my portfolio. I have a big one. Real big. I know that it isn't that special, because I see bigger and more impressive ones, all the time. There's a lot of really talented, experienced developers, with years of work, open to perusal. These folks are looking to hire critical-path talent, responsible for the lifeblood of their products, pay us six figures, and then they deliberately ignore resources that could tell them more about us than twenty hours of interviews. People could make the "hire or ignore" decisions, simply by reviewing the portfolio. They wouldn't even need to call me on the phone, or let me know they were interested, in any other way. Complete stealth. But, like I said, I'm not particularly interested in rejoining the "rat race." This forced me into an early retirement, and I'm fine with that. I work harder, these days, that I ever did, and it's a joy.

maerF0x0 5y ago

I wonder what you attribute the ageism towards? I wonder what actual or perceived traits trend with age that hiring managers are trying to avoid? I'll venture one idea-- Once you have enough experience you start to be able to see the emperor has no clothes situations. Not being naively positive about everything can be interpreted as being overly negative (at least in the bay area). Funny enough it might just be the "negative" ones are more accurate (Depressive Realism) .

cmiles74 5y ago
When I'm feeling generous, I would guess the company doesn't want to spend the money required to compensate people with that level of experience.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  Or ungenerously, they think all engineers are interchangeable and don't realize there may be a difference in code quality between different levels of experience, so why not just get the cheapest ones you can.
- ido 5y ago
  As a 38 years old who has worked as a software developer since age 18...I'd say software developer salaries really plateau long before you're 60. You make "senior" after about 5-10 years of job experience, and not everyone makes principal or director (or CTO).
- jpindar 5y ago
  Which is in itself a kind of prejudice, assuming I'm going to demand more money.
- pirate787 5y ago
  That's not the issue, as an older dev I'm willing to work for the industry standard wage. Sr. Engineer is Sr. Engineer.
conductr 5y ago
My experience is it has everything to do with the non-work part of work. Diversity isn’t really the goal, the goal is building a team who has fun happy hours, eats breakfast lunch and dinner together, off-sites with passport, knows the latest beers/whiskey/alcohol du jour. There’s a reason you don’t see many 30 year old single moms in the sorority. It’s just not a good “fit”.

avgDev 5y ago

Refreshing. Great ad design and to the point. 8/10. I would give it 10/10 if you included compensation range.

dan10400 5y ago
I have to agree. The ad was pretty much one of the better I have seen. Not everybody spends their life on FOSS. And a contract-to-hire model should work for everyone.
- joncalhoun 5y ago
  Many employment contracts prohibit doing additional contract dev work. I agree the spirit of contract to hire is great, but worth noting it won't work for everyone.

soneca 5y ago

Thanks, appreciate qualifying a bit what is considered “old”. I am 41, but only 4 years of software development experience. So only applied for junior positions yet. I don’t think I faced ageism applying to jobs, but I rarely applied to SV jobs (I am not from the US). What do you think is the reasoning people having ageist behavior use to convince themselves they are not bad people? That old people won’t learn, or won’t be “tecahable”, or “manageable”? That old people will be slow somehow? What were you able to grasp from the experiences you had?

webmaven 5y ago
You're assuming that the bias is overt and conscious. It doesn't have to be, any more than sexism, racism, or classism do. One looming issue for small orgs is a worry that an older employee will drive up the cost of the company health plan.
- Dhirvish 5y ago
  Which again touches on a social issue, ageism is the entire point of this thread. The idea that any health company gets to "choose" who costs more or less is dumb. Everyone is young at some point and everyone is old at some point: Fact. So everyone should pay the same at every point throughout their career and everyone should be covered. They did surveys of people in UK about US health care on one of the late shows last year and they were dumbfounded at the basic things their system covered that ours didn't. One example, if you have a baby - which is required for the human race to continue, the health system covers it. It cost my wife and I a total of $10k to have our 2 kids in the last 6 years. That's day 1 of parenting, negative $5k in the hole: WITH HEALTHCARE FROM AN AM LAW 200 COMPANY. And I was a tech supervisor for cripes sake.

fossuser 5y ago

I've also thought this would be an interesting approach, even explicitly. The laws on age discrimination are about discriminating against old people, but not about discriminating against young people. If age discrimination is real, that means that people are not valuing older people properly - they're undervaluing them. You could have roles that are explicitly only hiring people 40+ and that restriction would be legal (at least as I understand it). I think this would be interesting to try.

