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Coding as a greybeard

• jesse__ 4y ago
  ... blonde beard? checking in. I just wanted to highlight that most (probably all) of the most important programming lessons I've learned from others have been delivered by people significantly older than me.
• irrational 4y ago
  51! LOL I'm 50 and I came into this article expecting greybeard to be someone much older then just a year older than I am! Fortunately I don't grow my beard out (my wife won't even kiss me unless I am as smooth as a baby's butt), so I'm not sure if it is grey or not.
• njacobs5074 4y ago
  I'm 58 and feel like I still have a lot to offer. But my focus in these days is to help my team (most of whom are easily half my age) be successful. I find that their success gives me a lot more of a buzz than coding something I've probably written more times than I remember. I do step and code from time to time but only when it's clear that it will have some kind of multiplier effect for my team. [Edit] I just wanted to thank the poster for starting this discussion. It takes more than a bit of courage, I think, to write something like that.
• 1jreuben1 4y ago
  Considerations: - put some effort into healthy lifestyle to roll back the years and appear younger : Age discrimination laws means they cant actually ask you age - just say "old enough, but not too old" - after 20 years in the trenches, you should have enough accumulated wisdom to move up the ladder to an architect / team lead position. The alternative is arguing technical trajectories with peers / managers who know less than you, which can be frustrating - market your broad and deep experience and insights built up over the years when you interview
• lucasgonze 4y ago
  No need to either excuse ageism or let it stop you. It's real. So is the personal freedom of movement that lets you find ways around it.
• dusted 4y ago
  I'm not a greybeard yet, but they're my favorite type of colleague to work with, they KNOW THINGS, they have experience, they have war-stories, they're generally not impressed by every new bloatware that comes along. All things equal, I'd hire the greybeard, actual beard a plus. In the future, I can only imagine ageism being a thing too, but flipped around, when it's realized that older and more experienced people are needed.
  • zaphar 4y ago
    We have soooooo many war stories. I always like to think they are entertaining for my colleagues so it's good to hear that I'm not totally off-base.
    • phoe18 4y ago
      Can you send one our way?
      • zaphar 4y ago
        I once presided over a DB2 to Oracle migration for reasons that had nothing to do with technological considerations and everything to do with politics. The hardest thing to get right was the different interpretations of what was 'null' in a given column. It was a never ending stream of in DB2 it's null but in oracle it's not. Or vice versa. You wouldn't think you'd have so much of that to sort though but I would bet at least 40-50% of the issues we ran into were purely around what one database counted as null and another did not. The empty string in one database would null in another as an example.
    • vidanay 4y ago
      I have so many war stories, I stop myself from telling them because I feel like it's just a game of one-upmanship.
  • toyg 4y ago
    > they're generally not impressed by every new bloatware that comes along. The problem is when this attitude backfires into immobilism. Sometimes there are solid reasons why the new hot shit is hot, and just saying "we can do the same already with X" can be reductive (and leading to technical debt down the line). But yeah, now I'm 43, I see the difference in attitude that I bring when faced with wide-eyed youngsters, even just because they often "drink the kool-aid" a bit too uncritically.
• rtontic 4y ago
  Ageism in tech is strange to me, like, we think old scientists, doctors and writers as better than their younger counterparts, but for some reason it's different in programming.
  • duncan-donuts 4y ago
    Fresh young folks work more for less and have less “distractions” outside of work. Less opinions, more likely to fall in line. When you need bodies ageism makes perfect sense.
    • prometheus76 4y ago
      We responded along the same lines, but your response was much pithier. Thank you for reminding me to edit my jabbering.
    • crustycoder 4y ago
      When you need something done quickly and properly first time, hiring someone who has seen same the same half-assed ideas "reinvented" over and over for the last 30+ years and who won't try to sell them to you as the New Shiny makes much more sense. Unless you are into square wheels, of course. Most of the time experience and healthy cynicism is the cheapest option.
      • duncan-donuts 4y ago
        Absolutely agree. There’s an aspect of technology investments that you can’t really see payoff with less than a decade of experience. I know early in my career I didn’t really understand how technology choices were really investments
      • sjamaan 4y ago
        If you only care to "move fast and break things" with the sole goal of getting acquired, none of that matters.
    • pugworthy 4y ago
• crustycoder 4y ago
  60 year old here, still writing code for a company that provides Cloud services, today I'm hacking away on some Scala. My role model and hero is Roger Faulkner, the creator of /proc who died at 76 "with his boots on". An elder statesman who took no shit from anybody, and a true gentleman to boot. https://thenewstack.io/remembering-roger-faulkner/ https://thenewstack.io/remembering-roger-faulkner/
  • mech422 4y ago
    54 here - got my last job 2 years ago, middle of covid, no issues with my age. That was with a smallish cloud services/architecture firm and had no issues with my age. We were just acquired by a F500, and again - my age doesn't seem to be a factor at all.
• mojuba 4y ago
  I'm a 50+ greybeard (literally) and here's my story: I once figured I could improve my chances of getting a job if I shave my beard. I knew I looked much younger without it, people would get my age wrong by some 10-15 years. And so my 6 months-long search for a job that time ended in success on the first interview after I shaved it. The first one! I remember the faces of the guys who hired me when they saw my personal data on some tax form that I filled later, after the contract was signed. Ageism in this industry is real. I think the root cause of it is investors, it's where the origins of this phenomenon are. They prefer younger entrepreneurs who in turn hire people like themselves, and so it propagates down the hierarchy as the company grows. It's transitive. In fact this is true for all types of discrimination. I switched to entrepreneurship and feel the same effects here. Good luck raising money or even finding a co-founder. It's tough. Not going to shave my beard though. I have no idea what could be done here other than for the aging tech people to unite and form their own companies, investment funds. Just like the other discriminated groups do - women, then racial and other minorities. Edit: I should add, I was talking about a hands-on engineering job, not management. I love coding and not going to quit it because of ageism or pay or other circumstances.
  • vidanay 4y ago
    Another literal 50+ greybeard here. I'll offer a counter example: In the Fortune 500 company I work for, we are absolutely FILLED with greybeards. I's say that the average age is pushing 40 and the average tenure with the company is 10+ with a significant percentage being 20+ y.o.e. (including me).
    • mojuba 4y ago
      I see, but it can be explained by the aging management (middle or high or both) at your company. Correct?
      • crustycoder 4y ago
        No.
    • quaffapint 4y ago
• lambic 4y ago
  Curious which computers had 4k of memory. I started with 1k, jumped to 16k a few months later (wobbly ram pack) and 48k a year after that.
  • rbanffy 4y ago
    My Casio PB-700 still has 4K of RAM. Got me through college.
  • prometheus76 4y ago
    My first computer was a TRS-80 Model III, which had 48k of RAM. That's an embarrassment of riches compared to 4k. High-res graphics mode was 128 X 60 (black and white only) and no sound. I remember typing in a BASIC version of Conway's Game of Life, and each generation on that size of grid took about 20-30 seconds to update. Good times!
