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Ageism exists and it gets worse as you get older. I think geebee did the right thing, but came to the wrong conclusion. If you are experienced and good, you a

by russell 18y ago

Ageism exists and it gets worse as you get older. I think geebee did the right thing, but came to the wrong conclusion. If you are experienced and good, you are probably expensive. You can probably be replaced by 2 new grads, H1B's, or a whole offshore team. I was. Read the comments on stackoverflow and you will see such stupid comments as the one who said he didnt like older programmers because they talked about their kids, yeah must be old 30 somethings. Or the usual inane remarks that imply older programmers never made it beyond Cobol. Experience does matter. LOC per year dont matter; it's writing the right lines, or choosing the right architecture that does matter. geebee hit the interview nail right on the head. Most interviews are structured to weed out incompetent new grads, hence the programming tasks and the language lawyer questions. When I'm in an interview, I really dont want to waste my time describing when I would use an abstract class over an interface. Why waste time with programming problems with someone who has been doning it for 20-30 years. The successful interviews discuss how I would tackle the real problems that the company faces.

tptacek 18y ago
Part of the problem here has nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with the market. If you can be replaced by two cheap, less-experienced developers, the market correctly determines that you should be replaced. Like comment #1 says, you need to not only keep your skills up to date, but also continually upgrade your value proposition by being selective about your roles.
- gaius 18y ago
  Being able to hire 2 newbies for the price of one experienced developer doesn't imply that replacement makes sense. It could equally well imply that the experienced developer is a bargain.
akeefer 18y ago
As someone who's conducted dozens of interviews over the last few years, I can tell you that there's no way to infer from someone's age or resume if they can code or not. Plenty of people with stellar resumes and 20 years' experience come in and absolutely bomb on relatively simple coding problems. Maybe they used to know how to code but have gotten rusty since they've been doing more management or hands-off architecture recently, but for whatever reason they can't solve problems that any recent grad ought to be able to solve. Some of those people can talk a good game when discussing higher-level stuff or when they're doing a lot of hand-waving, but they just can't translate it into code effectively. My point is not that "older" people can't code: when you do find someone with 20 years experience who can code well, they're generally incredibly valuable. Rather, it's that you always have to be skeptical and can't take someone's resume or stated experience and skills at face value. Those questions are there to filter out people that won't be successful in our company because their coding skills are below par, regardless of age, experience, or education. If someone asks you to do something that seems "beneath" you or trivial, just do it as well and as quickly as you can so you can get it over with and talk about more interesting things, or use the problem itself as an excuse to start a conversation about something more interesting than the problem itself ("the interesting thing here, is that if you write it this way it's easier to test" or "if you used a language like X, you could write this more easily," or "realistically, I think this function would be more useful if you changed it to behave like this, so that it would then be useful for doing Y and Z as well as X.") It's nothing personal, it's just the interviewer's job to be skeptical about your stated skills until you prove to him or her that they shouldn't be.
- fauigerzigerk 18y ago
  I think ageism sometimes shows in the assumption that the "rusty skills" phenomenon is so much more prevalent than the "untalented graduate" phenomenon. So, yes, I agree that interviewers need to be skeptical. But they need to be skeptical about their own preconceptions as well.
- known 18y ago
  How do you interview for a manager opening?

by russell 18y ago

tptacek 18y ago

Part of the problem here has nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with the market. If you can be replaced by two cheap, less-experienced developers, the market correctly determines that you should be replaced. Like comment #1 says, you need to not only keep your skills up to date, but also continually upgrade your value proposition by being selective about your roles.

gaius 18y ago
Being able to hire 2 newbies for the price of one experienced developer doesn't imply that replacement makes sense. It could equally well imply that the experienced developer is a bargain.

akeefer 18y ago

As someone who's conducted dozens of interviews over the last few years, I can tell you that there's no way to infer from someone's age or resume if they can code or not. Plenty of people with stellar resumes and 20 years' experience come in and absolutely bomb on relatively simple coding problems. Maybe they used to know how to code but have gotten rusty since they've been doing more management or hands-off architecture recently, but for whatever reason they can't solve problems that any recent grad ought to be able to solve. Some of those people can talk a good game when discussing higher-level stuff or when they're doing a lot of hand-waving, but they just can't translate it into code effectively. My point is not that "older" people can't code: when you do find someone with 20 years experience who can code well, they're generally incredibly valuable. Rather, it's that you always have to be skeptical and can't take someone's resume or stated experience and skills at face value. Those questions are there to filter out people that won't be successful in our company because their coding skills are below par, regardless of age, experience, or education. If someone asks you to do something that seems "beneath" you or trivial, just do it as well and as quickly as you can so you can get it over with and talk about more interesting things, or use the problem itself as an excuse to start a conversation about something more interesting than the problem itself ("the interesting thing here, is that if you write it this way it's easier to test" or "if you used a language like X, you could write this more easily," or "realistically, I think this function would be more useful if you changed it to behave like this, so that it would then be useful for doing Y and Z as well as X.") It's nothing personal, it's just the interviewer's job to be skeptical about your stated skills until you prove to him or her that they shouldn't be.

fauigerzigerk 18y ago
I think ageism sometimes shows in the assumption that the "rusty skills" phenomenon is so much more prevalent than the "untalented graduate" phenomenon. So, yes, I agree that interviewers need to be skeptical. But they need to be skeptical about their own preconceptions as well.
known 18y ago
How do you interview for a manager opening?