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Recruiters Use 'Digital Native' As Code For 'No Old Folks'
bizwriter writes: Companies are trying to get around Equal Employment Opportunity Commission restrictions on age-discriminatory language (like "recent college graduate") by saying that they want "digital natives." So far, no one has complained to the EEOC, but that could change. "Since the 1990s dotcom boom, many employers have openly sought to hire young, tech savvy talent, believing that was necessary to succeed in the new digital economy. At the same time, age discrimination complaints have spiraled upward, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with 15,785 claims filed in 1997 compared to 20,588 filed in 2014.
Out of the 121 charges filed last year by the EEOC for alleged discriminatory advertising, 111 of them claimed the job postings discriminated against older applicants. The EEOC has said that using phrases like 'college student,' 'recent college graduate,' or 'young blood' violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1966. That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age."
Out of the 121 charges filed last year by the EEOC for alleged discriminatory advertising, 111 of them claimed the job postings discriminated against older applicants. The EEOC has said that using phrases like 'college student,' 'recent college graduate,' or 'young blood' violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1966. That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age."
What I find ironic is that the people who wrote the basic items that are taken for granted, be it the Linux kernel, apache, the HTTP protocol, the IP protocol, Mosaic and its derivatives... are all people likely over 40+.
Demanding someone be a "digital native" means you will get someone who knows how to flip through cat pictures, re-list their stuff on WoW's Armory, talk about how bad their work environment is on Yik Yak while trying to hand out their kik ID for a score. You won't get someone who actually knows the foundation that those apps are built on.
Unless of course you live in an area where there are more people that are skilled, talented, and have experience than there are available positions. Your false assumption is based on the idea that there are more jobs than skilled people to fill them. It may be true in some areas, but not all.
Haha with any luck you'll be representing the plaintiff in the case. You have a rock solid argument. Seriously, you do.
If employers lose lawsuits over this, they'll probably change it to "up-to-date education" and "3 years of active use of a major social network, iOS or Android operating system, and electronic bill payment". This allows older people to technically qualify by having taken a relevant class at a local college and joining Facebook.
Comcast online application has the question "Are you older than 49 or younger".
When I went back to school to finish up, I applied for several low level IT jobs and was asked "aren't you a little old for this job?".
Watch the look on the temp service persons face when they meet you the first time,ageism is fairly rampant I would say.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Wouldn't "Entry level position" basically do the same thing?
"Digital native" is old and only luddites use that term. The new term is app appers, because app appers love apping apps!
Apps!
Didn't us old folks usher in the age of the Internet and the digital world?
Fad Savvy more likely. Most of the "Tech Savvy" people I know are Google experts, meaning they know how to Google for an answer, and they think that makes them an expert. Take away their computer, and they can't have a Tech conversation with anyone.
They have no idea what it takes to get them their "Google". They aren't tech savvy, they are digital savvy illiterates.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
We call then n00bs. :^)
This is one of the biggest bullshit laws I've ever seen.
Let's say I don't want to hire you because you're old. EEO laws simply mean that I can't say it in your face that you're old. Instead, i send you the standard HR rejection e-mail and we're all good.
Sight, I hate seeing my tax $$ going to waste drafting these stupid laws.
Anybody using the term "digital natives" is someone I don't want to work for anyway.
How much more "native" could I be?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Companies want recent college grads because they know they're willing to work for less, not because they believe them to be more talented. Do you want to pay a landscaper $100 to mow your lawn, or the kid across the street $20? Same concept. If it's important, you'll pay the experienced professional, but a lot of development work is doable by amateurs. It might not look as good, but it's good enough.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
People over 40 can be good with technology too. Most of the younger people never learned how a CPU works, how to work with limited RAM, etc. Stop giving cutting-edge technology to your people in IT because most of the rest of the company (or the world, if you work with the Web) never has cutting-edge hardware either. Your bloated code may run "fine" on your maxed-out 2015 workstation but it's painfully slow to use on the mid-to-low-range, five-years-old hardware that other people use.
Web example: if you have people who can't even correctly choose between PNG and JPEG for the graphic format of an image (logo/chart vs photo), they're not using technology correctly, no matter what their age is. If you work in IT, age shouldn't have anything to do with it. The only difference is that most veterans won't be jumping to the flavour-of-the-week languages and just keep using what works best for the job.
It's hard finding programming jobs with so many younger developers willing to work 70+ hours per week at 2/3 the salary I'm used to making.
That being said, let companies hire who they want. I don't really understand the forced-melting-pot concept of hiring. If a company wants young people, who am I to force them to take me?
Some things need to be said...
"That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age."
HR drones everywhere are rolling on the carpet laughing. Ever tried to get HR to pass your resume along if they spot any clue that you are 50+?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I've been called "culturally incompatible", which I know means "too old."
Yes, posting as AC, because my lawyers told me to.
It's been said before, the over-30s with a family don't care about the in-office perks, they just want to go home and spend time with their kids.
These companies are missing the flip side of the coin, that the over-50s are highly motivated (saving for retirement!,) often highly skilled, and generally have done that before, several times. Though they do command the big salaries.
She worked on the earliest mainframes for the airline industry (one of the first industries to computerize,) and has always been "high-tech." She had internet at home in the mid '90s, and was on Facebook early on in its "open to all" stage.
She was never a programmer, but it wouldn't have been a stretch for her to be one.
Likewise, my uncle has been a programmer since the '70s, always keeping up to date. He current writes mobile apps for a large national company. (iOS and Android.)
Age discrimination is stupid, even in "hot/fresh/new" areas. Back when I ran a small tech company, I had great employees that included a dropped-out-of-college-to-take-the-job young man, as well as a woman who was a retired IBM mainframe programmer, re-invigorating her skills. They were fully equals.
Would it be a bad idea to follow up a rejection letter with "Is there anything I could do to improve my skills to make myself a better fit for your company?"
"That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age."
I don't think I ever realized how ironic that was before now. A threshold requirement for an age discrimination claim is that you not be certain ages...
Native? As in the ones who were here first or showed up later? The older folks who actually created the systems and infrastructure everyone uses and now takes for granted, or the youngsters who just use those systems and infrastructure, but have little/no idea how anything actually works? I'm not sure who to thank most, the people who created Ethernet or Angry Birds.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The 100% correct answer regardless of age is "YES".
The form's answer to your answer is "Please choose an option from the list. ( ) Older ( ) Younger or same"
I don't really understand the forced-melting-pot concept of hiring. If a company wants young people, who am I to force them to take me?
Anti-discrimination laws keep older people from becoming long-term unemployed before they are old enough to qualify for social security. Long-term unemployment is associated with increased costs to the government to control crime.
Riiiiight. Because of us old folks didn't do digital before you were a glean in your daddy's eye. You think you know digital? We gave it life.
Just another day in Paradise
Just turned 50; been unemployed since mid November. Not even an interview yet; recently did apply for a state program called OJT and did well on their little test, but I seriously doubt it will lead to a job either. We all are going to get screwed in September or October when China drops its financial bombshell which will lead to the replacement of the dollar as the international standard anyway, so it won't matter to me once we all experience misery since misery loves company. :)
I am just about to hit that milestone 40th birthday this year. If things are as bad as they seem, I'm probably in for a rough couple of decades.
One thing that does bother me is that "digital natives" are no more or less capable of doing a good job in a technology job than older people. The skills are the same -- creative problem solving, troubleshooting, logical thinking and awesome communications skills. Older people do have different qualities in my opinion:
- We've been around the block and seen technology fads appear, disappear and come back later on with better underpinnings. We've also seen how stuff like virtualization and application containers aren't actually new concepts...just way better now than they were.
- Many/most of us have obligations outside of work and greater responsibilities. A 40 year old with two little kids [raises hand] has a little less flexibility than a recent grad who will move anywhere in the country in a week, doesn't mind sharing a 2-bedroom apartment with roommates and will willingly work 14-hour days for no extra pay.
- Many/most of us have also figured out the game of working for a company, and prefer a healthier work/life balance to throwing all your energy into projects that can sometimes get trashed for no reason.
- One advantage we do have is growing up with computers in a much more primitive state, where more about the actual machine was exposed to you. "Digital natives" grow up with packaged platforms and a lot of the underpinnings are permanently abstracted away unless you are sufficiently motivated to dig further.
For these reasons, among others, companies prefer younger workers because they're easier to control. I'm not saying that all of us oldsters are perfect -- I've worked with a lot of burnt out folks who do the bare minimum to keep their job. But, in my opinion it's not fair to paint everyone with the same brush. I won't kill myself for deadlines the way a 22-year-old working for EA might, but I have cranked out consistent good work over my career, and really want to continue doing so until I don't feel I can contribute anymore.
Well, "discrimination" (of any type: sex/age/race/etc) is "A Good Thing - brought to you by reality and its associate nature" - make it "A Bad Thing - a registered trademark of left-wing and friends" and you automatically create the euphemisms needed to keep reality and nature still working, because (ironically) any "anti-discrimination" is actually "discrimination"!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
McDonald's in town has a help wanted sign out front saying "hiring 15 year olds". Discriminatory?
My Grandpa would count. He's been dead since 2002 and he was in his 90ies. Given, he worked with Grumman Aircraft on the Lunar Lander back in the 60ies as an electronics engineer (hearing the proud grandson? ;-) ). Basically high-end avantgrade technology back then, but he was a digital native none-the-less.