  • vraylle 4y ago
    For me, the TRS-80 Model I (4k). I later "graduated" to the TI-99/4A (16k) and Commodore VIC-20 (5k).
  • Wildgoose 4y ago
    I started with 2K, (the "minimal" Acorn Atom). I expanded the memory 1K at a time to the maximum of 12K of RAM. Two chips for each 1K. I can still remember which ones: code "2114", 300ns static RAM chips, 4 bits x 1024 (hence needing two chips per K).
  • mdtancsa 4y ago
    Some of the early 2001 PETs had them IIRC. I dont know what it was, but when I took computers in highschool there were still a few of the old ones in the class that had 4K and crappy keyboards and I think and there was something that didnt run on them. Hence it was a rush to reserve the fancy new 4xxx series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET Ooooh, the nostalgia looking at those pics.
  • spacedcowboy 4y ago
    I suspect my early trajectory is similar (and my parents couldn’t afford the pre-built version of the ZX81, so I learnt soldering at 11), except my jump was not to the Spectrum, but to the Atari XL because Dixons had a sell-off-the-stock deal where you got a floppy-disk drive + the computer for £100. So I went to 64k after 16 :) These days I live in Sunny CA, I’m almost as senior engineer as I can be at Apple (and I’ve got a good chance of getting rid of the “almost” over the next couple of years), and I’m going to retire early as soon as the kid goes to college. Not bad for a docker’s brat from ‘pool. Can’t say I’ve noticed much Ageism here at the fruit company. I know people who’ve been here for 30 years (I’m coming up on 20) and my direct boss used to work at NeXT.
• zwieback 4y ago
  I'm 56, still actively coding everyday but also using accumulated ME & EE Domain knowledge. What's most striking to me is that all my bosses three or four levels up are same age or younger than me. That affords me some level of respect so far no sign of ageism.
• kuon 4y ago
  I am at near 30 years in tech and let me told you one of the first commercial customer I had about 25 years ago. This customer had a factory where it sorted potatoes. They had a huge weight scale where they would weight truck coming in, full and then going out, empty. The difference was the weight of the potatoes. The problem was that scale was mechanical and calibrated by officials, which means nobody was allowed to tinker with it. You could read the weight on a big VFD 7segment display, that was it. They wanted to automate the reading of the weight. Everybody told them it was impossible because of the calibration. But I had an idea. I took a webcam (which could only take photo at the time, no video, I think it was photo man or something, serial based) and I put a colored filter in front of it which would only let red pass and did OCR on the result. It worked for 6years before they got a digital scale. I've been doing this kind of weird thing my whole life. I find solutions. Now I have more and more grey hair in my beard and I start to feel a bit "out of the loop" with all those new things (docker, kubernethingy, JS zillion of packages...). I am a bit scare, I fear the moment where I will just be a relic.
  • johnbellone 4y ago
    There's a great quote by a character in last week's episode of "For all Mankind" that pretty much summarizes my career in a nutshell. No matter my age I plan on living my life by it. > “These are engineering problems, and we are engineers. Shall we begin?”
    • vidanay 4y ago
      But, but....she sold her soul!
    • pugworthy 4y ago
      Fantastic quote indeed! I let out a laugh and smiled when I hear that, and looked at Dev in a slightly better light.
  • vidanay 4y ago
    As someone who works in machine vision and a sister division of my company likely made the scale you are referring to, I am both impressed and saddened by your story.
• jeffreportmill1 4y ago
  Agism is real, but probably unintentional. By definition, most people hire subordinates, and in their mind they picture someone some number of years their junior. When an older person applies, they just don't fit the image they have created in their mind (assuming they don't feel outright threatened). It might even be that agism has the opposite effect once you are established in an organization. If you are qualified, experienced and engaged, you might be first in line for promotions because then you fit the image. The best advice to fight agism is probably to use your network. If you've been around the industry for many years and made friends along the way, that might level the playing field.
  • bob_loblaw 4y ago
    My current boss (I'm guessing I'm 7 years her senior, not going to ask her age) later told me that she was nervous hiring a subordinate older than her. I'm grateful for her open mind. This is a fantastic job and she is a terrific boss. So yeah, there is probably some unintentional aspect to ageism. Not saying all of it is unintentional though.
• Upvoter33 4y ago
  It's funny in a thread about ageism, the blatant sexism of the term greybeard has yet to be discussed... just sayin'
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • zach_garwood 4y ago
    Don't you find it exhausting being offended by everything all at once? Pace yourself, young one.
    • Kaze404 4y ago
      This reply is so surreal. Pointing out blatant sexism is "being offended by everything all at once", but old men being discriminated against isn't? Not to mention the amount of condescension that just proves the original point.
      • CRConrad 4y ago
        > Pointing out blatant sexism is "being offended by everything all at once", but old men being discriminated against isn't? A more charitable reading is ~ "This discussion is about one problem; let's not drag another one into it". I just recently saw the same thing on LinkedIn[1]: a Finnish guy complaining about how, in another thread he had started on how his dark-skinned wife had been racially abused in Poland, some (Finns, apparently) had whatabaouted the discussion into "there's racism in Finland too!", and when he'd tried to explain that "Sure, but this thread isn't about that", he was accused of "derailing the discussion". No, he wasn't: they were. And so, IMO, are you here. ___ [1]: That really has become much more "typical social media" recently, hasn't it? Can't recall seeing such general -- i.e. not directly work-related -- discussions there even a year or two ago.
        • Kaze404 4y ago
          Asking for a discussion to be focused on one particular problem is fine in my opinion. But I think we can both agree that "Don't you find it exhausting being offended by everything all at once?" isn't exactly the best way to say that, to put it mildly, without even taking into consideration the condescending and infantilizing comment that came right after.
• bai232 4y ago
• fortran77 4y ago
  I'm 59. I dye my beard. ("Just For Men" brand, #45)
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• nickdothutton 4y ago
  The best guy I ever employed was someone I kept from retirement for the last 5-10 years of his career. He never once under-delivered in 20 years for me, either when we worked together at one of the “Internet giants” or afterwards at a couple of startups. I once asked him what was the best decision he made in his career. He told me it was choosing digital computers over analogue. I’m still not sure if he was joking or not.
• latexr 4y ago
  The closing talk at FOSDEM 2019[1] was so enthralling that when maddog (the greybeard speaker) ran out of time (around the 45:30 mark), the audience cheered for it to keep going and the organisers went with it. At FOSDEM 2020, the final talk[2] was outright called “maddog continues to pontificate”. Ageism may be real in the industry, but there is definitely a sizeable number of programmers who recognise the value of experience and enjoy the “war stories”. [1]: https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/keynote_fifty_years_unix/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/keynote_fifty... [2]: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/fossh/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/fossh/
  • Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
    I watched [1] in parent comment (really about the 49 minute mark fwiw), that was heartwarming. Ageism needs to be kicked from this industry. Yes, defeated, static, close-minded people of all ages exist, but don't tar everyone with that brush just because their hair is grey!
