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>At 40, I've done some of the best work I've ever done [...] Its because at 40, I had a much deeper understanding of the tech, The blog post isn't about self-r

• fortran77 5y ago
  > The blog post isn't about self-reported cognitive ability getting stronger (or not declining). It's about the job marketplace. C'mon! You don't expect someone here to have actually read the story. He didn't even get the irony of the title (Usually the expression goes the other way, i.e., "50 is the new 40") which means he didn't even read the title too well, either.
• alexwebb2 5y ago
  The implicit assumption powering this is that programming experience from 35 years ago is not only irrelevant to today’s challenges, but undesirable due to having the wrong habits and patterns of thinking; this stands in contrast to surgery or management skills which are widely perceived to be more timeless with candidate value compounding with experience. It’s plainly false for all sorts of reasons, but that’s the source of the disparity.
  • xedrac 5y ago
    I've met plenty of older developers that refused to adapt and keep learning. On the other hand, the best developers I've known have all been older. It's not about the skills you acquired at age X. It's about you attitude towards continual learning and improving, regardless of your age.
  • agentultra 5y ago
    > The implicit assumption powering this is that programming experience from 35 years ago is not only irrelevant to today’s challenges, but undesirable I think the implicit assumption has it the wrong way around. It seems like the industry takes about 30 years to catch up with the mathematicians who had discovered the solution to our problems. We create this problem for ourselves. Some hot new web framework rediscovers the continuation monad and treats it as a novel invention. Giving it a slapping new name, a slick logo, and talks at the hottest industry events. A whole generation of developers learn to talk the talk, walk the walk, and hit a wall. The next framework comes along and suddenly they're, "too out of fashion." Computing hasn't changed radically in a long time and certainly not programming.
    • kiklion 5y ago
      > Computing hasn't changed radically in a long time and certainly not programming. This might depend on what you consider radical. Web forms vs MVC vs react + restful API are fairly different coding paradigms. Trying to create a windows service in net framework 2.0 is totally different than net core 5. Or using SQLDataReader to read executed sql strings vs entity framework? Even just dependency injection and scope definitions (transient, singleton, scoped) is very basic yet is something I’ve seen older developers tripping over. At least it’s an easy to identify run time error as it validates the container when running in development. I’m not saying older developers are bad, but developers with the mindset that coding now is the same as coding 20 years ago are either using a language that never developed itself or are going to stumble over the changes that did occur.
    • jjk166 5y ago
      This is actually the attitude that I find highly undesirable in "experienced" programmers. They recognize that Y is just X with some fancy dressing, but fail to appreciate the immense value added by that fancy dressing and thus treat Y as if it were X and never take advantage of any of the improvements, or expect Y to do things that X could be made to do but really is best done by Z nowadays. You're still trying to accomplish the same goals, and there are only so many building blocks, so yes the big picture stays roughly the same and its only the details that change, but the devil is in those details. I find working with people who are not only ignorant of the details, but proud to recognize that they are "just" details, to be a nightmare.
• quadrifoliate 5y ago
  > Why is experience valued for outside hires of CEOs but not as much for programmers? In other words, a 55-year old programmer would have 35 more years of experience than a 20-year old but that "extra 35 years of programming" doesn't seem to be valued as much as the "extra 35 years of managing" that a 55-year CEO candidate has. Why? I'll bite – I think it is because instead of licensing and regulating our profession like surgeons, we have opened it up to creativity and inclusion like artists or fashion designers. As a result, programming job trends are far more similar to fashion or art than medicine. You always want the clothes from the hip new designer, but a few stalwarts (Yves Saint Laurent, Ralph Lauren, etc.) are evergreen and always in demand. They even end up influencing the larger trends of fashion. If you ask Ralph Lauren how things are going, he'll say "I'm 81 and I have no problems finding work!". You might even have individual designers who are discovered at 81 and become a hit. But that is not the condition for the average fashion designer who is 81. Similarly, you'll hear from plenty of older programmers for whom things have worked out as they get older. My hypothesis is that they are also the ones who have kept up with changing fashions and paradigms.
  • syshum 5y ago
    hmm there are a lot of old brands and designs out there in clothing, and I dont think I have ever owned anything from a "hot new" fashion brand My clothes are either no name, or old old companies like Carhartt, levis, Wrangler, Dickies, etc...