So is just about any computer kid of the eighties approaching 50 years of age today. We grew along in lock-step with the hardware, its capabilites and our capabilites to understand it. I'd argue that nobody will be more digitally native than our generation of nerds.
I'd also argue that I am way more a digital native than my daughter, since I not only can operate a computer or smartphone, but actually know how it works.
In short, I can't see how this is supposed to be an age-filter. Perhaps a fiter for non-tech-savy, ok. The age-filters I've come across are more like "willing to travel" (go forth and act as a fall-guy for that remote project heading towards a solid brick wall), "resilient" (german: "belastbar") ... meaning "young and stupid enough to work extra hours under shitty gouvernance for no extra pay and a fake career outlook" ... and similar telling lines in the confidentials.
On top of that, how hilarious is an HR person asking for "digital natives"? We all know the bizar truth behind this.
Most of those people couldn't distinguish Google from the Web in general if their life depended on it. It's idiots like these who know less than nothing and actually think they can judge tech and its requirements. Admitted, quite a few if not most of those actually *are* above 40, but they shouldn't get to call out for digital natives. They'd mistake a resus monkey for one.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
At the same time, age discrimination complaints have spiraled upward, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with 15,785 claims filed in 1997 compared to 20,588 filed in 2014.
In 17 years the number of complaints went up by 30%. However according to the Census Bureau, the number of "Mathematical and Computer Science" workers increased by 150% between 1997 and 2012 (from 1.3 Million to 3.3 Million). The number of job postings likely scaled similarly, so the complaints per posting actually went down.
Source:
http://www.census.gov/prod/3/9...
http://www.census.gov/compendi...
"That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age." HR drones everywhere are rolling on the carpet laughing. Ever tried to get HR to pass your resume along if they spot any clue that you are 50+?
As we get older, That we should accrue several skills that are hard to commoditize (sp?), such as:
All of that crap translates to the following: By the time we hit 40's we shouldn't not be directly competing for the same type of jobs with right-out-of-school kids. Or in more general terms, we should allow ourselves to fall into a situation of having to compete with people 15-20 years our junior.
If we are, then we didn't pay attention to our career development. I saw this in earnest because I spent (wasted) a good chunk of my mid-career years being happy as a "code warrior", disdainfully avoiding any opportunities to take greater responsibilities or broadening my professional and technical horizons. I wasn't being lazy as I would happily clock 60/70 hours "just coding". I was just being ignorant (and ignorance is bliss, right?)
It wasn't until I had people depending on me that I realize how stupid and dangerous that is. We do not get any younger, and we must have something to show from all those years of experience (show something other than coding abilities.)
I oppose age discrimination on principle (and any kind of discrimination unrelated to reasonable work requirements - working more for less is not a reasonable working requirement.)
But I see too many people resting on their laurels expecting to retire doing the same shit they have been doing for the last 20-30 years. That *dream* started to get shattered when the Japanese started beating the crap of American manufacturing 30-40 years ago.
Some people really hadn't gotten the memo yet.
If only there were an old, established, proven labor institution that helped ensure older workers don't get churned out for new, exploitable blood.
Yes, unions you fucking morons.
Sorry that you libertarians ubermensch are too scummbing to the inexorable march of time and are finding that yes, it's not just the blacks and the fairer sex and the limp wristed dandies that get marginalized.
You're so eager to trash organized labor that the taste of your master's boot is still fresh in your mouth when he throws you old, aching, slightly less handsome ass out on the curb. Does it matter that the 3 bright eyed eager kids he hired can't even fill your shoes?
No, not really. They don't have a big pension to steal, or take as many sick days, or have seniority/experience/knowhow to make them look dumb. They get a bonus and you get an unemployment check. (For a short time at least) Does it mater that you like where you work? That you take pride in your work, and that you feel terrible because the things you built for the last 20 years of your life will fall in to ruin? Nope! You're expendable fucker! You're just an obstacle in the way of some metrics that will ensure some pencil dick middle manager's bonus.
If only there was an organization that represented not only your interests, but your pride as a knowledgeable and skilled worker. And yes, the seniority you earned by devoting so many years of your life.
It's funny. I worked at a county IT organization and it was filled to the brim with people that would trash talk the union all day long.. Until one day there was talk about canning the in-house IT unit and contracting with a vendor that happened to be owned by a very well connected local politician.
Plus, of course, it's still not that rare for people elsewhere in "IT" to switch over to software development at some point. They may actually be willing to take a salary cut and work for entry-level pay if that's what it takes to make the switch.
There are many reasons why pay alone doesn't "keep the old guys away", and some companies really do only want young workers. They tend to be very exploitative companies, however, banking on someone in their first job not recognizing how badly they're being used. Age discrimination may well be low on the list of sins for some of these companies.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm a digital native.
I learned to program on a DEC-20, PDP-8, PDP-11, and later worked on VAX-11 and Alpha, for Digital. How much more Digital (tm) do you want?
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I'm an "old fart" and more of a digital native than any 20 something.. I have been in the internet since 1987 in a legit form.. Was a part of it in other forms for 2 years previous... Running Unix and managing dial up nodes for UUnet access. I have been active in usenet at that time as well as not only living the digital world, but I have done more in networking and computing hardware than any 10 of the new kiddies from college put together. How many of them have actually licked a cray?
In fact most old farts I know that are still in the business can still work circles around the new turds on the block. We just work smart using that experience we have instead of being over caffeinated lost puppies sniffing and peeing on every server rack they can find.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
that natives were there first. But this seems lost on young recruiters.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The reason they want only younger applicants is to save time on people who know what their job is worth.
If they can sucker a younger inexperienced person in, they can tack on a shit ton of shitty and bull job responsibilities for crap pay.
An older person knows what it's worth, will tell them no or demand more pay for the amount of work they want.
Simply put they're just trying to save time, they don't want to interview those folks. :"Looking for young technologically capable but generally dumb otherwise to accept job with ridiciously low pay, crappy hours and way to much work"
They should be forced to change their job postings to say
Yeah, my dad would count, too. We had tons of punchcards at home when I was a kid, and he at one point mentioned programming by setting a bunch of toggle switches and then pushing the spring loaded toggle at the end to push the byte into memory. I'm at the very leading edge of Gen X and have been using computers pretty much all my life (not as my main thing post school though), and manage to be reasonably current for something that's mostly peripheral to my work. If I had to, I could go to the beach and make a computer from scratch and then program it, though it might take a while.
Now I wish those kids would get offa my lawn! (throws handful of 4004s at them)
My Grandpa would count. He's been dead since 2002 and he was in his 90ies. Given, he worked with Grumman Aircraft on the Lunar Lander back in the 60ies as an electronics engineer (hearing the proud grandson? ;-) ). Basically high-end avantgrade technology back then, but he was a digital native none-the-less.
Oh, they'd take him. And they'd take me (heckled local university computing center in the 70s for access to their computers, so I've "grown up" with punch cards, paper tapes, and even some computers with core memory deserving the name even though I'm slightly short of 50).
Worth our weight in gold. But nowadays about everybody growing up considers himself a "digital native", and in ancient times it was maybe 0.1% if at all. So it's still discriminatory if it requires an Elder God to compete with an average young idiot with a framework dependence.
In 1972. Started with tubes in a tv shop when I was 14, transistors just a bit later, then in the late 70's, went to a 2 year college for electronics. First computer we had in that school, took up an entire room, magnetic tape and a whopping 10 meg hard drive with a platter larger than a laser disk. After college, took a year long job in Houston for Texas Instruments. Loved the job, hated the city (early 80's). Came back (midwest) took a "temporary" job in an office machine business, been in it ever since. Was just starting to transition from discrete transistors to LSI chips so I bought myself a computer kit, built it myself, learning along the way. Played around with basic. The key is to NEVER stop learning. Some in my business dropped out, when things went digital about 12 years ago, add connectivity, internet, cloud computing and they just couldn't hack it. I'm in my mid 50's now, and I even have some of the vendors calling me for advise, because I never stop learning and always want to know "what if". When hiring, "book smarts" to me, only means you were good enough to sit through class and pass the tests, but, I always look at practical experience, and weight that, as much or more, than that little piece of paper with your name & a gold seal stamped on it.
The hardware knowledge argument has become virtually irrelevant in the EC2-world where you can spawn VM pretty much transparently.
Please do not use the Dilbert weasel words such as "young, tech savvy talent" when the real reason is cheap, naive, and willing to work long hours without overtime pay.
Their bullshit may be more modern. Perhaps us ol' fogies should attend "Bullshit like a young buck" courses.
When you are interviewing with a PHB, talking the talk matters. Let's face it, the work world is largely a bullshitting game, for good or bad. It would be nice if it were about logic and planning, but humans got into the mix and mucked up that ideal.
I remember during one interview the PHB asked me if I liked to download stuff to my PC to experiment with new gizmos. I replied that I did, but that I prefer to have one "production" PC to get regular work done and a separate "experimental" PC that can be rebaselined if the experiments mess it up and/or to not cross-mix experiments. (Active-X was the "big thing" at the time, which should be enough to explain my caution.)
Anybody with experience will agree this is the rational way to do it. However, this was a start-up and they had no money for double PC's. (Maybe I should have offered to buy my own spare.) My "kind" wasn't welcome. The details of reality bothered them: they wanted to be sold cheap pie in the sky. That is, naive pioneers who don't know about the arrows yet.
