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> But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. Maybe it's just me but with all the rampant age discriminat

> But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. Maybe it's just me but with all the rampant age discrimination nowadays in tech, I really don't like to see the continued propagation of this stereotype. All sorts of people of all ages are unwilling or unable to update their knowledge of new tech, there is no reason to link this characteristic to someones advanced age.

namdnay 4y ago
Do you see a lot of age discrimination it tech? What I have seen is awkward situations where you have two developers of roughly equal competence. One happens to be 45 and the other 28. Fine, nobody would care about that. Except that due to automatic annual raises, job switches, seniority bumps etc, the 45 year old developer is paid twice as much as the junior. The rational response to this would be to say to align the two salaries (probably somewhere in the middle), but obviously the older one is never going to accept that - we all expect our salaries to "ratchet" upwards. So we end up with the irrational response, which is to sideline/kick-out the old expensive developer
- prohobo 4y ago
  Really? I see 40+ people as diversity hires for the most part. They're there so no one can say the company is ageist. The "good" devs become managers or magically disappear. Magically as in they get banished to some other realm I've never been able to see. That, to me, says there's plenty of ageism. If it was as simple as "they ask for too much", then someone would snap them out of it and we'd see plenty of older devs at software companies. Maybe less than younger devs, but plenty anyway. Honestly, I'd prefer if there were more older engineers to show the younger ones how dumb they are. Maybe better at building dynamic frontends, but dumber. That kind of seniority is sorely missing in software engineering, and it would drive standards upwards rather than downwards as they currently are. I'm currently in between, and wish I had more mentorship.
  - namdnay 4y ago
    > The "good" devs become managers or magically disappear. Magically as in they get banished to some other realm I've never been able to see. I agree with you here - the question is why? I don't think it's because we're discriminated against for being old, I think it's because in 99% of cases (we can't all be donald knuth), our cost grows faster than our skills. So we either move to management/business (where experience matters more and it's much harder to quantify productivity), or we become "the overpaid one". > If it was as simple as "they ask for too much", then someone would snap them out of it and we'd see plenty of older devs at software companies But they wouldn't snap out of it. (a) in most countries you can't demote people, (b) it's very hard psychologically to accept being paid less for the same job > more older engineers to show the younger ones how dumb they are. I'm talking about 45+ vs 30 years olds here, not 30 vs 23.
    - cma 4y ago
      I think the dominant effect is because the whole field is rapidly growing, so newly trained and younger is a disproportionately high amount relative to if it was at a steady state.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    I don't know if we're just exceptionally lucky, but my friend group - the vast majority of which are still doing coding/sysadmin/devopsy stuff - are in our 40s and we have all had no problem finding employment. I think a major factor is that the field just exploded so much over the past 20 years. Statistically, people over 40 are going to be in the minority. I also do think a lot of startups maybe aren't the best place for older people. My brain wastes a lot of cycles on edge cases I've learned to identify from experience, that don't matter if you just need to slop some shit out the door ASAP.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    I thought it connected well to the staff-vs-line article from the other day— that the later you are in your career, the more it makes sense to be in a "staff"-type role, since a staff person is likely to have a lot of autonomy, long term ownership, more access to senior management, less dependence on mentorship, etc. Following from that, it's easy to imagine that a bunch of the older engineers that you don't see at software/tech companies have in fact graduated into extremely well-paid, long-term roles working on software for banks, insurers, utilities, resource companies, whatever.
- vkou 4y ago
