If you take a survey of hiring managers they will point to three primary reasons that candidates 40 - 60 have a harder time finding jobs:
1) They are typically more expensive than "market" for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc.
2) They are less flexible - they are less willing to relocate, they have kids to pick up instead of "beer hour bonding", unwilling to run the same 60 hour gauntlet that a 25 year old can etc.
3) They have less primary & secondary education relevant to today's enterprise issues. In the specific case of "marketers" - like TryOldster is pitching - the best people will learn anything, but anybody over 50 years old spent their professional training + formative 20s thinking about television, radio, and print - not paid search, mobile advertising, and social.
That we're at the top of HN again with another "hire older people" post (recently we saw OldGeekJobs) demonstrates there's a huge unmet need within this cohort.
I don't think a job-board is the right solution to this problem because the pitch on TryOldster does nothing to alleviate the three principal concerns.
My unasked, probably asinine business advice would be to turn this flow of traffic into a training / education platform where you can VALIDATE and address the very real, foundational concerns of hiring managers around this cohort, and suddenly you've got a machine that can get motivated people trained and placed.
I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) and it's astounding. I can't imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.
If you're hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an "acceptable tradeoff of competency" unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place.
Also if you're 50 and are relying on a new job's retirement program you're probably in for a rude awakening about when you can retire. That should be pretty close to set by that point. If it's not, the difference between matching 4% or 3%, or 75% match v. 100% is not going to be shaving more than a few months off your working career.
> They have less primary & secondary education relevant to today's enterprise issues.
I'm pretty knowledgeable about paid search and social but I don't think my Political Science degree has anything to do with that. To imply that someone's age precludes them from understanding paid search, mobile advertising, or social is the very definition of ageism.
I'm 63 with a BS in Chemistry and MS in Environmental Systems Engineer. I was a student teacher of microbiology when I was in graduate school. I started coding fortran in HS about 1969 or 1970.
> I'm pretty knowledgeable about paid search and social but I don't think my Political Science degree has anything to do with that. To imply that someone's age precludes them from understanding paid search, mobile advertising, or social is the very definition of ageism.
I run 134+ branded sites (and maybe 20+ other misc sites) some of which do extensive search marketing (extensive for a university). I am a digital native as much as the next person regardless of age.
It is not that bad. All are in a push CMS. We have a staff for content and UX. Many sites are small. Probably total 15,000 pages for all sites.
These are univeristy sites so they are not complex apps. But there is a lot of backend code and middleware for pushing files to the CDN and to an xml database.
All right. I'll be honest, I forgot what thread we were on, I was just in awe at all of the sites you run. My next thought was, "man, I wish I could use some guy like him, but he is just too expensive."
One thing is for sure: there are definitely, 100%, no-questions about it, over 1 people who can be reached and who, at least for a few months, would take over 15,000 pages and 154+ sites. (An early 20s hacker). For under $30,000.
That excludes nearly everybody: but not everybody. There is 1 person you can find who can do it.
However, that one person is not going to be over 50. Over 50 people "aren't stupid" and are not going to do that for you for $30,000 and no other compensation.
You can say under twenty people will be "stupid enough" that you can find someone to do it. But more accurately, they have different motivations. There's nothing stupid about working for $30,000 doing a job that's worth half a million, when your friends are earning $20,000 as barristas at starbucks. People's lives change over time. . . .
"There's nothing stupid about working for $30,000 doing a job that's worth half a million, when your friends are earning $20,000 as barristas at starbucks."
That's patently false. Undervaluing your labor because your friends work in a poorly compensated industry makes no sense. If anything the money you are earning when you are younger is more important to secure for ROI purposes.
All right: to the best of my current understanding, there is nothing wrong with ever taking a salary vastly under market in one's twenties, including literally performing CTO-level work worth half a million and equal to the work of many developers under you (or hell, even leading or directing them), for $30,000. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's not a bad life choice. Especially if one's social life is also important and includes many other twenty-somethings in various professions.
we're just going to disagree if you think otherwise - we don't have to get into an argument about it. In my world view not everything is about maximizing salary.
my only point is that the supply at that price is greater than 0 - that some people will do it. who are in their twenties. you won't find someone even over thirty willing to do it though. it's a descriptive statement.
? but they wouldn't take a job as an engineer at that same salary; whereas a kid who is working as a wal-mart shop cart person or cashier, would do CTO-level technical work (if they happened to be able to) for the same salary -- or more precisely the number of such kids who are willing to is not exactly 0. It is larger than strictly zero.
Maybe they just want to get out of the house and do something useful?
Otherwise if it was for $$$s, and they aren't poor without a safety net, seems like they'd be better off learning higher value skills and getting a better job.
I've considered it, but I don't think I can do that work.
I'm not actually retired, and may never be able to, because of a catastrophic health event around twelve years ago. I get paid very well when I'm working, and that plus learned frugality and a supportive family has enabled me to get by pretty comfortably, but the same health catastrophe created a situation in which it's quite difficult to find people who want to hire me. That difficulty is increased by a couple of other personal limitations that don't hamper my productivity (I can be outstandingly productive given the right tools, goals, and situation), but the right combination of things is just a little different from and more specific than the common default, and that's enough to have a strong negative effect on my chances of being hired. I'm a white crow, is what it comes down to--or a nail that sticks up.
My solution so far is to take work I'm likely to excel at when I can get it, and especially when people are comfortable paying me on par with what I've been usually been paid before (because it's good pay), but to be open to any steady work of any kind that I think I can do, because I also often have to weather extended periods of no work. The longest so far has been a little over two years.
Oh, and of course I'm always working on projects meant to become things that will generate residual income in the long run.
I would certainly work as a Wal-Mart greeter if I thought I could do it. There are a lot of other low-paying jobs that I would do if I thought I could do them. The main problem with low-paying jobs is that a lot of them require sustained physical exertion that I can't do, or rigid work schedules that I can't observe, or both.
I feel like you're not fully articulating your point here; in what circumstance would prioritizing leisure entail working for 6% of one's market value?
doesn't really matter. as I just wrote, my only point is that the supply at that price is greater than 0 - that some people will do it. who are in their twenties. you won't find someone even over thirty willing to do it though. it's a descriptive statement.
Are you sure the people that will do it are the ones you want to be doing it (if you are paying?). If they are so vastly underestimating their market value, perhaps it's because they are actually vastly overestimating their ability.
I have to agree with the perhaps inappropriately named logicallee. And I'd go further - it's not just a matter of age, nor (as others in this thread have said) of inability or stupidity, if someone works for a salary under market value. I am far from the best at my job in the world, but I'm ok, and for the longest time as a freelancer I charged way under the market (in fact I suspect I still do, though not so egregiously). This was - I think - not because I "overestimated my ability" or anything like that. I was simply not a business-minded person. I was afraid to ask for more. I earned enough to live from, and the rest seemed somehow distasteful to me. I'm not saying this is the ideal, just a fact. And if I have these characteristics, perhaps others do too.
Once you find the person stupid enough to accept crap pay for doing something that earns you tons of profit - are you sure you found a person smart enough to do what you need?
There is a big difference between "how much value you create" and the percentage of that that you can capture for yourself.
In the non-labor market airlines a great example of this. They create tremendous value for their customers (fast long distance transportation), but the industry as a whole is not very profitable.
Same for employment. Many (hopefully most) employees generate more value than their salaries, but that does not mean they can negotiate for that value to be added to their salary. If there is someone else with similar capabilities willing to do the job at $x, then negotiating pay above $x will be difficult.
accepting "only" $30,000 at the age of 22 is a lot less stupid than accepting "only" $30,000 at the age of 52. people's lives and motivations are vastly different, especially the most qualified, smartest people's lives.
This is honestly the strangest logic I've read on this site. You're basically arguing for exploiting workers by undervaluing them and saying it's ok because people's lives change?
it's just a descriptive statement about the market. for that matter, how many 50+ year olds even apply to be barristas at starbucks? perhaps nobody should work at a starbucks as a barrista, but we're not exactly going to blame everyone who does so in their twenties.
The biggest problem with "Hire someone super smart at a vastly-under-market rate." is that some other company will come along tomorrow and offer them market, and the best case is that they give you two weeks notice before jumping ship.
The worst case[0] is that they don't show up the next day and you are SOL.
0. Assuming they don't actively try to sabotage the company that has been exploiting them.
this is also the same reason why 'overqualified' is an actual concern.
people at the bottom of the totem pole view money as simply a scarce resource -- when it becomes somewhat more abundant, you have other things to worry about and it becomes a means to an end of hiring and retaining good, reliable people.
one way of doing this is not to substantially underpay someone who's worth a lot more on the open market, because eventually it will bite you in the ass.
> There's nothing stupid about working for $30,000
No, it's just rational as an individual, yet it ends up driving down wages. If, as a group, this kind of pay was shunned, that wouldn't happen. Don't devalue your job, wait it out.
Employers are in a better position to divide and conquer, than employees are to unionize.
I am 49 and have a CS Degree, ~25 years experience. I run my own mobile/web development company out of my home, making more money than I ever have before. I've been in business for about 3 years and each year my revenue increases by 20-30% I am principle architect and coder.
In order to do this, I have had to learn new languages, frameworks and new ways of thinking about things. Some of those "new" things weren't difficult, they just required tweaking old ways of looking at things.
For example, older mobile devices are resource constrained. Having to think about conservation while coding isn't new. I started my career coding on shitty MS Dos system where if you had 640K of memory, it was a high-end machine. The tweaking comes in with the addition of other constrains such as battery life, coalescing radio usage and the fact that the OS can decide to shut down your app and restart it at any time, but the user's expectation is it should be the way the just left it.
Continually learning and reinventing myself is just the way things are now. If you haven't had to deal with that yet, just wait. It will come.
I am 55, CS degree, and also a digital native. I run a digital agency. In this past year, I've been the technical decision maker for development efforts for over 20 web sites/applications, full stack. I can work with decision makers, and I can deep dive to any place in the web stack. I was the technical lead on a cloud deployment for a $1bn government contractor. I have a business partner and am also in the early stages of a SaaS startup.
