Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Have You Experienced Ageism? (observer.com)
Friday the Huffington Post wrote that "Ageism runs rampant through Silicon Valley, where older workers are frequently overlooked for jobs." They ran tips from the man who recruited Tim Cook for Apple, who pointed out that it's difficult and expensive to recruit new talent, urging businesses to "stop seeing workforce diversity as a good deed; it's good business."
And earlier this month The Observer ran an article by Dan Lyons, a writer for HBO's "Silicon Valley," who shared his perspective on ageism from his time at HubSpot. Their CEO actively cultivated an age imbalance, bragging that he was "trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y'ers," because, "in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated."
Meanwhile, Slashdot reader OffTheLip writes: Information technology is a young business in comparison to many other industries but one of the few where older workers are not valued for their institutional knowledge... As a recently retired techie I experienced this firsthand, both as an older worker, and earlier in my career [as] one who didn't see the value in older workers. As Lyons states, older workers are good business.
What are your thoughts? And have you experienced ageism?
Meanwhile, Slashdot reader OffTheLip writes: Information technology is a young business in comparison to many other industries but one of the few where older workers are not valued for their institutional knowledge... As a recently retired techie I experienced this firsthand, both as an older worker, and earlier in my career [as] one who didn't see the value in older workers. As Lyons states, older workers are good business.
What are your thoughts? And have you experienced ageism?
With the amount of angry whitebeards inhabiting /., we can expect a totally calm and reasonable discussion of the topic.
It's a shit deal for workers if you find yourself unable to find a job for something as stupid as age. And if "companies can be free to do what they want" is going to let them continue to get away with abusing workers - then they shouldn't feign surprise when those workers join together and fight back.
we all KNOW this is a problem.
we all know h1b is a problem.
but the place where it needs to be discussed - the national stage of public opinion, perhaps prompted by news coverage (crickets chirping sound heard) - it is NOT discussed. its swept under the rug.
I'm in the bay area, I'm over 50 and I've been a sw/hw guy since my teens. I'm currently out of work, looking, and its been dead for months, for me, so far. this is typical and usual, sad to say, and I have a little more time left before I'm empty and near bankruptcy again. yet again. I don't know if I'll ever see reliable employment in tech ever again.
I have tons of experience and a great resume. but I'm older, white, male, independant and aware of management's BS; and I guess ALL of that is out of favor for hiring prospects.
I really wish this was made more visible to non-geeks. taking to geeks is not useful, about this, as we all know about it already.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
While I'm sure some small number of companies may in fact try to hire a younger crowd, why would I want to work there anyway? A big part of the reason a company is usually doing that is either to pay less or work people much more, or a combination of both...
The large majority of companies I've seen have older workers, are totally fine with middle age and older technical staff. So a few companies who take age into account do not hurt job prospects.
A big pat of success for me personally has been keeping ahead of technical trends, and making sure not to fall into some pit of technology you cannot escape from and do not enjoy. if you enjoy technical work the keeping up to date is fun and the enthusiasm for your work shows. It also helps a lot to respect co-workers and be someone others enjoy working with, instead of just tolerating.
Another reason why it should be LESS hard as an older worker to find work is the connections and friends you make over the years. That's by far the best way to find jobs anyway, and building up good connections over years is less hard for traditionally more withdrawn technical people than cold-starting a relationship with someone in a company you are trying to hire into.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
in fact I work with a lot of people past retirement age who are usually offered a lot of money to keep working. In some (maybe not so cutting edge where real money is made and results matter) industries, experience is valuable.
I have hired over-40 programmers who were rockstars, and some over-40 workers who just could not deliver.
Age is just one variable among many, but people obsess over it because it is easier to ballpark someone's age in an interview than it is to get a read on other indicators of talent.
The biggest problem is that over-40 workers are universally more expensive than the 20's workers. They all want to jump in at the senior level, and feel justified in this based on their experience. This makes them a bigger risk to take, and ultimately more expensive if they don't pan out.
On the other hand, too much investment in kids results in software that works upfront but absolutely does not scale, and winds up full of ticking time bombs.
You will be. If you're lucky enough.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
well, my friend
(turns on yoda voice)
you will be. you *WILL* be.
(/voice)
think long and hard about it. while you dance today, tomorrow will be different.
and that thought actually gives me delight. the SOB bastards that are fucking me and my kind over right now; they'll soon experience it and while I won't be there to laugh, I'll laugh now in advance.
HA!
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
> Their CEO actively cultivated an age imbalance, bragging that he was "trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y'ers," because, "in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated."
Translation : young people have little to no idea about their true value and I can exploit them with shitty options, bad contracts and bonuses because I can sell them on some startup dream a hell of a lot easier than I can trick someone who has 'been there, done that.'
Am 51, and for the last decade I've experience some, yes. The most overt was for a Bay Area startup position that was going swimmingly until I did a Skype with the (much younger) DoE, and he saw I was "old". (Guess he couldn't read a resume.) But the more annoying ageism is a general assumption by some of the kids that if there is a difference of opinion on an engineering question, it's because the old guy is clinging to his anachronistic ways. Version control? Testing? Even a one-page design doc? Don't be such an old fuddy duddy!! :-)
It has its plusses, though. As an old guy, you realize that there's serious money to be made cleaning up after the kids. And experience can often tell you which projects are sure failures, which can save working on something hopeless for a year.
Is it ageism when I turn down work because the company wants my experience but is only willing to pay the price of a someone straight out of college?
But yes ..I have experienced ageism in a former company. I once worked for a company that had a president like the mentioned HubSpot CEO. Me and 3 other middle career hires once sat around with dropped jaws during one company meeting when he gushed over hiring people straight out of college because then he could "shape" them into the perfect company workers. Where as he couldn't do that with older hires. Apparently us older workers with all our experience were outright trouble makers.
