
Why Ageism Never Gets Old - eludwig
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/why-ageism-never-gets-old
======
jeremyjh
> In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it
> took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In
> the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for
> a software engineer, less than three.

This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has
valuable skills that do not age at all. Yes there are new languages and
frameworks we have to learn, but if we apply any effort (and we've stayed
current over the years) that happens really quickly because we're just
integrating all the knowledge we already have around a new set of features.

~~~
Swinx43
This mythology leads directly to horribly created software that will either
ensure many terrible security breaches in the future or the continued
proliferation of "magic" throughout a product.

One of the issues is using the word "engineer" for any of the brogrammer
types. an engineer in any other proper engineering discipline does not become
worthless with age, their experience actually counts for something.

Somehow we have confused people who stitch together software from pieces of
"magic" that they do not understand with engineers.

The work I did in my 20s cannot even begin to compare with what I am doing
today in my 30s. Those years of experience really makes a massive difference.

It is time people are honest about ageism and simply states the real reason
they prefer fresh grad or 20-something brogrammers. It normally boils down to
those people being willing to work longer hours for less money. At least in
most of the cases of ageism that I have seen.

~~~
Harvey-Specter
> One of the issues is using the word "engineer" for any of the brogrammer
> types

In Canada the term 'engineer' is regulated at the provincial level, and a
person can be prosecuted for labeling themselves as an engineer if they are
not registered and licensed with their province's engineering association. For
example in Ontario in order to join Professional Engineers Ontario and call
yourself an engineer you must meet strict academic and work experience
requirements[1], pass an ethics exam, and pay a yearly membership fee.
Everyone who graduates from an accredited engineering program in Canada has to
take an ethics course and has these rules drilled into their heads. I know I
did.

But then I graduated and half the people I run in to at hackathons and
conferences did a two week bootcamp and have "Software Engineer" in their job
title, and proudly introduce themselves as such.

I call myself a software developer because although I have a software
engineering degree I'm not registered with the PEO and it wouldn't benefit me
if I was.

[1]
[http://www.peo.on.ca/index.php?ci_id=1848&la_id=1](http://www.peo.on.ca/index.php?ci_id=1848&la_id=1)

~~~
wyager
> For example in Ontario in order to join Professional Engineers Ontario and
> call yourself an engineer you must meet strict academic and work experience
> requirements[1], pass an ethics exam, and pay a yearly membership fee.

Sounds like a racket, especially given that the PEO is a private organization.
I’m not sure why this is supposed to be a good thing.

> Everyone who graduates from an accredited engineering program in Canada has
> to take an ethics course and has these rules drilled into their heads.

It bothers me that people believe that A) ethics can be taught like any other
engineering class and B) ethics should be prescribed by some professional
association.

> But then I graduated and half the people I run in to at hackathons and
> conferences did a two week bootcamp

I agree this is a problem, but most of the actual engineers I meet in real
life (i.e. people who did a 4-or-more year accredited engineering program,
including some who are from Canada) don’t actually have a particularly
impressive level of rigor that would set them apart from most of the college-
educated programmers I meet.

~~~
pc86
You can become a software PE in the United States, but it is absolutely a
racket. One of the requirements for a PE is you need to work for another PE.
This leads to a situation where new exams, like the software discipline, have
_20_ people sit for an exam in one year. The transportation discipline had
1,800.

~~~
Harvey-Specter
> One of the requirements for a PE is you need to work for another PE.

That's also a requirement in Canada (Ontario at least). Work experience has to
be completed while working under a P.Eng.

------
whack
> _" Dan Lyons, a fifty-one-year-old Newsweek reporter, gets his first shock
> when he’s laid off. “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out
> of college,” he’s told"_

I wonder to what extent, the above is the reason behind senior workers having
a harder time finding/maintaining their job. It almost sounds like a Keynesian
liquidity trap. People expect their salaries to continually grow over the
course of their career, but at some point, the value they bring, relative to a
fresh-grad, may not justify that salary level. Other industries may sidestep
this problem since work output often depends on connections and reputation,
both of which keep growing in your 40s and 50s, but engineering is different
in that people's abilities grow exponentially in the first 10-15 years, but
not as dramatically afterwards.

If people were willing to continually update their salary expectations, accept
pay cuts when necessary, and signaled this to their current/prospective
employers, I wonder if this problem would mostly disappear.

As an employee myself, I fully encourage all my colleagues to negotiate hard
for every dollar they are worth. But at the same time, I wouldn't begrudge any
employer who's trying to get the most bang for his buck.

