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The Diversity Issue Silicon Valley Isn't Trying To Fix: Age Discrimination (medium.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The tech industry has recognized it isn't as welcoming to women or minorities as it should be, and is loudly taking steps to solve that issue. Major companies are now releasing diversity reports to highlight their efforts. But as Stephen Levy points out, none of them seem interested in doing something about a different diversity issue that's been pervading Silicon Valley for years: age discrimination. He says, "One company, Payscale, does supply some estimates. Looking at its numbers in 2012, Payscale noted, 'The typical tech employee wasn't around for the original release of Star Wars. And as of last year, the average age at Google was 30; at Facebook, 28; LinkedIn, 29, and Apple, 31. In comparison, the average age in more traditional tech industries like data processing or web publishing was almost 10 years higher than Silicon Valley/Internet firms. In my view, age information should be included in those diversity reports, to underline the need for change— and, even more important, those in charge of company cultures should view age diversity as a plus. Right now, that's not happening."
When for fuck's sake will the editors... oh, wait. Not women or minorities this time.
Carry on.
... us oldies don't want to work around a bunch of testosternone-laden kids.
No one's discriminating by age, just by salary requirements. This is a natural consequence.
If your number of women employed is 10%, and your number of women applying compared to men is 10%, what's the problem? Are we saying that women should get hired just because they're women? And that's ignoring the skill level of the applicants and assuming they're equal.
As for the age problem, well, younger people work longer hours for less money. They don't have pesky requests like more time for family and more money to match their experience.
I write embedded software and linux device drivers. When I was 50 I joined a startup that went toes up in '10.. I've been unemployed ever since. I've had one interview, but mostly my resume submissions are ignored. I can't even find contract work any more.
I live in San Diego.
This month is another milestone. I finally ran out of savings and dipped into my 401k. Yay 10% penalty from the government!
i am 30 and what is this
The so-called diversity figures never specify what percentage of the workforce are ethnic Finns. Keeping in mind that Finns are one the smallest minority groups in the world, hiring them over massive "minority" groups like women (over 3.5 billion in the world) and people of color (over 6 billion in the world) should be top priority.
as of last year, the average age at Google was 30; at Facebook, 28; LinkedIn, 29, and Apple, 31. In comparison, the average age in more traditional tech industries like data processing or web publishing was almost 10 years higher than Silicon Valley/Internet firms.
Maybe the older guys are wise enough not to go and work at Facebook. And why is no-one tackling the obvious discrimination against youngsters that's going on in data processing and web publishing?! ;)
Raw statistics like this are almost worse than no data at all when it comes to identifying discrimination.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
They can't legally ask your age, so the job application has a space to write your feelings about kids on your lawn.
Pro tip: They leave you room to continue your thoughts on the back of the page, it's a trap!
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
I say this as a 46-year-old... I'm able to find plenty of opportunities with most companies up here in Portland, and regularly get recruiters calling from Utah, Texas, Nevada, numerous East Coast locales... they actually want the experience.
Silicon Valley is chock-full of startups and Type-A corps, and they only want one thing: disposable slaves.
It's far easier to convince a a kid with a still-crisp CS degree (and way too much student loan debt) to work 90 stressful hours a week for a pittance.
It's much harder to convince someone with sufficient experience and a family to do that... life is way too short to become the personal bitch of some IPO-seeking asshole.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If your number of women employed is 10%, and your number of women applying compared to men is 10%, what's the problem?
If a company isn't attractive to a significant group of potential job applicants, it may well be that sooner or later the same group will be less interested in buying it's products. It's just bad business.
No one's discriminating by age, just by salary requirements. This is a natural consequence.
No.When you're out of work, you'll take anything at just about any pay. But what I have run across is if you're unemployed then you're no good - if you're any good, you'd have a job.
And there's this nonsense of having to match requirements 100% to even get an interview. Back when I started in the late 80s, being proficient in a programming language was enough - mainframe jobs many times also wanted CICS knowledge on top of COBOL. Knowing the OS or platform was a plus; after all, outside of the language, everything else is just API. But that changed with the advent of Java; that seems to be when the industry started getting retarded. And when web development took off with all these different languages and tools, we went into full ludicrous hiring mode - yeah, the H1-b scam added to it immensely.
Back in my IBM days, an old timer took me aside and said that when he started, there weren't any of those people - as he was pointing at the Indians. Then we were shut down and everything went to India and the rush to get what jobs there were in the area happened. It was amazing how fast the younger guys got jobs even though they had less skills than we did. So much for "if you have the skills, you can get a job" fairy tale,
Umm, longer hours does not mean anything when it comes to actual output. It is one of the biggest fallacies of the software industry. I am one of the older programmers, being over 40, where I work. I work with kids straight out of college. First off, half the time they are goofing off playing ping pong, pool, or board games. The other half, they are throwing code together that kind of works but will never be maintainable. They could spend 80 hours a week doing that and we would be further behind in the long run.
The older coders may only put in the 9 or 10 hours a day. But you know what, we get to work, get it done, and it works right the first time. We have tests, proper coding and documentation. I am also not looking for my company to entertain me and provide all kinds of crazy things just to keep me happy. More importantly, if the company is treating me fairly, I am not going to jump in one or two years because 'I am bored and need a new challenge' like the cheap hires.
Now I know these are generalizations, like everything else, but sometimes you get what you pay for. Hire one guy with real experience across the board earned from the hard knocks of actually having been there, and he is probably worth several (if not more) of the 'cheap' under 30's who really just haven't had the experience yet of what mistakes cost. Pair them together, and you probably have the best of both worlds.
If you can't Instagram, you can't work in the tech industry. Problem solved.
See subject: Ever wonder WHY software's so full of security holes? Don't. See subject. It's all about profit for mgt. & stockholders - get THAT thru your heads, you'll understand the entire thing.
(It's a HUGE part of why I went into business for myself on a few fronts, still "keeping my beak wet" in computing via consulting (@ much higher rates than working for others no less) but my main income has NOTHING TO DO with computing... why? I saw this trend coming DECADES ago!)