foobarian 5y ago
How awkward would it be to have the 35+ requirement be outlawed. Would certainly be interesting to read those legal arguments. Edit: I meant 35+ not 40+. Updated.
- TheDong 5y ago
  It would be quite tricky to outlaw. It's perfectly legal to have "years of experience" requirement, so for example you could have a requirement of: "Communication with spoken language is a valuable part of the job. We require all applicants to have 35+ years of experience speaking one or more languages". That's practically a requirement that you're 40/45+ without ever mentioning age.
  - gmadsen 5y ago
    That seems like a court case at least. You would need to prove there is any difference in language skill from someone with 15 years versus 35 years, otherwise it is just an age requirement superficially disguised as a needed skill requirement
    - bachmeier 5y ago
      > That seems like a court case at least. For what? Youth is not a protected class. Discriminate against them all you want. > You would need to prove there is any difference in language skill from someone with 15 years versus 35 years, otherwise it is just an age requirement superficially disguised as a needed skill requirement Age discrimination is different from other discrimination cases. It's really hard to win, for instance[1]. The company doesn't have to prove anything. The worker would have to prove that it was explicit age discrimination. For other types of discrimination, like race, the only thing that needs to be shown is differences in outcomes. [1] https://www.nextavenue.org/what-it-takes-win-age-discrimination-suit/ https://www.nextavenue.org/what-it-takes-win-age-discriminat...

II2II 5y ago

Other good qualities of your ad: it is clearly written and provides an idea of what the position involves. I wish more companies took this approach while advertising openings.

Mattiusly 5y ago

Agism is so bad in this industry. Thanks for writing that ad, it's brilliantly worded!

cjohnson318 5y ago

I worked at an electric autonomous car company in the Bay Area (not that one) that was crawling with 22 year olds slinging code every which way. Periodically a bug emerge that the younger generation couldn't get their head around. Invariably one of the older guys (in his 50's or 60's) would spend an afternoon looking at it, fix it, and then yell at all the kids in the room. I was somewhere between the two age groups and it was hilarious to watch.

api 5y ago
I've seen this too, and I really wonder why there is such an age bias toward straight out of college kids. Having some is fine but the whole industry seems heavily biased in that direction. I suspect it's rooted in the historic youth of computer aficionados back during the early-mid PC era in the 1970s and 1980s, and a cargo cult idea that youth was the ingredient that made this stuff happen. Instead it was the other way around. The youth of the participants was a product of all this stuff being so new. Now that the PC revolution is almost 50 years old there are tons of people who know computers very well in all age groups.
- klardotsh 5y ago
  I'd venture a guess that (especially in SV/venture tech startups in general) that bias also comes from young folks not having many/any external commitments, so may be easier to get to work longer hours - someone with a family probably can't pull a 60 hour week as easily as someone living in a microstudio with few other cares in the world, yeah?
  - gabereiser 5y ago
    Absolutely this. It's easier to force younger coders into a slave-like work environment, complete with beer on tap, foosball tables, and other amenities to get them to live at the office to constantly work on the product(s). I can't say it's like that everywhere, but most startups are _designed_ to take advantage of their workforce to quickly "move fast and break things" looking for their market fit.

krumpet 5y ago

I'm 47 and strongly considering jumping from marketing to front-end dev. I have experience with development so I'm not starting from scratch, but I'm definitely not a pro level developer. I'm fine with a drop in salary, but your comment sure worries me about finding ANY job. That being said, it has been my dream to be a developer for years. I even studied Math, CS and Mech Eng in college. But, sometimes life takes you in unexpected directions. No gain with no risk, I guess...

beebeepka 5y ago
I started at 31 or about a decade ago. Never managed to get past a single 20 something with the power to hire people. Not a single time. On the bright side, I never had to deal with the environment that breeds such young know it alls. These places usually pay very little and simply inflate positions. Trust me, as an old geezer, you don't want to be on a team of 21 olds. Especially if some of them will have power over you
- krumpet 5y ago
  Appreciate the comment. I'm definitely not chasing startups full of youngsters. I'm way, way beyond having any desire to work for FAANG type companies. I just want to write code and get out of marketing (which has been good to me, but never my passion). I recognize I'm taking a risk making this switch, but I also can't see myself sticking with marketing much longer.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    If you can safely afford to give it a proper try, and really want to, then go for it. I don't miss working for marketing one bit. Programming is so empowering