~~~
danielvinson
The problem isn't ageism, the problem is capitalism. For a long period of time
in the (not too distant) past, one of the the main purposes of a company was
to pay employees. Corporations in the U.S. have continually shifted goals to
eschew all goals other than raw profit and growth (leading to more profit). It
is EXTREMELY rare to see a tech company which offers its employees more than
they are worth on the market or spends more money than is absolutely necessary
to keep its employees on benefits.

~~~
jrhurst
>For a long period of time in the (not too distant) past, one of the the main
purposes of a company was to pay employees.

I don't really disagree with your sentiment, but I don't think that statement
has been ever true.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> With the advent of the cloud and off-the-shelf A.P.I.s—the building blocks
of sites and apps—all you really need to launch a startup is a bold idea.
Silicon Valley believes that bold ideas are the province of the young.

Well, right now I don't see any "bold" ideas coming out of SV. What I see is
everyone doing "X with deep learning", or "Facebook for Y", or "Uber for Z but
with deep learning"). That's, like, the opposite of bold. It's everyone trying
to milk the same cow before its teats fall off.

But even so- there's an obvious survivorship fallacy at work here. If SV is
throwing a ton of money at graduates and school leavers to come and work for
it in their startups, it kind of makes sense that the successful startups -few
and far between as they may be- will be made up by younger programmers.

Anyway, older programmers don't have to go to SV and join a startup. There
must be millions of companies in the world that use software, most of it
legacy- from big corporations to small mom-and-pop shops. Anyone who knows how
to debug and refactor can make a comfortable living these days.

In fact, "Pourvu que ça dure".

~~~
discreditable
> What I see is everyone doing "X with deep learning"

Agreed. Even Google is guilty. Press releases from them that don't mention
"Machine Learning" are becoming rare. "Machine Learning" is the new "cloud"
buzzword.

~~~
nilkn
Google is also responsible for creating many of the success stories for deep
learning. So I think this might be a little unfair to them. They created the
bandwagon more than they jumped on it, and they've gotten phenomenal results
so far in general. (This seems to be a general trend for Jeff Dean's career
overall.)

------
jasode
First, ageism is not just a SV phenomenon. For example, see the very young
White House aides in Clinton, Bush, & Obama administrations.[1]

Second, the tech companies that have a reputation for favoring 20-somethings
_will still hire older workers_ for certain positions.

\- Even though Mark Zuckerberg said, _" younger people are just smarter"_, he
hired an "old" person like Sheryl Sandberg to be COO at age ~38.

\- Bill Gates was ~32 when he hired Dave Cutler age ~46 to architect and
develop Windows NT.

\- Google hired Eric Schmidt ~46, Guido van Rossum (Python) ~age 49, and Peter
Norvig in his 40s

\- Netflix hired Adrian Cockcroft in his mid-40s

The SV companies will exhibit "reverse-age-discrimination" for executive
management and architect positions. Why? (And the obvious answer is _"
experience"_.) But then, why is "experience" not valued for the non-architect
programming positions? We actually do discriminate against young people for
many roles. I leave readers to sort out why we value experience selectively
for different situations.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15350873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15350873)

~~~
humanrebar
It's worth noting that the median age of an American is 41. That we're
discussing people in that age range as counterexamples kind of proves the
point.

~~~
jasode
_> median age of an American is 41. That we're discussing people in that age
range as counterexamples kind of proves the point._

Don't take my previous post as a complete dataset. It was only coincidence
that I happen to list programmers in their 40s off the top of my head. Here
are some more in their 60s:

\- Google also hired Vint Cerf (TCPIP) at age 62.

\- Amazon AWS recently hired James Gosling (Java) age ~62.

\- PayPal hired Douglas Crockford (Javascript book author) at age ~57.

My point is that SV companies (and other industries besides tech) will
actually discriminate against the young 20-somethings for certain roles.