You fellow computing geeks like to blame MBA's? You're right - why or HOW can I say that?? This entire trend was being "pushed" in the early 1980's is why, & I saw it in the 1st of my dual degrees (Business Admin w/ MIS concentration, I went on for STRICT comp. sci. a decade later) - they were pushing a "service economy" vs. manufacturing + CHAMPIONING "offshoring" too... these are your ROOT causes.
Here we are today.
Imo, the stock market is E V I L & the real problem. The fools on that crap table are ALL out to "get rich" & mgt. wants their "bonuses" (for doing shit essentially compared to actual productive workers, & trust me, I've BEEN on both fronts for decades or rather I was)... who loses?
THE PRODUCTIVE AMERICAN WORKER (& I won't listen to ANY bullshit "we are lazy"... man, show a US Citizen a buck, the RIGHT buck, & we work like NO OTHERS DO (anyone here ever put in those 60-80 hr. work weeks? I did... no more for a decade now, thank the merciful Lord)).
APK
P.S.=> It's how it is, & I can't change it for others - but, I could and DID change it for myself - for the better (I'm far happier working for myself vs. others, that's certain & the money is just as good if not better)... apk
I've have seen older people interview at a few programming jobs only to hear from the "FEMALE" tech manager the person was to old. Literally spoken just like that, and i've heard it at multiple companies. /also those same women managers are often the ones that hire male tech over female tech workers.....because they like having a harem of dudes kissing their butt.
The finger has been pointed at the wrong gender, most discrimination i've seen in the office has occurred at a women's behest.
These days when they get your information, it's nothing to scan databases out there to find out how old you are. Just connecting to the credit bureaus gives you enough to screen out people. And connect to other databases, I could screen anyone out for any reason and do what most employers do now when you apply; give no answer at all - let alone a rejection email or letter which was the custom back in more polite times.
And as far as old farts are concerned; "you don't have the skills", "you're overqualified" or the one my 72 year-old father-in-law got after they were so excited over his resume - "you don't fit in".
i am 30 and what is this
Something you will, inevitabley face very soon.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I have a pretty good resume - almost 20 years of experience at the Fortune 500/Global 1000 level as a programmer, consultant and technical sales. I have published 2 books. Last year, I got laid off from IBM in one of their annual "resource actions". My resume skews me younger though because I graduated from college in the mid-1990's ( I went to the military for a stretch before college). If you look only at my resume, you may think I'm in my 30's or early 40's (I am nearly 50). I sent my resume out to a metric crapton of companies in the silicon valley area and went through a number of interviews. Here's how one went for a technical sales resource. I started off with a local team of sales guys in my hometown. This went well despite one of the sales guys looking like he was on the tail end of a 4 day bender and tweaking pretty hard. The feedback I got from the recruiter was very positive with the biggest comment being, "We can close sales with this guy!" So they fly me out to SJC for the face to face. Now, I'm no spring chicken but I do run marathons and half marathons and my extensive background in marital arts pretty much means I could kick the crap out of any one at that office (during my lay off, I worked security at a high profile venue for a TV show). However, there is some gray at the temples and my hair is a little thinner than it used to be. Of the 7 people I interviewed with in SJC, 5 made direct comments about my age and asked if I thought it would be a problem - as in, "Do you think your age will be a problem here?" and "Tell me about a time you worked with younger people and what the challenges were" and "When did say you graduated college?", etc. etc. After the interviews, the asshole recruiter congratulated me on my willingness to answer and insights into this line of questioning that violated California as well as federal law. They are, shockingly, very comfortable with ignoring the laws in Silicon Valley regarding discrimination. Had I not been out of a job, I'd never have entertained them further but I was in a bind so I had to put up with it. Needless to say, I did not get a job offer. This is the most blatant of them but every company in Silicon Valley I spoke with took the same line. Every. Single. One.
Older people just don't give a shit about what Facebook, Twitter, etc are doing. Facebook has recruited me heavily the but I have no interest in anything they do. I am not going to uproot my family to work for FB, Twitter, etc.
At an old 33, I prefer to work on either my own company or optionally if that wasn't there, companies which share my passions.
Young People are great to hire because they'll work their fingers to the bones for some abstract promise, but once you build a family and a life, working 80 hours a week, because startup, isn't appealing.
I was at a 'hot' company a little over a year ago. They literally had the who's who of silicon valley and the east coast investing in them. I figured it was a great opportunity to be involved with at the time. Then I was sitting in a company wide meeting (kind of a pep rally that happened every week) and the head guy gets up and says exactly this:
"Look around you. Notice you don't see very much grey hair? That's on purpose. We want people on they way up, not their way out!"
I was shocked that they would be so blatant about it. Not even a hesitation in a corporate wide meeting of 500 people and recorded to boot. If I didn't care about torpedoing my own career, I would have filed a suit that day, being 44 at the time. Funny thing was their code was some of the worst I have ever seen and was having to re-write large portions of it do to the horrible architecture and coding patterns in place. Literally in just a few months I had re-written what was not working for their largest clients and had it running in a fraction of the time. The desperately needed people with experience.
Once I heard that I put my resume out to a couple of people, had a job offer within two weeks, and am making 50% more than I was there anyways with rapid promotion within a few months, and been at my current job exactly a year now. So in the long run, their loss. But I can tell you it is in fact real and blatant out there.
That said as a programmer if you keep your skills up, there are still plenty of jobs out there. It's just a bit more work than it should be to find a good one.
A top programmer in his early 20's will attack a problem in all earnest, formulating an elegant solution that uses the latest technology with one of the esoteric algorithms he learned in school. He'll pull a series of all-nighters until it gets done and when delivered, he'll get the acclaim of his peers.
A top programmer in his 40's - 60's will delay writing code if possible. Instead he'll look at the problem, decompose it, try to find analogies, talk to stake holders to find out the REAL problem. Then he'll look to see if it has been solved before. Or if there is a framework available that fits the problem to minimize re-inventing the wheel. Then he'll code. The end result will likely be an even more elegant, more transparent, and more maintainable solution.
I worked a brief stint as an IT recruiter. I observed age discrimination for tech workers 50+ in almost every sector, except Government.