  If the 45-year old developer has been with the firm for 15 years, they may have roughly equal competence in writing code, but unless they spent the past decade with their eyes and ears closed, the 45-year old should have vastly more institutional knowledge. Seniority bumps, x-weeks-vacation-after-y-years-of-service reward that intangible.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    Tho institutional knowledge can cut both ways - being indignant rather than resigned about the problems, and trying to fix things without knowing why all the prior attempts failed, and even being friendly to people that are politically outcast, are all great. Even just bringing novel solutions from outside industries or organizations to bear on problems is useful (tho experience is also a common cause for having a variety of solutions in ones tool box).
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >Do you see a lot of age discrimination it tech? Yep, especially culturally rather than financially. Almost everywhere I've worked there was the implicit assumption that engineers graduate out of coding jobs into management roles. In a lot of places there's the idea that focusing on writing software is some sort of career dead-end for older people which is a shame for anyone who just likes coding. I think it's widely perceived as a young person's job for no good reason. And on the business side it's also pretty blatant. IIRC founders in their 40s are statistically most successful. Yet prominent people in the industry still openly fetishize youth.
armchairhacker 4y ago
I sympathize with older devs, my dad is an older software dev. But you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge: nobody young is going to learn assembly tricks which worked on MIPS and other past architectures. Older devs and companies not constantly learning new things and updating to best practices is a real phenomenon. On the other hand, anecdotally most older developers actually do keep up to date with the latest best practices. And there are lots of decades-old frameworks which aren’t obsolete: lots of people greenfield projects with C++ and Spring Boot and .NET, and unless I’m mistaken the C ABI and system calls haven’t changed much over the past ~40 years. So it's not like being old automatically means or even really suggests you're going to use worse, outdated techniques.
- giobox 4y ago
  > But you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge I'm not so sure. Google and StackOverflow are chock full of outdated (sometimes dangerous!) advice and knowledge on just about any tech subject, which hurts the young as much as the old. I've seen just as many outdated suggestions from junior devs repeating the first thing they found on google as I have older devs with stale knowledge. I'd probably argue the former has been a larger problem, honestly.
- markdown 4y ago
  > but you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge. Not in the frontend dev space. I once left it for 2 years. when i came back it was a whole new world
- threatofrain 4y ago
  Bootcamps such as Hack Reactor (purchased by Galvanize) have curriculum which is basically outdated by 10 years, so you're going to have graduates using var, anonymous self-executing functions as modules that mutate the global scope, and libraries like jQuery and bluebird. If any student leaves that program with a modern perspective of web dev (such as using Redux or even RTK), it will be due to their own personal grit. C'est la vie.
  - 4y ago
reggieband 4y ago
This is a fair criticism of how I chose to tell the story. The line you quoted was supposed to refer to the character introduced in the second paragraph and not to a generic stereotype of aged man. I can see how my choice of wording created an implication that people who have grey beards are old and that it is this oldness that contributes to their unwillingness to learn. The familiar cliche of "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". What I actually hope to communicate is that there is a hubris which leads some to believe their skills do not require updating. The caution is that sooner or later this hubris may lead to sudden downfall. People may call on you in their time of need and you will fail. And this failure is not because of your age, your intelligence or your willingness to work hard. You will fail because you became overly comfortable with a passed status quo and you let your skills get out of date. I see a trend of well-written, evidence backed articles where large, well funded sites are making a case to deprecate jQuery. These fact-based investigations into problems faced by their dev team result in a reasoned decision to remove a dependency that no longer justifies its cost. I encourage everyone to introspect if their defense of jQuery is on an equal technical footing to these types of investigations.
- narag 4y ago
  I'm curious: what's replaced Query? I guess it's not a single library, but a set of frameworks...