That's not me. I value my experience and all the caveats I've learned over the years. I don't intend to sound grumpy or a like parade-rainer, but rather I'm just giving potential risks and estimated probabilities in a direct factual way. If you want to plow thru the asteroid field without being told the odds, then hang out with Jedi's fresh off the dust-farm and contraband runners. And off my swamp, get!
Table-ized A.I.
The "anti-discrimination" laws are also immoral — they seek to punish thought-crimes and force employers into hiring those, whom they do not wish to hire, for whatever reason.
Sorry, son, but society (and the Supreme Court) voted and you're wrong.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
There is, of course, a tug-of-war between corporate freedom and individual freedom.
Many people believe that people should have significant freedom in the management of their personal lives, but the actions that businesses can take should be carefully limited and closely monitored (in order to protect against wanton anti-competitive behavior, environmental damage, or economic strangulation).
In actual fact, the balance swings pretty far the other way, at least in America. Corporations get to impose all kinds of restrictions on what individuals can do (regional product distribution controls, using zoning to ensure that only one or two choices are ever available, using legislation to prevent individuals from starting up competing businesses, etc.), and corporations also get amazing tax avoidance loopholes, tremendous political clout, the option to hire plenty of cheap foreign labor instead of local talent, and on and on.
"The hardware knowledge argument has become virtually irrelevant in the EC2-world where you can spawn VM pretty much transparently."
But not cost free.
The every cent spent of VM comes right out of the bottom line. Take a look at the all the hard work Facebook does at optimizing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Somehow the idea that putting together a motherboard and a few other pieces, and learning a couple languages for electronics control, is a "digital native" seems ridiculous. As a kid I was designing and building digital electronics with discrete components (yes, no ICs; I designed and build gates, flipflops, adders etc. out of parts and used audio tape as a storage medium) and have designed many software systems, debugged and programmed in machine language (yes, 1 and 0s),
up through current languages. You don't get much more "native" than that. I have to wonder at those who think these n00bs who may build in a few specialized languages know something super special. Knowing what underlies all that structure is often useful and gives an appreciation of what the strengths and weaknesses of the whole are.
I tend to see discussions of systems in depth though most strongly among people looking for security weaknesses (and occasionally among colleagues who look for generic defenses against such weaknesses).
The legal issue though is better argued along lines of "you are trying to hire only n00bs. These folks may work cheaply but on the whole don't and can't know enough depth of how things work to figure how to defend their systems from attack. How do you propose to avoid liability for systematically keeping that kind of expertise away from your product or service designs?"
(Then too, apart from liability, how about reputation? Some places don't care, hire outsiders to replace their senior people and just let the departments treated like this go to h*** in a handbasket. It takes enough time for big companies to collapse that the managers who decide this way can escape with their golden parachutes. But the company gets killed.)
How is it "immoral"? First of all the law isn't against "thought" - stupid prejudice; it's about "deed" - actively discriminating against someone for reasons irrelevant to the job. We legislate against deeds all the time. Murder, for instance, is mostly illegal. You can think about murdering someone, but you can't take actions that might lead to that result, i.e. hiring a hitman, firing a gun at someone, stabbing someone in the neck with a pencil, etc.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Not only that... I'm 43 and I consider myself a "Digital Native". At the beginning of my IT career - 1996, I was using workstation virtualization products like Virtual PC and building Intranet applications. Things have changed since then, but I was part of it all and I know it at least as well as any kid whose claim to "Digital Native" is that he used Tumblr and YouTube in high school.
Yeah, my dad would count, too. We had tons of punchcards at home when I was a kid, and he at one point mentioned programming by setting a bunch of toggle switches and then pushing the spring loaded toggle at the end to push the byte into memory.
Oh come on, that's an urban myth. People did not "program" in that manner but entered bootstrap loaders. And you programmed those on paper (more commonly, read them off the paper provided by someone else) before you ever started the toggles.
I doubt that there were many sysops who could toggle in a complete loader without referring to paper. And even fewer who actually understood what they were entering.
Ah, so "right" and "wrong" can be determined by popular vote now?
Is not that nice... All those committees voting for Pi to be "3" or for rejecting the theory of evolution are now vindicated, aren't they?
Your response is an example of Appeal to Authority: unable to defend the point yourself, you can only state, that some others support it. Fail.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If you're over 40 then perhaps you should neither expect nor accept to be hired to do what a 20 year old can, and for a much lower pay. Never mind that you can do it better and faster if that's not what the employer needs. In a company there is always a trade-off between expertise needed and resources available to get it. Besides, younger people will take orders like you probably won't, and have physical resources that you probably don't (think crunch time). Know what you are capable of and either find the right job for you (i.e., the thing that only someone with you expertise can do on schedule - on budget - on specs) and/or build your own shop; they might come.
Most of the time when those tech companies are targeting the young people it's naiveté that they are really looking for.
They want someone who will work all their waking hours on salary and not bitch about it because they think they are "a part of something". They think they are working on the next Facebook and they are going to get rich because they are among the early employees.
In actuality they are just looking to pump as much cheap labor as they possibly can until either the kids are all burnt out and they dump them for fresh ones or they can find someone to sell the company to, likely laying everyone off but getting the owner a nice check out of the deal.
Most older people should know better by now anyway and realize they aren't missing much.
"Somehow, people around 45 years old (and females especially) REALLY lose their ability to problem solve or learn concepts."
I've been writing software for over four decades now. And since I'm currently building iOS apps using Objective-C and Swift on top of a noSQ backend, I'm a bit disappointed by someone who says us old folk people can't learn new concepts. In fact, it's pretty much a massive overgeneralization, on the order of someone my age saying that young people lack decent work ethics, perspective, initiative and that they spend way, way too much time chatting on Kik.
(Okay, the later is probably true.)
At any rate, about a little less overgeneralization, and perhaps spending a little more time judging individuals as individuals, based on their respective strengths and weaknesses?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The phenomenon you are describing does exist and is explained simply by the majority of voters not being in corporate management and not feeling the "other side" of the laws sold to them.
Whether Mr. Owner and Mr. Manager are assholes or not, the company is still theirs to run.
Bzzzz! Conflation-attempt detected. Fail.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Who do you think creates and enhances that VM technology? Who configures the servers, comes up with the load balancing strategies, and keeps our security tight? I can assure you it is the middle aged smart guys at my company... The kids we hire right out of college are almost worthless the first 3 years. Good thing we are willing to mentor you young snots!
You are forcing somebody to do, what they do not want to do — without any sort of force majore justification (like spreading contagion or enemy invasion). That's immoral.
The "deed" consists of not hiring for illegal reasons. Whether the reasons were legal or not depends on the thoughts the accused had. That's what makes it a thought-crime.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
He's an old guy. John Carmack is no spring chicken. Steve Capps, Andy Hertzfield, etc.
The only thing I can think of is that you are some kind of mentally challenged retard living in your mom's basement.
Seriously, Fuck You.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
He certainly did it from paper, not doing it real time.
So I guess Paul Allen doesn't count as a digital native. Oh, wait -- he wrote the Intel 8088 emulator on the PDP before the CPU was even manufactured. And how about Woz? Nah, nobody would hire these people anymore, they don't have the "right" expertise.
The "anti-discrimination" laws are also immoral — they seek to punish thought-crimes and force employers into hiring those, whom they do not wish to hire, for whatever reason.
Sorry, son, but society (and the Supreme Court) voted and you're wrong.
No fool like an old fool. But I am sure Sanjiv from Punjab is thankful for the push to outsource the job you were worried about.
Unless you work in a company that has any sort of data ownership oversight and rules that they need to follow, like HIPAA compliance. Then EC2 and similar cloud providers are absolutely verboten because to be compliant you have to own the environment end to end. Which means you need to roll your own, or in other instances run on bare metal to maximize bang for buck. Then you need hardware knowledge once again.
"the cloud" has been promising to kill customer premise data centers forever. "the cloud" never will. For web based businesses perhaps, but there are a ton of non-web based systems in many to most companies that will never leave the premise.
Good to know some of you single, double and triple digit UIDs are still alive :)
Activities and people everyone likes and supports require no protection.
Freedom is the right to be unlikeable and do things that not everyone supports.
This is the phrase we would probably use, and it's not for any of the reasons generally mentioned here. We are having an increasingly hard time with older workers who don't understand how to use computers and aren't interested in learning to use them. We want people who have a basic understanding of how to even operate a computer so that we don't spend tens of thousands of dollars training them to do something anyone under the age of about 50 at this point can generally do. Many people on Slashdot are technically savvy and work with a lot of technically savvy people, so I am unsure how many of you still experience the guy with a good resume, but who has literally never touched a computer in his life -- even to the point of not understanding what a mouse does. I still see this _monthly_.
In our industry, it's now virtually impossible to succeed without this knowledge, because everything has been computerized. I'm incredibly sympathetic to those people with just massive knowledge banks with years of experience, but if they refuse to touch a computer and can't connect to a machine (which requires computer input now, no more analog controls), they're toast. We hired one of the best in the country (well,he was 10 years ago) at what we do, who had just failed out of a previous employer, though the reasons he gave were bogus, and he's now, a little over 1 year later, gone. Because our customers expect to be able to communicate with him in e-mail, that he be able to answer a cell phone, and he needed to be able to fill out an Excel sheet, etc. He wanted a personal assistant available 24-7 to do these tasks for him, because he was "never going to use learn to use a computer."