My point. Nobody will ever dictate what I can and cannot do in this complex, wonderful, and growing digital space. Ever.
is he though? i mean, are you sure about the norm? meet a young colleague who doesn't understand search, you'll say "he has no clue about search". meet an older colleague and you might say "he's too old to understand search".
The norm? Which would be the general public? I think you will find anyone who can solve an equation is an exception to the norm. A computer programmer of ANY competence, even an amateur 12 year old, is 3 standard deviations outside the norm. And if you're going to restrict your norm to just computer professionals... you'd best run some numbers before making assumptions.
I'm a developer and am currently 47 (about to be 48). I'm the youngest developer in my department (basically call processing) where we work with C, C++ and Lua (which I introduced into the company). Down the hall is another department writing software to be embedded in Android phones (Java, obviously). With one exception (I think he's 30 ... maybe) the average age is mid-50s. The department working on the UI (HTML, CSS and Javascript) are in their 40s, like the department working on the (non-call processing) servers (Java mostly).
>I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) and it's astounding. I can't imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.
I completely agree (I'm 32), but what is worrying is the possibility of a fundamental shift that doesn't occur within individual companies but rather manifests itself as a new industry of sorts, and then a slow decline of the industry we're in right now - a paradigm shift, for a lack of a better term. That one is harder to detect until it's blatantly obvious, at which point the early practitioners in the new industry are now the senior engineers and newly minted college graduates are overwhelmingly starting their career in the new industry. Developers in the old industry have to cling on to whatever jobs are left or start over.
My uncle is a good example of this - he's in his 50s and has spent most of his career working in what are now ancient IBM technology stacks (ever hear of RPG?) He saw object oriented programming as snake oil and a passing fad. When there were finally no jobs left near him for working in this IBM stack, he begrudgingly learned Java/C#/JavaScript/SQL and took a major pay/prestige cut basically starting over.
It's not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse). What experience ends up transferring to the new industry? Soft skills, perhaps, but lots of people outside either the old or new industry have good soft skills experience, so what do you bring to the table that they don't?
This isn't an "age problem." It's something deeper than that. If my uncle had jumped ship from his IBM world and into e-commerce in the 90s, which he was perfectly capable of doing, he would probably be a senior leader somewhere right now. But how could he have known? When the .com bubble burst, he probably felt vindicated in his decision to stay put.
How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035? I'm not very confident at all. But how do I recognize when to jump ship?
I'm pretty confident that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will NOT be big in 2035. Computers will probably have evolved into pretty different forms, and we'll have different ways of interacting with them.
However, the principles of engineering good computing systems will probably be pretty similar. And the higher level skills needed to be a good engineer will almost certainly be the same.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss soft skills as easy to pick up - well, maybe you mean soft skills like basic verbal and written communication, in which case, sure, they can be learned pretty easily. But there are a lot of very valuable "soft" skills that fall under the realm of engineering wisdom and experience.
A senior engineer can add a huge amount of value for a team - justifying a huge pay check - by having a good sense for how to design things to allow for greater productivity, when to be extra paranoid about failures, which corners can safely be cut, or how to avoid subtle but devastating pitfalls in a given domain or platform.
I think most professions are a bit pyramid shaped, with lots of people whose career trajectories don't always go up and to the right. Software development probably has a bit more of a plateau than some, but it's not the only one. Architecture, for example, is very cutthroat, with a handful of senior people who do very well, and an awful lot of disappointed later-career professionals. Even at big corporate law firms things are pretty much up or out - not everyone makes partner, and not every partner makes senior partner.
I think across all of these professions, if you want to keep moving up and/or stay highly employable (and that's a big if), then you have to always be thinking about trends in the market for your skills, and how you can stay ahead of them. It's not that different from a company thinking about how their products can continue to stay competitive in a changing market.
I had a six month co-op in college where I worked for a major defense contractor working on software for an embedded system. I really enjoyed the work and had a few offers from defense contractors doing embedded development when I graduated but ultimately decided on going to work for a growing e-commerce company near Boston. My primary reason for not going back into the defense industry despite enjoying the work was because I saw that kind of work as too unstable and career limiting going forward.
I have to say that based on my experience I believe very little meta engineering skills would transfer between these two industries. The way software is written for a full authority digital engine control and the way software is written for an e-commerce website have very little in common other than they are both called "software engineering." The process is immensely different, the technology is immensely different, testing is immensely different, integration is immensely different. It's a different universe. If I went back to work for one of those companies I would be starting from the bottom - if they would even hire me. Yes, if you squint really hard, you can see parallels in the two industries - they both test, for example - but to try to extrapolate beyond that is... well, quite a big pitfall.
The things you mentioned - a good sense for designing things for greater productivity, where to be paranoid about failures, what corners can be safely cut, or where the pitfalls are - are extremely different between the two industries.
The nature of computation opens up a boundless universe of possible ways to both run a software project and build a software project. This sets us apart from other engineering disciplines -- there are a limitless number of ways to architect almost any software project, but there are only so many safe ways to build a bridge.
This allows our industry to fork off into places we can't possibly imagine today. I agree with you that in 2035, our field will be very different.
> It's not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse).
If this is the case, then when someone entered the workforce has absolutely no relevance. What is relevant is staying current. It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.
> How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035? I'm not very confident at all. But how do I recognize when to jump ship?
Thankfully, these days we have data scientists who examine trends in framework and methodology assimilation for fun and publicity. We have metrics like GitHub stars, Stackoverflow questions, and Google Trends to clue us in on the popularity and profitability of new ways of doing things.
> It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.
I don't know if I agree with that. When I was 25, I was all over every new technology that came out. I was the expert in my group. I'm now pushing 50. The latest tech isn't nearly as interesting. And honestly, I'm getting tired of chasing it. My energy level has dropped a bit. Physically I'm not in as good a shape (though still quite healthy). The effects of age are very real.
Another way to put it is that the 25 year old thinks all the shiny new technologies are important. The 50 year old knows better.
I'm 51. Many, maybe most of the tech that's fundamental to my career didn't even exist when my career started. Only Unix and SQL have been constants. http was a lab experiment. The Mosaic browser didn't exist yet. Java? Ruby? NoSQL? Whatever.
If you need to learn a tech to solve a problem, you learn a tech. It's not hard.
What I find interesting isn't new technologies. It's new problems, problems that didn't exist before (often because they're the result of new tech), or problems that could not be addressed before (due to limits of computational power or data access).
I'm your age, and I think a good example of what you're talking about is javascript frameworks. Younger programmers might dissect each one and suss out the details like any of us might have done with CONFIG.SYS, but as an older programmer they all seem essentially similar and as far as professional skills go I can probably either just choose one or wait until the dominant one shakes out. This of course is aided by my sense/prediction/bigotry that JS frameworks are following Hotelling's Law.
You're mostly right, but that means you're missing an extremely important piece of the picture.
Both the browser and Node provide hardly any structure at all compared to Cocoa, WinForms, or even the Java standard library. Experienced developers recoil because it feels like building a house with hand tools, compared to having a team of contractors at your disposal.
This results in JavaScript developers building their own tools. That's why there are so many of them. In iOS no one writes a GUI toolkit, because Apple already provided one and it's pretty good. People have their complaints but they're rarely serious enough to warrant throwing the whole stack away.
In that sense these more robust platforms are superior. But the JavaScript world is like a giant evolutionary system trying all ideas at once, at almost every level of the stack. Lots of repetition, lots of death, but also WAY more ideas floating around.
JavaScript frameworks all look the same to outsiders because they mostly are. But they are different in subtle ways that you simply can't explore on iOS because Apple already decided where the major architectural boundaries will be.
There are painful tradeoffs on the JavaScript side, but I think in the long run the fundamental advantages will become enormous. I believe the web a disruptive (to native) technology in the Innovators Dilemma sense, but we're still very early on the adoption curve. Only a fraction of a percent of people use the web's most powerful feature, which is JavaScript functions.
> And honestly, I'm getting tired of chasing it. My energy level has dropped a bit. Physically I'm not in as good a shape (though still quite healthy). The effects of age are very real.
But that's also experience. There is a sameness both the 'new thing' cycle and the new things themselves that largely becomes apparent as we accumulate experience -- which happens to coincide with years, but I don't think it's the years that are the cause.) From that perspective it seems logical to be less interested in chasing all the new things.
So far I've found (~10 yr. younger than you) that if something comes along that is sufficiently interesting, I dive into it just as deeply as ever -- but I'm a fair bit more discerning about what I find sufficiently interesting.
At 25 everything seems new and exiciting, now in my mid 30's I'm starting to see new tech as just a new spin on old ideas. If you were familiar with smalltalk for instance, you probably wouldn't have found java or .net particularly exciting, you probably wouldn't have as hard a time picking it up either.
You're right, and it's not just the affects of age. As I have gotten older, my responsibilities have become more diverse - Outside of work, I am a husband, parent, and bible study teacher. Much of the time I used to spend playing with new technology are now spent in those roles.
You also mentioned getting tired of the chase. It's hard not to get jaded about the newest javascript framework (for example) when we have been reinventing these wheels in our industry since the 50's. Whenever the next big thing pops up, it will arise out of the oeuvre of a lot of stuff that - taken individually - are a dead ends.
I think every 50 year old is different. A fifty year old who did some regular exercise, is different than a guy who spent the last thirty years sitting at a desk?
When I was younger, I thought most people over 30 were basically worthless. As I've aged, I changed that up a bit.
Young and old have their place.
When I was in my twenties, and thirties; you couldn't pay me to sit in front of a computer--literally.
What was I interested in? Guess? Girls! And then Girls! And then anything other than sitting at a desk all day, especially looking into a screen. Was I entitled? A bit?
Only as I aged, did computer science become palatable. Do I love it? No, but I haven't loved anything besides a few family members, and my pets.
I think where Hiring Managers get it wrong is assuming all young people will be Rock Stars, with great ideas. They will be happy with free food, and lofty promises. I never bought it. I took what I wanted. I smiled, looked promising, but hated my employers. I would not want to hire myself after college. I finished college ready for med school, and looked back, and could count on my hands what courses weren't a waste of time. I was dissalusioned.