    • quadrifoliate 5y ago
      > My clothes are either no name, or old old companies like Carhartt, levis, Wangler, Dickies, etc... You are wearing designer clothes! Just by a designer from 1873 [1]. The equivalent programmer would be John von Neumann, maybe. -------------------- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss
      • syshum 5y ago
        Exactly my point. the Comment I responded to was "No one wants old designers they want the Hot New young designers"
• seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Older programmers are judged more on their experience, a 55 year old candidate is expected to have 35 or so years of experience, but interviewing for that is tough. Instead, reputation is more important (having a bunch of people vouch for you so you be hired in as a staff/principal IC), but not everyone will have that, actually a lot of people won’t. So the 20 year old is an unknown quantity, they are all potential, a 55 year old candidate has to be the exact opposite (known quantity, not much accommodation for potential), and so…well, I’m sure we can see the problem with that. And if you change your career late in life, you are even more screwed by these kinds of standards. A 40 or 45 year old can’t just get into the industry via an entry level position. Even if they would have a 20 year career ahead of them.
• mekkkkkk 5y ago
  I think the (sometimes justified) fear is that an older programmer may have stopped learning X years prior, and gotten stuck in old practices. It's probably really easy to fall into a groove and say "it worked back then, and it still does". This attitude may be detrimental in a workplace that strives to innovate and wishes to test new technologies.
• jnorthrop 5y ago
  I agree with your sentiment. I was 51 when I last applied for a job at a new company. Initially I was getting very little interest in my resume. Then I cut out the first 10 years of my career from my resume (and LinkedIn), and downgraded the oldest position listed from a Senior Lead to just a developer -- essentially making me appear 40 instead of 50. Within a couple of weeks I started getting responses. And it is not like my work from 1990-2000 wasn't valuable. I worked on a complex large scale analytics system in the early 90's and migrated to large scale web-based applications in the later half of the decade. I'm proud of that work and have some interesting lessons and stories from that time period, but they are telltale of my age and were working against me.
  • stooliepidgin 5y ago
    Ageism is real. It's not some sour grapes of under-performers who let their skills decline, or move or think at a dotard pace. It's essentially "We don't want anyone old because old = bad, new = good."
    • ozim 5y ago
      I think it is a lot about under-performers that want to hang onto their "years of experience" as a selling point and being angry that there is not much of a market for "years of experience" only. Maybe they were not under-performers 10-15 or 20 years ago, but if someone gives 20 pages of resume and most of it happened in 90's I would not be interested. Because it is quite easy to see such person is hanging onto his past performance like Al Bundy to his 4 touchdowns in high school. If someone would be 50yrs old or even 60 but his last couple of years are taking most of resume and they did interesting work at that age I would be curious to talk to such person. It is not that they would need to have latest frameworks or libraries listed on the CV. It is more about if they did meaningful work in last year and not that they did meaningful work 20 years ago and now they are just hanging around doing whatever.
      • stooliepidgin 5y ago
        This is also true. Definitely can't slack off on the couch with a hand in their pants. Even someone with little experience can become perpetually stuck starting at the beginning of their career in low performance if they don't push themselves towards excellence. Slacking off at any point leads to a downward spiral of decay.
• alisonkisk 5y ago
  "corporate executive manager" is a tech role. "surgeon" is limited by the AMA cartel's supply controls, and requires 10 years more training than a programmer, so subtract 10 from effective age in job. Experience is valued for leaders (managers), which OP refuses to do. Experience is valued for careers where the work is the same year after year, which programming is not. So much of a 40year olds knowledge is useless because fashions have changed. Wisdom is useful in managers, but individual contributors need continually upating deep detailed knowledge and constant analysis and Nobel problem solving, which favors the youngish. It's more like chess than medicine or law. OP also gives hints that he has a bad attitude that may shine through in his interviewing and networking. He also didn't give any hint as to how many jobs he applied for and where.
• brandall10 5y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere in the this chat, I'm a 45 yo principal engineer at my current company who has seen nothing but an increase in attention from recruiters since turning 40. I'm also directly involved in hiring for my team, having helped add 15 members over the last year, working directly w/ the director to review all resumes, handling maybe 30% of the screens, and usually the veto vote. We've interviewed a number of engineers in their 40s and 50s. Experience is great and we're always welcoming of older devs... but there is a caveat. If that experience is tempered by a somewhat pessimistic attitude, which is often the case, there is rarely a chance to move forward. It's not being old - it's being worn out. AFA the resumes of older devs, we often cut them out because they're an objectively terrible, wall of text mess that goes on for 4+ pages. Like 2/3 of the time this is the case.
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    I understand the need to fake overwhelming optimism to get by interviewers with mindsets similar to yours. Too much honesty can be bad in this industry, especially at higher levels, where diplomacy and soft skills are very important.
    • brandall10 5y ago
      I have that optimism and it certainly is not fake. I love what I do. Yes, I bring experience to the table but not bad energy. WTF would you want to hire someone who poisons the well? It doesn't matter what the job/industry is, in what situation would that be remotely desirable?
      • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        If you say so. But just as you doubt the vigor of the “somewhat pessimistic” candidate (in your words, you didn’t say they were toxic), others will doubt the sincerity of your overwhelming optimism. So is life.
        • brandall10 5y ago
• swader999 5y ago
  Experience at that level is expensive and companies are less inclined to pay that much. They also are less likely to believe you'll be comfortable with taking a lower rate for a long duration. This is true for both CEO and high end programmer with decades of experience.
• gitfan86 5y ago
  A lot of companies are run with the Taylorism hierarchy. The people at the bottom are making the widgets. The layer above them are the managers, who are good at managing workers. A layer above them are executives who are good at making strategic management decisions that the managers will implement. That system worked well during WW2 and postwar America. Someone who was a manager at an airplane factory could move to another company and be a manager at a washing machine factory. While it is true that some management and people skills can transfer between industries, the big problem with Taylorism in tech is that the skillset needed to make the right management decision is orthogonal to the skillset required to get into a traditional executive role. Andy Grove, from Intel, was very successful at adopting a new management framework for this scenario as described in his book "High Output Management" Not everyone is as a good of a manager as Grove, so you still see a lot of managers following Taylorism hierarchy. And that requires that engineers assume the lowest level of the system and accept that their "managers" are qualified to make decisions. Young people without much exposure to the business side of things are much more likely to accept these positions. Managers are afraid of hiring someone 40+, who may know both the tech side and business side of things and be aware of management mistakes due to the manager's lack of technical expertise.
• usrusr 5y ago
  People don't look at a surgeon aged 55 asking themselves why that surgeon failed to move on to the next level. Unfortunately the same isn't true at all for programmers, for some reason it's assumed to be an entry position. If the path to surgery would be through nursing experience, aging nurses would have a much lower standing amongst all their future surgeon peers than they have now. Seen from this angle, the ageism seems to be an unsurprising outcome of the relatively informal qualification structure in software tech: apparently opportunity for all cannot come without a bit of stigmatization for those who refuse to strive for it.
  • stooliepidgin 5y ago
    It's as if the industry doesn't want competency to have a career and a retirement.
• deleted 5y ago
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• travisgriggs 5y ago
  Is it because large swaths of the industry use non experienced people to do the hiring? Experience values experience. Lack of experience values perceived longevity, ability to pay less, and zeal. Also, age is not experience. Age is usually an ingredient to experience (though some make use of less age than others to gain experience). But in and of itself, it does not create useful experience (maybe wisdom is the word we’re looking for here). I’ve worked with many older engineers who hadn’t gained useful experience. They’re still making the same mistakes they did years ago. And I’ve worked with younger engineers who I can tell are going to be old dinosaurs from the get go. They like the high paying career and the problem solving aspect, but the desire to evolve and improve their game play just isn’t there.
• laichzeit0 5y ago
  > Why is experience valued for outside hires of CEOs but not as much for programmers? In my experience, it’s that younger devs are cheaper, much cheaper, than older devs. Most software development is easy enough that you don’t need someone with 20 years experience. I can hire 2 or 3 people for the same price. There’s always a budget for resources, and that budget is usually as small as it needs to be. Web dev, CRUD apps, mobile apps are the norm, not Facebook scale. The tools are mature enough that a 20-25 year old can do the development, and their salary expectations are much lower.
• deleted 5y ago
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• ozim 5y ago
  Because let's face it: writing code is seen as digging trenches. I hear all the time from fellow developers how important we are. We get a lot inside jokes how non-devs don't understand things and all the self importance of devs that comes with it. I have a friend that is hanging a lot out with musicians/artists where they do the same thing as devs - thinking they are important. While developers earn more than musicians - a lot of musicians are just menial workers performing what they are told - coding is still menial work to be performed. So it is implementing other people ideas or they can just get another violinist. Surgeon while is quite physical and menial, everyone agrees it is occupation that deals with life and death - most developers are nowhere close to such responsibility.
  • Tarucho 5y ago
    Ok, but dev managers are also managing people digging trenches, not people in life and death situations, and they don´t face the same problems devs face. And they tend to be more "self important" than devs.
• karmakaze 5y ago
  - computer programming : oft-reported industry bias against age 40+ and active recruitment (especially by software companies) for 20-somethings. I think this is rational. 20-somethings have the least to unlearn, so you can get them to do things your way instead of the unique independent ways an experienced person would. Secondly, 20-somethings are much more easily abused with long hours and intangible or possible future rewards. 20-somethings are also really fun to work with. Sponges for knowledge and so much energy.