An average age of 30 would suggest a pretty robust distribution of workers up to 40 as well. Those people would have gotten degrees in the late 1990s. I did my EE degree in the early 2000s and back then CS was still considered a bit of a specialist degree with uncertain career prospects compared to engineering. Of course since then the industry has absolutely exploded.
Could the reason for the lack of above 40 workers be that there are simply far less CS people in that age group? I mean, going forward to 50 year olds and you are talking about the very few people who thought studying these new personal computer things in the 1980s was the way to go. If you were that forward thinking you are probably retired in Belize by now or in a cushy management position at Microsoft.
It's quite simple. Intelligence peaks at 26, and the mentioned companies attract the best of the best.
So, what are you like 82?
By that logic a company making products for women shouldn't hire men at all.
I am going to retire early in a few years at age 55. I don't plan on continuing in the tech world where you are expected to work 70 hour weeks every week. I don't mind doing it occasionally, but every week? I get dirty looks every time I leave the office before 6pm, which is most days.
Worse, I'm the only coder in my department that maintains a particular huge code base I've developed over the past 15 years or so. I've told the PHBs that they need to hire someone new so I can train them for the next couple years because I'm quitting then, but those calls fall on deaf ears. Oh well. My retirement won't be tied to this company's stock.
While we are generalising, we can also talk about how those 'experienced' always seem to know better and refuse to do what they are asked unless it's done their way.
Yes, younger people can have their issues, but then again, so do the older ones.
The other is a lack of formal education. The flood of post-secondary degrees now have not had a totally positive impact for the boomers - it seems like most employers in tech (in my area, at least) are requiring the Piece of Paper for any applicants. I'm fine - my father, on the other hand, got shafted badly by this requirement.
He didn't go to university after high school - rather, the company he was working for trained him to be a programmer. And he did well at it for many years. Over a 20 year period he worked in about five different places doing COBOL work, until his last employer got bought out by a competitor. He was a victim in the post-merger layoffs, and had to train his replacement (don't tell me there's no age discrimination in tech - if there wasn't, he would have been kept on for his experience). After that, he managed one or two short-term contracts over a few years until he gave up and left the industry altogether.
Very few companies seem to be willing to account for years of experience, and disregard how the dark ages of technology worked. As such, they have been ignoring a significant number of highly capable candidates because of how they entered the field.
People with families don't want to work there. With housing in the millions for a single family home, and poor public schools, it isn't worth it to people with families.
... and Google tried to hire me this year. As I am not willing to relocate to Silicon Vally, I turned down the offer.
They're all fabulously wealthy patriarchs who run the world.
Except intelligence alone will not make your company work efficiently. Except for simple problems, you want a mix of intelligance and experience. You want some one yelling out new ideas and proposals forpotential problem solutions and improvements. But you also want someone who some experience who can foresee problems, especially when what seems like a new idea has actually been tried before, or at least to ask the right questions about potential issues. It isn't that cleanly divided, as everyone needs a mix of experience and intelligence. If you are hiring the best of the best though, that means you are going to end up with a mixture of ages and backgrounds.
And the code written by the top programmer in his 40s will be so simple that no one will be impressed by it, because it's obvious and only a couple of hundred lines.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's called 'leading from behind', otherwise known as wisdom applied to the situation in which the older technical employees attempt to keep borderline retarded lazy-assed millennials along with non-engineering MBAs from either reinventing the wheel or just flat out fucking up the project.
Seriously, us gen x and y engineers have no tolerance for your bullshit.
So you mean a mix of skills and temperaments is better than monoculture and blind conformity?
Don't tell Corporate America and especially Silicon Valley that. Their brains might explode.
It could just be that the people with experience (and wisdom to go with it) want nothing to do with Silicon Valley.
In the IT dept I'm in here in the Dallas area, I would say the average age is somewhere between 40-45.
Funny thing... our EVP came from a place that hired a lot of those cheaper people and outsourced/off-shored a lot. He was absolutely boggled that our department managed to successfully complete over 40 major "combined arms" projects in a year (with barely that many employees), where the places he'd been previously could barely manage 4 with a similar number of people. So they're paying maybe 50% more, and getting 1000% more.
Oh, and we're all generally able to keep it to between 7-9 hrs/day, too.
There are many types of intelligence. Certainly there are types of intelligence that peak in the early 20s (liquid intelligence) by other types of intelligence continue to grow (experience intelligence).
Speaking anecdotally, I've found that engineers in their 20s concentrate on many of the wrong issues. They understand how to code, but don't have the discipline to debug their code fully or ensure their code is fully tested, and they don't code for security or maintainability. Mostly they don't seem to think these issues are important.
Some are brilliant but make make bone headed mistakes. One young coder (with a masters in comp sci) wrote code that roughly said "if the date is a holiday, bump the date by 1" ignoring the fact that sometimes holidays are more than one day in length and they can even be on a Friday. This bug wasn't discovered until his code was live and ran on Thanksgiving day - it crashed and he was out of town (for Thanksgiving) so there was a substantial delay in fixing it. He left 6 months later to work on his phd.
"My buddy at HP (Loveland CO) said he has an opening in his group. ... However, his boss told him not to bother bringing any white males to interview".
So, HP has an illegal hiring policy and are not afraid to tell their managers, who are not afraid to tell their professional staff, who are fine telling members of the public. We've come a long way, Baby.
I will never purchase or recommend a HP product again.
I don't think that's how it works.
There's a place for knowledge and experience, and there's a place for fresh talent and creativity.
Also, they have a different value for the company. Experienced guys are worth more, so they are paid more. Younger ones will maybe make it up in volume or not, so they are paid less.
I don't see that as a problem, just reality.
I don't think companies want younger guys because they are cheaper, they are aware they are less productive, esp in the long run, so it's the same deal for them to hire an experienced guy for 120k vs one or two young guys for 70k each (just an example, I don't live in the US).
But... two things...
One of them, inexperienced devs _may_ have a hidden cost in the long run, but for public companies there is no long run, there's only next quarter, and the managers kpi related bonuses. So, costs you won't look at, they don't exist.