  • latexr 4y ago
    > around the 45:30 mark Correction: I meant 49:30.
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  Im my opinion, creative work, like writing, painting, architecture or coding can be done efficiently almost until the last breath. Old writers and architects are not uncommon. I think we'll see many of us working until at least 80. I am 45 btw, and I am still actively learning new stuff and improving my art, I don't feel diminished at all.
  • newaccount2021 4y ago
• kieckerjan 4y ago
  Greybeard here. Whenever a younger colleague is picking on code that I wrote ages ago (and which is not up to modern standards, never mind that it worked for 15+ years without complaints) I reply: "listen buddy, I have bugs that are older than you." In some cases it it not even untrue. Self-deprecating sarcasm is one of the prerogatives of a greybeard.
  • zach_garwood 4y ago
    I recently worked with a 21 year old and I once told her that "I've been releasing bugs since you were in diapers!"
• CodeSgt 4y ago
  I know agism is rampant in this industry, but it still shocks me. I'm 23 and relatively junior at ~1YOE. The "grey beards" I've worked with have all been incredibly technically proficient and a joy to work with. The skill and ability and depth of experience held by my older coworkers makes me grateful to have the opportunity to work with and learn from them. To any older individuals here still working in tech, please don't feel unwanted. Your experience is needed and appreciated, especially by the juniors who get to work with you.
  • chasd00 4y ago
    Agism can cut both ways so i'll add that i'm 46 and have been continually impressed with the younger people on my teams. Smart, hardworking, and dedicated. I've learned as much from recent college grads as I have taught them so it's definitely a two way street.
    • qorrect 4y ago
      > I've learned as much from recent college grads as I have taught them so it's definitely a two way street. Can you talk more about what you learned ?
    • wink 4y ago
      I think the main problem are people who have this weird (to me) take that you can't be at eye level or form friendships with a huge age gap. Maybe it has helped that I've had friends a lot older than myself when I was ~20 (and not just my 50y old parents as the only reference point of older adults), but also at work. If people with 20 years of experience explain why they are correct and not "because I say so" it's a good experience, same as with people fresh off university - some are eager to listen when you tell them why it will fail and some will just believe you're the old grumpy neckbeard.
      • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
        ya.. friendships with huge age gap was weird to me until i hit 30 and realized we're all just people and i should probably stop thinking about older folks like "parents" or "proper adults" and maybe we can legit be friends. now i see young folks and wonder how they think about me. don't know where i fit anymore
• molbioguy 4y ago
  Greybeard is but a stage. Coding wisdom is accrued, powers tested. I have transformed to the next stage -- whitebeard! Now I wield power openly and code with ease ignoring the stares and doubts of younger coders :)
  • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    They sent you back!
    • molbioguy 4y ago
      Saruman :)
• wnolens 4y ago
  Big thanks to you greybeards out there. My ages 23-29 were spent under your close tutelage and I learned so so much, often via direct lecture on a whiteboard. Now I work at a place that burns out young folks and I literally have no one to learn from. It's frustrating, I'm probably going to leave because of it.
  • digitalsushi 4y ago
    A developer who professionally survives into their 30s or so needs to make peace that they have statistically exhausted their pool of mentors. If you enjoy mastery of basically anything, you should consider whether it's the time to invert yourself and become the mentor for the next person down the line.
    • wnolens 4y ago
      Yea that's fair. I do mentor quite naturally. I just miss the arms-length access to 20 years of experience which I was lucky to have at a previous work place. There's as much to learn when you are absent of mentors though. Self-sufficiency in the face of ambiguity is a critical skill.
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  My thoughts: It keeps getting better and better. You stop reinventing wheels. You know where most of the holes are and can laugh when the kids fall in them. You know the hype cycles and can spot the fads and fashions. With 10 or 20 languages behind you, code becomes separate and 'above' languages, so you can think in structures and abstract algorithms. Enjoy standing up for principles, you're the man now, and there's not much left to "look up to" (especially in this morally declining business). Not having something to prove means you can know your limits, like when to quit trying to fix someone's "poor little thing with a broken wing" that ain't ever gonna fly. You've time to read all four volumes of Knuth and really (almost) understand. Also, you're not going to win that Turing award now, so enjoy not having to try. Things to watch out for. Look after your eyesight and posture. Spend more time thinking about code while out walking. Shout at clouds less because you realise that dumb ideas will die of their own accord in good time. Enjoy the new toys the kids make, even if they aren't "production ready serious" - they will mature in time.
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > Look after your eyesight and posture. And your hands (including wrists). Carpal tunnel is no fun. Arthritis in your fingers is very much no fun. You don't think of programmers as people who work with their hands, but if you think about the actual mechanics of the job, our hands are critical.
  • arduinomancer 4y ago
    > With 10 or 20 languages behind you, code becomes separate and 'above' languages This one is so true I don't understand why younger programmers are so obsessed with which language is "best" To me the algorithm/logic in the abstract is the interesting part I would much rather work on an interesting project/problem in a "bad" language than work on a boring project in a "good" language
• commandlinefan 4y ago
  I started coloring my beard five years ago to avoid this.
• KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Some years ago I also had a grey beard. No it's white ;-) And still coding.
• mkarliner 4y ago
  I'm 66, nearly 67, and my main problem is that I'm widely regarded as being a bit too avant garde.
  • wistlo 4y ago
    62 here, and I know the feeling. I feel like a fresh out of school 22 year old when I have to explain current best practices to people a decade or even a generation younger (who insist on using Windows 7, or won't upgrade to supported 64 bit versions of IDEs, etc. etc.).
  • kerblang 4y ago
    > avant garde I just have to ask: In what way? Any examples?
• newaccount2021 4y ago
• ur-whale 4y ago
  >"Ageism is a thing in tech" Strongly disagree. I happen to be in the same general category as the author (older actually), and I've never experienced that. Quite the contrary as a matter of fact: the grey beard factor often gives you an authority that's very often not deserved and can be annoying in meetings were free flow of information (as much as that ever exists) is important.
  • khill 4y ago
    It feels like ageism is more pronounced at startups and tech companies - at least, that is my perception based on real world and online discussions. I'm 50, work at a large, established manufacturing/distribution company and haven't experienced any ageism that I know of. I also work with a lot of engineers from external vendors and don't see a lot of people much younger than me (except as junior roles at contractors).
• aborsy 4y ago
  I now stay away from hiring below 30s. Tons of effort to train them. I feel like raising children for a long time. Also, higher incidence of behavioral problems: they can be immature and bring drama, feeling entitled, they may lack sufficient social experience (it takes some time until they learn how to properly respond in a given situation, play well in a team, etc), don’t know well how the industry in which we work operates etc. I get better bang for the buck with more experienced folks. Much less headache. I think hiring young people is partly a cultural convention.