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    Plain JavaScript replaced it. jQuery provided useful things at its time, indeed, but JS has been somewhat improved at least and learned the tricks, even improved upon them. JS is still somewhat ugly, but I will give it at least that much. Now one does not really need jQuery any longer for most things, which were done with it. I personally find plain JS API and fetch to be cleaner than jQuery stuff even. People still use jQuery it out of habbit or, because it would be a lot of work to get rid of it everywhere.
    - petre 4y ago
      Fetch is fine but I'm not going to write document.querySelector every time I have to select some nodes, which happens quite often.
edoloughlin 4y ago
>> But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. > Maybe it's just me but with all the rampant age discrimination nowadays in tech, I really don't like to see the continued propagation of this stereotype. I would agree. If you last a long time in tech, you're more than the sum of the libraries you've learned.
Suzuran 4y ago
I have found the opposite of the stereotype to be true; I feel I've learned more in the last 5 years or so than I have the previous 30 because I now have the experience to contextualize and sort it all, the discipline to stay focused and active when Real Life doesn't want to let me, and access to resources that would have cost an unreasonable sum even 10 years ago.
sunjester 4y ago
You have offended me.
Apofis 4y ago
The problem is that a lot of old school website devs can write jQuery and very very little actual JavaScript.
aledalgrande 4y ago
Taking the age factor out, I have seen time and again senior level devs that have outdated knowledge and are, alas, not functioning as senior devs any more. This is not just in frameworks, but also in design and methodology. Once they reached a certain level they got lazy and decided they were good enough to stop learning every day.
nonethewiser 4y ago
But the guy in the story was old.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>All sorts of people of all ages are unwilling or unable to update their knowledge of new tech, there is no reason to link this characteristic to someones advanced age. In 1998 I was in a web development class with a guy, and one time I went by his house and he showed me his little resume site he was working on. It was really nice looking, he had a great sense of design, I could have made it but I couldn't have designed it. But it was all table based, so I showed him CSS and extolled its virtues. After which he exclaimed furiously "That's the problem with this industry, there's always new things to learn!" He was just starting out and was already unwilling to update his knowledge of new tech! I think he's working as a SiteCore admin in Dental association now. I'm pretty sure he has a nice work life balance, so make of that what you will.
goodguyamerikan 4y ago
Also, with the kind of smug tone op has posted his comment, I'm reasonably sure he doesn't understand that basic techniques fir x86 optimization have actually remain largely unchanged and what worked then also works reasonably well now, despite compiler improvements
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  Also you don't get good at assembly optimisation without understanding things like cache coherency and register allocations. New CPUs don't suddenly invalidate that ability to reason about what the problem might be and what might help (and what might not). Crucially, you already know how to adjust your existing skills to apply to new things.
judge2020 4y ago
It was just a reference to the person in the story, not an allusion to "because he was old he didn't try to update his knowledge/continue learning".
- squiffsquiff 4y ago
  So why describe him as a "greybeard" then? It are you claiming to have met many younger and/or female 'greybeards'? If your answer is that 'it's just part of the story'. Well that's precisely the complaint.
  - skavi 4y ago
    greybeard has always felt like a term of respect to me. personally i think of the type of person who could have been at bell labs in its heydays. definitely could exclude women though.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    The meaning of "greybeard" have moved from being literally, to current be figuratively. It doesn't mean that the person is A) old, B) man C) have a beard and D) that the beard is grey. It simply means someone experienced/being at something for a long time. The greybeards at a company can be all women of the age 26, but if they been with the company for 5 years when the company got started 5 years ago, they are the greybeards of that company. Might as well say "veteran" or "old-timer", although "old-timer" would imply actual old age, "veteran" implies nothing like that.
    - avar 4y ago
      "veteran", from latin "vetus" meaning "old" :)
      - capableweb 4y ago
        Weirdly enough, we don't speak latin no more, and the meaning of words changes over time :)
  - 4y ago
o10449366 4y ago
The OP doesn't link the characteristic to their example's age.