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kodah 5y ago

> Here's one you might ask: Why? I'm pushing 60 and I've attempted to interview for developer jobs over the last year. Got nowhere despite 40 years of experience. Getting really, really tired of this industry's attitude toward people like me. Ironically, in the early 2000's it was the opposite. Something did change though because I've seen the problem you're talking about. One thing could be companies, recruiters, or manager looking for CS or CE degree specifically. Someone who is 60 outdates CS and CE. I'd caveat by saying most fresh grads don't actually know how to negotiate algorithms correctly. They leetcode like everyone else before the interviewing process. As I've gotten older I've developed more holistic understandings of some data structures and algorithms, but definitely not all of them. The skill I think I became more adept at was working through the logic of them more efficiently. That's the gift repetition gives though, I suspect. All that to say, if entities are overvaluing those degrees, it's an irrelevant requirement. Another thing could be that most jobs are phrased, "CS, CE, or equivalent experience". As someone without a degree "equivalent experience" at times boiled down to, "Have you worked at a FAANG or on FAANG level problems?" It's a circular dependency unless you spend some time in growth companies or start ups that don't have these hard requirements. Again, it's another useless requirement because you either have the math chops to solve the problems in front of you or you don't. I don't need provenance to tell me that. All that to say, I don't even imagine how old someone is when I'm looking at a resume. Most of my judgement relies on the interviewing process and whether you can negotiate a simple algorithm and some systems design. That's as data driven as I can get it right now, although highly inefficient, but inefficiency is worth the time for quality, imo.

toadkicker 5y ago
> "Have you worked at a FAANG or on FAANG level problems?" "I have not, do you have those problems with 10k users too?"
greenyoda 5y ago
> One thing could be companies, recruiters, or manager looking for CS or CE degree specifically. Someone who is 60 outdates CS and CE. I'm that old, and I have an undergrad CS degree. CS degrees were already common in the early 1980s.

ren_engineer 5y ago

how do they even know your age? I think it's a pretty common best practice to only list your most recent 2-3 jobs for a 1 page resume and you could just remove your college graduation year to hide that as well.

Rd6n6 5y ago

All the best developers I know are over 40, if not in their 50s or 60s. I don’t understand the stigma. All the young smart programmers I know will be better next year than last year

samstave 5y ago

Annecdote: When I interviewed with Twitter in ~2008/09 the manager asked me about what I thought about my previous experience (I was already ~15 years into my career).. and how it would apply at Twitter I replied: "I've done a lot of neat things in my career, but I love to learn new things and I always hate it when one says "well the way we did it here was such-and-such, thus that must be the correct way" and he literally replied: "thank god, we have hired too many people from Facebook as their first job and they think that just because they did it at Facebook, that theirs is the only way - and they are like 22 years old" --- When I was at FB, I noticed this - too many people wanted to be the Big-Swinging-Dick in whatever area... too much ego attached to their current position... not enough *wisdom* --- Anyway - at 46 - I regret how much time I put into my career (meaning directly focused on work - rather than relationships - as my ~26 years in tech have garnered me nothing but lost relationships because I was too focused on "uptime" -- QUALITY DOWNTIME (in life) TRUMPS TECHNICAL UPTIME IN TECH. --- Now with a ~1.5 year gap in experience... I am floundering looking for something to do, and I lament going to the fricken Nursery to buy mosses, and envy the guy watering them.. --- Anyway - if you need any (previously highly technicals) who are now relegated to PM as opposed to OPs -- I'd love to give you a try.

ccleve 5y ago
I wish I could hire non-technicals. The problem is that the product is only partially built. No product means no need for anything other than product at this point.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

As a 58 year-old who has pretty much given up on tech, thanks for doing this. I'd apply, but I have no experience with postgress internals and have never even used Postgress.

candybar 5y ago

You're a borderline public figure in politics and your role in politics seems to have been your primary occupation over the past few years. Does that ever come up in your conversations with tech recruiters? Given these specifics, I'm not sure if your experience generalizes to other old engineers, though I'm sure ageism is a problem for older engineers in our industry.

ccleve 5y ago
No one has mentioned it, although it may well be a factor. I think it's not so much the politics as it is that people see other interests and don't know what to do with them. It's as if having done additional things during your life somehow dilutes the main things.

didntknowya 5y ago

we've hired and got many older people working with us (55+). the main reluctance of hiring them is many are inflexible and stuck in their ways. sure they have 20+ years experience but many don't bother to update themselves on new methodology and advances and still expect a significantly higher pay. the ones that do like to learn are definitely an asset with their life experience too and get along well in a diverse team.