Fortunately I was only at that place for 6 months.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'll show you ageism, you little shits. If I have to get out of this chair, somebody's gonna cry.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because, well, after a burn-out from working 80+ hours at a software shop I really never recovered and everybody I talked to had like, ew, burnout. And of course: No recent for-pay experience? Then no chance for you!
I can see you are young. you think its about SPECIFIC SKILLS.
lol
its not. a good guy in C can get any job done, really. c++ guy, java guy, whatever. this insistance on specific domain knowledge IS THE PROBLEM!
we used to have people who knew how to code and would learn the specifics on the job. that worked and it can still work, but companies are spoiled fucking rotten and they have had too much specific selection for too long. they now only want narrow skills and you can't keep chasing that and stay employed. there are too many things that come and go for you to retrain on specifics like that and still be effective.
your view is part of the problem! you really do seem to think that its 'old skills' that is the problem. I guarantee you that even if I had the latest 'skilz' that the grads leave school with, today, that will still not be enough. I demand a salary that is higher than theirs and companies refuse to pay unless they absolutely have to. they generally talk themselves into paying younger kids, for all the reasons mentioned in all the threads, here.
its not about skills. that argument does not hold water if you have been in the industry long enough.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Older people don't like the unpaid OT and end less 60-80 hour weeks so that is a black flag to HR / PHB.
Discrimination on the basis of age is a federal crime. But just try to prove it. I once applied for a position as a design engineer. When the owner of the company came out of his office to interview me, the first words out of his mouth were "I advertised for an engineer, not an engineering manager!" I did not get the job. On the other hand, my resume is golden, at least in the area where I live. I still was hired by a company after I had turned 65. Six years later, I still get inquiries.
Not without being a mind-reader.
I do know that after a long and very successful career I took two years off to deal with health issues with one of my kids (now happily resolved) and thereafter as an over-50 engineer with an employment gap I was pretty much unemployable.
My experiences in the interviews I got suggest something subtly different than ageism -- at least of the sort that believes older engineers can't do the work. I'd meet with a bunch of people and everyone would seem excited and enthusiastic about my background... except the hiring manager. Whomever I was going to work for would seem distinctly colder, as if they'd decided I wasn't going to get the job before they even met me.
I think what's going on is that people don't like the idea of supervising someone who is older and highly experienced. Maybe they think a more experienced worker would be less cooperative. Or maybe they were afraid we'd be angling for their job. I don't think, given my resume, that anyone believed I couldn't do the work. They just doubted my word that I really wanted the job because of my experience.
Is that ageism?
I think it's very common for more experienced engineers who've reached the point where they've been doing engineering management to want to get back down and dirty, only to be frustrated by the fact that nobody wants you for that kind of work at your age. You hear it a lot -- I enjoyed being a project leader or program manager, it was rewarding and I'm glad I did it, but now I want to get back to the stuff that brought me into the field in the first place. Except once you've taken any kind of senior position nobody wants you for grunt work anymore, even if you've been armpit-deep in engineering on a day-to-day basis.
Is that ageism?
I dunno. But it does suck.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There a lot of tech pro's who don't want to deal with / are not that good all doing all of the Management work and just want to do tech work.
I've experienced the bias against older tech workers. I've also seen the results of that bias: work that would've gotten a failing grade even in the college courses I took, let alone at some of my employers. There's a considerable advantage to having been there, done that, can see how current problems match previously encountered problems and what methods already exist to solve them. To give an extreme example, traditional Web applications (most logic on the server, Javascript in the client is used primarily for input validation and display formatting) mirror very closely the flow of ancient 3270 workstation "green-screen" applications: the server sends a block of display and validation instructions to the client, the user enters the data without interacting with the server, the client sends the completed form back to the server as a single block for processing. The same flow held for the forms applications I build for DEC VAX/VMS in the 80s. And many of the tricks developed to maintain session data across requests for web application are the same tricks we used for the same purpose way back when. I can see the same pendulum swing at work as well: 3270 workstations gave way to interactive terminals (where the application could directly interact with the user), which gave way to forms applications, which gave way to thick clients (PC applications that accessed remote servers via various protocols), which in turn gave way to Web applications, which are now giving way to thick clients again (this time Javascript framework applications running in the browser accessing remote servers via XML/JSON and RESTful interfaces). That perspective gives me a big advantage in knowing where to go for things that already exist and have had all the kinks thoroughly worked out that I can apply to the current problem, rather than having to work solutions out from first principles or copy-and-paste code from StackOverflow as a black box as many of the younger developers do.
Most of the bias I attribute to a mistaken belief that "old" = "unable/unwilling to learn". Some of that belief probably comes as a reaction to the normal skepticism older people have to the latest "silver bullet" sales hype. We've seen those fail to live up to the hype time and time again, someone who's only been in the business 5 years and who hasn't maintained a single application through many update cycles hasn't gotten the first-hand experience with the fallout. It's not that the shiny new tech isn't good, but the salesman is probably over-promising to try and seal the deal and I'd prefer to find the gotchas in a test project rather than by having production fall over.
I am over 50, I live and work in Silicon Valley, and I have never personally experienced ageism. By the time someone is my age, they should have plenty of experience, be able to apply old tricks to new technologies, and have deep and wide professional network. If I was looking for a new job (I am not), I could easily tap old friends and coworkers, and have several offers within a day or two. If an old person is trying to find a job using Craigslist, Dice, etc. then that means they have no network, or don't think their old coworkers would recommend them, because they are unproductive. That is not "ageism", it is "unproductivism".
serious money to be made cleaning up after the kids.
YES!!! There's also serious money to be made in the support of 40 year old technology running on critical systems whose documentation was lost years ago.`
Just look no further than slashdot. All these young whippersnappers with 7 digit slashdot user id numbers are taking over the place.
Some places are run by people who just want a pool of young ass to pull from or easily intimidated people to boss around. So unless you are the flavor they like and in your early twenties you are not going to get hired. Nor would probably want to work at that company.