Should a good manager or hiring person weed those people out to begin with? Probably. But that job now includes a "minimum" of computer skills in its description, essentially asking for a "digital native." Does that mean we'll mostly hire younger people for the same position, and that some older people have no chance? Probably. But it really is about their skill set, not about their age.
Right there with you. I was building web sites for college classes in '93...
I did some consulting at a start-up a few years back and had an off-the-record talk with their recruiter. She said that they preferred to hire younger folks because 50 somethings typically have a much harder time working under a 25 year-old supervisor.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
How is it "immoral"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Freedom of association is the right to join or leave groups of a person's own choosing, and for the group to take collective action to pursue the interests of members.[1] It is both an individual right and a collective right, guaranteed by all modern and democratic legal systems, including the United States Bill of Rights, article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and international law, including articles 20 and 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Conventions 87 and 98 of the International Labour Organization.
True. In Silicon Valley we have more techies who don't know how anything works than we have actual engineers.
they seek to punish thought-crimes
Not hiring someone strictly because of age is not a thought crime, it's an ACTUAL crime. You can hate or dislike older people all you want, but as soon as you act on that hate or dislike, it's a crime. So no, they are not trying to punish thought crimes.
and force employers into hiring those, whom they do not wish to hire, for whatever reason.
If an employer's only reason for not wanting to hire someone is age, then it's not a good, or justifiable reason. If the skillset is there and the person is physically and mentally capable of doing the job, what possible part could age play in the decision? Don't like to look at grey hair or wrinkles? Tough.
I've used email longer than any of those kids have been alive. That makes me more of a native than they are I suppose, even though I'm not on Facebook. If they want a cutting language then I can code one up.
If the government was into "jobs for crime control" they'd be paying companies to open up businesses in these areas (not just tax incentives... cash).
Would the program look anything like SBA loans and grants or the several states' urban renewal programs?
Exactly right. I'm a year younger than you and I've been a "digital native" since I was playing around with my TI-99/4a and converting programs in Byte magazine to TI-basic in 1981. Far too many of these millennial "digital natives" are about as deep as a kiddy pool. They've used one or two technologies that work for them and that's it. Hammer-nail syndrome.
"Somehow, people around 45 years old (and females especially) REALLY lose their ability to problem solve or learn concepts."
I've been writing software for over four decades now.
Man, you are an old fart! You should move over and let us young un's with almost three decades of programming under our belts take over. You just know we're quicker, smarter and faster than you! 'Cos we're younger!
Hey, waitaminute ... what's this 25 year old doing here? What do you mean "65 hours a week"? Overtime? Are you mad? Hey, wait, let me back in... I'll be good, promise!
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
These are the same documents that are used to prohibit all manner of discrimination - sex, "gender self-identification, sexual preference, race, religion, ethnicity, etc. You can disagree with the law, but declaring it to be immoral is presumptuous.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
False dilemma. A thought crime can be — is, indeed — an actual crime. If you do not hire somebody, the contents of your thoughts determines, whether you've committed a crime or not. That makes it a thought crime, though I'm glad to see you being repulsed by USA prosecuting such crimes — to the point, where you are willing to go into denial and state, that we do not...
The whole point I am making is that it should not have to be "good" or "justifiable". In fact, there should be no need for any reason at all.
It is none of our business. Both literally and otherwise...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I have worked in IT since 1979.
Where do people get this idea that IT workers work with old technologies? The idea is not true, and makes no sense.
Do older car mechanics only know how to work on older cars? How about older doctors, lawyers, scientists?
Do you think an installation has new technologies for younger workers, and older technologies for older workers?
I work with latest released technologies all the time.
I don't want to pay my electric bill. I prefer to climb the pole and discover electricity for myself. I don't want the man keeping me down making me pay my bills!
Of course, the reason is quite possibly because the 25 year old supervisor is inexperienced and doesn't take kindly to that being pointed out.
Posting anon because I'm about to talk about a former client I did some consulting for. It's a Valley startup. All a bunch of young guys, mostly with one job behind them. One guy did actually have a family, though. Anyway, at one point we were discussing interviewing and hiring. They didn't seem to think there was anything unusual about asking an interview candidate to spend an entire day doing pair programming with them on their own codebase. I pointed out that this would be fine for college students who could bunk off lectures and spend all day watching the interviewer tap out Go, but more experienced/older guys would probably find this a bit problematic, especially if they already have a job. Google can get away with 8 interviews and all day assessments and still hire very senior people because it has the reputation as a great place to work and with great pay, so people put up with the long process. Not every company can do this.
Their response: "well, maybe we don't want to hire senior guys".
I don't think they'd consider themselves explicitly agist. But they very much wanted to hire people just like themselves, and that almost by definition excluded "old" people (anyone 40 or over). This didn't extend to sexism by the way: they were very keen on hiring female interns and recent college grads to write code for them. But they didn't want some guy in his 40's or 50's turning up and pointing out that maybe some of the modern dev fashions they were following had already come and gone in the 1990's, and perhaps using uncool but tried and tested technology would have some real benefits.
If hardware knowledge is useless then we'll never have any new hardware, ever. The only thing a VM is good for is if you're on a stupid PC, it has nothing whatsoever to do with concepts of hardware. Or are you talking about "hardware knowledge" meaning the ability to manage a PC? I think "hardware knowledge" is knowing about how machines work, designing and building new and better machines, debugging the machines, etc.
Ignorance is a bad thing. Everyone has some ignorance of course, but everyone should be trying to reduce it. Knowing more than you need to know for your job is a great way to get ahead, and get out of that low end job and into something better.
In general, 25 year old "supervisors" don't know squat and can't supervise. Then again, neither can some 50 year old supervisors.
However, if an employee has trouble following orders, his supervisor should have the skills to address that.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'm 61, my first useful PC was an XT clone. I transitioned from office machines to PC service, then networking, helped run a dialup ISP, spent a decade connecting my clients to that Internet thing.
My clients were using email, intranet and extended web sites to share work, and working remotely before there was Google or Facebook.
I've been digital since there was digital. I was even playing MMOG before there was Internet.
I should go to college just to annoy the kids. I already work with teams where the 25- year-olds are in charge, and we do fine. After our team proves them somewhat misled, they listen to us.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
There were many who were kids when Sputnik got launched or shortly after who learned loads of science and tech stuff, seeing it was considered a national priority then. A fair bit of the computer industry was invented by that group. By the 1980s a later group was around, but building on much earlier work. Those of the
Sputnik time simply continued to design strange and wonderful stuff.
Good point though that "digital native" is being used by HR folks, or more exactly the automata the HR folks kinda/sorta know how to turn on and use. No actual brain required...
This in spades. Most "digital natives" wouldn't know a digit if it smacked them in the face. I'll bet a majority of these "natives" don't understand there are 10 types of people in the world jokes.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Your response is an example of Appeal to Authority
Actually, the one you're trying to reach for is Appeal to Popularity (Argumentum ad Populum) not Appeal to Authority.
However, you started by talking about "immorality", so you've already fallen victim to dogmatism (by Excluding the Middle). While likening the "Pi equals 3" law or creationism to anti-discrimination laws is an Argument by False Analogy, since Pi=3 and creationism are factually wrong, not morally, and are therefore unrelated to the argument you are trying to make.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Image if you tried to do the same with women, or African Americans.
Like computers, medicine, and law, change constantly. Image if accountants, lawyers, and doctors, were considered washed up at 40.
The real issue behind the "young movement" and a way to stop it cold is to deal with health insurance. Disallow health insurance to use age as a pricing factor, and watch how quickly the job market changes. I had a buddy that just went to an interview, and was flat out told that they have too many "old" people in the company and require some 20-somethings. Their insurance rates were too high.
In fact, I'd go so far as to state that basic health insurance (wellness visits, accident coverage, and basic illness diagnosis) should be 1 price for everyone, with no disqualifications allowed, with some base high deductible capped coverage for general illnesses. This would be relatively cheap as it stands today. Then additional coverage for whatever as we have today could be purchased on top.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The supreme court was also pretty specific about the necessary conditions for a group to be a protected class. One of which is that "They are powerless[ to protect themselves via the political process"
I'm not going to look it up, but I would be surprised if the numbers of voters under 40 outnumbered those over.
Plus, of course, it's still not that rare for people elsewhere in "IT" to switch over to software development at some point. They may actually be willing to take a salary cut and work for entry-level pay if that's what it takes to make the switch.
There are many reasons why pay alone doesn't "keep the old guys away", and some companies really do only want young workers. They tend to be very exploitative companies, however, banking on someone in their first job not recognizing how badly they're being used. Age discrimination may well be low on the list of sins for some of these companies.
This pretty much says it all right here.
They might as well advertise for "Naive, spinless young suckers who'll do anything for a buck."
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If it is no big deal to discriminate because of age, then why worry about discrimination based on ethnicity, or gender, or religion?
It really is the same thing isn't it?
How about: "if your a woman, you should not plan to have a career as an engineer. If you got your degree, and can't get a job, that's just bad career planning. Should have been a nurse."
Why is it okay to discriminate by age, but not gender?
Still use most recent systems, and languages, etc.