nicwolff 5y ago

I'm a 55-year-old Systems Architect at a big media company where I am a highly-valued senior engineer. But a few years ago I too had a personal referral into Facebook for a developer position, and I was invited in for the tech assessment, so I figured, why not see what the process is like, and how resistible the offer is? I pseudocoded simple algorithms on a whiteboard for a 25-year-old for an hour or so, and then never heard from them again. I don't really care, but yeah, it does rankle.

kenth68 5y ago
I'm in my early 50s, been programming since a teen and got my A+ and Microsoft system admin certs not long after they first came out. About ten years ago I left a partnership and was looking for work to make ends meet until I found the right job. Had an interview with a company for a tech/sysadmin type position. I was interviewed by a 20 something and one of their questions was how I would diagnose and repair a PC power supply problem. I said does the computer come on? No, I'd replace the power supply and get on to other things. She stopped me and started grilling me how I would know if the power supply is bad or not. I told her I could just look at the computer and tell, especially if it isn't powering on. She was getting a little upset and asked wouldn't I use a tester and check the other components, and I told her there's no need to get that involved when it's just a power supply. Needless to say I didn't get the job.

DarkTrick2938 5y ago

Same boat. I can retire from my current position, had the notion of putting my papers in here, collect my pension, and work someplace else. Jobs I applied to where I'm 100% matched for, I get nothing but crickets back.