After leaving the military the only ageism I get is "you want a job?! Oh thank God I don't have to deal with another fucktard kid that can't bother to show up on time, dress and look professional, follow instructions, and follow up on taskers. Yes oh yes please come work for me."
If you are competent and look the role (not as a dusty over weight fart) you will have no shortage of employment, doesn't matter how old you are.
There is an element of truth to that, but at the same time the older work tends to get more done in 20 hours than the younger ones do in 60. Of course the reward of getting your work done is usually more work, but the older worker is less likely to put up with that sort of bullshit even with a big jump in pay.
Yes, I have experienced it, and it's not just the tech field. ;)
A little ranting about the value of experience is below. Feel free to ignore it.
Though at my previous tech job, I was the secret asset. If a techie had a problem they couldn't solve, they were required to go to the help desk and were forbidden to the senior techs about it. (New and relatively young manager had foolish ideas.) After the helpdesk was unable to help, they'd come by my cube to 'chat'. Usually had an answer for them in a minute or two, or at least a few things to test out to isolate the issue. It's not just that I had more experience with the software than they did, but I also understood a LOT more of how the machine functions as I'd started fooling with computers all the way back in the early 80s. That's not to say that knowing machine language for a 6502 processor is directly applicable, but rather knowing the intimate details of how a computer actually does it's work will allow you a certain insight into the operations of any computer that someone who grew up in a gui world just doesn't get. The greater understanding and experience employing that allows for greatly enhanced options for approaching an issue. The others really didn't like it if I couldn't solve an issue because that almost always guaranteed it was getting kicked to the devs.
a good guy in C can get any job done,
Domain knowledge is sometimes more important than coding ability. Some industries, domain knowledge can take years, even decades, to acquire.
They are not the only friends I have. But yes in fact I DO want to the people I work with to be friends at some level. The people in the group I work with currently I spend almost zero time with outside of work yet I consider them friends on some level, and enjoy spending time with them - a good thing too as the people you work with you'll spend far more time with than most "real" friends.
Business today does hiring based on money.
HA HA HA HA HA HO HE HAHA HO....
That was hilarious. You should go on stage with that act. The things business does daily are so remote from real monetary concerns as to be laughable. It certainly does not come into play when hiring technical people as most businesses are simply DESPERATE (and I do not use that word lightly) to find someone responsible who knows what they are even doing.
There are probably a few businesses that hire because "cheap labor" but as I said why would you even want to work there? Such businesses are no fun, and more importantly they will not be around that long anyway so you'd just have to find new work. That's why the few places that are so short sighted simply do not matter in terms of *my* ability to find work, which is what the main article is about (older experienced workers ability to find work).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When the only metric management has to fall back on, due to their own lack of domain-specific expertise, is resume-speak, what can you expect?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Ageism doesn't exist? Bullshit
I can tell you from my personal experience that the amount of effort that I could put forward as a forty year old is much less than at twenty year old. OTOH, I can do much more even better than I could at twenty with less work. This is not because I am twenty years older, but because I spent twenty years getting better. Some people do that, many people don't and coast along
I'm in the bay area... I'm over 50 and I've been a sw/hw guy since my teens. I'm currently out of work
Get a grip on reality - that is to say, you are NOT LIVING IN IT.
Move anywhere outside and you can find work, and a good life...
The "Bay Area" is an aberration that wrongly colors of discussions around issues. It's a reason why theres such a furor over diversity in tech hiring, because the "Bay Area" is filled with a lot more drama than you will find in any workplace outside.
That said even in the "Bay Area" I know plenty of older SW workers who are quite happily working across a number of companies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Recruiters like it when you shave you beard for interviews in the midwest. They do, they really like it. They prefer if you do it. They can't tell you that you have to do it anymore, but they still very strongly prefer it. I've always felt kind of awkward without a beard. So, one day, about five years ago, and just as my beard started going gray, I stopped doing it. It's idiotic to change your appearance in this way, especially when it's a dishonest representation of what you actually look like most of the time.
I've always had a good resume, I get compliments on it all the time from clients and recruiters alike. The only people that dislike the way I write a resume are college guidance counselors, and people poisoned by their terrible advice, but they're few and far between. So all things considered, that factor in this equation has not changed. But since I've been growing the beard both longer and grayer, the number of successful interviews I've had has gone up. And the way I've been treated on the job has changed, dramatically. Bear in mind that the type of roles I go for hasn't changed since I was 25. I like coding. I intend to continue doing it.
People are more respectful. They ask me for my insights more often. I'm treated like an eccentric code sage, and that's absolutely fine with me. Even when I fly out to work in places like California or Seattle, this does not seem to change. I can only think of one instance where this decision has worked against me. One interview for a very hostile publishing company a few years ago, where they made it a point to ask me how often I keep up with new things, where they refused to believe that I read more books every year than their CEO. That said, I think that one would probably have went poorly no matter what I looked like.
I don't mind being older than my coworkers or project managers.
I don't mind taking orders from people younger than me. This isn't my trip in life.
I'm just there to make better stuff, solve more interesting problems, and keep myself challenged intellectually.
My biggest problem is boredom, so I've learned to be pickier in selecting my assignments.
Getting older, and reaching middle age isn't a bad thing.
You just have to know how to sell it.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
In bargaining, you can always lower your price - you can't raise it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I can't even get an interview. Last year I hacked off the first 15 years of experience off my resume in an attempt to get an interview, no joy.
For 30 years I had no trouble getting a job. Now that I'm past the magic 50 I'm toxic.
Not at Google, Microsoft, FB, Amazon and other top tier companies. They hire so much, they can't afford to age-discriminate even if they wanted to. Which they don't.
It's a disaster waiting to happen.
I'm almost in my 50s and I've constantly experienced ageism. It's easy for people to point fingers and say if you're competent you'll get any job no matter what - that would come from people with endless network contacts, but if you're mobile - and have to find new networks all the time then it's not THAT easy because believe it or not - most HR and Recruitment centres ignore you if they see 40+ in your CV. They don't even bother to read it after that, you won't even be contacted.