~~~
mbesto
> will actually discriminate against the young 20-somethings for certain
> roles.

Uhh that's not age discrimination, that's creating a job role "Chief Internet
Evanglist" and hiring the best person for the job, "Vint Cerf". Do you think
anyone other than the creator of the TCPIP protocol could fill that role
regardless of age?

Also, isn't there also an implicit age discrimination against younger people
in any job spec when you say "X years experience"?

~~~
lmm
> isn't there also an implicit age discrimination against younger people in
> any job spec when you say "X years experience"?

Yes there is, and it's lazy and wrong. Figure out how to test for the skills
you need; how many years someone's been using something is only very weakly
correlated with how well they know it.

~~~
mbesto
> Figure out how to test for the skills you need;

If you know how to systematically do this for all hiring positions, I
literally have thousands of businesses that would pay you serious money to
help them.

------
irrational
The code I wrote in my 20s was pure garbage. The code I wrote in my 30s was
embarrassing. The code I'm writing in my 40s is perhaps passable. I'm hoping
that by the time I get to my 60s I will be able to write good code. I'll
probably retire just as I'm hitting my peak as a programmer.

~~~
ChiliDogSwirl
In my 40s and feeling the same. It's the sad irony of life that just as we get
truly good at this stuff, we either retire or move into management.

~~~
swagtricker
So in other words, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see
yourself become the villain." :)

------
k__
A few weeks ago I attended a conference for startups.

Met one that was doing R&D projects for big corps and used "young" freelancers
for it, "because they know all the new tech!"

But what I heard was "because they're cheap!"

In my experience, young people won't hire older people, only if they are
really cream of the crop.

The only companies I worked for that had >40 or even >50 year old people were
those with >40 year old directors.

------
amelius
I always love to hear about cultures where old people are the most respected
of a society. I think such cultures are happier, because they ensure that the
future looks bright, no matter how old someone is.

But ... such cultures might be in conflict with the information society we
have built.

~~~
zaarn
Not really.

Ageism seems largely concentrated on the Silicon-Valley style society.

As far as I am concerned, ageism does not exist at my workplace. Old
engineers, even software engineers are looked for because they bring possibly
valueable experience.

The simple truth is that ageism is a result of not valuing the lessons of an
experienced engineer because they're not up-to-date enough.

~~~
geomark
"Ageism seems largely concentrated on the Silicon-Valley style society."

I saw ageism many years ago at a big aerospace firm in the L.A. area. It was
understood and even outspoken that young engineers would get the call to work
extra hours and weekends if needed, as well as the occasional graveyard shift
when a unit was in thermovac testing. Older engineers were not usually called
upon become they had "paid their dues" as young engineers. Colleagues at other
big aerospace firms said is was pretty much the same for them. Ageism for
sure, in hardware development, and not in Silicon Valley.

~~~
throwanem
That's not ageism; that's a gentle form of hazing, and to be found in almost
any profession or trade. An extreme example is what medical students go
through in the early years of their study; a mild example is how, when I
worked nominally as a cashier in a grocery store as a high school kid, the
more experienced folks ran me from pillar to post for my first couple weeks'
worth of shifts, doing everything from stocking to bagging and hauling to
breaking down boxes and cleaning up spills, including one especially memorable
spray of vomit from a kid who'd eaten too much of the extremely wrong thing.

The point is to find out whether you're game, and whether you'll work hard
when you need to. These are important traits in the makeup of a worthwhile
colleague, and those who would invest considerable of their own time and
effort in mentoring you want to make sure they won't be wasted. This is how
that's done. And, yeah, it's a pain in the ass for a while. But once you've
proven that, as it was once put to me, "you ain't no scrub", that's an end to
it.