The second one, inexperienced guys are inexperienced, so you can get away with paying a lot less than _their_ already lower worth. Also, they will work extra hours for free, will study stuff in their time, not company time. They will travel for free, so as to know new places. They will ask for less money out of lack of experience, and because they value other stuff like getting experience and contacts.
This means that you have to pay an older guy his worth, and you get younger guys at a discount on their already lower value, with no extra cost. Maybe mentoring kids into asking for that they are worth will make them better negotiators, and a little less desirable?
I work with several 20-30 year olds who can't code for shit. And a few of them graduated from Stanford. I'm not really seeing the benefit of hiring young people other than their low pay and ability to work crazy hours.
I'm 70 and I've been working in the computer industry for 49 years, the last 28 years in Silicon Valley. These days I work for a very large company and I manage projects and architect solutions. I enjoy my job immensely and I've never had a day of unemployment.
9 months ago I announced my intention to retire at age 70, at my wife's request. My manager's reaction was to ask if I could stay (with a salary increase) until they found someone to replace me. Two weeks ago I told him I would definitely be leaving when I hit 71.
I'm not even the oldest person I know in the company. There's a well respected QA engineer who is 74 right now.
I guess some companies in Silicon Valley actually do value the ability to get projects completed on time, and without fuss or drama.
gen x and y
Ah, the generations alternatively known as the screw up generations: Gen X — alternatively referred to as the “slipstream generation”, the “slacker generation” or the “MTV generation”....
MBAs
You are aware that the majority of MBA's walking around are from those 2 exact generations right?
Please tell us some more....
Race and sex *are* protected classes. If there's any evidence of this policy you've got a potentially lucrative lawsuit on your hands.
The headline implies "Silicon Valley" is trying to fix some diversity issue. Who is the submitter referring to by "Silicon Valley"? Maybe there is a group or two of self-proclaimed activists, but I don't see that they represent Silicon Valley.
I can see lots of reasonable explanations -- older people have more experience and demand higher salaries, older people have more life commitments and are less likely to work "epic hours", and maybe even older people have higher health care costs even.
I'm curious how the average age of managers relates to this. As humans, we're raised by adults -- people usually 20 or more years older than us and for the better part of the first 20-25 years of our life, ALL of our authority figures are people older than us. Historically, hiring and promotion practices have meant that managers and more senior employees were also older than the people they managed, even if this got somewhat blurred past age 40 or so.
I wonder if at a given company if you have a lot of senior managers in their early-mid 30s if there's not something intimidating, awkward or socially uncomfortable for a manager to be managing someone who psychologically somehow represents an authority figure to you. I can believe some manager in their early 30s feels like they are the authority figure when dealing with 20-somethings, but when they're dealing with someone in the mid-40s they are dealing with someone where that kind of natural authority is just lacking.
And I can believe it works the other way around -- it can be awkward working for someone who is much younger than you. Seldom are they gifted or experienced enough to avoid the mistakes someone more experienced -- not just in work, but in life -- wouldn't make. And it can create real friction to have that gap -- the manager hates being second guessed, and the employee resents extra work that's a byproduct of inexperience, especially when proffered advice is ignored because a manager is trying to flex their authority.
I wonder if maybe this isn't the real source of the problem.
Younger people working longer hours is only true for so many years.
I think the optimal age for people willing to put in lots of hours is under 28 and over 45. In between people are raising their kids which takes a tremendous amount of time and attention (school functions, doctor's appts, etc).
Once the kids are in college, the older employee can focus more on work again.
Yep, and being in academia won't save you either. You are over the hill and close to pushing up daisies if you are not a star by age 30 and bringing in your own salary plus that of your lab's workers.
I've forgotten more than you have learned...
I see you try and re-invent the wheel when we have perfectly good wheels that you could use, only because YOU think you can do it better, and want your own wheel
I see you scoff an fellow employees who literally have decades more experience than you
I see you work 12+ hours a day, because you haven't learned how to balance work with life and haven't learned how to work smarter vs. harder
I see you come into a new job, and the very first thing you do is trash the previous coder's work, and submit git commits that break existing code before fully understanding WHY that one line of seemingly 'do-nothing' code was there.
And the worst thing, I see in you, myself at a younger age. We need to stop the inherent age discrimination that occurs in IT. We are practitioners of craft, one that can take decades to master. If you are young, look at those who have gone before you, and get to know them. Know that they have encountered everything you are likely going to encounter, and learn from them. We of the older generation can also share our craft, do not be afraid of those who are coming up, they can help you see new perspectives. We are all in this together, and it is the end-user that is the most important, not us.
And for peats sake, go watch Star Wars. You won't understand my 'force' references if you don't have the context. And no, watching the robot chicken or family guy version DOES NOT COUNT.
he government has specific age-bias laws in place which prohibit hiring/firing on the basis of age. It is against the law. And yet, SV gets away with it on a massive scale. They will do mass layoffs where virtually everyone laid off is over 30. I have seen this myself.
Just so anyone who supposes that the 1% actually have to abide by laws the 99% pass can revise their views They're completely and flagrantly lawless whenever they feel like it, and they're not afraid of the government.
While we are generalising, we can also talk about how those 'experienced' always seem to know better and refuse to do what they are asked unless it's done their way.
Yes, younger people can have their issues, but then again, so do the older ones.
And if you mix the two, you can leverage the advantages of both and reduce the overall predominance of any one issue. But why do that when the only real goal is to hack out stuff fast and cheap?
....
three separate groups of people:
1 - 'borderline retarded lazy-assed millennials'
2 - 'non-engineering MBAs'
3 - 'gen x and y engineers'
I don't see any overlap there.