I do think the best ideas still come from mainly young people, but separating the the best from the herd is impossible.
Peter Thiel has the money to throw at young people, and wait for the shooting star. He knows that combination of being young, hormones at full throttle, and angst; might just produce another Mark Zuckerburg. (I used Mark, but he might have just stole an idea, and got very lucky? I honestly haven't figured it out.)
And to be perfectly honest; the young guys, I know, who became rich--all had wealthy enabling fathers. The more I think about it, it was their fathers(50 plus) who provided the idea, and capital, but weren't willing to give up their day gig to see their product through.
The ageism won't go away soon.
I think it will take another five to ten years for the industry to realize you don't need to fire programmer at 40, but who knows?
I personally think in a decade, this profession will be talked about in the past tense. Yes, a few will always have a secure job, but most jobs will be contracted out to the lowest bidder.
Hell, I don't think it will be ten years. Once "Let it go whatever", rehashedidea.com, etc. run out of free money; we will have a huge group of dissalusioned 25-35 year olds. Many will be homeless? Many talking about the good ole days when companies treated you like you were a valuable commodity.
> If this is the case, then when someone entered the workforce has absolutely no relevance. What is relevant is staying current. It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.
I might be wrong, but I got the sense that the comment you're responding to is trying to make the exact same point. It even says that one point that the uncle's age was completely irrelevant to his not learning the newer technologies.
> He saw object oriented programming as snake oil and a passing fad
for how long ? I dont blame him for reading about C++ in 1989 and saying "hrmmmf! hogwash!". But in 1995 ? in 2000 ? It sounds like he got set in his ways, and how is that NOT an "age problem" ? I'm also 32, and I'm getting slightly more set in my ways as I get older.
> he begrudgingly learned Java/C#/JavaScript/SQL and took a major pay/prestige cut basically starting over.
well, had he had an open mind and not shunned new things, he might be a Herb Sutter today. Or even in IBM, had he bet on a different "horse", and moved into As/400 or whatever other IBM technologies there are, he could be earning more than a C++ programmer, knowing some obscure proprietary IBM language and having 20+ years experience backing it up. I've heard of guys like that making $100+/hr because only a few people in the world can do it.
I think his story is one of mismanagement of intellectual capital. Maybe it's naive of me, but I dont see how you could be in software engineering for 30 years and not be worth at least a million, especially from his era. Did he invest in IBM or any tech companies at all ? How could you not see everyone making money in the dot-com era and not be a part of it ?
>for how long ? I dont blame him for reading about C++ in 1989 and saying "hrmmmf! hogwash!". But in 1995 ? in 2000 ? It sounds like he got set in his ways, and how is that NOT an "age problem" ? I'm also 32, and I'm getting slightly more set in my ways as I get older.
Christmas of 2002.
>well, had he had an open mind and not shunned new things, he might be a Herb Sutter today. Or even in IBM, had he bet on a different "horse", and moved into As/400 or whatever other IBM technologies there are, he could be earning more than a C++ programmer, knowing some obscure proprietary IBM language and having 20+ years experience backing it up. I've heard of guys like that making $100+/hr because only a few people in the world can do it.
That's actually the big trap. He WAS making good money because of legacy systems and because not many people were familiar with the technology... right up until there were no jobs left. It makes changing fields earlier difficult even though it would have probably been the best long term strategy.
>I think his story is one of mismanagement of intellectual capital. Maybe it's naive of me, but I dont see how you could be in software engineering for 30 years and not be worth at least a million, especially from his era. Did he invest in IBM or any tech companies at all ? How could you not see everyone making money in the dot-com era and not be a part of it ?
I assume he's worth well over a million. It isn't enough to be worth a million when you are 50. When you and your wife will be living for (hopefully) another 30-40 years and social security doesn't kick in until 62-65, you gotta keep working unless you explicitly planned for an early retirement.
As for how to avoid the .com era - well, you miss it by seeing it as a bubble (and feel vindicated when it "pops" in 2001). You also miss it because you are committed to living in a certain geographic area without a significant presence of e-commerce companies.
I've got a year on you and I think I'd agree that OO is snake oil. The worst code bases I've ever seen (and I've seen some horrors) have been from over used inheritance and mixing logic and data. Provided you avoid global state (also a problem with OO) I think a c program would be more understandable than a lot of java/c# ones.
Not to say there aren't useful features, that would go well with a language like c, like interfaces, but I'd love to get rid of inheritance, encapsulation and mixing data and code.
it could very well be snake oil, but I make a living doing it (or at least knowing how to answer C++ questions during interviews. many of my jobs were advertised as SE but really dont require much actual coding (to my frustration)) and I actually enjoy C++.
Personally, I think both java and javascript (yes I know they are entirely separate languages ) are snake oil. But you know, I learned to program in them anyway.
I tried to find a happy medium where I learn about a new technology and see if it sticks. If after 3-5 years its still around, I give it a try. This worked for me for javascript and python. When python first came out (or when I first heard of it ) I said "no way, not learning a new language right now. perl works fine as a scripting language". Then year after year I kept hearing about it, and heard about perl less and less. Then I finally tried it.
But a couple years ago, I kept hearing about "coffee script" and "clojure". I said the same thing, "not touching it". And now, I hardly ever hear about them, and I barely even know what they are.
From what you are saying I guess you have never been in an OO project but you just worked in the "cold hell" of procedOOral code, the worst mix of copy and paste, overblown inheritance and singletons.
I experienced a lot of it in my career, nowadays I am more oriented towards the functional world, but saying that OO is completely useless and even dangerous is an outright lie.
The most awful codebases on which I worked on would have been quite nice applying the OO best practices.
Sadly they where far too big to be changed by the concerted effort of a couple of people.
And they were full of anti-patterns.
Even loving the type safety of F# and Haskell I can't honestly say that OO is an anti-pattern per se.
What it matters is not the size of the hammer but how you use it.
But I can rightfully proclaim that the wrong tools used for something that they were never meant for are the worst possible solution. EVER.
I've spent 10+ years of my career working in OO languages, I'm no stranger to it and I've seen it used well. But we'll tends to be a subset of OO, with minimal inheritance and encapsulation with data and logic in seperate places.
"unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place."
I think that's a key thing to look at. There is only so much space at the top of the experience chain in most jobs. I doubt most companies need more than 1-2 senior software devs per 5 software devs.
Most companies are structured as a pyramid. Depending on the career path, it's about 1/5th the population for each rung up the ladder you climb. Not everyone should expect to climb to the top.
> I can't imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.
I think the problem we run into is that neither can most people.
> If you're hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an "acceptable tradeoff of competency" unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place.
And, again, the issue is that most people honestly believe that they don't need the extra competency.
I work in a relatively enlightened group. People treat me with considerable respect and I feel that they value my experience (I'm knocking up against 50 years old). Even still, if I say, "You know what, I've tried that before a few times and it never seems to work out" nobody will accept it as an answer :-). These young guys all want/need to make their own mistakes.
Sometimes I've even run into situations where people are doing considerable damage to their careers by making bad choices. Explaining the situation often makes them very, very unhappy. You end up feeling like the dad on a team of teenagers where everyone deep down loves and respects you, but day to day hates your guts :-).
Since the field is growing so fast, we have this influx of young talent. They just can't see beyond where they will be in 5 years. Just the other day I saw an ad on Youtube for some programmer mill -- "I took a 10 month course and now I'm living my dream," kind of BS. Everybody wants to think that they are doing an awesome job and we have pushed back the bar for awesome a fairly long way. There's an expectation that you can do a boot camp, work for a year or two and then it's easy street from there.
The reality, of course, is that 30 years on I'm still reading and hacking and struggling and experimenting and learning -- and I've been doing it for 30 years. I look in awe at some people in the industry and wonder if I will be able to gain that kind of competency before I retire.
I think if I could sum up the advantage of being more experienced it would be to watch the classic movie, "The Seven Samurai", note who survives to the end, think about why they survive and remark on what they plan to do next.
> You know what, I've tried that before a few times and it never seems to work out" nobody will accept it as an answer
Because that's hand-wavy nonsense about "a few" data points. If you said that whatever you're discussing never worked out because of A, B, and C, and at least once of those is still an issue, then it would probably be accepted.
There are fundamentally two kinds of experienced people: Those with n years of experience, and those with m years of experience n/m times (where n >> m). Part of the only-somewhat-mythical recently-lost middle class compact was that you you train to do something, then work the rest of your life doing that. The former kind, the people who trained as electrical engineers in the 70s (because computer science wasn't invented then), then kept their skills up to date, will have very little trouble finding interesting and well-paid things to work on. The people who still think in terms of mainframes and consider tab-completion uncomfortable magic[1] won't. When, on top of that, they subscribe to the other part of said middle class compact, that your salary is supposed to keep going up (above inflation), then you have a recipe for disappointment.
Is there embarrassing ageism in tech? Undoubtedly. Does ageism explain all of why elder techies on average have trouble finding employment in 'new tech'? I strongly doubt it.
1: The number of ostensibly highly experienced Unix (retrained on Linux) system admins that I have personally, not even exaggerating, promise, taught to use tab completion in Bash in this decade is depressing.
I think the companies that hire an army of 23-25 year olds are planning to fail fast anyway. Why bother trying to recruit older, more senior talent that is going to expect higher benefits if the skills that they bring to the table vs. a 25 year old (knowledge of scalability, long-term decision making, planning, deep technical knowledge, etc.) aren't going to be used unless the company survives the first few years?
I was with you until the straw man in the last sentence. No one here is suggesting that age "precludes" you from understanding modern marketing media, only that it's less likely. Whether that's true or not is a question of actual data, not broad statements about ageism.
I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30)
and it's astounding. I can't imagine what the difference
between 50 and 25 will be.
While it's true that there's some new tech/tools coming out, stuff doesn't necessarily change that much...I started working as a programmer at 18 (I'm 33 years old now) when the popular new thing was java.
In between I used many different languages and tools (c, c++, python, matlab, js, haxe, as3, in no particular order & probably some that I've forgotten) but now I'm using c# which very in-vogue in my line of work (game development, due to the popularity of unity) and it was a virtually seamless transition from java (I actually started using c#/.net in 2009 as a tools programmer independent of unity).