  • dominotw 4y ago
    30-40 is the sweetspot for devs but they are also distracted by new family members in that time period.
  • mardifoufs 4y ago
    Isn't this just blatant ageism too? Especially the part about "behavioral problems"?
    • aborsy 4y ago
      No. We are talking about the selection or rejection of people with or without justified reasons. Ageism refers to discrimination without a justified reason. For example, someone’s beard is grey, he is not considered, or gets negative points. If a valid reason is provided to the person, young or old, pertaining to the performance in the job, that’s fine. The person can perhaps work on it and improve. At the end, the person who better performs a job and delivers should get that job, irrespective of gender, age, religion, etc.
      • scottlamb 4y ago
        If you provide the true reason specific to the person why you didn't hire them, and it's an actual job issue they can improve other than "wait until you're 30", that's one thing. On the other hand, you said "I now stay away from hiring below 30s." You may have had all kinds of bad experiences after hiring younger folks, but none of those are the fault of the person sitting across the table from you when you interview the next person. You're stereotyping. It's ageism.
• dugmartin 4y ago
  50 year old greybeard (in winter) here. I worked with a lot of smart female engineers over the last nearly 30 years. I'm wondering what they call themselves now (and I'm wondering if we can get a better name in general)?
  • CRConrad 4y ago
    "Greyhairs", I guess? Though many men go bald, so "baldy" -- but (AIUI) a lot fewer women do, so that won't work as a gender-neutral moniker.
• yosser 4y ago
  I'm 62. I started out by coding basic and machine code on a ZX-81 I won in a competition when I was on the dole in the early 1980's. These days I earn a handsome salary as a front end developer - mostly React, but other frameworks as and when required. I pull in very good side income as a freelancer too. Over the last 15 years I have had absolutely no problem getting a job at any stage, usually winding up with a number of offers within a few days of leaving my previous job. I imagine I've come across ageism from time to time, but honestly it has made little difference to me or to my prospects. I'm told I look quite young for my age, but I dye no hairs. Take heart oldies, if I can do it, so can you.
• swader999 4y ago
  I find there is general agism, but hard won experience is still really valued on the teams and the places that I want to work.
• BirAdam 4y ago
  Ageism is, for sure, a very real thing. I work with a guy who started his programming career on UNIVAC and he’s doing cloud stuff now. He’s still quite sharp and capable. Another gentleman is middle aged, as I am, and there’s one younger developer on the team. My older colleague is probably our best asset. He knows when we do something stupid and has no fear of telling us. I work for a non-profit though, and I’ve become management. Other companies I worked at in the past didn’t treat older people well at all. Always bugged me. We may add more layers of abstraction to things but logic and math do not change. The things that worked in the past will still work, you may just need a different language, framework, or whatever else… and it’s probably easier than what we all started with, let alone what someone who’s 60+ started with.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  I'll be 59 at the end of this year. Unlike most of the commenters here, I've been self-employed for the last 20+ years, working on my own open source project, and so I have not had to interact with interviewers or companies that might or might not want to hire me during that time. The folks I do collaborate with are generally fairly anonymous unless they stick around the project for a long time, at which point nobody really cares much about anyone's identity or age. My experience of coding-while-aging has mostly been centered on just a few things independent of industry ageism: 1. smaller working set size: I am fairly sure that I just cannot retain as much design and/or code in my memory at this point as I could, say, 10 years ago. It's a little hard to tell, because the scale and scope of the project itself has grown. But I remember when I could relatively easily think about the entire codebase, or when I knew the answer to any question about the codebase without having to look at it. Those days are over. Interestingly, my main collaborator is about 10 years younger than me, and to a large extent he can still do those things, which reinforces my belief that memory limitations are what is driving it. 2. FOMO: not money, but technology. I look out on the landscape of "the new" and wonder if it is possible that it actually contains anything that would make my work or my project better, easier etc. So far, the answer is a fairly solid "no" - realtime audio software has so little connection to web-centric application development that it's not that hard to be fairly confident about this. But things like Rust still make me wonder if it could potentially do a better job of providing memory safety than the somewhat ad-hoc solutions the project has adopted (in C++) over 20 years. And a couple of weeks ago, someone built VCV Rack with emscripten and thus got it running in the browser, which seems right on the doorstep of what I do. Should I be thinking more about that, or is it a diversion? Hard to know, and only time will tell. 3. Work/life balance: working for yourself on your own project is hard to beat, but finding the boundaries between work and the rest of life can be harder still. Getting older, with a spouse that entertains some ideas about how that means a (slow) shift in priorities, makes that challenge seem even more important. I was lucky that I got to be a stay-at-home parent when my kids were young, but now that I'm closing in on 60, the question about what work means, what work is for, how much I could actually live on, what I actually want to do with my time have gained increasing significance and weight. The answers, alas, are as elusive as ever.
• abledon 4y ago
  will this continue into the 2030s? 2040s? at some point, won't a large swathe of the industry be in their 50s/60s? A couple decades ago tech/programming was niche, but now there is a huge % of people going into it
  • dogline 4y ago
    People that graduated in late 80's/early 90's are now hitting 50+. This is the big bubble, there aren't that many people older, but there's a big group now that we're in our 50's. There are workplaces now that have a big group of these people, which didn't exist before.
• deleted 4y ago
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• ta238911 4y ago
  I believe, if you can maintain a genuine interest in certain, contemporary topics than you will probably have an easier time to stay relevant. Today, depending on your interest, I'd probably would go deep into the "devops" field, since that's quite technical, fast moving but with lots of stable parts (like operating systems) and there's demand and will be for some more time. There's also always a way to stay relevant by just being very good at a very particular thing - even if there are only a few jobs. I remember mainframe people advertising that if you know your way around z/OS you'll never have to search for a job again.
• mikerg87 4y ago
  54. Understand that your target market may change. Think legacy. My father at 72 was contacted about a system he was an intern on in 1967 because he was the only one left alive from when the system was built. Plenty of legacy stuff from the 4gl craze of the 90s and 00s is aging out rapidly. Power Builder, Cold Fusion, Dbase/Clipper, Delphi, Java apps and many more will need to be updated or migrated to newer tech stacks in the coming decades.
  • dagw 4y ago
    Think legacy. But not too legacy. A friend of the family got his first programming gig (in the early 80s) working on some old in house main frame system at a fortune50 company and spent the next 20 years doing that. When they retired that system in the early 2000s they fired him and he ended up having to take a job at a gas station, since no one was interested in hiring someone who had spent their entire career working on some main frame system that no one had ever heard of.