snaidamast 5y ago

ccleve... I am now 71 years of age. I retired in 2014 after 42+ years in corporate development. I have developed 3 commercial products in my career and am Still doing development. I have worked through three major eras of computer technologies from mainframes, to LANs, to the Internet. I am also a published technical writer in Europe. Can I get hired today? Not a chance. I took an interview out of curiosity several years ago just to see what was going on in the industry. Even though I answered all the questions successfully, the attitudes of the interviewers were questioning why I was even there since I was in my late 60s at the time. I have written on several ocassions that the entire field went to crap in 2010 when Microsoft changed from ASP.NET WebForms to the ASP.NET MVC paradigm, without continuing to refine the WebForms internals as they had been doing. From what I could see, this move was done to accommodate the new mobile technologies but other than that, the Microsoft Community had completely ignored this new development paradigm as its mirror image was always available from the then known Castle Project. But few showed any interest in this offering. Why would they when WebForms could do everything actually required with a lower learning curve, and substantially less complexity. I worked on one of the largest MVC projects at the time in the United States. I worked with 2 other highly qualified software engineers and quickly saw the attraction of the MVC paradigm. It allowed anyone to break as many rules of project development as they liked, while creating as much complexity as one could want. The project completely collapsed after 3 months (my initial contracted time) for 2 very specific reasons (though we made each of the expected phase deadlines); one, the management had no idea how to handle such a project and as a result, increasingly got into viscous fights with the client the application was being developed for. And two, the MVC paradigm, though providing all the flexibility required, could not provide superior project time lines as a result of its inherent complexity. The WebForms environment and tools would have done the same exact things with much faster turn-around times. However, my 2 colleagues could simply not get their heads out of the sand long enough to see the mistake they had made by adopting such a development paradigm. And to this day, I always wonder why anyone would take up a development technology that added a tremendous learning curve, far more complexity than WebForms ever had, resulting in far more vulnerabilities to attack as a result. I can't blame everything on the younger generations of developers but they were certainly a driving force behind this adoption. Everyone was going to develop the next mobile killer-app. The odd thing is that Microsoft had on one of its web pages that discussed the use of MVC whereby it stated that it should only be used for content and not such things as database intensive applications. Well as MVC continued to get traction, that statement was eventually removed, though the paradigm did not get any less complex. Since the early 2000s, Internet development especially, has been driven by fads emanating from the younger generations of technologists. Some of this is warranted as the industry needs younger people to try out the newer technologies that come along. However, the loss of the senior personnel driven out by younger arrogance combined with corporate greed that exploits such people has had devastating effects on a profession that saw its vital functions and working hierarchies destroyed for the sake of both these factors. No senior engineer worth their salt would have allowed such developments in their organizations seeing them as primarily driving up costs, development timelines, and severely lowering the integrity of the organization's systems. Today, everything is now under attack from the criminal element on the wires, with Cloud operations being the juiciest targets for such attacks. Web sites are poorly designed and long proven implementation architectures have been thrown out the window to accommodate cost reductions and just plain laziness. But everyone just keeps promoting this path. Mostly because our younger counterparts don't know any other way of doing development. Without the guiding influence of experienced, senior professionals, the entire IT industry has been lost to a fantasy emanating out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere with corporate buy-in because it sounds "cool" and it promises to reduce costs in an area that simply tends to be costly when done correctly, though there are ways to reduce these costs scientifically. Young people in our profession are the life blood for taking on the challenges of new tools and software. But they do not have the experience to know what works or doesn't. They do not understand that in general, everything will do the same things that have always been done in our profession and the slight increases in application performance they get from their efforts does not mean that such new techniques are justified in terms of general implementations. But now there is no one to demonstrate this to them. You can see this trend in the differences that the spat between SpaceX (Musk) and Blue origin (Bezos) are bringing out. Despite Elon Musk's idiosyncracies, he has created new industries generating huge profits and his SpaceX company has hired and worked with some very talented engineers. Musk is a highly intelligent man with a double degree in both economics and physics. What is Bezos? As Economics Professor, Richard Wolff stated recently, Bezos is nothing more than a glorified delivery man making an obscene amount of money for coming up with nothing really original. His Blue Origin company appears to be run the same way as his Amazon warehouses, where everything is on deadline, everything is corralled into budgets, and safety is an afterthought. No wonder his top engineers are beginning to leave the company, with some going to SpaceX. Blue Origin has never produced anything to the level's of SpaceX but Bezos insists that he has a right to the NASA contracts for the Lunar modules being developed. The two companies, on the face of it, are like night and day. Our profession is just as much a science as it is an art. But without the science (Blue Origin does not have), you cannot get to the art (SpaceX). This disastrous loss, is just not the fault of the inexperienced younger technicians but instead must also be placed at the doorsteps of our large corporations that threw out our American citizens of all ages to outsource one of our most valuable industrial capabilities, that of software engineering, mesmerized by the ability to cut costs (and corners) at all levels of our profession. And many foreign managers were brought in to do just that making things even worse. GE, the most innovative company in the world in its heyday, was destroyed by Jack Welch as he turned it into a financial operation. Now GE is merely a shell of itself. It no longer innovates because it no longer produces anything. Sears Corporation is another example of American management stupidity. Twenty years ago the board hired a real estate mogul whose intent was to make money by selling off the vast land holdings the company owned, thereby destroying one of the most successful retail outlets in the nation and ruining thousands of lives economically along the way. To understand the need for the experience levels of older technologists, we have to turn to a real life example in our profession. A few years ago a highly competent senior technical analyst at 55 years of age decided she wanted to get experience in the new wave of technologies with the younger and newer technical startups. She resigned from her company where she could have stayed until her retirement and joined a startup. The younger technicians were anxious to tap into her experience levels for development projects until she began to warn them that their approaches would not work. Increasingly, this women was soon pushed aside as she watched one project after the other go down in flames as she had warned these younger professionals that they would. After around a year she left the company and formed her own, now successful business. Unfortunately, the die has been cast and there is little that can be done within established companies. But young people can start anew with worker-cooperatives where there is an emphasis on a 50-50 split in a company's employment practices. Half the company made up of senior personnel and the other half the young tigers. The older people to temper the whims of the young, and the younger people to bring fire into their endeavors. Finally, there is but one bible of software development to be followed, despite the many other publications on the subject; the 1996 edition of "Rapid Development" by Stephen McConnell, which is still in its first edition printing. Every young professional should get a copy of this venerable book that is based upon 35 years of project analysis and research as it will clearly demonstrate that unless one is working in scientific or engineering development endeavors, general development will NEVER change. It can't simply because the axioms to it are like the laws of physics. Not every tool has a a place, software design patterns are solutions looking for problems, and every single development endeavor has an optimal number of people that can be assigned to work on it within an optimal time frame to complete the effort. This is what has been lost to us as professionals and we need our younger counterparts to begin thinking in terms of discipline, structure, and paradigms that have been proven to work by software engineers over so many years... Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer

TimothyByrd 5y ago

Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html http://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html : "Perhaps the reason people have fewer new ideas as they get older [...]" Adam Grant, "Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World", chapter 4 : "When companies run suggestion boxes, there is evidence that older employees tend to submit more ideas and higher-quality ideas than their younger colleagues, with the most valuable suggestions coming from employees older than fifty-five."