EDIT: nevermind, I realize now you meant you improved drastically in 5 years, not that the tech field has changed drastically.
> If you're hiring 40-60 year
> olds you cannot simply hire
> a 25 year old and get an
> "acceptable tradeoff of
> competency"
I'm a much better developer than I was 10 years ago, and I was pretty damn good then, but even when I'm 50, there will be people whose talent and ways of thinking about programming at 25 will be much superior to mine.
And every year, my intuition about what constitutes bloat vs developer convenience, and when to just throw hardware (physical or cloud) at a problem that could be fixed via developer time, gets slight slightly more out of date.
"We're just wise enough to know that it leads to no good outcome."
I'm middle aged, working with some very young people right now, and I'm having an epiphany, because they are running around like chickens with their heads cut-toff, and I see there's no reason for it, they are equating 'sweat and crunch' with 'value' and making all sorts of mistakes. The epiphany is: they remind me exactly of me at that age!
And they won't take any advice. I mightn't have either ... though I did definitely respect my managers ... and they have none ...
These problems are particularly pernicious when the younger teams have no upper management, or have never worked in larger organizations.
Hopefully, we are starting to realize the value of older devs in some situations and can respect their abilities wherein they are valuable.
That wisdom makes you of negative business value to your manager, since he still believes 60-hour gauntlets are an intrinsic part of being on time and under budget.
I'd be happy not to be hired by such a manager. Crunch time happens sometimes, and you gotta do what you gotta do. But 60 hour weeks as a matter of course are a dealbreaker for me.
I gotta get a giggle. Not that I'm mocking 60 hour work weeks, that's still a lot of hours no doubt. But whenever I read 60 hour work weeks as a big deal I just think back to my time as a chef. I think the max I capped out was 120 hours a week, and I did that for 5 weeks straight before contracting pneumonia due to a cold I got sometime within that period. Never again. Hell...10 hours of work per week is enough to discourage me these days heh.
I disagree. I have read articles like http://lifehacker.com/working-over-40-hours-a-week-makes-you... which claim that over 40 hrs a week on average, for average people, will have lower productivity. I get that sometimes people have to work over 40 hours a week, and then follow it with extended periods of rest. An example is tax accountants. But for continuous producers like executives or engineers imo they are more interested in volume of work completed in 1 year than fastest single week/month.
More like, I won't "hire" him. Hiring is a two way street.
Always ask about how much overtime is expected from a job during interviews. If you don't believe in >40 hour work weeks, except maybe under rare conditions, then don't "hire" your prospective employer.
But once a recruiter has this type of experience with a few older candidates, they will be more likely to discount older candidates in the future, regardless of whether those later individuals were willing to do 60+ hour weeks or not.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for ageism -- why?
There's no magic button you can push in your brain that says 'don't form conditional expectations based on protected categories'. If you're a recruiter and older candidates keep blowing you off, would you really continue to put in the same amount of effort to try to recruit them, even if you consciously attempted to?
Older people are more likely to have stable homes, relationships, expenses and goals. This can also translate into a "comfortable groove" of 60+ hour weeks that goes on indefinitely, simply because it's not a grueling ordeal.
I think it's a matter of degree. A two week crunch time every 6 months is OK, maybe even beneficial. Every month though? Not OK, and definitely detrimental.
These may be the reasons that hiring managers give. But they are not necessarily the real reasons.
Most managers have trouble recognizing that their job is to make sure stuff is happening well, and not to be in charge. Older people are more likely to bring relevant experience and knowledge to bear on problems, and therefore to question authority. This knowledge and experience tends to be quite valuable, however it is easier for insecure people to discount it than to process it and incorporate the applicable bits.
The result is that it is more comfortable and easier for most managers to find grounds to ignore and discount experienced people than it is to find value in it. Which becomes a competitive advantage for those companies who "get it".
> I don't think a job-board is the right solution to this problem because the pitch on TryOldster does nothing to alleviate the three principal concerns.
jobboard = take money from company who puts job ad
It's never been about solving the problem. It's about making money off the problem ;)
Your point #3 is the very definition of ageism. It assumes that since I grew up before the Internet, before cell phones, before CDs even, that I cannot understand any of this newfangled mobile and social nonsense. It also assumes that I haven't continued my education.
The fact is that I'm currently the architect and sole backend engineer for a mobile app that relies heavily on data mining, search technologies, and social media marketing. I'm also finishing my current degree (one class to go), and then I'll be starting another one right after that. I'll be 50 soon, and I'm a hell of a lot smarter and more capable now than I was 25 years ago.
Having been 25 before, I think 25-year-olds tend to think they know everything, and make the rash assumption that people older than them don't. The truth tends to be quite the opposite though.
My CTO likes to hire cheap. 90% of the time he passes over more experienced candidates for those with only 0-4 years of experience. He says it's because of the big cost savings.
But, internally, we think it's very short-sighted and a waste. Almost always, the less experienced candidate has to be guided. They rarely have sufficient experience to be full-stack, and over half of the time they are on the average learning curve. That means that they're only 0-50% on the way to mastery. And, that has the unintended consequence of dragging down the productivity of everyone.
Worse, they come in with very strong opinions and aren't pragmatists. They lack understanding of trade offs, because that flexibility comes only from years of this work.
I suspect that the CTO (and many like him) likes to hire people who know less than him (i.e. B players). Luckily, I don't report to the CTO.
#1 should not matter. Market rate is the rate I should expect. Just because I have 20 years of experience does not mean I'm going to get my rate for a Jr PHP job. The complaint is more likely that most companies do not need many people with that level of experience. The old phrase too many generals and not enough soldiers comes to mind.
#2 is changing because we are entering the baby-boomer phase of IT. It was recent that that there were not many people programming, and then the field blew up with tons of young people coming out of college. Those young people are now turning into older people. Where I work now we have a median age for the IT staff in the high 30s. I don't think anyone is under 30 anymore.
#3 can be true of anyone, depending on how well they have managed their career. Sadly, I have interviewed people with '5 years experience' who learned their job in 3-6 mos. and have just continued to do the same job for 5 years. Their actual experience ends up not being much more than a recent college graduate.
True, but I never undervalue the conversations that happen in the pub after work. (NDAs after all don't apply if people hold a pint or so it seems.) There just is no need to hang around for long nor do it every night. But it is beneficial to show your face occasionally.
I got 2 small kids that I try to get home to at a decent hour most of the week, but I also try to go for a quick pint with my team once or twice a week (depends on the team..) I got it down to a fine art of fitting in just one maybe two pints then run to catch my train so that I am only home 30m-1hr later than normal. Also being in London with several pubs across the road and a train station 10 minutes walk away helps.
The other bit about unwilling to do 60 hour gauntlet now as a 40 year old compared to me at 25 is bollox though. I didn't do it then and I don't do it now.
So, by saying the behavior irks me I am saying they think they're better than me? That doesn't make a lot of sense. They could be completely indifferent.
And so hiring managers simply reject older candidates out of hand.
No matter what level of training/education the candidate has (and likely his existing skill set far exceeds the value of a ruby boot-camp), the preconception will preclude it ever being seen at certain shops.
Rather than pretending there is no ageism and it's all the candidate's fault, what is needed is a list of companies that simply will not hire people over 35. That way we can all stop wasting eachother's time.
>"They have less primary & secondary education relevant to today's enterprise issues"
What primary and secondary education that gets out of date matters much for a software developer? Algorithms, complexity etc. don't change much. The technology changes so much and is do vast that what fresh graduates know won't help much.
The only thing I as a hiring manager value about a university degree is that it signals that you have enough discipline to see something through even if you don't always like it. There are plenty of people who can't or don't want to do that. If you can't do that no amount of smarts is gonna make me want to hire you.
You're not valuing what they bring in experience. If you have seen multiple cycles of successful projects and failures you learn patterns.
We tried it like that before and this is what will happen. But instead if you do it this way you will be more successful.
Some bosses may not like the push back and see it as questioning their authority. However if they can overlook that the teams they manage will be more successful.
If you're unemployed in IT over 50, especially in Silicon Valley, you're going to have to adjust your salary expectations down. The older programmer may not want to work for less but it is far better than the alternative.
the boom in "old geek" job boards is the market correcting itself. smaller companies have known about it for a LONG time, because we don't have access to the genius-level kids that churn out code 80 hours a week. tough luck for us, too bad, so sad.
our team is exclusively 35-60. i wouldn't hire a non-genius 25 year old to run anything critical. nope, no way. sorry, kids.
I hope you don't use AWS then. Just because you don't see 25 year-olds as competent adults doesn't mean that plenty of other places aren't using them in critical roles to great effect.
Though maybe you have a really loose definition of genius?
I attended a lecture last week, older people were one of the topics that got touched. Instead of having old employees teaching the younger, he told a story of a business requiring old people to receive fresh young employees as their mentor.
I'd like to hear more. What are the benefits of this arrangement? Is it merely an organizational statement that over-30's are worth less and need remedial training? What was the rationale? What was the group discussion like? What do you think about it?
Is it merely an organizational statement that over-30's are worth less and need remedial training?
No that was not the point.
The point is that new employees, students, practically live in a different world that older employees. The point of the system was that students would teach older employees how to operate within this "new world". It's an approach to make sure that older employees don't get stuck in their ways of thinking.
Interesting, thanks. A mentor is a senior, more experienced person who assists the development of a junior person with advice and guidance. This seems to be something else, more of a cultural integration idea.
What kind of organization is it (what's the business).
I find #2 rather amusing and incorrect, at least as far as the "beer hour" part goes. I'm 55, my youngest is 24 and married. It's all the guys in their 30's that have to pick up their kids. Those of us with grown kids have tons of time, it's the 30 somethings that have kids to pick up.
Being one step removed from the hiring manager at work, the one thing I have noticed about some older candidates is sometimes their background/resume/performance demonstrates to me that some just don't show an aptitude for learning quickly in technical problem spaces. Personally, I don't particularly care about how old someone is, but I absolutely need to see the ability to learn (in addition to the standard things of integrity, good problem solving ability, is not a jerk, etc.). My company even trends older than a lot in our industry (I might be average at 32 here), especially for a smaller one.