namdnay 4y ago

Do you see a lot of age discrimination it tech? What I have seen is awkward situations where you have two developers of roughly equal competence. One happens to be 45 and the other 28. Fine, nobody would care about that. Except that due to automatic annual raises, job switches, seniority bumps etc, the 45 year old developer is paid twice as much as the junior. The rational response to this would be to say to align the two salaries (probably somewhere in the middle), but obviously the older one is never going to accept that - we all expect our salaries to "ratchet" upwards. So we end up with the irrational response, which is to sideline/kick-out the old expensive developer

prohobo 4y ago
Really? I see 40+ people as diversity hires for the most part. They're there so no one can say the company is ageist. The "good" devs become managers or magically disappear. Magically as in they get banished to some other realm I've never been able to see. That, to me, says there's plenty of ageism. If it was as simple as "they ask for too much", then someone would snap them out of it and we'd see plenty of older devs at software companies. Maybe less than younger devs, but plenty anyway. Honestly, I'd prefer if there were more older engineers to show the younger ones how dumb they are. Maybe better at building dynamic frontends, but dumber. That kind of seniority is sorely missing in software engineering, and it would drive standards upwards rather than downwards as they currently are. I'm currently in between, and wish I had more mentorship.
- namdnay 4y ago
  > The "good" devs become managers or magically disappear. Magically as in they get banished to some other realm I've never been able to see. I agree with you here - the question is why? I don't think it's because we're discriminated against for being old, I think it's because in 99% of cases (we can't all be donald knuth), our cost grows faster than our skills. So we either move to management/business (where experience matters more and it's much harder to quantify productivity), or we become "the overpaid one". > If it was as simple as "they ask for too much", then someone would snap them out of it and we'd see plenty of older devs at software companies But they wouldn't snap out of it. (a) in most countries you can't demote people, (b) it's very hard psychologically to accept being paid less for the same job > more older engineers to show the younger ones how dumb they are. I'm talking about 45+ vs 30 years olds here, not 30 vs 23.
  - cma 4y ago
    I think the dominant effect is because the whole field is rapidly growing, so newly trained and younger is a disproportionately high amount relative to if it was at a steady state.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  I don't know if we're just exceptionally lucky, but my friend group - the vast majority of which are still doing coding/sysadmin/devopsy stuff - are in our 40s and we have all had no problem finding employment. I think a major factor is that the field just exploded so much over the past 20 years. Statistically, people over 40 are going to be in the minority. I also do think a lot of startups maybe aren't the best place for older people. My brain wastes a lot of cycles on edge cases I've learned to identify from experience, that don't matter if you just need to slop some shit out the door ASAP.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  I thought it connected well to the staff-vs-line article from the other day— that the later you are in your career, the more it makes sense to be in a "staff"-type role, since a staff person is likely to have a lot of autonomy, long term ownership, more access to senior management, less dependence on mentorship, etc. Following from that, it's easy to imagine that a bunch of the older engineers that you don't see at software/tech companies have in fact graduated into extremely well-paid, long-term roles working on software for banks, insurers, utilities, resource companies, whatever.
vkou 4y ago
If the 45-year old developer has been with the firm for 15 years, they may have roughly equal competence in writing code, but unless they spent the past decade with their eyes and ears closed, the 45-year old should have vastly more institutional knowledge. Seniority bumps, x-weeks-vacation-after-y-years-of-service reward that intangible.
- lanstin 4y ago
  Tho institutional knowledge can cut both ways - being indignant rather than resigned about the problems, and trying to fix things without knowing why all the prior attempts failed, and even being friendly to people that are politically outcast, are all great. Even just bringing novel solutions from outside industries or organizations to bear on problems is useful (tho experience is also a common cause for having a variety of solutions in ones tool box).
Barrin92 4y ago
>Do you see a lot of age discrimination it tech? Yep, especially culturally rather than financially. Almost everywhere I've worked there was the implicit assumption that engineers graduate out of coding jobs into management roles. In a lot of places there's the idea that focusing on writing software is some sort of career dead-end for older people which is a shame for anyone who just likes coding. I think it's widely perceived as a young person's job for no good reason. And on the business side it's also pretty blatant. IIRC founders in their 40s are statistically most successful. Yet prominent people in the industry still openly fetishize youth.

armchairhacker 4y ago

I sympathize with older devs, my dad is an older software dev. But you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge: nobody young is going to learn assembly tricks which worked on MIPS and other past architectures. Older devs and companies not constantly learning new things and updating to best practices is a real phenomenon. On the other hand, anecdotally most older developers actually do keep up to date with the latest best practices. And there are lots of decades-old frameworks which aren’t obsolete: lots of people greenfield projects with C++ and Spring Boot and .NET, and unless I’m mistaken the C ABI and system calls haven’t changed much over the past ~40 years. So it's not like being old automatically means or even really suggests you're going to use worse, outdated techniques.

giobox 4y ago
> But you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge I'm not so sure. Google and StackOverflow are chock full of outdated (sometimes dangerous!) advice and knowledge on just about any tech subject, which hurts the young as much as the old. I've seen just as many outdated suggestions from junior devs repeating the first thing they found on google as I have older devs with stale knowledge. I'd probably argue the former has been a larger problem, honestly.
markdown 4y ago
> but you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge. Not in the frontend dev space. I once left it for 2 years. when i came back it was a whole new world
threatofrain 4y ago
Bootcamps such as Hack Reactor (purchased by Galvanize) have curriculum which is basically outdated by 10 years, so you're going to have graduates using var, anonymous self-executing functions as modules that mutate the global scope, and libraries like jQuery and bluebird. If any student leaves that program with a modern perspective of web dev (such as using Redux or even RTK), it will be due to their own personal grit. C'est la vie.
- 4y ago

reggieband 4y ago

This is a fair criticism of how I chose to tell the story. The line you quoted was supposed to refer to the character introduced in the second paragraph and not to a generic stereotype of aged man. I can see how my choice of wording created an implication that people who have grey beards are old and that it is this oldness that contributes to their unwillingness to learn. The familiar cliche of "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". What I actually hope to communicate is that there is a hubris which leads some to believe their skills do not require updating. The caution is that sooner or later this hubris may lead to sudden downfall. People may call on you in their time of need and you will fail. And this failure is not because of your age, your intelligence or your willingness to work hard. You will fail because you became overly comfortable with a passed status quo and you let your skills get out of date. I see a trend of well-written, evidence backed articles where large, well funded sites are making a case to deprecate jQuery. These fact-based investigations into problems faced by their dev team result in a reasoned decision to remove a dependency that no longer justifies its cost. I encourage everyone to introspect if their defense of jQuery is on an equal technical footing to these types of investigations.