I know that not everyone reading this is a fan of labor unions, and there have been a lot of corrupt, failed, and ineffective unions out there. All of that said, software engineers would be better off if they had some sort of collective bargaining option and representation (which may be more of a "lightweight union" like the Screen Actors' Guild). The tech barons (the VCs and their puppet CEOs called "founders") know this and the original purpose for driving out the older engineers was to prevent unionization. The pampered, socially awkward, and privileged (if disempowered) 25-year-olds who work in tech companies don't have the organizational skills or the credibility that would enable them to start unions, but older engineers could. That was the original reason to drive them out: a terror in the Valley that some sort of collective bargaining arrangement would form, ending the resource-extraction bonanza surrounding self-undervaluing talent. Most of the ageism is superficially about something else. Open plan offices and "Agile"/Scrum became big due to ageism-- older programmers, even if they're very competent, can't stand that nonsense-- but now they're about "culture", whatever the fuck that is supposed to be. Mostly, "culture" is about keeping the young male quixotry machine going, by driving out the people who might threaten it. This also means that the VC-funded startups are designed to run on large teams of mediocre programmers instead of the "10x" very good ones (who powered the first wave of startups in the 1980s and early '90s) who tend to be older and harder to manipulate.
If you quit on your own terms and took a break for a few months to do something worthwhile, you have a lot less of a problem picking up where you left off. When asked why you left your last job, immediately indicate it was your choice to do so (even if it wasn't exactly a choice), and then explain what you did besides immediately start looking for a job.
At my last job, I ran into issues with my boss. We both agreed it'd be better if I quit. (No employment insurance that way, but I retained positive rehire status, which is more important than people realize.) So I quit, and took the summer off. I published a book on Kindle, and when that inevitably didn't make me an overnight millionaire, I started applying for jobs. I got an interview by the second application, and framed the terms of ending my previous employment as, "My boss and I both agreed the position really wasn't what I had expected it to be. So I took a break, and pursued my dream of publishing a novel. Now that I've done that, I'm ready to get back to work."
On the topic of matching requirements - match them in the cover letter with the qualifier of "I may not have (x) but I do have (yz)" - (x) will get picked up by the HR scanning software, and get it in front of a pair of human eyeballs. Which is really all you need to get an interview if NOBODY has all the qualifications.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Every generation loves to label the others as absolute shit.
So which one are you?
We want to be sure to sling the right insults and slurs your way.
"am 30 and what is this"
You probably already have a grey hair, Gramps, but for the next ten years you will still be able to get away with surreptitious dye rinses every few weeks. Save pension money now.
"only"?
Why do people put up with this? Is this really what you want to be thinking about on your deathbed?
My god you're an unidentifiable cowardly little snivelling in the shadows WAGESLAVE jerk.
* :)
(See subject..)
My time is nearly COMPLETELY my own - how about you? Not...
Your downmod of this post PROVES I really "got to you" (nothing does like the truth) last time I posted it here http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
APK
P.S.=> So please - Keep on getting PLAYED (you're only playing yourself), & keep on working 60-80 hr. work weeks making your masters RICHER while they pay you peanuts for what's REALLY BEING MADE (& you're the ones making it really, not your 'bosses') & while you piss away the most valuable thing there is - your youth & LIFE/TIME, fool... lol, "it's 'noble work' you're doing" (fool)... apk
Rest assured, unemployment will continue to rise in the future. There is no going back.
Computers, Software and Robotics will increase "productivity" to the point to where less and less people, be they in the US or anywhere else, will be left without a job or an income.
You can guarantee "think tanks" are thinking about this right now.
How will First World society function when there is 20% unemployment? 50%?
Especially in a Social Darwinist society like the US?
Answer:
It Won't
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
If you quit on your own terms and took a break for a few months to do something worthwhile, you have a lot less of a problem picking up where you left off. When asked why you left your last job, immediately indicate it was your choice to do so (even if it wasn't exactly a choice), and then explain what you did besides immediately start looking for a job.
Somehow, you got an interview.
How can one do that if you can't even get an interview? These days applications are done on the Web and they all get screened. And then you hear nothing back. There is no opportunity to explain anything.
That's the problem: when you are out of work, you can't even get an interview; let alone explain why you are out of work.
And as a side note, I did the volunteering in IT no less! and even wrote code and put it up on GitHub. Made no difference at all. And looking at the GitHub stats, no one even looked at it.
The rest of your advice is well known and has been tried and does not work.
Shhh... Your ruining his narrative.
Grow some balls and stand up for your rights, like these guys:
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2...
http://dailycaller.com/2014/08...
http://blogs.lawyers.com/2013/...
Cheap storage VM.
So, your still putting 45 to 50 hours into a 40 hour workweek...
Man up and admit you can do the job in 7.5 to 8 hours a day.
Cheap storage VM.
I'm a hiring manager. I try to look at candidates without bias (which is hard because I am inclined to root for the older guys given their underdog status). When I selected an older worker to advance in the interview process I got my hand slapped. I was told, "we want younger workers ... not younger workers age-wise, but younger workers". I can't rule out there was something legitimate there (e.g. open to fresh thinking, etc), but probably not. I also see a lot of discrimination from individual contributors also. The younger devs don't seem to want to work with older coders, and I think they are very foolish this way because it is perfectly clear to me that they are very likely to reach that age some day unless they get Darwin'd.
But, yeah, age-discrimination is very really in SW.
I'm 58. Yes, most kids consider me over-the-hill. Luckily, I recently got picked up by a company that values experience more than youthful exuberance. I've been in the IT field since the mid-80's and worked with most hardware platforms. All that said, I can fully understand why companies want younger employees. When I was 35, I could not forget something if I tried. I was able to take in a ton of information, pass it through that huge pattern recognition engine called my brain, and spit out a small handful of possible fixes to any IT problem. Not anymore. My memory isn't anything like it was. In order to commit something to memory now, I have to practice it and reinforce it multiple times. I'm no longer able to multi-task, although I was never really good at it. If given the chance to focus in on an issue, I can still solve it in a reasonable amount of time. So, I can understand why employers want younger people.
you wear a hidden microphone. Surely there is a lawyer willing to work with you to squeeze this mf's for every dollar they have.
know better and refuse to do what they are asked unless it's done their way.
only because that other way won't work and/or is not maintainable
Race and sex *are* protected classes. If there's any evidence of this policy you've got a potentially lucrative lawsuit on your hands.