    • mikerg87 4y ago
      I'm not talking about a first gig, I'm talking about skills and skillsets where you aren't competing with new devs and the .js flavour of the month. Sorry to hear about your friend, but my friends in the mainframe priesthood tell me - "it's not about knowing COBOL so much as it is the CICS/JCL and other legacy stuff that keeps that COBOL alive they are really paying for". The kind of things that unless you lived it you can't possibly know because it never made it into google.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I'm 60 (no beard). I did have to adjust to the way that I'm perceived. I don't like it, but it's just the way things are, and I need to accept it, and work around it. I seem to get done what needs doing. I'm no slouch, in the areas I work at. Basically, folks are free to ignore me. I won't ignore them. I will step up (politely), when I'm being downright insulted, and will usually remove myself, if possible, from situations where that happens. A lot of times, when I see some of the Jurassic-scale clusterf**ks that happen, I wonder "Did anyone over 40 review this plan?"
• agentultra 4y ago
  I was learning on an Amiga 500 in the late 80s. I dropped out of high-school to take my first programming job (it was the 90s and I went back to finish). Before I had an email address we used Fidonet. When I had my first email address the Internet wasn't commercially available. I've been there since and watched it grow. What I find weird about it all is seeing how the same things get discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered: and how all that froth forms some of the weirdest trends and opinions. I've done the management thing for a couple of years and while I was good at it I wasn't enjoying it. I intend to stay on as a developer for the rest of my career. I like programming.
• throw_acct_919 4y ago
  > ageism is a thing in tech Managers are looking for people they can control, because companies and CEO and founders are looking for those, who they can control. The thing is that folks who are 40-50+ are more smart when it comes to politics. It's almost impossible to screw them over with deadlines, dragging multiple times across the org. They know the law, and it's expensive to set unrealistic goals and paying with engineers' health for that. But this trick works with younger folks. Managers can do all sorts of weird stuff to younger folks, and CEOs tolerate that: - Work on weekends (I remember my manager was yelling at me when I didn't reply to him on Sunday, while I was working all day long on Saturday lol). - Switch you, your team, and your folks to a totally different tech stack without a way to switch back, and see what happens (happened to me in Atlassian). - Fire you when you sick - happened to me in Atlassian. Yes, it's illegal, but sometimes it is legal. You're getting back from being sick, and once they realize you gonna take more sick days, boom! For example, once Atlassian found my wife has cancer, they tried to find ways to fire me. It happened September 2021. They know I gonna take extended medical leave to take care of her, and I'm eligible to do that every year. But no. 1 year after terminating my employment, my wife is still on treatment. Tomorrow is her 20th chemo. I reached out to Mike Cannon Brookes and Scott Farquhar multiple times (Atlassian founders), it didn't help. No reply, CEO and founders in tech tolerate ageism, and looking for ways to screw over younger folks because they can hire, and fire, and intimidate in a multitude ways. The bottom line is that younger folks are more disposable, you can put more toll on their physical/mental health, and that's why there is a hire preference.
  • Clubber 4y ago
    Thanks for naming names. I wish I had known about this before we subscribed to their service, I wouldn't have done it. Companies who do things like this deserve to die and the investors deserve to lose their money. It's got to be horrible for morale of the people there, and eventually horrible for their product as a result. There's just some companies you shouldn't do business with if you can help it.
  • babycake 4y ago
    Ah yes, the Shitlassian story. Read up on it here if you don't know about it: https://shitlassian.com/ https://shitlassian.com/
• jason-phillips 4y ago
  > I am mindful, these days, that I'm 51 because I know ageism is a thing in tech. I hear this a lot, but that hasn't been my experience. The demand for me far exceeds the supply of me. > ...when I start to talk about things and find solutions, that disappears. Exactly. If you can prove within the first 30 minutes why you belong in the room, they aren't going to want you to leave.
  • mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Most people don't even get in the room because their resume was thrown out, most of the rest don't get in the room because they can't pass the codepen hazing. Not all of us have fantastic networks.
    • jason-phillips 4y ago
      That's where you're wrong, kiddo. I have no network and never passed a Codepen test. I'm smart and do excellent work. I have decades of experience that speaks for itself. Maybe you need to recalibrate everything you think is true because from where I sit, you couldn't be more wrong.
      • mixmastamyk 4y ago
        (Ah, the "I never experienced it => doesn't exist" argument.) Neither have I (passed test, good network), and was unemployed for year and a half a few years ago as a result. Had to move to a different but one of the few related industries that does not consider itself leet. Might tone down the arrogance+provincialism bit.
• wistlo 4y ago
  Fifty-one. Ha. I am 62, with salt and pepper hair that just crossed about the 50-50 line, and beard that's about 75% gray. My current job started in September 2001, and because of the grounded airspace that month I was offered remote status, and there I remain after 21 years. One good thing about the company is we rarely use cameras on calls. We did try it briefly at the start of COVID lockdown did we try, but everyone found it distracting. (I was shocked how young my manager looked, and he probably felt the same way in revers). But teleconferencing among dispersed and remote staff has been a thing here for decades (could say we invented it, actually), so voice-only calls with screen sharing fortunately are the norm. One thing I noticed in hearing myself on recorded calls is though I may look like I'm in my 7th decade, I don't sound it. In fact I'm the guy constantly pressuring younger people in my team to stop using tools that are out of date or no longer available, to adopt current practices (trade fragile 20 year old Excel macros for Postgres, trade CMD scripts for Powershell, move apps to the cloud, etc.). That's key: people forget your age if you bring sharp chops to the table and stay current with the tech stack. It helps to use an ID picture that looks younger, something that's been easier now that we take our own badge pictures rather than go to a corporate DMV-style photo booth. Some of the people I work with peripherally, I suspect, would be shocked to meet me in person (and that includes some in my chain of managers). I have no illusion or desires around climbing that chain, I just want to be paid a competitive salary to develop solutions. I try not to date myself in conversation unless I feel safe confirming my sexagenarian status (that's an age range, people). Like the OP, I look forward to doing this until I'm ready to stop (or forced to by real aging issues), not because my birth date in an HR database.
  • lucasgonze 4y ago
    Good takeaways here: 1. The less time you spend on-camera, the less your appearance dates you. Go voice-only when possible. 2. Stay on the leading edge of tech whenever possible
• furyofantares 4y ago
  How uninviting our industry must be to women when our term for someone that's been in it a long time is greybeard
  • stillkicking 4y ago
    • samatman 4y ago
      Did you mean besides COBOL? There's CLU. Speaking of which, get one.
    • phailhaus 4y ago
      Yikes. What's your argument here even? "Therefore, women don't exist"?
    • hnaccount141 4y ago
      Top 20 language is an, uh, interestingly narrow request. Is being the first computer programmer ever[0] not enough impact? In programming languages there's of course Grace Hopper, one of the early advocates for machine independent languages, who implemented the first linker[1], and also created FLOW-MATIC[2], the first english-like data processing language. FLOW-MATIC was was a major inspiration for COBOL which, incidentally, was partially developed by Jean Sammet, also a woman. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_pr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_compiler_construction#First_compilers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_compiler_constructi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC
  • khazhoux 4y ago
    The only place I ever hear this term is in the every-3-months thread on Hacker News like this one. IRL I never hear it.