narag 4y ago
I'm curious: what's replaced Query? I guess it's not a single library, but a set of frameworks...
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Plain JavaScript replaced it. jQuery provided useful things at its time, indeed, but JS has been somewhat improved at least and learned the tricks, even improved upon them. JS is still somewhat ugly, but I will give it at least that much. Now one does not really need jQuery any longer for most things, which were done with it. I personally find plain JS API and fetch to be cleaner than jQuery stuff even. People still use jQuery it out of habbit or, because it would be a lot of work to get rid of it everywhere.
  - petre 4y ago
    Fetch is fine but I'm not going to write document.querySelector every time I have to select some nodes, which happens quite often.

edoloughlin 4y ago

>> But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. > Maybe it's just me but with all the rampant age discrimination nowadays in tech, I really don't like to see the continued propagation of this stereotype. I would agree. If you last a long time in tech, you're more than the sum of the libraries you've learned.

Suzuran 4y ago

I have found the opposite of the stereotype to be true; I feel I've learned more in the last 5 years or so than I have the previous 30 because I now have the experience to contextualize and sort it all, the discipline to stay focused and active when Real Life doesn't want to let me, and access to resources that would have cost an unreasonable sum even 10 years ago.

sunjester 4y ago

You have offended me.

Apofis 4y ago

The problem is that a lot of old school website devs can write jQuery and very very little actual JavaScript.

aledalgrande 4y ago

Taking the age factor out, I have seen time and again senior level devs that have outdated knowledge and are, alas, not functioning as senior devs any more. This is not just in frameworks, but also in design and methodology. Once they reached a certain level they got lazy and decided they were good enough to stop learning every day.

nonethewiser 4y ago

But the guy in the story was old.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

>All sorts of people of all ages are unwilling or unable to update their knowledge of new tech, there is no reason to link this characteristic to someones advanced age. In 1998 I was in a web development class with a guy, and one time I went by his house and he showed me his little resume site he was working on. It was really nice looking, he had a great sense of design, I could have made it but I couldn't have designed it. But it was all table based, so I showed him CSS and extolled its virtues. After which he exclaimed furiously "That's the problem with this industry, there's always new things to learn!" He was just starting out and was already unwilling to update his knowledge of new tech! I think he's working as a SiteCore admin in Dental association now. I'm pretty sure he has a nice work life balance, so make of that what you will.

goodguyamerikan 4y ago

Also, with the kind of smug tone op has posted his comment, I'm reasonably sure he doesn't understand that basic techniques fir x86 optimization have actually remain largely unchanged and what worked then also works reasonably well now, despite compiler improvements

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
Also you don't get good at assembly optimisation without understanding things like cache coherency and register allocations. New CPUs don't suddenly invalidate that ability to reason about what the problem might be and what might help (and what might not). Crucially, you already know how to adjust your existing skills to apply to new things.

judge2020 4y ago

It was just a reference to the person in the story, not an allusion to "because he was old he didn't try to update his knowledge/continue learning".

squiffsquiff 4y ago
So why describe him as a "greybeard" then? It are you claiming to have met many younger and/or female 'greybeards'? If your answer is that 'it's just part of the story'. Well that's precisely the complaint.
- skavi 4y ago
  greybeard has always felt like a term of respect to me. personally i think of the type of person who could have been at bell labs in its heydays. definitely could exclude women though.
- capableweb 4y ago
  The meaning of "greybeard" have moved from being literally, to current be figuratively. It doesn't mean that the person is A) old, B) man C) have a beard and D) that the beard is grey. It simply means someone experienced/being at something for a long time. The greybeards at a company can be all women of the age 26, but if they been with the company for 5 years when the company got started 5 years ago, they are the greybeards of that company. Might as well say "veteran" or "old-timer", although "old-timer" would imply actual old age, "veteran" implies nothing like that.
  - avar 4y ago
    "veteran", from latin "vetus" meaning "old" :)
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Weirdly enough, we don't speak latin no more, and the meaning of words changes over time :)
- 4y ago

o10449366 4y ago

The OP doesn't link the characteristic to their example's age.