4 ms·

Is this essentially a Web 2.0/Bay Area issue? I recently went to a Java User Group meeting on the east coast where the presenter and about 60% of the audience..

Is this essentially a Web 2.0/Bay Area issue? I recently went to a Java User Group meeting on the east coast where the presenter and about 60% of the audience....had grey hair. I think I may have been the 2nd or 3rd youngest person at the meeting and I'm 30.... I'm the 2nd youngest person at my current place of employment in the finance domain. I'm hoping that means by 40 yrs old there will be lot's of work and I can contract for $150/hr or whatever by then as a lot of the brick and mortars are heavily entrenched in the JEE stack and if this board is any indication there will be a dearth of JEE talent . Even in the Java space I can’t say I’ve seen too many 80yr old developers. But at least your career is not dead at 40. I’ve developed in Python professionally in the past and am teaching myself RoR now for both personal use and I have to admit I like writing in those languages more. But after reading articles like this and going out to San Francisco seeing the environment first hand I have to be honest when saying that I would be a little tentative jumping out there feet first.

hga 14y ago
It's a problem in the D.C. Metro area as well. My experience is interesting in that I'm blessed with genes that make me look decades younger than I am. And dress pretty much the way I did in my 20s, so everyone who initially looks at me thinks I'm somewhere in there. After I hit 35 or so I increasingly found it difficult to find work ... until I scrubbed my resume of all evidence of exactly how old I was and then tried to be careful in interviews. I did this in the middle of one job search and the difference was like night and day. And for a specific example, once I screwed up and mentioned working on PDP-11s, at which point my technical interviewer exclaimed "Just how old are you?!?!?!!!" Which is of course illegal, but in all fairness he'd just realized his model of me was seriously off. I said "Older than I look" and got the job, but it didn't end well....
zevyoura 14y ago
I would expect Java User Groups to skew much older than the average HN'er or start-up employee, or probably programmers in general.
- mynameishere 14y ago
  Replace "Java" with "enterprise" and you're correct. As for COBOL, you're looking at some real geezers pulling in huge consulting fees. 20 years from now when RoR is passe, expect the same for that.
RDDavies 14y ago
I think that's also a "Java" deal. You could go to a COBOL meetup and see the same thing, that doesn't make it the norm.
- abolibibelot 14y ago
  Because the norm is working at a startup in SV?

hga 14y ago

It's a problem in the D.C. Metro area as well. My experience is interesting in that I'm blessed with genes that make me look decades younger than I am. And dress pretty much the way I did in my 20s, so everyone who initially looks at me thinks I'm somewhere in there. After I hit 35 or so I increasingly found it difficult to find work ... until I scrubbed my resume of all evidence of exactly how old I was and then tried to be careful in interviews. I did this in the middle of one job search and the difference was like night and day. And for a specific example, once I screwed up and mentioned working on PDP-11s, at which point my technical interviewer exclaimed "Just how old are you?!?!?!!!" Which is of course illegal, but in all fairness he'd just realized his model of me was seriously off. I said "Older than I look" and got the job, but it didn't end well....

zevyoura 14y ago

I would expect Java User Groups to skew much older than the average HN'er or start-up employee, or probably programmers in general.

mynameishere 14y ago
Replace "Java" with "enterprise" and you're correct. As for COBOL, you're looking at some real geezers pulling in huge consulting fees. 20 years from now when RoR is passe, expect the same for that.

RDDavies 14y ago

I think that's also a "Java" deal. You could go to a COBOL meetup and see the same thing, that doesn't make it the norm.

abolibibelot 14y ago
Because the norm is working at a startup in SV?