    • furyofantares 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• graderjs 4y ago
  It's funny to me that the future generation of greybeards (maybe greymanes as a less gender biased word, or greypubes? heh), will be like: "I started with a iPad when I was a toddler, and my dad who was a web developer taught me to use JavaScript" --- and then that will seem old skool. Hah.
  • ultra_nick 4y ago
    Our grandkids will dread helping us use the holosuites.
• lotw_dot_site 4y ago
  Cast of Characters: - Ezekiel as the Old Man with the Grey Beard - Assorted youths off the street, aged 16-25, as the Whippersnappers [Old Man, bent over and walking with a cane, enters stage right and starts pointing around in a somewhat accusing manner] Old Man: Why I may not look it, but all of these young Whippersnappers have nothing on me! I declare that I wake up before the crows every morning and eat my oatmeal and more vitamins than you can possibly imagine. Then I sit down in a straight-backed oak chair to do my calisthenics, followed by a vigorous 10-minute walk in the park outside of my condo. All before the crack o' dawn, I tell ya!!
  • galdosdi 4y ago
    Do you have a point? If so, make it.
• psi75 4y ago
  I'm almost 40. The aging process has certainly begun, and here's what I have to say about it. Bodily health is important. Do everything you can to stay in shape. You don't have to have bulging muscles or a six-pack, but don't let yourself go. Some of it, of course, is out of your control. Your brain is a part of your body, so do what you can to take care of both. Intelligence-wise, some people get smarter in their 30s, 40s, 50s, likely beyond that... and some people get dumber. I'm smarter than I was at 22, but an upward trajectory isn't a guarantee. You can actually predict which way people will go: the ones who buy into corporate and accept the notion of an employer having authority are the ones who turn dumb as rocks. If you sit in meetings with people who talk about "synergizing" "at the end of the day" after a "drill down session" where we'll "boil the ocean" and "jump on" calls, you become one of them. If you spend 10 years doing work with no career value, you lose your skills. The ones who never bought in are the ones who keep getting smarter. Which explains what ageism is really about. Bosses know that not everyone turns into an idiot in middle age. Plenty of us don't. However, the people who buy into corporate do get dumber, and the ones who preserve or improve their intelligence and skills in middle age are exactly the anti-authoritarian types who don't make the best subordinates. With a 20-year-old, you don't know which way he's going to go, and it'll be a decade from now; with someone like me in his late 30s, you know which they've gone.
• joydeep314 4y ago
  I have worked for many startups and I can say for a fact founders below 30 in leadership are useless and will make a mess of things, especially when they dont have any prior experience. In contrast when the leadership is more than 30 and have prior experience they make decisions which are sound in multiple dimensions, both in terms of people, fiscally, in terms of technical capabilities and so on. I have vowed to never work in a company where the CEO/directors are less than 30.
  • klysm 4y ago
    I’m looking forward to being useless so I can become not useless :)
• throwaway787544 4y ago
  I also started encountering something like ageism, but more careerism. If you're old and you haven't climbed the corporate ladder, they think something's wrong with you. Why haven't you gotten Senior yet? Principal? Staff? Management? Director? It's not enough to say you don't care about money or title, they assume you're just not very good. Even though the Peter Principle shows the worst often floats to the top. So now I work for promotions just so the resume doesn't look bad. But it sucks because I don't want more responsibility, I want to just put in 40 hours of code and go home.
  • granshaw 4y ago
    Hopefully with wellness and life outside work being in trend this will lessen
• b20000 4y ago
  i don’t think we should be portraying ageism as something cool or acceptable. it is a huge problem in our industry that this discrimination exists. i’ve started to experience this stealth discrimination when i turned 40.
• squarefoot 4y ago
  I'm 55+ and left the field ages ago, but I experienced this in my late 30s and 40s since the field was and apparently still is mostly dominated by people in their 20s, which from an overall point of view can also be a good thing. It's not their fault however; workers in the IT field are often regarded as numbers, exchangeable commodities that can be moved around at will by HR. "I know a team of smart guys very prolific in C++" becomes "I have 5 C++ resources", so treating them as machines where the newest one is always a better version of the older one is just a matter of time.
• irvingprime 4y ago
  I'm another one of those guys who literally has a gray beard. Recently spent a long time looking for a new job. When I interviewed at my current company (for about 6 weeks now) my wife went to the website, looked over the pictures of the leadership team and said, "Look! They're not all children. Maybe they'll hire you!" And so they did. Great company. Fantastic job. I didn't used to believe in ageism. Then I got a little older. What I've found is that a lot of the problem is cultural. The hiring managers often make pop cultural references that I don't get (and don't want to). At times, I don't think we're even talking the same language. This is much less obvious when talking to actual technical folks. We all understand the language of tech and we all get Star Wars references. It's fine. But management sometimes seems to see me as some sort of alien species. They can't judge my technical skills and are offended that I'm not impressed by their new fad diet or corporate social media campaign. No, I'm not going to "like" your newest Tik Tok video. I would have to sign up for an account first and why would I do that? Little things like this create friction with a lot of younger people who haven't yet figured out how little it matters. And by younger people, I also unfortunately mean some in their forties, who think youth is the future. Anyway, that's some of what I've seen.
  • draw_down 4y ago
  • mixmastamyk 4y ago
    > No, I'm not going to "like" your newest Tik Tok video. I would have to sign up for an account first and why would I do that? According to this site it is a national security risk. Maybe this answer would leave them off-balance and possibly think about larger consequences for a second.
• runjake 4y ago
  It's early and I haven't had my coffee yet, but anyone have a source link for this interview? I'd like to listen/read it (with proper paragraphs), it sounds really interesting to me (a literal gray beard). Edit: paragraphs. "I'm 51 and I've been active in this industry since I was 14. I watched it grow from computers with 4k of memory to having a supercomputer in my pocket. I was learning in the age of Apple II and the Commodore PET. When I realized that I could create an explosion of data with just a few lines of code, I was hooked forever. It was such a magical thing. I found some other guys in my high school that were also into computers and we started meeting regularly on Fridays and Saturdays to... Well, to do some things that were, perhaps, not allowed. Since then, I've started three companies, and I don't think I could have found the same satisfaction in any other industry. I am mindful, these days, that I'm 51 because I know ageism is a thing in tech. There's a moment when you walk into a room and people think, 'Oh, he's a greybeard.' I don't have a beard, but you know what I mean. But when I start to talk about things and find solutions, that disappears. I can't change my age but I am in full control over what I do and what I read and how much time I carve out to write code. I can still see myself doing this when I'm 60, 70 years old. Even older. Because I want to keep doing meaningful things."
  • dboreham 4y ago
    Hmm. I assumed it was the direct speech of jamesofthedrum. Also here: https://www.hazumi.news/posts/32317441 https://www.hazumi.news/posts/32317441
    • runjake 4y ago
      Thank you!