I wonder what an effective approach would be for 40+'ers who don't have kids or other outside constraints. I'm thinking they wouldn't necessarily want to bring it up in an interview, since familial status is a protected class and employers may blanch at statements along these lines.
i'm 51 (altho i probably pass as 40-something) and if during an interview it feels right, i'll mention that i'm child-free and unmarried (thus free to travel and work flexibly i try to say implicitly).
i know employers aren't supposed to take those things into account but i think they do anyway.
It's something I've mentioned in interviews because, yeah, I think it can make a difference in some cases. (married, but no kids, wife works from home, wife travels some independently of me, etc)
@aresant - The problem isn't with us older programmers, marketers, etc. It is with the ignorant young, who believe that they've achieved the apex of their careers, experience, and intellect in their mid-twenties.
Umm I guess your talking about startups and creative agencies... Ones that do not have a lot of money and their workforce is young. Oldsters its best to avoid that scene!
Otherwise here in the east coast there are many of jobs in insurance and government, so much so more then of half the workforce is from India because they have the skills needed.
For those not able to find work where are you located and what are you skilled in/how many years of experience?
There are also other challenges that may not end up in a survey at all. For example, the hiring manager could feel insecure hiring someone older than they are.
> higher related costs like healthcare for a family
How exactly is this a concern for a hiring manager? I thought a company's employees were insured as a pool. In any case, discriminating against someone because of their healthcare status is pretty scummy (in my opinion), but I don't even understand why this is a concern, let alone a legitimate one.
For a hiring manager at a large company (10000+ employees), that interviewer probably won't mentally compute the healthcare costs of a candidate. Although even large companies like AOL were not immune to high medical costs -- even if they inadvertently presented it in a distasteful way.[1]
However, for small companies (e.g. 10 employees), the premiums to fund the health insurance pool will change drastically depending on which employees it has. For example, let's say after a candidate interview, the employer (owner) checks Facebook and notices the wife just had a premature baby or birth defect, etc. Let's say that preemie baby's medical costs is $46000 more[2] (or $1 million more in AOL's case[1]) than a normal healthy baby. We as society may want the employer to ignore that costlier number but we should'be be surprised if he'd rather not pay it and hire another cheaper candidate. Yes, it's illegal discrimination, but we have to be realistic about self-interest -- especially when the employer's (real) reason for rejection can't be proven in court.
If you're bringing in big profits like Google Inc, you have the luxury of not having to make distasteful decisions with finite amounts of money in regards to employee healthcare costs.
In the US employers typically share in the expense of health insurance, so the more dependents an employee has, generally speaking, the more their (non-salary) benefits cost the employer.
I agree with your points 1 and 2. Not sure what you mean by your last paragraph, though. Train who to do what? Old people to stop expecting to have money after retiring? Managers to stop letting their monkey brains harm their company's profitability by having people work 60-hour weeks? Something else?
I was recently working with an older developer. I don't know, maybe of 65 or 70 years. He was working on aerospace network intrusion detection systems, and I was helping him set up a simulation system. He was slinging around low-level computer architecture terminology, while I was quickly trying to access what I remembered from a college class 15 years prior, just to keep up with the conversation.
Older programmers are worthless, simply due to their age? Ridiculous. I hope to someday be as skillful as this guy.
It's a weird experience if you're a clever youngster. I liken it to speed vs torque. I have to rely on being fast and being able to scan a problem as fast as I can to understand it. But an older engineer will just know the lay of the land. I had this happen a lot with an older electrical engineer. He seemed slow and I looked to run circles around everyone, but he could point to things as a root cause before I even understood the problem. I would have to spend time to decompress his observations to backtrack how he figured it out, and you start to realize that his shortcuts and heuristics are just so much better than mine. I wish all young engineers to have the opportunity to be whooped by the tortoise.
Sometimes I would spot something he didn't, but it was frequently because I was approaching from a position of ignorance. It worried me that someday I'll lose that edge, but I guess it's why a good team will be diverse and balanced.
Yup, I worked with some grey-beards in the GPU space and holy shit did they know their stuff, root causes and the like. My experience mirrored yours almost exactly.
The best ones are also pretty enthusiastic to share and educate. This group was very much like that and I'm incredibly grateful for all the things I learned.
I'm on the opposite end of this as I'm pushing 40. It's like speed chess vs chess over snail mail. I tend to see all the way to the end of a problem within moments of hearing about it, already formulating solutions to edge cases 10 steps ahead while others seem to ask almost quaint questions about the first step. They spin very quickly while I don't appear to be doing anything at all, yet I often go completely around a problem. It generally takes me longer to explain how I arrived at the solution than it does to just solve it. But I've been trying to be more communicative, to work in a more communal way so that others can participate and I can count on them.
Of course nobody believes me about any of this and I've long given up trying to explain. I just quietly go about my work. It's frustrating though because I have no real leverage, no way to demonstrate my experience other than to just keep plodding odd glacially. I've utterly failed in any kind of management role but at the same time am having a hard time letting go of being a "hands on" dev in the trenches. I just hope that the level playing field of the internet dissolves agism before I'm faced with its ramifications.
An added bonus of brain age is being able to remember people's names. I never used to be able to do that, and I never tried to learn. It just happened one day. I guess I care more about people now and it seems like the least I can do is remember their fricken name.
My friend would always talk about old war stories. And he'd repeat too :) But his son said jokingly over lunch with him, "Always suffer an old geek." And I've never regretted it.
Keep trying to share what you know. He couldn't figure how to teach what he knows either, but really I think mentorship is more about showing and sharing. You'll find someone who appreciates the skill, and you'll be that guy who sets them on track for their career.
Also kudos on the name memory; I have been well instructed by every good engineer that clearly mirroring people's name back. I don't, but I see how much that helps (just wish I could memorize labels).
I wonder often how often cliquishness gets interpreted as agism, but in either case, being an aging white male in the tech business has given me a new perspective on the merits of workplace diversity :)
Professional Engineer. It's an anointed position from an association of engineers, like an old-time guild. There's a duty to mentor youngsters, and a requirement for youngsters to spend time being mentored before getting PE status themselves.
Sounds good at first thought. Reliable quality and ethics for software engineers, right?
On the other hand, you're inviting a special interest group to restrict the supply of software engineers and dictate university curricula. These professional programs/societies tend to be very conservative (engineers, doctors, lawyers) and have their members' interests possibly before society as a whole. Overall it probably still makes sense for the traditional professions.
But as a CS prof watching my engineering academic neighbors struggle with scheduling, staffing and difficulty updating things, I really don't want the external constraints on our academic program.
Overall, the community has not yet agreed that professional software engineering is a thing, though there have been several attempts to kick start it.
This whole idea of going after young fresh graduates is a ploy from the likes of Facebook or Google to increase their outreach and expand the talentpool they could source from. They are the ones that are on high towers and need people who know react or polymer or stuff like that.
Startups usually, though anecdotal, don't discriminate based on age or length of experience. In fact most of the awesome startups that I know hired solely based on experience and that "fit" into the cultural diversity of the company.
I feel like in the startup space a lot of young people just aren't exposed to just how good highly experienced engineers can be. As a result, they end up just hiring the best youngsters they can find (and afford) and dismiss a lot of people as dated.
It's just breathtaking when you watch an experienced engineer slap together a well architected, highly optimized project that passes all tests on the first try. They even keep track of things like code size in the cache, opportunities for vectorization, etc.
Yep, in contrast to the current unfortunate common practice of "hire in quantity and brute force your way to a working app". I've seen places where copy-pasting from StackOverflow was the norm and "getting it to compile" was seen as a milestone worthy of congratulation.
Elsewhere in the threads here someone noted that a lot of young teams don't have upper managers. And frankly, I'd believe many simply don't have any proper management.
Where "proper" is critical. I've had a lot of managers, but few effective ones. And almost none who led the department. I found my mentors in other departments. It's a real shame, since a great manager will do more for learning and quality of life than anything else, I think.
My father is still a practicing mechanical engineer in his 70s. The 20-something engineers use words like "awesome" to describe him. Of course it helps that his brilliance is God-tier, even without the decades of experience, but still.
Apart from the particular technical knowledge an older guy may have, the accumulated human experience (this is, how to interact, trust, judge, understand, influence and work with other human beings) is always a very valuable factor that they may possess, for while technology changes very fast, basic human nature remains the same.
In my country we have a saying: the Devil knows more from being old than from being the Devil.
Don't know what country the OP is from, but my guess is the phrase he's referring to is the Spanish "Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo" (which translates to what he wrote above). It's a common saying in Spain at least, and presumably in Latin America as well.
It's a pretty old spanish proverb. I couldn't find where it came from, but for reference, I lived in Peru and heard some older guys say it. Then in college, I worked in a warehouse in the southern united states and older Mexican guys would say it to make sure the young workers respected them.
So, I wonder if it's just a universal Spanish proverb?
As an oldster - two things that I really wish my younger self would have intimately realized.
1) As a software person your are employed to Solve Business Problems - NOT to write code, NOT to write tests, NOT to hack on platforms, NOT to be Agile. Solve the problem (or add the feature) - never lose sight of this. The value you bring is directly related to this.
2) People outside software development don't give a flying f* about most issues software related - but everyone has a computer, so most are poorly informed about technology and terrible at making right software choices - build products accordingly.
>As a software person your are employed to Solve Business Problems - NOT to write code, NOT to write tests, NOT to hack on platforms, NOT to be Agile. Solve the problem (or add the feature) - never lose sight of this. The value you bring is directly related to this.
My chemical engineering degree really instilled this idea in me early on, and it's by far the biggest motivating factor as to why I love to work at software startups. When a scientist discovers something in a lab, the ChemE's job is to then come in and figure out how to turn this discovery or innovation into a legitimate business. How do we scale this reaction up from a petri dish to a 10,000 gallon reactor? Where and how do we get the reagents? How much do they cost? Are there any hazardous byproducts? How do we dispose of them?