I'll take your 61 and raise it by 3. My digital experience started in the late 1960's when DTL was common and TTL was new. A CPU was an ALU and gates. Now I show the "Digital Natives" how to use the (current) technology, when I'm not constructing it.
Why, on the Dice job listing sidebar at this moment three of the six jobs postings ask for 'Senior' positions.
This is obviously age discrimination against the young!
Ah, so "right" and "wrong" can be determined by popular vote now?
Not so much "popular" as "fiscally responsible".
Society has a compelling interest in keeping people employed as long as possible - Ideally until they drop dead on the job, but as long as possible in any case. The longer someone can't work, the longer society will bear the financial burden to keep them alive. A decade of SSI, we can readily bear when offset by a 40 year career of paying in to that system. 30+ years of welfare because companies "don't want" to hire competent experienced professionals, however? The numbers just don't work out when we allow that to happen on any large scale.
So yes, we as a society have determined, for our own good, that companies (you remember "companies", right? Legal fictions allowed to exist as a boon society grants them in exchange for the small possibility they will benefit us overall?) cannot turn away otherwise-qualified people because of a few protected categories.
It doesn't matter if you don't want to work with blacks - Too fucking bad.
It doesn't matter if you don't want to work with women - Too fucking bad.
It doesn't matter if you don't want to work with fogeys - Too fucking bad.
It doesn't matter if you don't want to work with Jews - Too fucking bad.
If someone can do the job and you don't "want" to work with them, rejecting them for only that reason breaks the law. They have a "right" to consideration for employment regardless of the age, gender, race, or religion; you don't have a "right" to run a company however you want, simple as that.
If it weren't for us old guys, there wouldn't be a tech world today. No internet, no PC (no matter how badly designed it is), no smart phones, no hi-fi audio for music players, none of the top ten programming languages, no Windows or Unix or MacOS, no web browser, etc.
I've used email longer than any of those kids have been alive. That makes me more of a native than they are I suppose, even though I'm not on Facebook.
I suspect that, among other things, "digital native" means "more comfortable communicating by Facebook and Twitter than by email." Older workers, who started with email and found it to be completely adequate for all their text communication, are completely out of band with text, twitter, snapchat, and this bizarre phenomenon of sending photos of yourself holding hand-written notes.
Really what they want is people who will work for very little money for very long hours who aren't encumbered by things like spouses and children.
No fool like an old fool. But I am sure Sanjiv from Punjab is thankful for the push to outsource the job you were worried about.
That process works better for fungible young talent who might be plenty gifted but have no experience to set themselves apart from the pack. The best defense against seeing your job outsourced is becoming so good at it that you don't have much competition. The second best defense is becoming friends with the greybeards who are positioned to argue against the manager who wants to rightsize your job.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Old people for entry level jobs isn't that bad of an idea (except that it screws up your social security earnings probably). Entry level jobs in tech are often much easier, no one pressures your for more patentable ideas, you're often doing simpler programming like fixing bugs rather than designing major systems from scratch, no one cares about your opinion so you're left alone more to get more work done, and you can go home before it's dark.
Hiring someone intentionally who is "new to the business" is dumb, unless the goal is to get an outsider's view which is rarely if ever needed in an engineering job. The "new to the business" person needs a lot more training, they may be utterly incompetent as well and you'll never know from the interview.
Everyone is a digital native, hell, you're born with 20 of em! I can count to 2^20 on mine, 2^21 if I like you.
Seriously, this is bullshit. Oh no, I wasn't born on FaceBook or Twitter and I don't Instagram my meals or Pin my interests! I must be an old fossil with tons of useless work experience in the field!
My first digital computer, circa 1965:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I
Those punks aren't digital natives. We are!
Now what if you're over 60, but more "digital native" than 99.99% of youngsters?
no, I don't have a sig
Well, I got my introduction to electronics in the service. The RCA CDP1802 was the CPU in the equipment I learned to service. Yeah, it was actually used in something that sold for money. I felt kinda disappointed in what was available to civilians for a bit after separation.
I was fortunate to have gotten a lot of digital electronics back then. Playing with 74xx logic kept me off the streets for a few years.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Without hardware knowledge, you cannot have an expectation of how much performance you should get out of certain specs. This is why you get people who thinking throwing more servers at a problem is a perfectly good bandaid.
But do I count as a digital native? RAM did not exist in those days. Internal memory consisted of iron rings strung on wires by hand. It was so costly that to have as much as 64K of it, you had to be an insurance company. Unlike you young whippersnappers, we had to code for economy of resources. That's a performance measure that's no longer in required skillsets, though.
True enough for the cases where you already have a job and want to keep it. The problem with excessive regulation is that it makes American workers look less desirable for new positions.
I just completed a 6-month contract at Google. I was trying for a full-time gig and my resume matched their job description to a "T". However, they would only offer me a contract. While I was there, they were desperately looking to fill two or three FTE positions, so I asked to be submitted for one of them, but they wouldn't allow me to. While working there, they hired one person whose skills were below mine. The average age of the employees was around 35 (two of the 5 full-timers turned 30 while I was there and the new-hire was 34. The other two were in their late 30's or early 40's). The manager turned 40 the week my contract ended. I'm 53. It didn't dawn on me until just now that they might have discriminated against me because of my age.
Right, we forgot, Amazon VMs are magical devices powered by hopes and dreams, rather than CPU cycles like old fashioned "computers" are.
Back here in reality cloud virtual machines are just a shitty containment mechanism that's sort of like an operating system process, only dramatically less efficient. Did you know that Google, not a company exactly famous for lacking clue, doesn't use VMs internally at all? Every internal program runs as a regular operating system process on top of a patched Linux kernel. The system is called Borg and they published a paper on it recently.
Why don't they use VMs, Amazon style? Because VMs suck. Running an entire OS inside another OS just to provide isolation is a great way to waste vast amounts of money and resources. It means sysadmins get to reuse their existing skillset instead of learning some new way of managing software, but that's about it as far as advantages are concerned.
Certainly your Amazon VM will suffer from cache line interference, limited resources, and other things that plague physical devices.
The vast majority of medical software runs networked now, many actually over a website and not on an intranet. It probably isnt the smartest thing to do, but it is definitely done.
The step 4 "Don't live in luxury....buy a low-end boring car" would seem to exclude the possibility of owning a Jag e-type.
The upshot of the advice given is to NOT spend money, and to INVEST the money that you make. That is what prevents the dependence on SS checks later on.
well great, mr exception.
I'd like you to meet mr. rule, he's calling IT again because something popped up on his screen, this program doesn't do like the old program used to, and he needs you to come down and move his monitor 3 inches to the right.
while, yeah, I am over-generalizing a bit for the purposes of illustrating a point, the trend is real and true. the gist of what I'm saying really is the reality in cubicle-land. great, you are a programmer, but IT support probably has a little better "finger on the pulse" of what goes on in this respect.
My father had been using the Internet since the early 90s or even earlier. My father wasn't a tech worker, but he did stock trading and advertising, so he needed computers to access data. There were multiple computers in my house at any one time (Commodore 64, Macintosh, MS-DOS PCs). He kept it up buying new gadgets such as a programmable watch (using the PC screen to transfer data), PDAs, and the first Tablet PCs (the Microsoft hybrid laptop/tablet that preceded the Surface).
It didn't save him from getting laid off eventually.
While many tangible reasons can be stated to rationalize why older workers are discriminated against, with counter-points for most or all of them, the fact is that people in a range of 25-40 years old just plain don't like to have to work with older people. I'm 57, and am one of 2 in a group of 35 in that range. It puts the younger ones off a little -- I should be their boss, not some kind of elevated peer. A guy my age cranking out code or doing design/plan/build on a data center just plain looks weird to younger people. Consider a musical analogy: what if musicians in the orchestra were expected to 'progress' in their career, and those that didn't 'take it to the next level' of conducting or administrative leadership were deemed 'failure to progress', and thus aged out?
It's not about technology savvy. Older workers are much more informed -- not from a user perspective, perhaps, but certainly from an architectural one. In my experience, the younger guys know so little about how things actually work end-to-end, from endpoints to networks to servers to Internet etc., that even trying to teach them stuff like that is tough on the job. Enter the cloud vendors and Business Analysts, exit the engineers and admins from the corporate scene.
So I went to work for a tech service vendor. Sign of the times, go with the flow. Sure I'm old, but I tell great jokes.
Same story here. I'm 50 years old and consider myself a digital native. Most digital non-native are retired now.
What they're getting after is can you relate to the demographic you're targeting. Anyone can develop a system, but it takes intuition to make a good system. In their case, a system that caters to the needs to "social internet" users.
"a glean in your daddy's eye"
never got that term. Always used "before you were a squirt in your daddy's balls"
I'm 47. No secret.
With so much experience to bring to the table, I have so much to give, but it doesn't mean I stop learning. Every day I learn something new. 40 is nothing. My grandmother where hired when she was 75 as an expert and a professional within her field.
I don't hire by age, I hire by experience.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Say I'm a business owner, and I get burned by younger women who take the job, get knocked up, take the maximum legal maternity leave (while I pay for the medical insurance), and then decide to quit at the end and not come back. You think that's not going to dissuade me from hiring members of their class (young women likely to become mothers) when there are other applicants in front of me who can't burn me that way?