• galdosdi 4y ago
  One easy trick to keep your skills relevant: Just try to predict ahead of time how long-lived a technology will remain prior to learning it. If you do this throughout your career and are moderately successful, you will end up knowing a bunch of skills that will rust very slowly. The question then is how to successfully predict the future lifespan of a technology? Obviously you'll get some right and some wrong, but with a little thought you can at least get a good batting average. The easiest trick, which actually works, is to estimate the future remaining lifespan of a technology as being equal to its lifespan so far.[1] If it's been around for a long time, it's likely to keep staying around. By contrast, most new languages, databases, etc invented in the last couple years probably won't last more than another couple years. Some concrete recommendations this simple heuristic would have made in the recent past, just by way of example: * If you're working in front end, just get good enough at React to get by. Instead focus your extra efforts on mastering CSS. * If you're working in back end, just get good enough at novel NoSQL databases to get by. Instead focus your extra efforts on mastering SQL and the relational model. * If you're in "devops" just get good enough at Ansible, Salt, Puppet, or whatever the flavor of the week is to get by. Instead focus your extra efforts on mastering fundamental UNIX/Linux systems concepts and the basics of internet protocols, etc * If you have to get stuck on either a ruby or perl legacy project, pick the perl one. * Learning the basics of C will likely turn out to remain useful forever (even if C itself becomes obsolete) * Git has been around for a while and will be around for a while longer, so investing in knowing it well is probably worthwhile considering how intimately you work with version control. But the really important and long-lived skill you should master, that was applicable (if more challenging) before git and will remain applicable under whatever replaces git, is being good at resolving merge conflicts. Etc. Obviously use your own judgment in concert with this heuristic. Your judgment about this can get better if you practice it a lot, thinking about why some technologies live long and others live short, and what factors allow a new technology to outcompete an old one. But even if you don't get very good at it, the "It will live as long as it already has" heuristic will work pretty well. [1] This works because it follows from the assumptions that in the absence of any other information, a technology must be estimated as currently being 50% through its total lifespan. It works for estimating the lifetime of anything else that does not decay with time, ie it is just as likely to die early as late other things being equal. So it works great for things like organizations, fashions, human languages and cultures, technologies. (Obviously it would not work for an animal, which gets closer to death as it gets older)
• LocalPCGuy 4y ago
  In a slightly different situation, mid-40s, but even though I grew up with Commodore computers, programming in BASIC, Pascal, etc. I didn't spend my 20s in tech (yah, I know, missed opportunity). Anyways, back in it now, but instead of 25 years of experience in my mid-40s, it's 15ish. I have not had it negatively affect me in hiring yet, but I do things like just eliminate the non-relevant jobs from my resume so they don't age me up, and emphasize that I'm able to learn things (I think fairly quickly), but also that I have a wealth of non-tech but important skills I learned during those years that give me a different perspective sometimes. I do think ageism will (and is) slowly getting better as the first few generations pave the way. I don't know if I'll run into it in my career, but if so, I'll look for a company that values my age rather than views it as a negative.
• draw_down 4y ago
• hancholo 4y ago
  I guess I should consider myself lucky that if I shave my facial hair (in 30's) I knock off about 15 years. Just getting a haircut alone I always get told I have a youthful looking face. All my colleagues have always guessed I was younger than them. For aging, I have heard great things about creatine supplementation for cognitive benefits (lots of research backs this supplement and it's relatively safe)
• sbf501 4y ago
  50+ no beard, starting to gray, here. Been coding professionally since the mid-80's. I still sit in front of 3 computers (win10, mac, linux) every day writing code for various projects. Mostly embedded on NXP/Renesas for ODMs (lots of security and ML these days), but also device drivers on Linux/Windows, native windows tools, and as a bonus SPA dashboards for IoT/cloud (Vue/Node). I use python+excel extensively for behind the scenes analysis. To stay current, I read multiple newsletters because HN tends to skew to the web and misses large parts of the industry. It is rather myopic that way. People talk about tech leaving grayhairs in the dust, but that discussion always seems to be related to web front-end, which is like a fraction of the industry. Sure there will always be a need for a fast flashy website that scales to billions of users, but optimizing C in embedded space, or debugging a Windows bulk USB endpoint, or customizing UDP for multicast, etc. will always be necessary, too. Realize as you older that you are going to be charging a premium for experience, so you have to build breadth while you are young to compete when you are old. If you just stick with one tech your whole life you won't be able to leave it. And you can only get that kind of breadth from decades of experience. There's literally no short-cut to age.
  • ppppwwwww 4y ago
    I am interested in knowing which newsletters you are subscribed to if you're willing to share ?
    • sbf501 4y ago
      Sure. These are the top level sites but each one has a variety of different newsletter (these are free); https://www.techonline.com/ https://www.techonline.com/ https://www.electronicdesign.com/ https://www.electronicdesign.com/ https://www.edn.com/ https://www.edn.com/ https://www.eetimes.com/ https://www.eetimes.com/ Pay newsletters: https://www.techinsights.com/ https://www.techinsights.com/ https://ojoyoshidareport.com/ https://ojoyoshidareport.com/
      • Dracophoenix 4y ago
        What are the specs of your development machines? By embedded, do you mean FPGA development or something else?
• cdkmoose 4y ago
  Closer to 60 than 50, gray hair, white beard(which is why I'm beardless most of the time) been developing since I was 13 starting on TRS-80 Model 1. Currently a technical manager so I still get to develop 40%-50% of my time, but as a manager I also get to have a broader impact with my experience. I still program in my free time to maintain my knowledge and learn from/play with. I think we of a more senior vintage can still demonstrate our value by explaining not just how to build complex components but also how to tie these pieces together into a complex system. So many of the junior and mid-level developers I work with can solve a targeted problem definition but fail to see the bigger picture. The value of the greybeards in the room truly is the wisdom and experience of their years, it's important that we use that knowledge to help these newer developers become the next generation of greybeards.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  I remember the year 2000 crunch and huge demand for golden age COBOL programmers.
• jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  Agism is probably somewhat overestimated because there are a lot more young people entering the industry than there were 30 years ago. So it looks like a lot of old people were pushed out, but they were never there to begin with.
• DocFeind 4y ago
  Guess I am a young buck grey beard, only 47, but coding since i was 11, and I won't stop until the AI takes it all over and we can't write it anymore ;)
• yuan43 4y ago
  The greybeard in this case appears to be, not an employee, but an owner. Maybe he's acting as a consultant, or maybe he's supporting the product his company makes. What about greybeards trying to interview for coding (not management) jobs at FANGMAN and others? In the US you don't include a photo with your resume or include your age like in some countries. But a graduation year in the last century and an employment history a mile long is a clue. What are the prospects?
• stack_framer 4y ago
  I interviewed at age 42 with an early-stage startup composed of a handful of twentysomethings. They asked me on three separate calls if I was concerned about how young they all were—which in retrospect seems like a veiled form of ageism. They ultimately told me that their company was not yet ready for someone with my "level of experience". I wonder if I should have sued them.