~~~
watwut
Nah, as the older engineer, I can say with conviction that it is simply taking
advantage of younger colleagues. Older engineer is using his connections,
status in group or friendship with decision makers to avoid uncomfortable
shift. There is no other point. Occasions to find out whether you work hard
tend to arise naturally, without putting all weekends on younger colleagues.

Also, while mentoring is important part of seniors work, it is not "own time
and effort". It is paid on the clock time and effort. I am not mentoring
overtime for sure.

Hazing is not rational. Its main benefit is that incumbents feel good about
power trip they are allowed to do. Plus a bit of good feeling after someone
else has to go through uncomfortable thing you yourself was through in the
past. Nothing more, nothing less.

~~~
throwanem
Paid time and effort that could be better spent than on mentoring someone
who'll make no good use of the knowledge you're trying to impart, then.

Part of learning your craft is learning how not to get owned, too.

~~~
watwut
What does someone not using knowledge have to do with younger employees having
to do all the weekends due to hazing and "unspoken rules"? Anyway, if you are
not willing to explain, then your senior salary is deathweight to company.

Another part of learning craft is to recognize when someone else is being
owned. It is a bit harder.

~~~
throwanem
One wonders whether a senior engineer who does so recognize has put a word in
the ears of the juniors involved, if he feels they are indeed so hardly used.

------
tyingq
A good way to counter this is to become an expert in some combination of
"something old + something (somewhat) new". Like knowing bog standard java
well, but also knowing how to deploy/use it in AWS well. Or being a C expert
that also understands git in a deep way.

~~~
humanrebar
Or just pick a good technology going forward. Experts in C and Java are still
in demand. There's no urgent need to branch out from those core competencies
(well, C devs should probably have some C++ skills too). Old+New is an
interesting and likely beneficial career plan, though.

~~~
maxxxxx
"pick a good technology going forward"

That's hard to pull off though. Who knows which technology will go out of
fashion in a few years? It may become fashionable again a few years later but
int he meantime you will have a hard time.

~~~
humanrebar
> Who knows which technology will go out of fashion in a few years?

Tech that is in heavy use and has been in heavy use for a decade is much more
likely to be around in two years than tech that was invented two years ago. If
the older tech _were_ to decline, rarely would it drop off the face of the
earth quickly. It would more gradually shrink in market share.

~~~
maxxxxx
I used to be a hardcore C++ guy., Going was really good until around 2004 or
so and then suddenly nobody wanted C++ anymore. That lasted a few years and
suddenly demand picked up again. It's definitely a gamble with factors that
are outside one's control

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Zuckerberg once observed, “Young people are just smarter,”

When he's old that will change to "older people are just more experienced".

I mean "it will change" as the Seven Commandments changed in the Animal Farm:
you won't be able to find the original quote anywhere on the internet,
anymore; only the retconned one. Zuck will always have been wise beyond his
years.

You wait and see.

(I exaggerate)

------
Noos
It sounds like we are seeing work become sport, with all the positives and
negatives sport has. Maybe seeing it as ageism isn't helpful. Ageism doesn't
exist in sport because the abilities you need can and do decline with age. I
wonder for all the talk about "I'm just as good" if people really are; it's
honestly ridiculous to assume a forty year old is as elastic or is possessed
of the resiliency or endurance to keep reinventing their entire knowledge set
every few years.

~~~
garfij
It's been said elsewhere in this thread, but there is a distinct difference
between the knowledge you accumulate in years of engineering and the constant
cycle of learning the new framework.

Anyone can learn a new framework. Making good architectural and design
decisions generally takes experience.

------
YeeHawGeddyUp
Well, I am 37 and in my Junior year of a Computer Science degree. I'm not
gonna lie, this freaks me out a bit. I do live on the east coast though,
hopefully that will help some.

~~~
acuozzo
I'm not kidding here…

If you're eligible for a clearance, move to MD or VA and work for a DoD
contracting company.

I'm 29, but most of the people I work with are 40-60+. Ageism simply doesn't
exist here and the salaries (6+ figures for new grads) and benefits are
excellent.