And this is a freaking catastrophe - because at least Sweden (and Scandinavia) where I live, the government have decided that we're LIVING LONGER all the time and pushes the retirement age up towards 67 - 70yo because the society can't afford to support the pensioners that keep living longer and longer, we're expected to reach 100 nowadays, if your retirement happens when you're 60 years - this means we've got to support you for 40+ more years, no society can afford that.
But you do the Math: Ageism = companies want them younger and younger - Government expect us to live longer and longer = extreme poverty above 40 to you're 70 if you make it that far.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
That's basically my feeling on it also, and I'm mid-40's. Too many people stagnate naturally, or end up (or stay too long) in jobs that don't provide any avenue for technical growth. I built my skills on a foundation of solid Unix/Linux admin at financial places, but have also done 4 startups, picked up solid Network skills along the way, etc.
The biggest problem I've seen is young jocks wanting to use "buzzword technology" just for the sake of using them, even if it adds complexity for no gain, and then seasoned people get viewed as "old school" for using tried-and-true tech.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I am guilty of ageism: I prefer to work with older people.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The last time I worked a 9-5, my coworkers used the think I discriminated against older applicants. I said I didn't like when people stopped learning. I was lightly involved in hiring decisions from a technical perspective, mostly "what's your opinion?" kind of stuff. My coworker's opinion was partially because I never recommended hiring someone over 50. Then, I did. I HIGHLY recommended one applicant that appeared to be very old, and his college dates showed that he had to be old, or have started college before he was 10. Everyone questioned me. They said "What's up Brian? I thought you didn't like old people?" and I responded:
This applicant never stopped learning. I can look through his resume - the list of technologies, projects, and jobs he's had, and he never stopped learning. I told you my problem was with ossified people that stop learning. It's impossible to be that way when you're young, but a lot of older people have had the change to chill out, relax, and do a job for 10 years without learning anything new. That is what I discriminate against, people that stop learning*.
Then they believed me and stopped worrying about getting sued because of my obnoxious opinions.
* May not be exactly what I said, i.e. not for use in a court of (employment) law.
This echoes something I usually see in engineering. One can have all the engineering resume stuff, but that ability to get down and dirty with a new problem cannot be taught, it can only be earned, and it generally requires a good bit of domain knowledge. Those people are definitely worth their price.
I work for a university doing IT and as with most universities, you see a big mix of ages. We have everything from students up to people in their 80s (I'm 35). The most common problem I see with older workers is the lack of willingness to keep up with new tech. IT, development, or any computer field progresses fast, of course. If you are going to be effective, you have to be open to learning new things all the time and changing how you do things. Some older workers have a lot of trouble with that. They act like things should be how they were 10 or 20 years ago, and still try and do things the same way. It leads to inefficient solutions, and inability to effectively help users with problems they have with new tech.
While I'm sure there is legitimate ageism, since there are people who will discriminate, on purpose or not, against all kinds of things, I think some of it is just older workers having a common problem that doesn't gel well with technical work. I personally have zero care about someone's age, what I care about is when someone is trying to do stupid shit from 10 years ago and refusing to get with the times.
I think I read once where it takes about 20,000 hours to become an expert in a field. Some disciplines of engineering encompass more than one area of expertise. I remember one problem that was solved in two days by one of these 5k/day consultants that a dozen people hadn't solved in two months because they'd run across a similar problem a decades earlier while working on something completely unrelated.
I know this is far from Silicon Valley, but I work with a significant amount of grey hair within my company and alongside our clients. It's not that hard to build a kick-ass profile, working within open source if the job is stagnant, and writing articles. You can't coast in a stagnant job and then jump jobs, not because of age, but because of stale skills. I'm over 50 and the date of my degree makes that obvious, but my skillset is in very high demand. Obviously, I have to continually retrain like a 22-yo or that will change in a couple years tops.
I am 58, but look 15 years younger (partly genetics I guess, but I also lift weights and so am pretty buff - I can beat anyone in my company in push-ups and arm-wrestling). In my most recent job hunt (last year), I experienced what I think is age discrimination for the first time - having an interview with a start-up that went really well I thought, but then got an rejection with the explanation that I would not "fit into a start-up environment" (I had worked start-ups in the earlier tech boom though). But then I got an offer from a start-up a few weeks later, where I am currently working.
I dropped my first decade of experience off my resume years ago, as I thought it was not obviously relevant to the modern tech industry, and harmful in dating me, and so I also do not list my Bachelors graduation dates. I was fortunate to earn my Masters, and do PhD work, mid-career, so that I do list those dates on my resume, making me look more than a decade younger on paper (which is not then exposed upon meeting me since I look like my implied age).
I am concerned though, because I need to work until I am 70 to collect my full SS income, and build up a decent retirement account. The drain of a child with cancer for many years, before she died, and a wife that had serious health issues and an emotional breakdown during that same period set me well behind financially. (A lot of obviously young, and so far lucky, posters here make it sound like saving for retirement is always a piece of cake, and anyone who has trouble preparing is just stupid and lazy; but bad things can happen in life through no fault of yours that can really hurt your savings - there is no safety net to help you out). I am not sure how long my apparent youthfulness will hold out, and whether the industry will become even more intolerant of age. I just need 12 more years though.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
... gray hair and experience are really overrated.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have been working in technology for over 20 years. I see the same thing over and over. There is the oracle dba who fought for years to keep the primary servers all Sun. Then one day not only is the switch made to linux, but much to his shock one or more data stores were deployed with new projects. Radical things like MariaDB. Then the same guy is screaming mad that he isn't being consulted on database schemas saying that some junior programmer will just expose their clients to all kinds of pain without him.
But what happens is that all his attempts to stay with the old result in his not being invited onto the big billing projects. So as the ever shortening list of Oracle customers dries up, so do his billable hours.