I like to operate the same way as a software engineer. I'm an engineer, not a scientist. My job is to use technology to produce value for the business, while mitigating risks of that value eroding over time. All the work done should be focused on those two things. And it's not about focusing on those things instead of other things, it's more about realizing that anything worthwhile to do at work that you can come up with actually filters back to those two things anyway in some indirect fashion, so you might as well keep those ideas front and center.
That's a wonderful perspective. One thing I feel that's really missing from our field is some of the traditional engineering learnings and approaches from other industries.
Nothing made me scoff at the idea of a "Software Engineer" more than when I started digging into some of the EE stuff. When you have a $1M tape out that goes wrong if one transistor is miswired.
I just throw crap at the wall and see what sticks, EE and stuff like that is real engineering.
>I just throw crap at the wall and see what sticks, EE and stuff like that is real engineering.
That's one of the things I really love about writing software. You don't have to plan too much before you start to see some results and so you can really get creative quickly. If your thinking was wrong, just undo and try another angle.
Theoretically point 1 is true but theory and practice can be very far apart. At the end of the day you're hired by a hiring manager to make him look good. Sometimes that involves solving business problems, sometimes that involves working 60 hours a week on a death march so that when the project inevitably fails the hiring manager can say the problem was impossible. Look how hard his team was working and still weren't able to accomplish it.
>1) As a software person your are employed to Solve Business Problems - NOT to write code, NOT to write tests, NOT to hack on platforms, NOT to be Agile. Solve the problem (or add the feature) - never lose sight of this.
I couldn't agree more with this. When I was very young, I secretly wondered why people would pay me money to play with computers all day. Once I understood why, I was able make myself more valuable because I understood why I was valuable.
I've worked for a number of companies that did pay to "be agile". It was sort of a cargo cult thing sold by middle management to upper management or upper management to other upper management.
Delivery of working software is supposed to trump everything else in theory, but in practice it often doesn't.
From a reverse perspective, I am new to professional development but have been a long-time programmer. At the age of 45 I decided to pursue my life-long dream of being a programmer and went back to school. There was another "oldster" in my Intro to Java class. He really struggled at first because he had spent the last few decades using technology but not really understanding it. Me, on the other hand, I utterly destroyed everyone in the class. My final project was a "Dwarf Fortress" style game that utilized more advanced programming techniques, algorithms, data structures, AI etc. that was far outside the scope of the class. Not only was the class blown away but the teacher appeared threatened. I had never had programmed in Java before though I have programmed as a hobby throughout my life. But the major difference between me and the other oldster as well as me and my much younger classmates is that I have devoted my life to learn. I've never settled. I've never grown complacent. If I forget something I relearn it. If I don't know something I know where to find an answer. I believe that this is the problem with many oldsters...they get comfortable, set in their ways, entitled.
I quit school that semester as it was clear that I would be far more effective learning on my own. What was true in my Java class turned out to be true in my Linux class, my networking class and my generals. I was WAY ahead of the curve. I now work in the industry as a full-stack Javascript developer and continue to learn each day.
I'm 40, in tech years that's like 1000. I also see value in hiring experience but explicitly factoring by age discriminates against a protected class in the USA. I think a lawsuit is in my future if I use this for placement at my company.
Of course, if you simply rebranded to talk about "experience" rather than "age" then solvelem probbed.
I worked for a recruiter for a while, and the euphemism used for age was 'seasoned'.
"Company X isn't looking for anyone seasoned"
"Company Y is open to seasoned individuals"
Companies would also look for people who were a certain number of years of out school. Like, "5 to 10 years experience post-degree." Sure, that could technically mean a 45 year old who went back to school at 35 is qualified for the position, but there is a 0% chance the company would hire that person.
The other recruiters would talk about these things pretty explicitly outside of emails. There were a lot of interesting justifications:
Older people are harder to train
Older people are difficult employees because they are stuck in their ways/used to getting their way
Older people expect more benefits/vacation/pay
Older people use more sick time
Older people don't keep up with developments in the field
Discrimination wasn't limited to age. The recruiters were just as happy to help their clients discriminate on race, or gender, or familial status. Really anything.
In my experience, age was the only protected class that recruiters would try to suss out how the hiring managers felt about while they were trying to determine the ideal candidate. It seemed to me that the other prejudices would only come to light after the recruiter had a relationship with the hiring manager and had sent them a number of candidates in the past. There were still a lot of euphemisms though.
This was just my experience though, and I was working for a small firm. I have no idea what the rest of the field is like at all.
I always find this kind of thinking to be counter productive - we are all going to be older. The people hiring, the people recruiting, they will all find the same bias working against them in the future - why not do future you a favor and not perpetuate the bias.
Some of these recruiters were pretty old themselves. The had a number of justifications for perpetuating the institution of prejudice. Most common were "don't hate the player, hate the game" excuses.
They were just working within the system, they don't have any ability to affect the system
Hiring managers aren't going to work with us if we send them candidates they are prejudiced against. They'll just work with someone else, or run their own ads, and they'll still be prejudiced.
Interviewing with that person would be a a waste of the candidate's time, and they wouldn't want to work for someone like that anyway.
Some of the recruiters didn't have justifications, since they didn't feel it was wrong. They just felt they were getting their. Their attitude was pretty much that's the way the cookie crumbles / them's the breaks.
Or maybe one year of experience, each in a specialized topic, which are all intertwined. I have 20 years experience in RF engineering, and probably a few years each in sub-disciplines that combine to form a full system. That is pretty valuable, especially being able to head off problems, due to prior experience with them.
A whole career of very short jobs isn't great though. One particularly valuable kind of experience is seeing a project through and understanding how early decisions went awry later on.
Some older coders I work with might not have obsessively learned the latest framework, but they can identify issues like "that's the kind of subsystem that one person ends up maintaining, and then they leave and it's awful", or "We did something similar in the 1990s, and it didn't go so well because it is overly complex. Is there a simpler way to do this?".
Ha ha, I guess I'm screwed as I work in a job shop where no project lasts longer than 6 months. I love it though. Better that than the same project for several years.
I've always understood that saying to mean "someone who learned everything they know in the first year, and coasted for the remaining nine," or something to that effect. Someone who never progresses.
I think this saying is generally applied more to people who stayed in the same industry (or even the same company) for ten years, yet still has the equivalent of one year's worth of experience (basically they just stopped learning after a while). Hiring someone like this doesn't get you anything that hiring someone with nine years less "experience" gets you, but that other person is more likely to keep learning things, and get more valuable over time.
In the world of programming, repercussions of what you do take longer than a year to full play out. Let's say you join a company, get up to speed quickly (let's say 3 months), and you get on your first product, start working on it, and after 6 months you release a beta. And 3 months after that, you launch. And then you are done, and you move on to the next company.
You don't see the results of that year that you were there. You don't see the results of of long term maintenance. What worked, what didn't, where you wasted time, what was used, etc.
Even the tools you used, you only used that to get it into production at some level, but you don't fully understand the full long-term impact.
So when someone looks at that, they don't see production level experience. They see that you've done the first years worth of work 10 times, and that you don't have experience with the results. That your experience doesn't mean you can build something that works in the long term. That you can even be counted on to work on something in the long term.
I am 42, and I don't agree with your assessment. I didn't get my first full time software dev gig until age 40 (learned to code over previous few years). The primary thing my employer cares about is my contribution to the company's mission. If lose sight of that, and try selling the value of my many years of X, I am missing the point.
To put it another, my age is not coupled to my value. It's up to me, at any age, to focus on what it takes to make my employer more successful.
Employer: "I need a developer who can do A, B, and C."
Me: "That's me!"
Employer: " I can't ask you how old you are, but maybe sometime you can tell me what it was like to start your career at a time when computers read your code off punchcards and ran it on vacuum tubes."
Me: "Nah, I started when computers ran on steam and looked like a building sized abacus. All kidding aside, why do you need A, B, and C? Let's talk about how I can help you make mad stacks of greenbacks."
Employer: "I like making money! OK, I here's what we're working on..."
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) only forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states do have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination.
If your state or local jurisdiction doesn't protect young(er) workers against discrimination and only the federal law applies, then an employer can discriminate against the young but not the old.
Not an HR lawyer, but I believe that as long as you weren't exclusively hiring through here, using a site like this as part of your hiring strategy could in fact be used to demonstrate that you are seeking out candidates from a broad range of backgrounds. If you only advertise a role in youth-oriented venues that might itself be grounds for being accused of discriminatory hiring practices, so also considering candidates through a channel like this would help defend against that accusation.
It's good to note that this would be a worry, and the name Oldster is troubling, as it's common definition is "an old person."
However, aside from that, they do seem to toe the line with phrases like "veteran," "Experience never gets old" and "senior advertising professionals" without explicitly referencing age anywhere. And, at least arguably, an "Oldster" is any experienced professional who uses their site, regardless of age.
So, look, it could be that I have a lot of extra self confidence because my career has been decent to this point.
But really, I mean I don't feel even slightly threatened by the technical ability of 20-something coders. I was warned throughout much of my career that I'd eventually have to head off to management to keep afloat, but, nope, that was bogus advice.
I can go into more detail here but I'm derailing things slightly already. It is not my contention that ageism isn't a thing. I'm sure it is --- I mean, I'm confident it's a real problem.
I'm just pushing back on the "40 is 1000 in tech years" snark. No, it isn't.
Sure, but I find the problem isn't competing against twenty somethings once you're hired (could be done with one lobe tied behind your back, haha). It's getting hired by them at all, and very difficult if you're not "internet famous."
Having recently interviewed lots of developers (in NYC), my experience was that there's such a shortage of senior and even solidly mid-level talent out there currently that an employer would have to be crazy to turn down anyone for non-merit based reasons. We would have hired a 300 year old sea turtle if it could get the job done... internet fame definitely not required.
Perhaps the problems are more at the margins (junior level devs, choosing between people of similar ability), but unless the market changes drastically, I can't see a competent engineer having too much trouble regardless of age, at least in locations with a big enough tech scene.
So, I'm not an oldster, not a young'un, but somewhere in between in my mid 40's, and I've been in this industry for over 20 years at this point.