Yes, it's discrimination. No, I wouldn't tell anyone I'm doing it. I'd fix the demographics by hiring women in their 40s and beyond, when available, thus meeting both gender quotas AND age quotas in one fell swoop. Obviously, I'd have to accept younger women when they're the only ones qualified for (or possibly the only ones seeking) a certain job, but I wouldn't invest the same degree of training in them, knowing they have a propensity to abandon the working world as is convenient to them. It wouldn't be personal, and I wouldn't blame them, but it's still bad for my business to dump money into training employees who are likely to leave at the drop of a hat.
Now if I ran a business where everyone was replaceable, and nobody worked enough hours to get covered medical, I wouldn't give a shit. In fact, the propensity of those same women to leave the job would help reduce the overhead of people staying on too long and expecting ever increasing wages.
I'm not a business owner, and I have no plans to do anything of the sort, but I'd have to be a blithering idiot not to at least consider the problem. I've certainly seen this play out in the real world.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
... create a job where the essential functions of the job really do require at least 30 clock-hours of recent (in the last 5 years) training OR equivalent on-the-job/volunteer/self-study experience in a broad list of non-technical courses typically taught in undergraduate programs AND which candidates who have not been in school the last 5 years likely won't have.
For example, most recent graduates who went to school full-time the last 4-5 years studied at least one semester of
* American history
* Writing or composition ("English 101")
* Differential Calculus
If you have a job that really does make use of these jobs - even if you've deliberately gone out of your way to engineer the job requirements so that someone without this knowledge would have difficulty doing the job - you should be alright.
Round out the list with "relevant" technical courses. For example, for a programmer position, structure the job so that it really does require that a candidate recently had 30 classroom hours of ALL of the following courses or had the equivalent experience or self-study in these areas:
* algorithm design
* computer hardware
* [list two programming languages that weren't in vogue 10 years ago here]
* [list another skill that is widely taught in school but which only a small fraction of "industry hires" will have more than a passing knowledge of here]
Then for good measure throw in things like "must have given at least 3 technical presentations of at least 15 minutes each in the last 5 years, at least one of which is to a non-lay audience."
Again, this will only work if the job really does require the knowledge and skills that the job description asked for. If a motivated candidate that lacks one or more of the requirements could reasonably be expected to "fill in the gaps" through self-study before he needed to use those skills between the time he started the application/resume process and the time he needed them on the job, then making them a job requirement could be seen as a sham and it could get you into trouble.
Here's a hypothetical "engineered" job designed specifically to require such skills:
Job posting: Web programmer Level I
Salary range: [keep it on the low end but not OMGTHISMUSTBEANHB1POSITION low]
Primary duties: Work under supervision to design, implement, and maintain web sites using [list 2-3 fairly new web-development environments]
Secondary duties: Give short talks about your projects to other teams in the company; attend short talks given by other teams and provide feedback; present papers at technical conferences
Non-technical duties: Represent company in college- and high-school outreach including participating in "adult vs. youth" contests like "Are you smarter than an 11th-Grade American History Student," giving talks to middle school students on topics such as "how to make a ripple-carry adder circuit from the things you find at home," and giving talks to high school Calculus students on topics like "not all computers are digital."
--
Now, Mr. Employer, I have to ask you:
Is it really worth re-jiggering your employees' job duties specifically so your typical industry hire would not be qualified but your typical recent B.S.-holding technical-degree-graduate would? Add to that the fact that more seasoned professionals bring certain hard-to-define qualities to the job that you typically just can't get from less-seasoned professionals and recent grads? Also, don't forget loyalty: People who have kids-in-tow or who have lived in the area for awhile are very unlikely to want to move to a new area once they hire on with you. While you can't ask about kids or length-of-current-residence in a job interview, you can generally assume that your average person over 30 is more stable/reliable and less likely to "jump ship" for more money or a minor on-the-job annoyance than someone under 25.
Oh, and as for salary:
It's not like the 1990s, we, the "older tech workers," get it: We know that despite the benefi
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The whole point I am making is that it should not have to be "good" or "justifiable". In fact, there should be no need for any reason at all
Why not? Age didn't gain protected status for no reason. Older people have the same right to work as younger people.
It is none of our business. Both literally and otherwise...
I understand what you are saying. You want business owners to have the right to build whatever team they want, and there are any number of reasons for that, not all of which are discriminatory. Maybe you just want a younger looking public-facing team because you think it makes your company look fresh and cutting edge, and that's valid, but too many employers have demonstrated that those decisions sometimes ARE used to discriminate against older workers, and so the government stepped in. If you don't understand why the government stepped in, then you haven't been passed over for someone younger (yet).
We're not even talking about how this affects the workers. Imagine if there were no age discrimination laws, and all the companies in your area started grabbing all the fresh young college grads, and stopped hiring anyone over, say, 38. Now you have a whole population of perfectly qualified, willing workers who can no longer find work, simply because they were born earlier. How fair is that?
Older people with memory or social problems still feel entitled to equal opportunity.
Younger people with memory or social problems also feel entitled to equal opportunity.
Employers would don't usually write very good job requirements and just want to fill a position within budget.
The chief skill unfortunately is everyone just wants to be lied to and they'll get along fine.
When deception and entitlement are the actual goals, everyone looses.
That's probably why startups shoot up like rockets based on one or two self-driven innovators and flame out and they get sold or become larger companies and the original talent seeks and exit strategy, or just quits because of all the social problems with big groups.
Ironically the autistic individual might actually be the better focused and successful in a post startup boom, since they tend to drive away or isolate themselves and focus on the problems or projects they have derived as their primary interest.. they are particularly good at remote tech support, without the interference of a constant barrage of "information" from the users.
" Knowing more than you need to know for your job is a great way to get ahead, and get out of that low end job and into something better."
Hmmm. If you're over forty it probably should read:
" Knowing more than you need to know for your job is a great way to get classified overqualified, and get out of that job and into early forced retirement."
Hope you've kept up with your savings.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Those who get octal, and those who don't...what are the other 6?
I'm pretty sure they meant "digital naive".
"Willing to travel." Maybe if this is to do software development in a remote location, this could have somewhat of a discriminatory effect. Willingness to visit customers makes a big difference, though, in how valuable an employee is. Sure it sucks when you have a family. But it's probably worth 30k/year.
Not only that... I'm 43 and I consider myself a "Digital Native".
When you've been Digital Resident longer than many of these so-called Digital Natives have been alive, it's hard to take the term very seriously.
It's also easy to imagine how a 50-something might bridle under the 'tutelage' of a 25 year old. There's a lot to be said for a society that rewards innovation and youthful energy, but that doesn't mean there's no longer any reason whatsoever to venerate our elders. And I, for one, would not hesitate to remind any youngster of that, should circumstances require.
But it's true that we oldsters shouldn't just assume that we deserve respect by default. Not at all. I should earn it, by reminding these callow youths that hipster used to actually mean something, and that I knew Mick Jagger back when he wrote music, and not only did I have an Apple ][, but I rebuilt it on Saturdays just for fun, and that was a time when cars had exhaust and tires actually squealed, and the TV had channels, and a real man earned his stripes by dismantling one of those cathode ray tubes without dying in the explosion. And THAT was being a geek back then, so fuck you, you sniveling little runt, go climb back up your mother's vagina for a few more years until you're ready for this world. Fuck.
Or something like that. :-)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I'm sure that will be very helpful for running my vehicle information system. Harvesters love offloading their real time data gathering to EC2 instances.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
25? Sorry, too old. We only hire 20-yro summer interns who pay us to for the experience...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
If its a bunch of Party Kids like FaceBook in Social Netweork, would a 40+ want to work there? I a lot of cases its not so balck and white.
I see a lot of jobs where you really can't be overqualified. The more qualifications you have the more job duties they give you. For an entry level job, overqualified is a real thing since they are afraid you'll switch jobs the monent Burger King has an opening. For senior positions it's not necessarily the case, because at that level they really do want some skill and experience.
There has to be *someone* around at least that can answer all the kid's questions.
The thing is, a mere 5 years ago, email was the primary communication method. Even today, when at work, you almost always communicate with email. No one sends a twitter saying "staff meeting in ten minutes", documentation doesn't get sent via snapchat (though it approximates this when I can't find it ten minutes later), and so forth. Tough IRC type stuff does get used, but that's been around for over 30 years as well so there's not much new there.
Oh really.. *snicker*.. so then when you over provision resources you can undoubtedly tell me why some damned near emergent theory-esque phenomenon occurs and how to deal with it, right?
Oh, wait.. you can't.. you'll just run back to daddy asking for more VM provisioning because you're a pussy.
Wow, is your newsletter still mimeographed? It seems like you've been inhaling it a bit much.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, even if there are bigots standing in your way. Freedom is not about just you and your own freedoms, but those around you also. You can not exercise your freedom at the expense of others. Thus the existence of governments, created by the citizens in order to protect their freedoms against the freedoms of others. People get together and agree that anarchy just is not working out very well and decide that maybe some laws will improve things for everyone. Fairness is enforced to some extent. So yes, you can't refuse to hire someone just because of the color of their skin, that's unfair and damaging to the economy.
So yes, we give up liberties in order to have liberty. I don't have the liberty to shoot you for being an idiot, and I accept that because it means you also don't have the liberty to shoot me for being an idiot. Except in Texas.