Then another guy down the hall, the exact same age has just made a crazy contribution to redis because of his hard core C skills. Thus he has blended his old school C skills with his passion for a more recent and awesome technology. Oddly enough this second guy is fought over by the various projects as his contributions are relevant, and also don't come with any smell of arrogance.
Weeks after the Oracle guy is let go when the last project finally went away, the GM privately passes some of Oracle guy's emails on to the redis guy not only arguing that redis is a pile of shit, but that by contributing to a project he is revealing proprietary customer code and that the customer should be warned as to the risks of this and open source in general.
Sound hypothetical? Nope, real life example. I could find other guys who have done the same but you can cross out Oracle with Novell, MSDN, IBM, etc. I can remember in the early 2000s waving my arms in more than one meeting saying, "We can buy 20 whitebox linux machines for the price of one Sun machine, plus when the customer finds out what their database licensing costs are going to be for a database with a few thousand rows they are going to freak. Let's go open source on that as well." In the above there would be Sun certified guys arguing that Linux and whitebox machines working in a cluster were so fantastically unreliable that we were crossing the line into fraud to deploy them on clients. This would be when our own statistics showed a long term failure rate that was pretty much identical between the two. Then these same guys would eventually give up this battle but then move onto an argument about switching from perl to PHP because perl was a "proven" language.
I don't think that is is caused by age so much as by aging skills. I suspect a 50 year old who got into programming today would use modern tools in modern ways, but in 10 years would have a roughly equal chance of then being 10 years out of date as some 30 year old would have after 10 years of programming.
My personal example is that I work with C++ (which is pretty old school for many) but I know quite a few C++ programmers my age who don't even like vectors yelling that they are a performance hazard and cover up to much of what happens under the hood. I am not 100% modern C++ and haven't even generally stuck to the latest and greatest. But my code does require C++11 compilers to function in the slightest.
Know this: If you make me a fair offer that matches the position and I do take it, I won't gripe about the wages I agree to and I will work hard so you will want to promote me to a position where you can take advantage of what I have to bring to the table.
That was my strategy too for the first half of my career, and it worked out well. I often got promotions and pay raises fairly quickly.
My experience in the last 15 years has turned that view around. In the positions I have held since then, "promotions" come without significant salary increase (inflation is low, but your "merit" increases barely keep up with it, if you are lucky). I have found that it is virtually impossible to get a real pay increase on the job now. The last time I got one from an employer I literally had to take another job, then get hired back - which is when my pay went up.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Face it, 100% of the "entrepeneurs" want to project a "young and vibrant" image
and an ounce of Image is worth a ton of performance.
So, Mr. Greybeard, find a new career, along with the other 115,000 former Engineers who "aged out" after 2008
So clearly he never worked 75+ hour weeks on a normal work basis, like everyone else in the industry.
With school requiring > 30 hours week, no one is "always learning" in any formal way
As an older worker with considerable skills, it was hard to even get an interview stateside, but overseas in Asia, they recognized my value and were more than willing to not only hire me, but pay well for what I brought to the table. In the US, older workers are made to feel like dirt. In Asia, they respect age.
There have been very few "new things" in the last 30 years.
New coding technology these days is kind of like bathing in dirty water. It's all the same dirt, just in moved around to different places.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
""in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated." "
Translation...
Older employees don't take shit from management happily as readily as the young ones do. Younger employees are a lot easier to abuse so we should have more of them.
Older employees, it's your duty to show the young guys they are being underpaid and abused so they tell management to fuck off and find different jobs. the more we educate the youngsters on how to not be abused the better it is for everyone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In bargaining, you can always lower your price - you can't raise it.
That isn't always true... many times yes, but not always...
HubSpot isn't a Silicon Valley company, they are an MIT spinout in Cambridge, MA.
And if they think Gen-Y employees are better than people with experience, good for them; let them succeed or fail by their credo. There are lots of other jobs.
Think about it: would you want to work for a jerk who only hired you to fill a quota but is secretly deeply prejudiced against you? What chance do you think you'll have for advancement in such a company? Would you really want to work in order to help someone like that get rich? I think it's much better when bigots come out of their closets and voluntarily state their prejudices publicly.
Know this: If you make me a fair offer that matches the position and I do take it, I won't gripe about the wages I agree to and I will work hard so you will want to promote me to a position where you can take advantage of what I have to bring to the table.
Then you would like working for me...
Years ago, I had a bookkeeper, she was in her late 30s, she had about 15 years experience in bookkeeping, HR, payroll, etc. I didn't have tons of money, so offered her a job for $36K, which she took because she needed a job and I needed someone to fill that job.
Within 6 months she already had a raise to $40k. Why? Because she came in and worked hard, never complained, and took on many tasks without being asked to.
At her first annual review, I think she was expecting maybe $42-43k... I gave her a raise to $50k, she about fell out of her chair.
My comment was simply, "you have done far more in the past year than I expected, you have fixed many problems within the company and taken on an office manager's role, while keeping an eye on the overall business. I hired you for a basic bookkeeping and HR position and you've turned it into the officer manager's position while still taking care of the bookkeeping/HR/Payroll."
"If I had to replace you, I have no doubt it would cost me $50k, so you're worth every penny."
---
If you pay people what they are worth to you, rather than the "least you can get away with", then you can have long term employees who grow with the company. Sadly too many companies have forgotten this lesson.
My Grandfather served in WWII, he left the military after that and started at the ground floor in the mailroom of an insurance company. He retired in the 1980s from that same company. His last position? CEO. That doesn't happen anymore, but it should...
By the time someone is my age, they should have plenty of experience, be able to apply old tricks to new technologies, and have deep and wide professional network
Unless you have stayed too long in the same vertical amongst the same small set of players. My problem now is most of the network of people I have worked with, those who I have impressed over the years, have retired or clocked out.