I see my friends from the same age group go different ways; quite a number stay in tech as employees, getting more senior and climbing the engineer ladder. They're the ones who are affected by age discrimination, particularly as they get into their 50's and over.
The other group takes what they know in tech, and become a super experienced tech-guy in another industry, doing things like machine automation at car manufacturing plants, or optical quality control at meat packing plants, etc. They use their skills in other industries, but by silicon valley standards, they leave tech, since making pistons or making sure chicken breasts don't contain wing aren't tech problems. This second group of people don't stress anywhere near as much about their jobs as the first group, but their highest attainable pay wherever they work is definitely lower.
The third group retires early and pursues their dreams, but they're not worth talking about in this context. Tech is amazing in that it enables people who are moderately successful to retire earlier.
53 and I learn all the time. I'm sorry but age has nothing to do with productivity or capability. Talent and hard work are still the primary components of a successful developer.
There is ageism and it's completely unfounded, but some recruiting leans towards younger workers for whatever reason.
I think this is similar to H1-B's getting jobs for lower wages. Companies tend to believe that adding X developers to problem Y will produce a better/quicker product. They believe this of younger workers at times as well.
They are always wrong. I'm pretty sure my 40 hours is significantly more productive than most 25 year old's 60 or even 80 hours.
Some interesting points made here in these comments, worth rebutting.
1. older folks are less flexible, can't relocate, etc. When we have kids in high school, that's valid. But high school doesn't go on forever.
2. older folks cost more. You'd be surprised. Salary doesn't have to be an always-upward ratchet. There are plenty of us who are able and willing -- even delighted -- to work for less than the executive-level pay of the biggest jobs on our resumes.
Unlike many of our juniors, we aren't scrambling to pay off our edu loans any more, nor are we scrambling to cover those costs for our kids, or pay big mortgages.
You know that dream about being motivated by the work, not the money? It's a real thing. Many of us are living that dream.
3. older folks are a protected class (in USA, anyhow). That's true. We are nominally harder to lay off when things get rough. But we've been through a few cycles of things being good, then bad, then good, and we've survived. We are as willing as anybody to stop drawing our pay when things aren't going well. Some of us are willing to agree to that in advance. Ask whether we'll accept contractor status, rather than employee status.
See item 2 about being motivated by the work.
4. older folks drive up health insurance pool costs. true. sucks. But I, for one, am on my spouse's insurance so the startup I'm with doesn't have that problem. Many of us have similar setups. You can't ask in an interview, but we can tell you voluntarily. Plus, when we hit 65 (in USA) we go on this decent national single-payer health plan and out of your pool altogether.
5. older folks can't manage 80-hour work weeks. Of course we can manage crunch time. We've done a lot of it, and we're skilled at getting it done.
Can we manage sustained 80-hour weeks for years at a time? No. Neither can you and keep your quality up.
6. older folks' skills are obsolete. Not true. Maybe that was true once, but many of us put a lot of work into keeping up to date. Safari Books Online, and online tutorials, and community / dev versions of various tools, have made that possible.
7. older folks would rather play golf than work. For many of us, that's just nonsense.
So, don't just screen out that resume showing a MS degree from 1980. Take a look.
I used to worked for a startup where the CTO and CEO were older in their 40s and didn't hire people over 30 because they weren't a "culture fit". I was constantly asked what my age was (I look a bit older). The team clocked 60+ work weeks for a product that was barely progressing. The CTO was so work obsessed that he got married to his pregnant fiancee in the morning and came back in the afternoon to make up work.
Thankfully for my next job, while the staff is still older, they work smart instead working hard.
While I think there are issues with the presentation, as edoceo noted, I love anything that stands to dispel the startup bubble myth that experience is a contraindication. I've been privileged to work in companies with programmers in their 50s and 60s and they've been great mentors. Their work continues to be top-notch and the insight and maturity they bring is absolutely invaluable.
In order to keep their labor costs depressed, VCs are incentivized to promote the lie that a very young workforce is an inherent asset, but there is simply no replacement for experience. As the industry continues to mature, that will be self-evident, as it is in all other mature industries.
A good organization has a mix of old hands and inexperienced young people. They have complementary strengths.
Put it another way. When you board an airliner, are you happy to see a fresh faced pilot?
Or my (old) dermatologist. He said he could spot skin cancer from across the room. I asked him how, he said half his business was skin cancer - he looked at it for hours every day.
Yes, I completely agree that it's an asset to have all types of people aboard, and that youthful contributions are also important and valuable. They simply don't displace or supplant the needs for mature/senior/experienced contributions, as many in the SV ecosystem would have you believe. You do NOT have to be young to be innovative.
As a slightly older person (I am 46) and employer the issue I have found with older employees is they don’t cope well with frequent change. I have always hired the person I thought was most qualified for the position and so have hired quite a few older people over the years.
What I have observed first hand is that if the job requirements are relatively stable then older people are fantastic, but if the requirements change from month to month (or week to week) then they struggle. As I know from personal experience fluid intelligence declines with age and as you get older rapid change gets increasing difficult to deal with. I wish it were otherwise :(
There are of course exceptions, the problem is that it is really hard to know who can adapt to rapid change in an interview or from a CV. A service that could test the fluid intelligence of job candidates would be very valuable, but it would almost certainly be sued out of existence for discriminating against older employees.
Are you detecting an inability to shift gears quickly, or is it a reluctance to shift gears quickly based on hard-won experience where management-driven frequently-changing requirements led to project failures that were then blamed on the development team?
As much as we'd like our job to be engineering, it's usually more like craftsmanship. Craftsmanship goes back a LONG ways, and the traditional approach for learning a craft is for apprentices to learn from experienced masters. Those masters can teach you what to do, and what not to do, in the traditional ways that they've learned over many years. What they can't teach you is new techniques that they've developed, unless they're among the few masters that are advancing the craft.
I suspect that works for our craft as well. Most experienced developers can do the work very well, and can also help you to avoid bad practices that they've seen before and can predict the likely outcomes. But only a subset of those experienced developers are able to advance the craft. They have a mixture of the drive and creativity of the younger inexperienced developers, along with the experience to quickly weed out bad ideas and see the potential of the good ideas.
Are you detecting an inability to shift gears quickly, or is it a reluctance to shift gears quickly based on hard-won experience where management-driven frequently-changing requirements led to project failures that were then blamed on the development team?
That is rather an impossible question to answer as the two causes ultimately have the same end outcome. I certainly never introduce change for changes sake - 95% of management change I have been responsible for have been due to outside factors out of my control. When the market tells you that you need to change you must change.
I can say on average I get more direct pushback on change from younger employees than older purely because many younger employees have not learned that arguing with your boss about something when you don’t have a full understanding of the situation is not that wise. I have found that my older employees have understood the need for change, they just find it hard.
I am certainly not immune to this effect myself - the thought of learning React or Angular (or the next JS framework de jour) does not fill me with joy.
A fluid intelligence decline is not necessarily age-related, see for example "The effect of age on fluid intelligence is fully mediated by physical health." 2013, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23540273 :
"Our findings imply that improving health by acting against the common age-related circulatory- and nervous system diseases and risk factors will oppose the decline in fluid intelligence with age."
> I know this this is why I said there are exceptions
If indeed it is physical health that is the crucial factor in preventing the decline in fluid intelligence, and older workers are becoming more healthy (relative to the older workers of the past), you might say, rather, that the exceptions are those that experience a decline in fluid intelligence.
Interesting idea. Let me talk about something very tangential, if I may: a minor branding query.
Why go with "A Qureshi Media startup. Contact us at contact@qureshimedia.com" in the site footer?
It made me wonder "hmm, why haven't I heard of Qureshi Media, let me check them out, they are probably some huge media conglomerate." To my surprise, http://qureshimedia.com/ appears to be the website of a consultancy that includes the less than inspiring text "Our new site will be up soon."
If you are managing multiple established brands, having that in the site footer makes sense to me. For what appears to be a company's only brand, I wonder if it might be better relegated an "About" page. Thoughts?
I think it makes a lot of sense for a company--especially one whose primary business is as a consultancy--to carve products out into their own brands. And you have to start somewhere.
I've benefited quite a bit from Oldster mentors in my career who had Been There, Done That but still wanted to be in the game. Combining hungry smart 20somethings with Wise Oldsters is a potent combo.
I'm not old, 32, but this problem worries me. My plan for addressing the "Must keep up with latest tech" problem is to CREATE the latest technology. My hope if I create enough of it that in 15 years I'll be that old guy who created tech X or Y and nobody is going to bother wondering if I can keep up. Will this plan work? Who knows.
Best way to predict the future is create it right?
What happens when the technology you created becomes "last year's" technology? Then you have to continually create the latest tech, which is probably even more exhausting than simply keeping up with the latest.
My plan for addressing the "Must keep up with latest tech" problem is to CREATE the latest technology
This kind of thinking is why there are a hundred Javascript frameworks and more being made all the time, thus creating the problem you're trying to solve by joining in...
I think for every story you hear about a guy in his 50s who only knows how to program COBOL on mainframes, there are 10 of us ("us" - well, I'm 45) who are learning new, valuable technologies all the time.
31.5 here and I have definitely caught on to the "create the future" tack, although I'm taking a mixed approach that isn't purely technology-driven, but more generally "change agent" - so, entrepreneurial, managerial, design, technology, community leadership, any opportunity I spot. I see it as all one rolling snowball that I can find ways to merge together as I push it upwards.
So much time is wasted in our field, reinventing the wheel, adopting ill suited architectures and abstractions, not seeing problems in advance, misunderstanding the requirements.
An experienced engineer, who can prevent the above is worth their weight in gold.
Because ultimately, the fundamentals of software engineering haven't changed for decades, like abstraction, modularization etc
You are only as old as you believe you are. I'm 42 and won't trade spot with any 20-something for a job. The knowledge and experience I have today, most 20-something would love to have but.. they have to live some 20 years to now gain.
Between "tryoldster.com" and "oldgeekjobs.com" it strikes me as a stunning display of blatant ageism. I'm in the second half of my career and I like the idea of writing articles and making the case for hiring experienced men and women.