~~~
logfromblammo
If you don't want to live in the DC Metro, you can also move to any city
adjacent to a major military base. Huntsville, NW Florida, San Diego,
Clarksville, Waukegan, Ft. Worth, etc.

Salaries are lower, but traffic is better.

------
barrkel
As the bulge in older people progresses and ageism becomes worse in an
irrational way, it may make sense for older people to come together and form
companies of their own, focused on selling to older people, who, of course,
have the wealth (if not always the income).

~~~
ryandrake
You bring up a good point: Despite older people having all of the wealth in
the world (and likely a great deal of the income), few startups seem to be
courting them as customers. Everyone's target end-user seems to be that
mythical 15-25 year old middle class Ideal Consumer.

~~~
eicossa
Could it be because older people are also going to be much more unwilling to
try something new ? Noophilia seems to be a feature of youth.

~~~
CaptSpify
I don't have any numbers on this and would welcome any, but it seems true. How
many young people are willing to sign up for $how_new_website_of_the_week vs
older people? My personal experience is that older people realize that the
website will likely disappear within the next 2-3 years, so they ignore it
until it _actually_ catches on. Younger people seem willing to sign up for
anything new.

How many young vs old people used myspace or facebook when they first came
out? How many young vs old people use instagram, whatsapp, etc ?

Once again, I have no numbers, but I'm guessing it's heavily skewed towards
younger people.

~~~
ryandrake
It's a chicken-and-egg problem: I'd propose old people are not trying
$hot_new_website_of_the_week because they are not in
$hot_new_website_of_the_week's target market, and they are not in
$hot_new_website_of_the_week's target market because they are old.

I consider myself an early technology adopter, have been all my life. But as I
get older I'm less interested, not because I'm older, but because new
technology companies are actively choosing to ignore my needs as a customer
and my interests.

------
caio1982
I think the reason for tech ageism is simple: generational conflict peppered
with historical perceiving of how old tech folks work (being stubborn, "slow"
to adapt, too hierarchical and other common views, as all the old folks were
baby boomers or something trying to step in tech for the first time, just
today). It takes time for this prejudice to fully spread in waves over the
years so only recently this ageist view became critical in tech, I guess. It
will also take some time for some of the affected old folks and the young ones
to realize the current "old" people were actually young enough around the 90s
so ageism will slowly stop being a problem in, say, 10 years from now (I
believe peek ageism is past us). But perhaps I'm being naive and for lots of
20-somethings out there being over 40 in tech is a career death sentence
indeed.

------
Bartweiss
> _“Those holding more negative age stereotypes earlier in life had
> significantly steeper hippocampal volume loss and significantly greater
> accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques. "_

I'm a bit disgusted that the article asserts this is somehow causative - that
ageists age worse for some sort of karmic reason.

The screamingly-obvious interpretation of that data is that people who see bad
examples of aging hold more negative stereotypes. If your whole family has a
history of early-onset dementia, you'll probably view aging as a horrible
process. And, surprise, you'll probably have rapid cognitive decline just like
all the people who shaped your opinion. Just about every age-related form of
decline has a major genetic component, and yet Friend insists that fear of
aging is 'karma'.

~~~
matt4077
I'm a bit disgusted that you're asserting that the article asserts a causative
relationship when it does no such thing.

Here's the paragraph in question & full: _Karma’s a bitch: the Baltimore
Longitudinal Study of Aging reports, “Those holding more negative age
stereotypes earlier in life had significantly steeper hippocampal volume loss
and significantly greater accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid
plaques.” Ageists become the senescent figures they once abhorred._

Nowhere does it imply any causation. The reference to "Karma" isn't the author
professing his believe in the cosmic power's intervention to establish justice
among the people. It's just a rhetorical devise to highlight the finding.

------
golemotron
Ageism is exacerbated by technology.

Pervasive communications technology has increased the number of choices that
we have. We are suddenly all in competition with many more people. That means
that superficial signals like age and culture rise in importance just to
reduce the search space. It's Tinder-ification.

------
shkaga
I think it is a mistake to think that ageism only describes a preference for
young over old. The exact opposite has been/is the case for many industries in
many countries.

Ageism is bad, regardless of age.