• BLO716 4y ago
  I'm 45+ and headed into the 50s was so scary, I am headed off to get an MBA to future proof my income a little before I die off in coding because of cognitive ability escapes me on remembering more than 3,945 places of pi. The one thing that's tough working at a start-up is trying to convince those who (of the same age) that you can indeed lead more than your co-developers in something more than a dev/project meeting. I saw literally 3 promotions pass me by, most likely because of the perception that at my age if I hadn't started my own company/become a corporate C-suite leader/done it by now I couldn't. Thing is, I can feel I can do everything UP to the CTO level of work - naturally, given the chance. At least I got them to give me a raise to equate to the level of paying for my education I'm taking on at my age. Regardless, at least now I can have the chops, the cohort network, and hopefully if we exit - the money to have the last laugh. Revenge is only bitter sweet if you can execute on it by being a better shark in the water that knows a few tricks the young lads (and lasses) don't have.
• shrimpx 4y ago
  For me, the “ageism” trope hasn’t aged well. When I was in my 20s, the idea that I’d still be an engineer in my 40s seemed unlikely — with how fast things were changing. But the pace of change has slowed, and now 40-something engineers with 20+ years experience are highly sought after and paid very well. Another point is that most people top out or tap out. If you’re a graybeard who has mastered a deep topic or two (e.g. OS, compilers, networks), you’re living in rarefied air and writing your own checks.
• didgetmaster 4y ago
  Since ageism is very real in the tech industry, why in this era of 'Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity' don't we hear all kinds of tech companies telling us why they need to focus on the under-represented greybeard group? I have been to a few tech conferences that have multiple seminars on why we need to hire more women or minority or LGBTQ++ people; but I haven't heard a single one who talked about catering to greybeards.
• a99c43f2d565504 4y ago
  I've always considered being graybeard a positive thing in the field of programming. Maybe that's just me as I have my personal reasons; I look up to many such men with respect and when I hear someone has been coding for decades and has that beard that is turning gray I just think how good of a coder he probably is. He probably knows C and stuff, is what I think. Also I haven't been involved in many interviews and still work at my first developer job, so I haven't been exposed to much of this. If I had to guess a field in programming where gray beard has negative connotation, that would be a field that has evolved the most rapidly in recent years and is the most volatile still. As a hint the field in question largely revolves around a language that used to be very domain specific and was initially developed quickly, in just 10 days, the legend has it.
• dbrowne 4y ago
  Ageism is real and you either adapt or fade away. The tech is like the porn industry: youth is coveted and the elderly are not. Zuckerberg stated: “Young people are just smarter.” https://ricochet.com/1274812/zuckerberg-stated-older-people-arent-as-sharp-how-wrong-was-he/ https://ricochet.com/1274812/zuckerberg-stated-older-people-.... and many believe dementia begins at 40. I'm 56 and in my 4th year of a CS PhD program. Was lucky enough to be able to afford to temporarily retire to school with the hope of becoming the old guy with a fresh degree and the niche expertise necessary for another decade of work. Some of my age peers are beginning to experience difficulties with managers who are young enough to be their children. Many are now getting as many certifications as possible to prove their worth and are becoming frightened. I am unsure of the solution but hair dye is not it. One person wrote: "One advantage we, The Elders, have is that we know not only how things got (and get, and will get) built, but we also know how they fail... We seldom need more than five minutes to point out organizational issues that can cause a project to fail" You will be mercilessly "cancelled" unless you deliver the message in an amenable manner. The generation gap has made many youth unaccepting of contrarian ideas as the hubris of youth can be difficult to tenor for a wizened programmer.
  • ilaksh 4y ago
    Like porn? That's a bit of a stretch.
  • lucasgonze 4y ago
    "temporarily retire to school with the hope of becoming the old guy with a fresh degree and the niche expertise necessary": that's a smart strategy. How big did you go on this? What was the degree and how long did you take off?
• ivolimmen 4y ago
  I am 47 and have a beard. I work in a company that only has consultants. We all have beards. I just shaved mine because I want my skin to tan equally. Next week the beard is back. I read some of the comments about ageism and I have to say that I do not believe I will have issues with getting a new job or contract to work for a client. Maybe it is also related to where I live (Netherlands) or cultural. I started off with a VIC 20. Been hooked ever since. I have a few nice stories and worked on a lot of interesting stuff in the past so I do not have issues getting jobs/contracts now. Nowadays I do not talk about tech but on communication, documentation and other non-tech stuff. My CV is large and filled with a huge spectrum of technologies. People sometimes still ask about certain tech stuff but then I reply, yeah that looks like x and that is not to difficult to use. I am now working on AWS for the first time. And to be honest; I'm not impressed. Cloud really is someone else his computer.
• poorbutdebtfree 4y ago
  I retired from software 9 years ago and what really bothered me about the 26 year old senior software engineer tech lead was that they used "social proof"/hype as their justification for every decision. RubyMotion, Chef, Meteor, Riak, it's current best practices!
• RickJWagner 4y ago
  57 year old here. One thing that's changed: I've started to volunteer for mentoring assignments. I really enjoy talking with people new to the industry and hope some of my career advice is helpful.
• BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 4y ago
  Having younguns pounding out code 12-16 hours a day reminds me ofInflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney Fadiman story of a roomful of chimpanzees on typewriters churning out Shakespeare. Today it would be the latest version of Windows.
• evaneykelen 4y ago
  Hi, I am Erik van Eykelen, not the OP but indeed the subject of this post. Long time HN reader. AMA!
• gloosx 4y ago
  That's beautiful, he's basically meditating on code at this point i guess
• greyhair 4y ago
  I am still doing this and I am 65. Started in this industry at the tender age of 27, this being my third career choice. I have taken a minor step back after turning 62, for a few simple reasons: A) I am not 'building my career' at this point, so leave that opportunity open to the young. (this is the key point) B) I just want to do technical work, I don't have any reason to be the team lead any longer. C) I don't want to spend multiple hours in planning meetings every week. Particularly making plans for products five years down the road, and having someone else be responsible for those decisions. (likewise, I would like to see the average age of our representatives come down, for the same reason) I still enjoy the work. I particularly enjoy working with young people. I still learn something new every month. The people I work with all know me, some have known me for twenty years, so that helps. Maintain your network, people! Your network matters. I find far more ageism now, outside of work, than at work. This is the truth. I have learned to politely tolerate young people, outside of work, trying to explain to me how to use my technology. Hint: If you visit my home, I hand you a photo with a QR code of the guest network, and I expect you know how that works. But when I go to restaurants, I have to tolerate an overly cheerful hostess explaining to me how QR code menus work.
• geekraver 4y ago
  58, started when I was 12. I never really felt ageism until the last few years but now it’s very evident (and dumb; I still help and mentor much younger people a lot and am regularly reminded by this that I still am highly competent). No intention of ever stopping coding, if it’s not my job it’s my hobby.