Venues which seem to explicitly encourage candidates/jobseekers to focus on age violate the spirit of the law if not the letter (29 U.S.C. § 626).
I feel like I would love to use this, but I would be worried about HR freaking out. I had a training before being allowed to interview people and it mostly consisted of teaching how to avoid questions that might inadvertently provide you with information that could be used to discriminate against people that was also irrelevant to the actual job (e.g. don't ask "what do you like to do on the weekends", but you can ask "this job requires you to be on-call on weekends, is that something you are able to do?"). Going on a website specifically advertising that it has people in a specific class seems like the exact opposite of that.
Um, I know it's not industry specific, but in the United States, since the 2008 Recession, workers age 55 and older have been the ones gaining employment. Zero Hedge routinely posts the BLS numbers that show just how much better the Oldsters are doing than the Under 30 crowd. Projecting a false notion that older workers are being slighted, when the opposite is true, is not good for the long-term health of a Consumer-Based economy like the United States.
So who is responsible for that cohort being "less able to retire acceptably" if they've been on this Earth in the United States long enough to reach the ripe age of, well, let's just pick 55? If you'd give me the leeway, I'd like to rebut that there's no reason for a website catering to OLDSTER or GEEZER employees when they're still a blood clot of mobility.
Or, in more plain terms, why shouldn't a person use critical thinking to ask if a person over the age of 55 is smart enough and/or has good judgment if they haven't positioned themselves as able to retire? Does this register at all?
Brilliant! I'm only 30 but I know plenty of older folks that have a hard time finding jobs. This is basically an issue across all industries. I'd love to get involved in this and help it grow.
I've heard it said before that ageism is the only -ism that everyone ends up experiencing.
You're 30, and I'm 32, which means that in a decade we'll both be in a federally protected class. I don't think there would be federal protections if ageism wasn't a huge problem for 40+ people. In another decade, we'll both be in our 50s, where ageism is definitely a problem.
I think all younger people, myself included, have a responsibility to fight ageism now so we don't get bitten by it ourselves later.
Ok the word 'All' implies quite a bit, but I definitely think it's an issue in a lot of industries. Yes age and experience definitely get you to much higher positions but I was thinking of 50+ aged people losing their jobs and then having to find a new company to work for. I've worked in a variety of places and definitely see the trend of it being difficult to get hired or to fit in. The company I currently work for basically runs all of the healthcare in my state and for team lead and supervisor positions upper management seems to prefer people in their early twenties because they're more "pliable". There are men and women here that are older and needed a job to support their family and they're stuck making way less than their experience dictates. I see them getting passed up for promotions and opportunities all the time. Obviously I can't definitively say it's ageism because I don't think things like that are always explicit but from talking to them they definitely infer that that's the reason. Could it be a lack of ambition or that they used their fire up at their previous jobs? Maybe. Something like this is never black and white so who knows?
Obviously, all good intentions ... but the very title of this, and insinuations therein ... are really negative and creepy. I think there may possibly be more harm than good being done here.
I would agree with this. They need to get re-branded and completely ignore the accusations of ageism in the industry, and instead just focus on finding high quality mentors with many years of experience, who will all be older.
Try going sideways to the "ops" side of devops. Lots of work for older sysadmins (I'm 50 in a coupla months), and you can often gently hint to your hotshot young devs the pitfalls of doing it not so well.
Also, as you get older: LEARN TO WEAR A SUIT. Not all the time - suits are going-out clothes, not things you waste on an office - but every now and then show that you can present well and be convincing. Your stock with the non-techies in the office will go through the roof.
Well, as someone over 40 let me suggest a perhaps controversial take on this type of post: by the time you reach a certain age you should have found a place in life that doesn't involve "looking for a job" or "getting hired". The biggest problem with people at that age isn't that they aren't curious, creative, willing to work long hours, etc but rather that life hasn't worked out for them somehow and they need to apply for jobs. It's basically the same problem as trying to find a date to the prom when you are a teenager. Most people do it naturally and easily so if you are the last person in that game of musical chairs looking for a date, you should ponder seriously why nobody asked YOU yet. Likewise with jobs. If you have 20 years of perl programming experience and 10 certifications in various databases and suchlike, then why exactly aren't you an equity stakeholder in some successful business by now? Short answer: you aren't very good at the game we are all playing. Hence, I am passing on this hire.
Been thinking about related topics recently (probably as a result of this wave on HN) and realized that despite I am still a young pup (30) my goals are not that different. Knowing that certain company is actively hiring older, more experienced folks I would take it as a sign of potentially very interesting workplace where experience is actually needed and office environment might be actually sane.
I'm a 37 year old self-taught backend dev (a fallen physicist) and I seem to be able to talk myself into a job with relative ease, both big and small companies.
I worry sometimes that a significant factor in this is that I still look and dress relatively young. I think this body has about 5 more years before it starts to look unambiguously like a grownup.
I mean, I have to think that's because our field has been exploding for the last 2 decades. Give it 5 years, and all those bars will likely shift down 5 years, and the new 26-30 bar will be yet larger.
Cool idea. There are some creative people out there. Rather than complain about the perceived age discrimination in tech and business generally, someone decided to do something about it. I hope it helps people.
I wonder if there's a broader solution to the problem that might involve more outreach and educational efforts to communicate to the younger folk that us oldsters have something valuable to offer, despite our encroaching senility and decrepitude :)
Perhaps however, the proof's in the pudding. Nudge some of the bigger corps. like Facebook & Google to expand the upper end of the age range a bit, and then people will rub shoulders with people possessing different and possibly broader life experience.
That said, I do find lots of 20-30-something techies to be quite smart and experienced so am not trying to knock them here. Quite often it comes down to the individual's qualities and not merely their numerical age.
My biz partner and I have a recruiting software company that makes career portals for corp HR and staffing firms (SnapHop).
We power many many branded niche staffing firm career portals. There are basically niche job boards but with recruiters backing it. For example I believe there is one just for retired nurses. It is very akin to all the different dating services.
It is absolutely amazing how many of them there are and how well they still do despite Indeed and Linkedin.
I imagine one of the major staffing firms (randstad, manpower, etc) will probably pick up this niche soon. Probably through an acquisition. The major staffing firms have thousands of niche job boards.
This is tangentially related (and wholly anecdotal), but one thing I've noticed is that when dealing with other engineers or managers, it's often very easy to tell who has kids and who doesn't. I find myself drawn towards those who have them because they have a knack for understanding people better and can approach mentorship on another level. Easily the best engineer I've ever worked with had a couple of kids, only worked 30 hours a week, but did more to grow team members than any other engineer has done in 20 hours more per week.
It's not a perfect 1 -> 1 to between kids and age obviously, but working with older engineers (and managers/TPMs) has been invaluable for the growth early in my career and I wish we had more of them.
It is possibly the wrong framing. It might be better to do something like this with the framing on "a veteran of the industry" or "someone with experience." Being old per se does not necessarily make you one with more relevant work experience.
I think hire an oldster is a flawed argument per se. In fact, once escaped the hourly rate trap, forever escaped. Think in terms of providing added monetary value and charge your clients a well deserved 20% instead of asking for a salary. That way, if you are so smart you will work many less hours for a much higher return. This comes natural as we get older because we grow both human and technical benchmarks, but I concede it may not be the best setup for a fast burning startup (headless chickens environment it seems to us). That's why this kind of posts here on HN, recently.
As I am approaching my 50s, I kinda find this type of jobsites a little discriminating. I know that age should not contribute to whether you are suitable for a job or not, but the reality on the ground is rather different.
Should there be sites that zone in on a particular discriminating aspect of a person? Hmm, like www.hireanoldveteran.com for old veterans that are having trouble looking for jobs.
This service should be superfluous due to enforcement of discrimination laws. If companies are specifically not hiring older people then there's surely some way to find out.
And the idea that an "oldster" is a thing should not be legitimised by people in the tech industry. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas.
If this is just for the advertising industry, wouldn't 'oldsters have broader networks' also be worth noting? I would have thought networking to be particularly important in advertising.
It is illegal to discriminate against a candidate on the basis of them being too old. It is not illegal to discriminate against a candidate for being too young.
If you're 50 (edit: and have 20+ years of experience) and interviewing for low level tech jobs, I have to think you just haven't given a fuck for the last 10-20 years of your career. Like why aren't you either
1. Retired
2. A principal dev
3. Managing
4. Doing your own thing
5. Raising kids
If you say "I just like to code," fuck off. I'm growing a business, not "Just coding."
If you say "I have super powers," I say you're probably delusional. I'll get someone who has 15 years' experience who isn't delusional.
If you're still writing ifttt code at 50, yeah, I can find someone with literally 15 year's experience to do the same thing who is more than qualified for the job, but who won't either die or fail to grow with the role. I'm sorry if that's a shitty thing to say, but let's embrace reality.
If I can't find anyone else, I'll take a chance on you, but I want to hire people who will grow with the role, not people biding their time doing service-level code work.
If you think that's cruel, try getting a job in law.
Edit: p.s. If you're 50 and just starting out in programming, none of this applies. I'm interested. It's not age that concerns me, it's failure to grow.
1) They are typically more expensive than "market" for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc.
2) They are less flexible - they are less willing to relocate, they have kids to pick up instead of "beer hour bonding", unwilling to run the same 60 hour gauntlet that a 25 year old can etc.
3) They have less primary & secondary education relevant to today's enterprise issues. In the specific case of "marketers" - like TryOldster is pitching - the best people will learn anything, but anybody over 50 years old spent their professional training + formative 20s thinking about television, radio, and print - not paid search, mobile advertising, and social.
That we're at the top of HN again with another "hire older people" post (recently we saw OldGeekJobs) demonstrates there's a huge unmet need within this cohort.
I don't think a job-board is the right solution to this problem because the pitch on TryOldster does nothing to alleviate the three principal concerns.
My unasked, probably asinine business advice would be to turn this flow of traffic into a training / education platform where you can VALIDATE and address the very real, foundational concerns of hiring managers around this cohort, and suddenly you've got a machine that can get motivated people trained and placed.