So if we have more job discrimination you think we can keep all our jobs? Refuse to give jobs to old people, women, blacks, people from the wrong political party, and so forth? Technically, I think that would mean that the remaining few people get a bigger choice of jobs. But in the long run the economy would collapse from the weight of all the people who can't get jobs and the humungous amount of skills and experience left lying on the floor. It would solve the immigrant problem by creating an emigrant problem.
So if we have more job discrimination you think we can keep all our jobs
Well I certainly feel justified in discriminating against the illiterate.
Way to change that up, from lowering costs due to government regulation to promoting discrimination.
So I suppose I'm digital native x10 ???
"Nobody ever sends a twitter" ....
Tweet M8
If you began using the net in the mid 80s and are younger than 60 you've spent half your life on the net and have seen it all and sure as fuck know more than some kid coming out of school with extensive Microsoft experience.
Would Stallman be considered a digital native?
Need Mercedes parts ?
They might as well advertise for "Naive, spinless young suckers who'll do anything for a buck."
That's how they should advertise the job so that more experienced people don't waste their time. It's the same old story once you get there and it takes a lot of social skills and energy to walk away amicably. Most of the time it isn't a happy ending for anyone.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You kids know nuthin! When we was young we learnt to count with out own digits, thank you very much! And if we ran out we'd nip over the mountains and cut off some more!
There are some who call me
I am thinking of removing anti-discrimination laws completely (not just to create exceptions) and allowing regulators (such as anti-trust) to impose anti-discrimination conditions on specific companies instead, because of the problems they cause and the lack of effectiveness.
I took my first programming class in 1976. We used punch cards on an IBM mainframe. Somebody have a link to a job req. for a "digital native?" I could have some fun.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Does this pass the HIPPA requirements ?
I wouldn't want to trust my clients data to cloud security.
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
> In short, I can't see how this is supposed to be an age-filter.
A shibboleth (/bl/[1] or /bl/[2]) is a word or custom whose variations in pronunciation or style can be used to differentiate members of ingroups from those of outgroups. Within the mindset of the ingroup, a connotation or value judgment of correct/incorrect or superior/inferior can be ascribed to the two variants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Ok, so it's not the letter of the definition, but surely the spirit.
if "digital native" means comfortable communicating by Facebook, twitter, etc....
I translate that as social stunted and likely to emberass themselves & your company in photo and print.
How many social media shaming stories about overhead comments/jokes or comments (perhaps out of context) this year ?
Communicating by social media is like calling "selfies", photography.
Your face 500 times is no match for almost any other 500 pictures (even my vacation photos, I take nice vacations).
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
You will be a dinosaur by the time you're 40. I learned that the hard way. Instead, find a career in medicine or physical science where older people are actually respected for their knowledge and wisdom.
Yes, HIPAA requirements actually aren't that strong. The key phrase to everything is "reasonable". Additionally, for cloud services their higher tiers (Enterprise) will sign a Business Associate Agreement with Covered Entities so they are definitely HIPAA compliant. Since the Omnibus Security Rule and HiTECH acts the business associates are just as liable for Security Incidents as the Covered Entity - so you bet your ass they are compliant.
YOU may not like your data on a cloud provider, but if you choose a respectable provider (Rackspace, Amazon, Microsoft, Terramark, etc) you can be pretty confident in their security practices.
- HIPAA Chief Security Officer speaking here.
If i was hiring, I would probably discriminate as well. Yes, I know that people fresh out of college or with a few years under their belt might know some new technologies (probably not. Colleges usually lag technology), and might be willing to work long hours, but I know that somebody who is 40+ and has been working most of those years in the technical industry has already made many of the mistakes that a young person has yet to make and has figured out how to do things right and how to write code efficiently and using the proper tool and not the latest wizbang tool that isn't quite right for the job but looks great on a resume and everybody is constantly blathering about on the internet.
So yes, I would tend to discriminate in favor of the experienced individual, even though they are probably more expensive and won't work as many hours, I know I will get an overall better product out of them and in a shorter time frame.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They didn't seem to think there was anything unusual about asking an interview candidate to spend an entire day doing pair programming with them on their own codebase.
Heh... I had a similar situation a month or so ago. Headhunter cold-called me, told me how hard they're looking for people with serious amounts of Mac experience, so I went to see the customer (startup over in Mountain View), product wasn't terribly interesting, and then the recruiter says they want me to come in for a "coding exercise" that should only take about four to six hours. I told him my rate for very short term projects, and he actually expected me to give them six hours of my time on spec.
I quit taking his calls.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Depends - I was one of those and since the number of employees in my section was not large and the tasks were not frequently changing the skill level required was not high. 25 year old "supervisors" are fine if they have someone to fall back on when they are not, and if they know to do so when they are out of their depth.
Spot on. Unmentored young developers with uber-machines who ran nothing but MS stuff with full admin rights were a blight on software for years because they expected everyone else to have the same. The only thing that's saved us recently is that poorly skilled programmers can only do single threaded stuff so multiple cores cuts down on the pain.
Without hardware knowledge people do stupid shit like sort on disk instead of in memory.
A lot more of that happens in scientific and engineering computing than it should, sometimes wasting many hours of time per project.
3 weeks ago I visited my dad. He is 75. Still working. His boss is an old apprentice of him who lets him run his shop a few days a week while he works in his own electronics shop, builds circuits and sells and toys with 3D printers. This guy started his electronics shop a few years ago, at the tender young age of 60, because he like to play with new electronics gizmos that you build yourself (most of his stock are electronic building kits). I (age 45) felt like a kid in a candy store there.
His shop has a inventory system that runs on SCO Unix and dates from the 80s. Someone screwed up and started printing inventory reports for an entire year. My dad dug out the SCO manuals, went into the terminal and found the command line stuff to stop the printer.
Now they have a problem. Their terminal program runs on DOS and it uses a strange version of telnet that can print locally (on a dot matrix). They can't use it anymore cause they can't find floppy disks that can boot DOS anymore. This is problematic. The inventory program on SCO is still better than anything you can find nowadays and they like to use it. The menu is burned into the green-screen monitor.
I looked into using a Raspberry Pi as a terminal with cKermit to get rid of the old (one still running since the 80s') DOS boxes. Old 60 year old guy installed it himself.
This was 3 weeks ago, in 2015. That is what a digital native looks like.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Really the discrimination stuff is a pretense of fairness rather than an actual effort to be fair. Look at it this way. You have 20 applicants for one position. You sort through the pile and discriminate until you find the person that matches what you seek. You have your own values that you have established which are probably quite misleading. For example most of us consider past accomplishments as a signal of what to expect from a person. That is nonsense. People change and the fellow that was behind may have made special efforts to make sure they are superb at the tasks at hand. Even former convicts, who most people consider bad, may well be top drawer people who were placed in such a difficult circumstance that crime was the best or only choice for them a couple of years ago. All of us like to feel comfortable and assured that we are not hiring some sort of freak but when you think about it those nuts who run back into a building and gun down people that they worked with all passed interviews and probably back ground checks as well. We even had a Florida cop who enjoyed dragging young women into the woods and taking them apart with an ax. He had passed muster at more than one Florida police force.
The key phrase is "Looking for a [junior|entry level] ..."
While there may be the odd exception - perhaps companies that like to mould people in their own style - this usually means "we're cheapskates". Nobody would take a novice instead of a master, give the choice.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I tried to send an internet but it got stuck in the tubes.
Has it occurred to any of those witlings that people who are now "old folk" invented the computer, the network, the operating system, the Internet, and - marginally - the Web? (Sorry TBL!) Moreover, they are more likely to understand how those things work than younger people who simply take them for granted.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
We surrendered that essential freedom in the hope of some sort of safety... As predicted, we lost both
What? We live in the safest times in human history. The freedom of which you speak is called bigotry, and we're all better off without it.
What's really funny about this is I'm finishing up a game theory class and for a project thought doing a game theory analysis of EC2 with AWS would be interesting, how to come up with proper scaling policies and such. The amount of information I've had to gather about the hardware and just how low I've had to go into their systems was quite astonishing. I can say this much for sure, the idea of "The hardware knowledge argument has become virtually irrelevant in the EC2-world where you can spawn VM pretty much transparently" pretty much means that they're literally flushing money down the toilet not bothering to know how their hosting works. It's a complex system and using it effectively is no trivial task. Especially with the auction system they use where when free servers become more scarce and the cost goes up quickly. Just spinning up new hardware rather than trying to optimize the instances you've already got can get really expensive really quick.
The phrase is "a gleam in your mother's eye" which refers to the sparkle a woman gets in her eye when she looks at someone she would like to take to her bed.
It makes perfect sense once you have experienced it.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Mi is a bigot
I thought those meant that they were not going to pay.
Recent Grad - young - low pay.
Passion for subject - willing to work nights and weekends without overtime or other compensation.
H1b- willing to be an indentured servant for 3-5 years.
The other 14....
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
That's what you took away from my post? Really? Maybe you think that YOU are working for the next big billion dollar business?
I guess con artists who go after specific age groups shouldn't be prosecuted for being con artists. They should be sued for age descrimination because they are not offering to steal from everyone equally.
Bits and bytes, what's that is it something like on and off things in hyperspace. Aha it's like me being on FB and other social networks or not, always connected as borgs living in a virtual and matrix world, guess this is better known as VR but not AR in the terms of the native digital awareness. Of course you are native as long as you know how to use and access your I/O between real world and the matrix world now this is a philosophical new era in our digital appearance, wouldn't you say!