Not if you are white and male. "Positive discrimination" as it is called is not only legal, it is often legally mandated in many places.
I would also like to pile on the generalizing bandwagon, and say that the code that old people *think* is maintainable is not. The fact that they refuse to learn or use any new technologies causes them to think that any code that uses them is unmaintainable (because they don't know how), and that their code is maintainable because it follows best practices from the 80's.
I lunch with some of my HP friends. Now they're saying v "no one who the note than two year's experience".
Another way to age discriminate.
Back. No one with more than two year's experience.
I'm old, but I started working without a degree and finally finished a bachelor's in '08, so I look relatively young, but the jokes on them. I was 30 when I graduated. Still, as long as I pluck the few gray hairs that pop up people still think I'm late 20s. I think the fact that I workout constantly and don't have a gut helps. Protip: That "dad gut" aka beer belly makes you look old and lazy. Hit the gym.
Gen Y is the millennial generation lol. The name changed somewhere along the way.
Always the case, the best developers can decompose a problem and come up with a simple solution because they can fit the entire problem in their head, understand it and lay out a well organized logical approach the minimizes code and encapsulates the complexity. They'll write a 1000 lines of very simple looking code and maybe have a few exceeding cleaver lines as well as an organized structure that makes life easy, the elegance is there and not transparent. Age is irrelevant I've know 50-60 years who are really good and 15 year olds who are good, if you can code , you can code, age, sex, creed, or race aside.
Yeah, because Carly Fiorina really though about what was going to happen to HP five years down the line?
VW emission cheating scandal would not have happened in a programming team including women and older folks. They would have said "sure this may get us great bonus now, but we might get caught 5 years down the line, and what would that do to our families?". Current business culture rewards short term gains and irresponsibility to customers and shareholders. As computers become more central to immediately life and death tecnologies like IOT and self driving cars, I think the balance will shift.
In the meantime, a great automaker and its thousands of employees are ruined because they didn't put mature, responsible people in charge of a project.
'Cause we all know that women and older men are NEVER greedy and short-sighted, right?
By that logic a company making products for women shouldn't hire men at all.
You've just described Mary Kay Cosmetics...
Not just the tech sector. Ain't nobody trying to fix this anywhere.
Twinstiq, game news
I was 19 in 1987 interning at a government lab when I was told that if you don't hit it big by the time your 27, it's over. I decided then not to go into academia. Sure there are exceptions, but I was betting I wasn't one of them. At least the corporate world gives you an extra dozen years.
One benefit of a young workforce is that intimidation, gaming, and aggressive negotiation can force them to accept salary and benefit packages below market, below skill levels, and even below what is the norm for their gender. The only reason that Silicon Valley does it is the same reason any business does anything - there is strong fiscal advantage to it. There is strong fiscal advantage to slavery - thus the H1b, the foreign engineer as slave in the "land of the free". Sad. Very sad.
which may be more of a "lightweight union" like the Screen Actors' Guild
I don't think you understand the whole SAG union stance in on the closed-shop issue (aka global rule one)...
"No SAG-AFTRA member shall work as an actor or make an agreement to work as an actor for any producer who has not executed a basic minimum agreement with the union which is in full force and effect. This provision applies worldwide."
This means once you join, you will *NOT* work for a non-union shop as long as you are a member. This includes independent, low-budget, pilot, experimental, non-profit, interactive, educational, student, or ANY production, unless that producer has signed a Contract or Letter of Agreement with SAG-AFTRA. Conversely, producers generally need to sign that they *exclusively* use union members (some exceptions are made to avoid Taft-Hartley for some specialized performers such as famous people portraying themselves or roles that require specialized skills like real operating equipment on-screen for documentaries)
I don't this this is the best example of a "lightweight union"...
that a lot of hiring managers have and that make it more difficult for certain class of people. And once the stereotype exist any problem employee in any of those classes just reinforce the stereotypes. There are ways to help but the most effective and the most brutal way is a quota system. Does your employees reflect the surrounding population. If not find out why. Then implement procedures to fix it.
I don't. I started working as a self-taught programmer (age 16 or so), got a degree in engineering (BS&MS) did some gigs as freelancer (before/during/after) studying. Did an Internship working with IBM mainframes. I worked for a company writing (mostly) embedded software. It was programming very close to the metal and working together with the HW people. I worked as an instructor for a college. After a few years I got bored. I joined a PhD program in my late 20's. I designed coprocessor chips. I worked on a CAD system that automated part of chip design. Did some theory, published in STOC, SODA etc. I was invited by a recipient of a Turing Award to do a 2yr post doc in his lab. I did some nanotech research there. I wrote software that ran on one of the fastest clusters on earth.
Then I tried to go back to industry in my late 30's because of a combination of personal and professional reasons. Summarizing 3 interviews at 3 tech giants:
One was for a help desk position. Somehow a head hunter matched me with that job. I turned it down.
In another one they mentioned that they had to be very careful with someone as senior as I. They did not call me. I would learn later that my PhD was a disadvantage as it would have forced them me to pay me more. Also, my impression is that they were looking for a code monkey.
During the third one I also got a comment about the risk of hiring very senior people, while pointing at my balding head. Did not hear from them again.
I ended up working for a startup (for entry-level money) after the strangest interview I have witnessed, but that is another story.
FF in time, I got fed up, sent A SINGLE email and I got a job in academy. Money is not abscena but more than decent. Luckily I came to work with smart and nice people. Life is not perfect but close enough ;-). The market decided. If the tech industry cannot find a use for a person who has shown proficiency in fields ranging from very hands on hw/assembly development to pretty abstract math and comes with a letter of recommendation written by a Turing award guy.... then something is seriously fucked up with them. In my 20's with much less experience I was turning down jobs. 10 years later, after much studying and showing that I am well above average I had problems finding work???
If someone thinks I'm bitter, I just have to say that (probably) except money-wise, my life is better than what it would have been if I had been hired. Yet I'm a home-owner and debt-free, so I can't complain. My only gripe with my work is that it's only intellectually rewarding. It feels like solving a glorified Sudoku. I doubt it will make anyone's life better. But, as I said before, the market has spoken.