~~~
falcolas
I agree, but it is important to make a distinction between ageism and roles
genuinely requiring a certain amount of experience.

I wouldn't want a college graduate to be the one architecting the
infrastructure for our company's golden goose.

------
eptcyka
> With the advent of the cloud and off-the-shelf A.P.I.s—the building blocks
> of sites and apps—all you really need to launch a startup is a bold idea.

With the advent of operating systems and the standard libraries - the building
blocks of applications and widgets - all you really need to launch a startup
is a bold idea.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about trivialising tech startups - sure there
are some which are trivial. At the same time, I don't really like that the
venerable idea people are being encouraged even more.

~~~
zbentley
"I'm an 'ideas guy'; all those details like implementation cost and
monetization strategy and stuff are best left to others, so people in my
position can have more time to think up the next cool thing!" <finger guns>

------
dsfyu404ed
If the tech industry wasn't mostly located in SV with all it's housing
problems it wouldn't have nearly as much ageism.

Of course the 20-something who's running a rat race to pay overpriced rent on
a poorly maintained dump with no hope of ever owning real property resents the
50-something who owns the place. Of course that trickles down a little
resentment for all "older" people.

~~~
fjsolwmv
This is utter baseless speculation. Who thinks about how old their landlord
is? Why does ageism exist outside of CA?

~~~
morgante
Ageism flows both ways.

I recently had a landlord demand that I get a guarantor for signing a lease
even though I make well over 40x the rent (the typical requirement). It's
clearly because he (an elderly man) considers me (a young guy in my 20s)
untrustworthy/unreliable.

------
dkarl
Is it just me, or was there was a generation where it was hit or miss whether
they regarded learning entirely new technologies as a routine part of the job?
Among people who would be over, say, roughly 60-65 years old right now, it
would be pretty cool to meet someone who kept abreast of developments in the
field and were excited when they spotted something that could be an
improvement on the tech they currently worked with. Those people were
exceptional, and they were always pretty smart. The norm was to want to spend
the next ten years working on the same thing you spent the last ten years on.

I think people younger than that (people under 60 now) have internalized the
ethos of always being ready to roll with change. Who moved my cheese, all that
stuff. Even if it's hard for them, they at least accept it as fact and give it
lip service. It's been a huge cultural shift to an attitude that everyone has
to spend their whole lives learning and adapting. That attitude is native for
my generation; in school we read about the Rust Belt and the collapse of
American manufacturing and we all said, "What was wrong with those people? Why
didn't they adapt, move to a different economic sector, and move where the
jobs were?" That's the way we were programmed to think. My father's generation
understood the Rust Belt differently. They all hoped they would have done
better, but failing to adapt was a normal response that they could easily
sympathize with. That generation was not on notice to always be ready for
change.

I think this cultural shift is going to result in a decline in ageism. The
older engineers I've worked with in the last ten years have behaved like any
other engineers, except they happen to have a lot of experience. Unlike many
older people I worked with early in my career, they aren't cranky about their
favorite tools declining in popularity. They don't drag their feet learning
the team's new tech stack and rationalize their refusal by predicting
widespread failure and a mass return to last decade's technology. There was a
time when that was the way older people _were supposed to act_ and there was
no embarrassment about it. In a younger worker behavior like that could be
treated as an attitude problem, but in an older worker, it was tricky, because
social norms said they were entitled to act that way.

Now the expectations for older people have utterly changed. I can't imagine a
55-year-old engineer pulling that shit in 2017, so there's no reason to be
afraid of hiring them.

------
gerbilly
>“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the
anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and
so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

I'm less afraid of death than of not fully living my life.

------
snickerbockers
Why do people who write these stupid articles think it's alright to assume
that younger employees are less intelligent based on their age, but not to
assume that older are out-of-touch or have misplaced priorities based on their
age?

------
elthor89
I never understood ageism. We all get older, fact of life. So why look down on
older people and write them off.

I wonder how milenials will talk when they themselves turn 50. Maybe they turn