It doesn't help that my skills are dependant on hands-on interaction with the data, code etc, and when it comes to a tag-team of interviewers quizzing me with stupid questions I go semi-autistic like a possum in headlights. Hopefully others who have stayed in IT into their 50's are a little better at giving good impressions and selling themselves. I never had to do the hard-sell before I got old.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
And it's unfortunate that as I've aged, I can't switch focus as quickly, I require more rest and food breaks, my medical expenses have risen drastically, I'm much more likely to have family or friends need me for medical support, I'm also much less willing to move, and I'm less likely to be versed in the latest technologies taught in school because I've focused on the longer lived, familiar tools which I'm paid to support. My chances of dying or being incapacitated for medical reasons has also gone up profoundly: all of those are understandable, though not legally defensible, reasons to prefer a younger employee
I'm also far less willing to be misled by management promises, to buy into management promises of "this is a contract to permanent role" position, to let a manager lie to a customer about our products, or to fail to create a paper trail if someone if someone is cooking the books. And I've enough of a name in my chosen technology fields to be taken seriously and "call shenanigans" on personally profitable but fundamentally foolish technology decisions. Some managers really do not appreciate technology personnel with enough experience to question their particular "big picture".
Conversely, younger workers are more likely to melt down or switch career paths unexpectedly, especially if they marry. It's illegal in many states to take the possibility of pregnancy into account for hiring, but it's a constant factor for employing young women. And younger technology workers are usually on the upward path of their career, likely to seek more income and more responsibility. They're also more likely to be caught up with the latest exciting technology fad. My personal list of once exciting but now discarded technologies includes Rust, SysV UNIX, BeOS, R, DOS, and Usenet.
Wait, WHAT? I'm curious. How is a Sun guy thinking that MariaDB is "radical"? Considering MariaDB is a fork of MySQL, a Sun project, forked by the very founder of MySQL himself, in essence it IS the original Sun guys keeping it alive after the Oracle acquisition. If anything, the switch to MariaDB should have been a godsend for that old Sun guy!
The biggest problem I've seen is young jocks wanting to use "buzzword technology" just for the sake of using them
Free advice: Pick your battles carefully, and avoid being overly negative. Instead, point out the drawbacks of new-fangelism, and make constructive suggestions. If your organization is, say, going with JavaScript so everything will be "cross-platform", then go with the flow, but suggest a framework/library that is actually cross-platform, familiarize yourself with JS static analysis tools like JSHint and Closure, and become the expert in on-device debugging (notoriously hard with JS). You won't be the high-flying trapeze artist, but you will be the guy with the safety net.
More free advice: Don't ever, EVER say "I told you so", no matter how tempting it may be.
I'm about to turn 41 and have been working in tech since I was 24. To my knowledge I have never experienced ageism.
Posting AC. My current job doesn't care, because they just need people who know what they are doing.
However, I've had previous interviews where I was asked if I would grow a full beard and wear flannel so I can "fit in the team" (once I realized I can't stand the place, I mentioned that the reason I don't bother growing a full mane is that gas masks don't seal over facial hair, which befuddled them greatly), or have been overtly called a "fossil" because I didn't put my whole life on social media, or been told, "find a mainframe shop, pops" when I mentioned the security ramifications of "just put it in Docker", or "move it to OpenStack."
Ageism is out there. I would say post 40, you have to be -exceptional- to be able to find any work. A 20-something with far fewer skills will always get the position before you every time, especially if the person is an H-1B, because of the payroll tax advantage.
My current job is computer security in government IT. When the nation-wide team got assembled two years ago, many were hired based on resumes with 10 to 20 years of IT experience. The youngest in my work group is 33, most of us are in our 40's, and the oldest is 66. As for the local facility I'm assigned at, I'm one of the youngest grey beards in the IT department.
Education investment has a payback timeline that only justifies learning a skill if it commands a salary premium long enough to amortize the $0/hr sunk cost of acquisition.
Sorry, but if you don't find learning new things interesting in its own right and do so regardless of potential "payback", you are SO in the wrong industry.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh, you wanted details. I'm 66, have been a computer programmer since 1972 and have worked at fortune 500 firms (ATT Bell Labs, Intel) and startups (5 people firms you've never heard of through VA Linux - the dot com bubble, good memories). Sorry but whether I've been the youngest or the oldest person in the department I've always been treated as an engineer, age has had no impact.
Admittedly, I work in a relatively small niche (Unix/Linux kernel programmer) that might have some small part in why this hadn't been an issue.
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
Not only that, ageism is mandated by law. I wanted to earn money when I was 10 years old, and it was forbidden.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I find it hard to find people who are reasonably competent in C though. Some of them are baffled why I waste time putting in "const" (I'm not makign that up). People with experience in it often are using a 70s era understanding of it, people without experience I spend too much time training them.
Domain is useful, but I agree there's too much emphasis on it. But experience is useful. Do they understand device drivers of any kind, multi-tasking, real time operating systems, or anything please other than Linux or Windows middleware. I want to know if I'm going to waste my own time doing half of the new hire's job.
Ok, so software engineering is a fairly recent field (or rather, it's recent that it's so "big"...but even in absolute, it's more recent than, let say, law, finance or construction. My orders of magnitudes).
Now, the first big influx of tech worker was pre-dotcom crash, when anyone who knew basic HTML could get a job (we're seeing some signs of that lately as it's happening again, but that's a different topic). Then the bubble crashed...all the tech workers at the bottom of the barel had to switch career, leaving only a small fraction. That weeded out most of the people that today would be 40+
In early 2000s, going in CS wasn't exactly the prestigious career path (because of said dotcom crash). Anyone who went to college then would be around 32-35ish depending on the date range you're looking at and how much education they had. And there wasn't that many.
My wife went to college after that, and it still wasn't a big craze. She's now just over 30.
It's after that it started booming, and it keeps growing and growing. So most of the people available would be 30.
During that time, some percentage of people figure out it's not for them, move to management, etc. That means you have very few older workers left.