People over 40 can be good with technology too.
I'm over 50. I've been immersed in computers and writing software since I was 12. How exactly am I not a digital native? And yet, when these assholes use that phrase, they are certainly excluding me.
Yeah, I'm currently learning C++ 14 and bringing the new techniques into my code base. And I'm also learning Ember.js, to be able to bring "reactive" applications to the web side of my work (as I did for the fat-client side 14 years ago). And I'm looking at Phoenix/Elixir on the back end, because I don't feel like Ruby on Rails is evolving in the right direction to be a really good back-end solution for the upcoming generation of web apps.
And yet, I got to the point where I didn't get any calls back from recruiters or companies, none at all, until I removed from my resume my date of graduation. (From one of the best unis in the world.) Removing that one date got me back to getting plenty of responses. (My resume already did not list my entire work history dates all the way back, because it was just too much irrelevant info. Who gives a crap that I happened to be exposed to an early framework written in Objective-C in 1988? At this point, information like that is just trivia.)
Posting anon because I'm about to talk about my experiences at my job.
I just want to point out hiring entry level doesn't mean "hiring young people." If a resume for an entry level position came across my desk from someone in their 50s I wouldn't think that was odd or wouldn't want to hire them - in fact of the people I work with the mid life career changers seem to be the best. Hiring for a position that is open isn't in and of itself discrimination. If you have a entry level position open you aren't usually going to create a senor person because that is who applies.
About my job - I used to supervise someone that is over a decade my senor and has a decade more time at the company than me. This guy is a terrible coder, I'm not sure how he is still employed. But he was really bitter that I supervised him since he is so much older than I. It does cause a toxic work environment because he wouldn't listen to me. He had to be moved to another part of the company because of it.
...when I was 10, on paper, before I learned standard algebra, and my first program for a "real" computer was a binary decimal conversion program. So yeah, I'm a digital native.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
Born in '57. Changed paper tape for batch printing jobs on at FSU in 75. Was an author on PLATO. Sold the first TRS-80 in Tallahassee. Had a 4 digit, 2 digit compuserve login. Knows the difference between CP/M and MP/M. Put the dash in MS-DOS. Spent $600 for my first month on Genie. Reformated my ST-251-0 from MFM to RLL. Installed an Intel Aboveboard 386 in my Tandy 3000.
Been there done that.
Now I do ITIL
There's a large employer in my area that basically staffs entirely with college grads. I've seen the compensation packages they're offered and they're not awful, but given the hours they generally work and the demands placed upon them they're not really fair. Part of the company's repeated excuse for not hiring more experienced devs is "it takes us too long to break them of the habits they picked up elsewhere." Which doesn't speak well of their development practices, frankly - if all you get from experienced developers is "bad habits" the problem may not be with the devs...
Also, "hire a 23 year old" also means "hire someone who is less likely to have a family and demands outside work." It's lot easier to convince someone to work a 12-15 hour day if they don't have to pick up the kids from school.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
YAWN.... So what else is new. Age discrimination will never be solved. It was an issue when I started after college in 1972. I have always found environments of companies participating in age discrimination schemes to be a drag to work for. They are usually sweat-shops and no place to build a career on. Give these companies and their recruiters the "bird" and move on. Choose your companies carefully. Keep your skills honed and in areas of demand. If you're stuck on Java, try stretching and learning VHDL or something. This often means venturing into new technologies and a lot of self-learning. As you get older quit being an employee and become a contractor or free-lance. The pay is better--you get paid for every hour you work. No one seems to care about the age of contractors. I've worked with contractors who need to walk with a cane. I'm now 70 (although I look younger) and am leading the development of an ARM-based medical device. There are ways around the age discrimination issue if you remain good at what you do.
I have been dethroned as head nerd. I never figured out sendmail.
(I installed a different mail processor just to get decipherable config files)
I recently was flown to Paris, France, for an interview with one of France's largest corporations. Since I am a fairly recent college graduate they had no concept beforehand that I might be over 50 (especially since in France they do not accept older independent college students into university). They told me to my face I was too old. At least in the US they have to make an effort to ignore your qualifications and come up with some sort of bullshit to keep from hiring older workers.
As someone born in the 50's and was a contributor to the revolution I prefer to call my self a "Digital Original" ;)
I also was just laid off last week because of a site shut down and will have a chance first hand to see how bad the discrimination is.
Pax, Richard Elliott
I'm pushing 50 and have been using computers since I was 7 years old (mainframe access originally)
Am I more native than someone in his 20s who's only really started using systems since age 15-18 or so?
This is one of those buzzwords which is hard to nail down and as such discrimination suits would have trouble.
Turned out I had a knack for coding, but didn't find that out until my first encounters with terminals and PCs around '82 or so, at the age of 39. So I started hacking (back when that term wasn't quite so derogatory as it is these days), turned out or participated in some pretty significant code. (Does "Info-ZIP Workgroup" mean anything to anyone anymore?) So I would've been disqualified even before I started, if it were up to those damned recruiters.
Good thing, back then, that a degree in Computer Science didn't mean quite so much. If you had good ideas, if you could code, if you could produce .. hey, give the guy a chance! (I loved that!)
I'd love to be 21 and give it a shot these days (although it wouldn't be nearly as much fun: no such thing as a one-man programming shop these days). But I'd want the same shot if I were 39 .. or 79!
Contracts are also a way to discriminate against people with families and lives and mortgages -- we need benefits and income, 22 year old singles don't.
You forgot "now get off my #00FF00 lawn"
This signature is false.
I was born with 10 digits. Doesn't that make me a digital native?
My sixth grade science fair project was a 1 bit adder made out of a battery, wire, two DPDT relays, switches, and lights. Does that make me a "digital native"?
Place me among 1964's digerati? biterati?
How about that everyone in my 10th grade learned FORTRAN on our school's IBM 1130?
Fortunately for me, I needn't care.
Sadly, others do.
This is pretty much me today... I'm 42, been at my current company over a decade and a half. There is one pretty big downside to it: People think you need to be involved in every project, because you're the go-to guy (or one of only a couple) with the experience with not only the OS and hardware but the internal company stuff as well.
Also, people continually come to you for help with just about everything. So it's very hard to focus on stuff and get things done. I tend to spend a lot of time working from home just to be able to focus when needed.
It does make you feel a heck of a lot more secure in your job though. I will say that.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
It's lot easier to convince someone to work a 12-15 hour day if they don't have to pick up the kids from school.
Any company that works that way is bound to fail anyway. Working people that hard doesn't make them productive, it makes them exhausted and prone to mistakes. Those mistakes compound into needing more time to fix - so it's generally an advanced sign of failure.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Don't get me wrong. I hate all the industry Kool Aid but there's a fine line between sticking with the best tools for the job and falling way behind on the latest developments. There's an awful lot of Java and C developers out there who get agitated when required to work with any other language then the one true supreme solution. If you're not learning regularly or never wanted to learn after college in the first place, it's best to get on the management track ASAP.
There are still plenty of avenues into a career writing code sans a CS degree. Web UI was mine. One Node.js developer can accomplish an awful lot.
4 years younger here. But same sorts of experience, First computer was a TRS-80, Vic-20, then a big bump to 286, and so on. My online handle predates what most would consider the Internet (though I also had access though a university working coop in high school) on BBS's...
I've found while the younger generation might be more familiar with technology than their older counterparts, the apple mantra "it just works" mantra is more often than not is pervasive. They lack a basic understanding about how technology works, where it came from, or how it is connected and all works together...
The older folks that grew up throughout the change have a more fulsome understanding as they have been through it.
All generalizations of course...
I recall my actual interest in computers was born out of the difficulties of computer games at the time, and connecting to things like BBS's. Where you had to write a bit of code even if it was just into a BAT file to play with memory settings so you could play a game or to connect to a BBS. Though I'll admit my first modem was a 2400 baud, but I do recall connecting to some 300 baud modems myself...
Not sure kids now a days would become interested in computer science when everything is seemingly done for them...
Two things:
1) Just because you work 70+ hours, doesn't mean you are actually doing anything good. If you know what you are doing, maybe you can get that work done in 40 hours, better. Hiring someone with less experience to work longer, seems like a poor business plan anyway.
2) Become a consultant. Then be the one that they call in to fix the mess that a bunch of tired 20 somethings bashed together, charge 10x as much. Consulting sucks because of the risk involved, but then again if you are going to work for a start up, that is pretty risky anyway. You may have to work 70 hours anyway, but at least you can decide when, and not have to do it every week.
Am I the only one bothered how rodrigoandrade's post got modded up to 5? What's going on, are the moderators all young or something?
Also, are the protected classes only on businesses of a certain size? Meaning small businesses, perhaps 12 or less employees, are exempt?
Nothing wrong with VMs if used correctly. ESX clusters, fail over, fault tolerance, etc. Just don't think that a virtual CPU is the same as a dedicated hardware CPU or that IOPs that you see are what you are really getting. This is after all, a shared resource.
Where old time hardware knowledge comes in is knowing what is "under the hood". How to code or configure or code in an efficient manner to make the best use of the current architecture. I've inherited a lot of code from young programmers and end up stripping down and rewriting a lot of it to make more legible as well as optimize. Funny thing is, my code is stable, theres was not ;)