the tables and 50 will be the new 20.

------
danjoc
Ageism <-> Burnout

Change what you call it and the conversation changes. It depends on the
narrative the author wants to push. Those two things are related.

The middle age software dev you burned out then tossed aside has the children
most likely to be software devs. You spoil your reputation with the kids
before they're even old enough to apply at your company.

You've also increased the chance that, due to unstable home life thanks to
layoff, the kids won't ever become software devs in the future. Then you
complain about needing H1Bs. Those things are also tightly related.

Zuckerbergs of the world are too immature to see cause and effect. They only
see next quarter results while driving society to ruin.

------
throwanem
The idea of professional senescence beginning with the fourth decade of life
seems to originate in academia, where publication of original research is the
figure of merit for professional value, and does indeed appear, in the
aggregate, to peak late in the third decade.

But academia is a profession more unlike than like our own. We do, after all,
call ourselves not scientists but _engineers_. While the role of an engineer
may include the invention of novel applications or even novel theory, it need
not; what we do revolves instead around the application of ingenuity to the
solution of real problems, and I see no reason to assume that facility of
ingenuity or skill in its application are dependent upon youth. On the
contrary, the accrual of experiential knowledge which comes with a long period
of practice in the field makes a canny engineer more capable, rather than less
so.

Not to say that there's no place for genius, of course - but, again, genius is
hardly the sole province of youth. And ours is a young field, as the
professions go; ours is the third or perhaps the fourth generation in all
human history where the phrase "software engineer" has even had a defined
meaning, and so it's reasonable to expect we may still be somewhat bound by
the traditions of the theoretical fields in which our own so recently
originated - we haven't really had time to establish traditions of our own,
and the field is something of a free-for-all as a result. Combine all that
with one of our preeminent centers of practice by happenstance being a place
which has fetishized youth and beauty for well longer than our field's been
around - and which has also, separately and for quite a few more years, made
an industry of exporting its own culture to our country and the world - and
it's not hard to see how we might end up with the kinds of attitudes here
under discussion.

There is, though, cause for considerable optimism in the fact that Silicon
Valley is not the reliable metonym for software engineering culture which it
is so often taken to be, whether by the self-congratulatory among its own
inhabitants or by those naïve or ignorant enough to believe the hype they
expound. Sure - the field was in considerable part incubated there, and
largely codified there to the extent it has been codified at all. But that a
thing was invented in a place does not give that place an exclusive, permanent
claim on defining the nature of the thing.

Sure - if you're forty or fifty and you want to work for Google as a software
engineer, you're going to have a bad time, not least because you'll probably
be interviewed by infants who may find you reminiscent of the fathers in their
relationships with whom they are not yet fully past the adversarial phase. But
there are many places to work other than Google, and many more preferable
places to work and to live than Silicon Valley. There is no reason for anyone,
but especially anyone who knows better, to subject herself to the programmer's
equivalent of the Hollywood talent mill - often, as we have lately been
hearing in the news, complete with "casting couches" for those who happen to
suit the sexual fancy of one who happens to hold some power.

Come and join us out here in the real world! We'll be happy to have you among
us, and you can make a life for yourself here. Believe it or not, we even have
some houses that sell for under a million!

------
grabcocque
Silicon Valley, in particular, has always seemed to me to fetishise the
pseudo-legendary brilliant young school leaver overachiever superstar. Anyone
who hasn't burned out by the time they hit 40 is clearly either lazy or an
underachiever, and therefore not the sort of person _we_ would want to hire.

The Valley's most cherished myths are amongst some of the most societally
detrimental.

(Disclosure: I'm 40 and work in tech. This sort of thing gives me waking
nightmares.)

------
blahman2
How about y'all stop complaining about everything

~~~
sctb
Would you please stop posting like this, read the guidelines, and then comment
civilly and substantively?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
blahman2
It was a substantive comment,and I agree I could have been nicer. The negative
emotional overtone was a part of the message

------
christofosho
I really hope that the ageist title was on purpose.