On the portion that's left, in a field that changes all the time, you really have 2 groups: older workers who kept up to date, and because of experience, are now Principal Engineers, Architects, Tech leads, etc. And you have those who didnt, or forgot the strong fundamentals that are making a come back (eg: functional programming), refuse to pick it up, etc. Those are becoming less and less employable.
Obviously I don't have any statistics, but as someone who entered the field right before the dotcom crash, that's roughly what I've seen. Essentially, there just can't be that many mediocre or above older workers. And things changed so much in the last 15 years or so, that having 20+ years of experience is just not gonna give you that much unless you're doing lead/architecture/management, and there's only so many positions for those roles (plus, getting the right architect with the right company is hard).
All around, while there's totally some age discrimination, even without it things probably wouldn't be very different.
I'm going to assume you are willing to move.
I'm going to assume you are willing to pay for my relocation. If not, then you aren't serious.
As an old guy, you realize that there's serious money to be made cleaning up after the kids.
My first IT job was a Token Ring to Ethernet conversion project. A real simple job of removing the coaxial cable from between the Token Ring card and the wall plug, plugging in the Ethernet cable between the motherboard port and the wall, and testing the video app that required the extra bandwidth. We had 300 systems. I took 150 on one side, the two fresh out of high school kids took 150 on the other side. When I started overlapping the computers that they did and noticed that the video app didn't work, I checked the cable connection. The kids plugged the Ethernet cable into the Token Ring card that uses either coaxial or twisted pair cabling and not the motherboard port. Because they didn't test the video app, they never found their mistake. All the computers they touched were like that, and none of the computers in the offices were touched. The worse part was that the project let them go for the night without checking their work.
I made an extra four hours in OT that night for cleaning up after the kids. Whenever I get hired on a new job, I look for a mess to clean up. That's where the real money lies.
I don't think it is quite Ageism exactly. I think it is the nature of the interview. Most interviews consist of coding exercises and if you can do them fast and accurately in your head, you look like a genius. Younger guys can blaze through this stuff and make it look like a piece of cake. Older guys just take longer and they look like they don't know what they're doing. I could swear that I answered all these questions in interviews correctly before. But now as I am seeing them again, it is taking me longer to solve them as I am getting older.
I also wonder about crystallized vs fluid intelligence. I think older guys have a harder time thinking outside the box than younger people. Lots of interview questions tend toward this kind of thinking.
I was thinking of retiring there when I got to about 110 (:-))
Instead I was asked to do a gig replacing for my old director until we chose a permanent replacement, and then went back to a true engineering gig at a very "young" start-up.
In my opinion, old and smart still works. Everything I learned in Simula and Concurrent Pascal applies to Java and the modern scripting languages. I had expected my new, younger, colleagues to be rocket scientists on objects. Nope: the smart folks are smart (Hi, Muhammad!), and the ordinary folks are ordinary.
Some places thing young is good, but old guys do well. Some places think old guys are good, but young guy do well (Hi, Sesh!)
Keep learning and have fun. You'll die before you run out of fun things to learn. P.--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
The dick hole director of engineering hadn't even seen my resume. I look young for my age, so all he had to go on was my face and my answers to his fluff-filled personality questions. The "paired programming" exercise I did with a different engineer (who also hadn't seen my resume) used a different set of libraries than what I'm familiar with, so there was no chance to come off as an expert. The bulk of my interviews had been with the guy who was going to be my boss, who loved me, and met my salary expectations, but after the two dipshits who hadn't seen my resume, the verdict came back that I was "intermediate" level, and they were substantially below both my other offers.
I told the recruiters to sincerely tell the old bastard to go fuck himself. And egg his car.
A shame, as the problem that HR types don't understand that the quality of work falls off as the hours go up. 50 hours is not a problem but 60+ hours can only be done for a week or two at a time before quality falls off and the extra time actually results in less usable output. The older employees know this, the younger ones have to learn it the hard way while the HR types only capture data on hours, not productivity.
Is it ageism when the interviewer remarks "You're a little old" during the interview? This happened to me when I was 40 and still had hair, none of it gray. No offer was forthcoming, but the place didn't rate very highly from my perspective, either. And then there was the letter I received recently from EEO investigating a complaint about a company that hadn't bothered to have me come in after the phone interview despite my having all of the skills they seemed to be seeking.
Now I work for a small company where I am probably the oldest employee., but we all get along well, and I'm having the time of my life.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
A good post. As a mature employee I think we can, to some extent, be broken in to two groups. Those who learnt a technology and have stuck with that for most of their career and those who keep on learning. When looking for new employment the former group will have trouble and will be tempted to blame ageism. The later group will get further, depending on how much real Ageism there actually is.
Don't ever, EVER say "I told you so", no matter how tempting it may be.
At a large semiconductor company, where we are enjoying a huge layoff (the axe falls Monday, when you will know your employment status), lots of people are saying "I told you so". I told you so - for the management that thought skipping validation would draw TTM in. I told you so - for the architects who thought a home built internal bus standard would serve us well. I told you so - for the idjits who thought IP requirements flow from customer to IP creator, rather than from standard to both IP creator and IP customer. I told you so - for the management that thought they could save money by putting half a team on the other side of the world where pay is less.
I've worked for an organization that specifically mentioned that they would prefer someone younger (20's), but at the same time they want someone with a Ph.D and 20 years of experience. -= Insert swearing here =-
The smarter places I've worked for realize that hiring experienced personnel that want to learn new things won't need to start with computer 101.
As an older employee, you can't rest on your past accomplishments. You need to respect all ages on your team, and focus on delivering future accomplishments commensurate with your salary. For example if you're getting paid 2x as much as some kid or H1B you better deliver 2x too.
This is especially rampant among staffing/recruiter companies. JobRivet, for example, if you apply on their site and they find out you're over 30, suddenly your profile disappears shortly after being approved.
And many places that you could work at use this site EXPLICITLY to avoid being directly involved in age discrimination. El Torito is one of them.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...was for being too young.