Posted as AC to avoid further deterioration of my employability.
Ive been through a few interviews; do great over the phone, pass their tests.. then walk into the company.. no one on the team over the age of 35; i literally see their faces drop; and i dont get the job..
I would chalk it up to coincidence but this has happened 20 or 30 times now..
going to be homeless soon.. and considering ending my life .. so sick of interviewing, doing well over the phone and not getting the job..
In academia it's not age but time since Ph.D. I'm 3 years into being an assistant professor and my industry experience has been nothing but helpful at this job. However there seems to be sometimes a negative attitude about people who got their Ph.D. a long time ago but didn't work in academia. That being said, there were some schools I applied to that seemed biased against my industry experience although my age didn't appear to be a factor.
I've heard that kind of questioning back even when I was in my early 40's, in multiple interviews. IT runs in dog-years or something.
Companies often don't value experience because they cannot "see" the benefits of it. Most of the managers are short-term thinkers and the 60-hour code-monkey mentality gets you quicker short-term results in the latest IT fad.
However, if you care about 5 years out or more, than experience can make a huge difference. I started pointing that out in interviews and gave examples. Some didn't seem to care, and those are probably managers who expect to be promoted etc. within 5 years and don't give a fudge about the long term.
But some did seem to care, especially those burnt by hit-and-run coding/design.
The US corporate world is generally a short-term world, for good or bad, and in that environment, experience is not as valued. That's just the way it is.
Table-ized A.I.
Don't believe everything you read on Breitbart.
Mandatory workplace cosplay casual
What are you clucks gunna do when you've run out of causes to champion? Legalized gay marriage.. But oh no! Now we gotta do something to get the trannies properly integrated! Make sure workforces are properly diversified! Awwww now we are running low on causes Jim Bob... I got it! We need to do something about the elderly being picked on! But fuck.. What next? Necrophiliacs certainly don't get a good rap! Next up... The Martians. Blah blah blah
Open plan offices were designed to save space and money - some places they got each employee down to 10 square meters (L shaped desks), or even down to 2 square meters (basic rectangular office desk + chair), with desks side-by-side, face-to-face row after row for a whole building.
Closed plan offices had the problem that being able to move between different rooms became a seniority perk.
Agile/Scrum came into play because project managers could just create a flurry of tasks, throw them at the programmers and some programmers would just claim to have implemented the task, but #ifdef'ed out the code, put in chicken bits that bypassed the code, any other bypass scheme, and then run off to the next company once they ended up having to get their own code working. Other times, a set of constraints may have built up that prevented any further tasks to be completed "oh, we'd like this software encryption scheme to be ten times as secure, but run in half the time, and use one third of the memory currently in use, and have it finished in a week".
Stuff I did: Wrote a lengthy, personalized cover letter that included every key word in their list of required and preferred qualifications (even if it was to say I didn't have it.) Kept my actual resume 100% honest and truthful, but also included all the key words I did have. HR software scans both resume and cover letter. Did my homework and gushed over the software project and how exciting and cool it sounded (it is, in fact, exciting and cool and I'm happy to be here.)
I think the biggest plus, though, was that I didn't have to relocate. Already living 20 minutes away didn't hurt at all.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I DECLARE MISOGYNY!!!!!!
Your bias is noted.
Ok grandpa. The nasty old programmer will stay off your lawn.
> It's called 'leading from behind'
"Topping from the bottom."
If that's in writing English, you'd fit right in. Nigger.
This story is getting old.
When my brother-in-law's employer was acquired by Google not too long ago, he found himself in the peculiar position of having more seniority than the number of years that Google has existed. He's not the oldest one there, he's quick to point out: there's another guy he knows (also acquired in the take-over) who's older. Although he reports no discrimination based on his age, he's commented wryly about being one of a very scarce population there: people over 50.
MCSE Windows NT 3.51 4.0 Not much call for it. No I am not about to get any new certs the old ones were not worth shit. Perhaps a Main Frame Console Operator, I know I can babysit your Frame Relay network. Out of date skills and well I am just more inclined to go fishing then give a shit about the next computer crap, that is going to offer good pay for a very short time then zip. I loved the newspaper ads remember those? I guess you dont, but any NT 100.00 per hour was great. Computers were great when they were something you tinkered with I dont like buying crap on line and even fry's is pitiful these days. No one makes a laptop that is not craptastic now days. Your hand held computers I mean phones are pretty cool for whipper snappers. But I still use Long Plays and a turn table if you dont know what that is ask your grand dad. The job other than survival is nonsense I no longer accumulate things as I cant take not one of them with me. Down sizing you have to throw most of your stuff away as no one want what you spent a life time getting money to buy. Funny not really.
What are these kids going to do in ten years when the tables are turned? Pathetic.
Liberals only care about the color of skin, not the age of it. Nor the character of the person is adorns. Only the color, nothing else matters. A wealth black child, who goes to an ivy league school, and get's a six figure job right out of college, gets more opportunities in life than any poor white kid growing up in crime ridden neighborhood. White? No scholarship for you, no matter how poor your vanilla ass is. Black? Wealthy? Grow up a good hood? BOOM, here's a several hundred thousand dollars for Yale. You're black, life must have been tough while growing up the son of a doctor and lawyer!
Welcome to liberal land, USA - Color means all, status means shit.
What an excellent comment. I'm out of mod points else I would +1 it to give it more visibility. Good statements of the way it is, with the consideration that it's a balance, that it's a two-way street. No-one likes arrogance; I've seen it, I've done it. I've try to reduce it in myself and I see others try too. It helps.
. I work with kids straight out of college. First off, half the time they are goofing off playing ping pong, pool, or board games. The other half, they are throwing code together that kind of works but will never be maintainable.
Three recommendations:
1) Fix your hiring process.
- Out of college has no bearing here - these are crappy candidates that should never have given thumbs up to hire.
- I'd recommend getting personally involved with your team's interview / hiring process - you seem to have a good handle on what's needed out of a candidate.
2) Fix your development process.
- Out of college has no bearing here - if you write crappy code that is not maintainable we fully expect a senior developer to reject it.
