4 ms·

just gonna be straight here, there are older people that are the really smart, savvy engineer types that school all us young folks, then there are the older peo

just gonna be straight here, there are older people that are the really smart, savvy engineer types that school all us young folks, then there are the older people that learned Pascal in 1978 and never stepped outside of their comfort zone. We have an older person working in our office that, if it wasn't for him would practically be a zoo. He constantly schools us on all things tech, and keeps everyone in line. You are gonna be just fine. The fact that you are on HN and able to have this kind of insight proves you are capable of hanging with the youngins.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
On the flipside, I've personally witnessed a manager firing someone just because he was old. There is an ageism problem in the industry. Like racism or sexism, whether you see its effects depends on where you are.
- inmyunix 12y ago
  surely there was more to the story. hard to believe it was only attributable to age without some context.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    No, not really. It seemed quite strongly that the reason was due to his age, but the official reason was that he couldn't learn new skills very well. The problem was, he seemed to be learning them pretty decently.
  - cafard 12y ago
    I saw that happen to my father and a number of his co-workers (scientists and engineers) at a mining company forty years ago.
kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
Reminds me of someone who refused to use revision control because "merges were unreliable". Of course they are when you wait 30 days between commits.
- pcthrowaway 12y ago
  Git noob question here (but someone who has been working on that noobishness for a year now): Can't you just rebase the branch you're on before trying to merge to another branch?
  - codeonfire 12y ago
    Rebasing is similar to merging. Instead of merging their code after your code, you are merging your code after their code. So if the two versions modify the same code fifty commits apart you'll have conflicts in both cases.
dinkumthinkum 12y ago
The other side to that is that there are plenty of younger developers that don't know how to use timers in Javascript or know what the CPU cache is.

sillysaurus3 12y ago

On the flipside, I've personally witnessed a manager firing someone just because he was old. There is an ageism problem in the industry. Like racism or sexism, whether you see its effects depends on where you are.

inmyunix 12y ago
surely there was more to the story. hard to believe it was only attributable to age without some context.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  No, not really. It seemed quite strongly that the reason was due to his age, but the official reason was that he couldn't learn new skills very well. The problem was, he seemed to be learning them pretty decently.
- cafard 12y ago
  I saw that happen to my father and a number of his co-workers (scientists and engineers) at a mining company forty years ago.

kevin_thibedeau 12y ago

Reminds me of someone who refused to use revision control because "merges were unreliable". Of course they are when you wait 30 days between commits.

pcthrowaway 12y ago
Git noob question here (but someone who has been working on that noobishness for a year now): Can't you just rebase the branch you're on before trying to merge to another branch?
- codeonfire 12y ago
  Rebasing is similar to merging. Instead of merging their code after your code, you are merging your code after their code. So if the two versions modify the same code fifty commits apart you'll have conflicts in both cases.

dinkumthinkum 12y ago

The other side to that is that there are plenty of younger developers that don't know how to use timers in Javascript or know what the CPU cache is.