- Do it often enough we'll find somebody else who can learn from their mistakes and get it done right.
3) Fix your mentoring process.
- Out of college does have a bearing here - they need more of it initially than somebody seasoned.
- Spend the time with them and they'll become an asset - not a liability.
While there is age discrimination, there's 2 other things that probably matter as much.
First, people burn out in Software Engineering. Its rewarding, and extremely high paying, but the barrier for entry is low (you don't need a master or a PhD, and in many cases, you don't need a degree at all lately), and the job is hard. That means a lot of exit. This is a bit different from, let say, a doctor, who did a PhD...not something they'll walk away from at the drop of a hat.
Second, its a field where you need to keep your skills up to date. Some of it is just stupid hypes, but some things genuinely get revisited, and the commonly accepted "best way of doing things" change. If you don't keep up to date, you die.
Put those 2 things together, and no matter what, you'll have a steady attrition, much faster than in other fields, keeping the average age down. And well, the push to "bring more people in IT" means the input of new software eng today is a lot higher than the input a couple of years ago, so yet another reason you'd have more younger devs.
Good luck with that. White men never actually win these kinds of lawsuits. In practice it's perfectly legal for companies to hire only women or only non-Asian minorities because of "diversity" or some other crock.
What happens to all engineers as they get older and need to move up? You always need more junior engineers vs senior. There is need for only so many mentors/senior engineers/leads/etc. at some point u move up technically, move the management chain, make your own company, or do something else. It is very rare that a 20+ coder does the job of the collage grad and is ok with the low salary.
Btw. I'm in the older what is next category.
My company is almost all over 40 (40-60s) with only a few (10%) younger. We're a startup so we can't afford to hire kids who haven't made mistakes yet. If other companies don't want smart, experienced people it simply leaves more for us and makes it easier for us to compete with them.
Posting anonymously becasue age discrimination is legitimately illegal in both directions.
I would also like to pile on the generalizing bandwagon, and say that the code that old people *think* is maintainable is not. The fact that they refuse to learn or use any new technologies causes them to think that any code that uses them is unmaintainable (because they don't know how), and that their code is maintainable because it follows best practices from the 80's.
Yes, you are generalizing & IMO incorrectly so.
In my experience older developers (incl me) do not "refuse to learn or use any new technologies". However, they will probably be more skeptical about them than some younger folks. This is a *good thing*.
That said, I think we can all agree that Mongo DB is Webscale. :-)
You don't know what a protected class is.
Race is a protected class, period. You can't discriminate on the basis of race, regardless of whether it's black, white, etc.
Gender is a protected class, period. You can't discriminate on the basis of gender, regardless of male or female and in some states transgender.
In some states, sexual orientation is a protected class, period. You can't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, be it gay, bi, straight, etc.
If your buddy's boss actually said that, then I would expect HP to get hit with a discrimination suit any day now. He should probably turn his boss in, if it's actually true.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Then why work? What is the point?
Your post makes being homeless and dying sound better than working.
My first, in-your-face (which I respect) experience with age discrimination was jarring. On paper and on a follow-up phone conversation with the founder/CEO, everything went great. He did everything, short of offering me a job sight unseen, to convince me, I would like working at his cutting edge company. I was all but certain, I would be starting a new job within days, that is, until I walked into their swanky loft-office. As soon as he saw me, I knew, the deal was off. To his credit, he said to me, " i thought you were young". Until then it never occurred to me, my age was a problem. I considered myself technically as capable and as competent as any of them, and I had the work experience and professional certifications to probe it. The founder offered me an alternative, to work as their sales and marketing manager, which he thought I would be great at. I was willing to consider his offer, had it not been a 100 percent commission job.
A couple of years later, I had another in your face "you are too old to work here" experience. This time, it was with a fortune 100 company. Again, the moment the IT hiring manager showed up to welcome me, I knew the deal was over. He did all but call me pops. Now when one is an African American, as I am, it becomes even more daunting to get a job, regardless of your technical qualifications, once you hit your 40's. I am not pissed, neither do i feel sense of entitlement, but such assumptions, that one's age is relevant to doing a job, must be challenged. To be fair, in general, I find it easier to relate to a younger person than an older person - this is based on years of experience.
hahaha disregard that, I suck cocks!!!!!
APK
Cite the law then. If it's legal and legally mandated - in the US - then you should have no problem what so ever backing that claim up.
If you're talking about countries outside the US, then I don't really care.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Mothers advice: Never go grey at work.
Yes discrimination is rife, but exploitable people on visas are the first picks, especially if overtime will be 'free'. I believe the younger set believe the time quality cost triangle does not exist, and their client will eat the dog-fooded outcome/code placed before their noses.
Lets be honest - E-Lancing is the future, but the not so funny thing is most companies have lost the ability to recognize and acquire real talent when it pops up. I am grey, and know whatever Java VB and cooked up interface will be obsolete in 10 years, paying blackmail support costs. So nice knowing that even Indians get replaced by freshers, and Indians over 33 are over the hill too.
See subject - ... Form of flattery. Same old, same old when I dust a troll, in off-topic b.s., failed ad hominem attacks, & "impersonating" me, & failing it.
* "Imititation IS the sincerest form of flattery"...
(However, your WEAK mind is like a paper rose - mere imitation!)
APK
P.S.=> You STILL wish you were me - trying to BE me only proves it moreso... apk
See subject: Imitation's the sincerest form of flattery. You fail it. Same old, same old when I dust a troll:
* Off-topic b.s., failed ad hominem attacks, & "impersonating" me, & failing it... lmao!
(However, your WEAK mind is like a paper rose - mere imitation!)
APK
P.S.=> You STILL wish you were me - Your NOW trying to BE me only proves it moreso-> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... ... apk
Many people are too blind to nuances to make proper use of their experience. I've seen it where we needed a new SAN device for a data warehouse. We told them specifically that sequential performance is more important than random access. What did they get? Some $200k high IOPs device that has great multi-LUN performance and poor few large LUN sequential access performance.
People miss-use best practices all the time because they don't understand the "Why" aspect.