Crawling my way up the corporate food chain, while outperforming people not only 10-20 years my senior, but with 10-20 years more "experience", was a long slog.
Now that I'm the guy with the 10-20 years more experience, I'm noticing that my peers who have been around for the same amount of time, with the same "years of experience" have not really gotten better over the years. Some plateau at around 2 years, in, others at 5 years, but very, very few continue to grow at any appreciable rate.
The big problem here is that there just isn't enough spread in the typical salary ranges to adequately compensate people based on their productivity. Typical rates run from 80k/year to 160k/year, so you can theoretically pay someone for doing twice as much work with twice as much pay, but very often, you've got a small cadre of folks who provide 10x or even 20x the productivity of their colleagues. None of them are making 800k, or 1.6m/year.
Yes. Programming is one of the few fields were more than a decade of experience is considered a negative. At my job they are looking for reasons to fire old programmers. They write them up, give them a NI (Need Improvement) and then fire them. These are people who have being working for decades and never had a bad review. Now the older workers are getting them all of the time.
I suspect it is a bigger issue in the USA than other counties partly for cultural reasons. In the US more emphasis is put on looking after yourself and becoming independent at a younger age. The flip side of this is less respect for age and experience. I'm a 50+ Kiwi and I worked in China for a couple of years. I was the oldest employee there by a decade or two and I was managing a team of young engineers. I enjoyed it, they were respectful of my experience so I was able to effectively mentor them, and they were glad of the chance to learn stuff not taught at University.
Now I am back in NZ where we have a selection of both young and old employees. It works well. We older folk respect the education and enthusiasm of the young ones and they respect our experience. The company fosters a culture helping your coworkers so the young ones seek advise when needed and we mentor them. We trust that they generally know what they are doing so don't push our views unless asked. There is no us and them attitude as the culture is one of getting ahead by getting results as a team, not by shafting your coworkers. I suspect that attitude is lacking Silicon Valley?
The biggest challenge I find in getting a job is finding an employer who can afford the extra cost of the salary I expect for my experience and in that respect the young ones do have an advantage, but to call that Ageism is a bit unfair.
Am 51, and for the last decade I've experience some, yes. The most overt was for a Bay Area startup position that was going swimmingly until I did a Skype with the (much younger) DoE, and he saw I was "old". (Guess he couldn't read a resume.) But the more annoying ageism is a general assumption by some of the kids that if there is a difference of opinion on an engineering question, it's because the old guy is clinging to his anachronistic ways. Version control? Testing? Even a one-page design doc? Don't be such an old fuddy duddy!! :-)
It has its plusses, though. As an old guy, you realize that there's serious money to be made cleaning up after the kids. And experience can often tell you which projects are sure failures, which can save working on something hopeless for a year.
Interesting. I spend most of my time cleaning up after the old guys who set up their systems and code back in the 90's and can't for the life of them understand why any of it should be rebuilt/replaced/repaired. If I had a nickle for every script with hard coded IP's and passwords in it I could have retired in my 20's.
If this group of senior-level devs is so unproductive, why does management continue to pay them?
Also, if you really are coding solid solutions but are not getting recognition ($$$) for it, you should be marketing your skills to other employers.
I'm 40 which I can't decide if it's old or not in this industry. I generally feel quite young among my peers.
To be honest, I agree with you with the exception of with my Asbergers "friends". I have worked with some of the most exceptional minds in computational mathematics and physics over the years and to be fair, these guys are genuinely unmarketable. They are the best people at what they do and they work extremely hard and for the most part diligently and make miracles happen in code. Companies around the world are desperate for their skills and talents. But they need to work the job they got when they graduated the university until they retire or they're screwed.
I know of at least three of these guys living on unemployment (maybe for the rest of their lives) because they are utterly unable to communicate with anyone with an IQ under 170 (I use the term IQ just to have some numerical reference... I just mean really really good at solving puzzles). It's not because they check IQ cards or they black list people because their IQs are too low. It's because they actually are medically incapable of being interested in holding an interest in communicating with anyone who doesn't provide "valuable input" to solving their puzzles. They have absolute focus on problem solving and have absolutely no interest in the outside world. These are real life Sheldons x10. I had a conversation with one the other night who displayed a very unusual level of emotion and excitement since his roommate (a girl with severe communication issues... crippled by fear of other people) had taught him to use a vacuum cleaner properly. He'll probably vacuum that apartment 16 times a day for three weeks.
I honestly never have any problems finding work in this business and my age has had absolutely no impact other than positive. I do recall having major problems with age when I was in my teens and early 20's. At 40, people simply assume that I know what I'm doing.
Man,woman,elderly, dog.. if it can work well enough and most importantly, work well enough with the team you currently have, that's all you need.
We have the opposite problem. I think 40 is the youngest programmer on our staff of about 10 people who are programming. I have jokingly told lots of people that my skills are so out of date that they are back in demand. I think it is similar with COBOL programmers. My skills aren't really out of date, they just aren't the "sexy" jobs in languages most people think of. I like my job and the people I work with and we get a lot of work done that drives a thriving business.
Not that we take any old "old" person. We just had a 60 year old on a 60 day "try and buy" and he couldn't stay awake - blamed it on medication. He did a lousy job also so didn't even last the full 60 days. We find it hard to find anyone qualified and the ones we do try aren't young. None the less, it is a great platform.
I was once told by a recruiter that the employer chose not to select me because they didn't believe that I could have had the experience that I claimed to given my young age.
Networking is key (I'm in my late 40s). I changed jobs last year and went to work for someone that I've known for 20+ years now, working along side someone else that I've known for 15 years. When you can tap your network like that, you bypass HR and your resume (or LinkedIn profile) lands on the right desk to get you hired.
It's one of the things I tell young collage-age kids. They need to pay attention to their social networks in college and build them and continue to expand them into their 20s and 30s. Because those connections will be what gets you good job after good job in your 30s and 40s and 50s.
(I don't care if you do it by hand, or do it via a tool like LinkedIn. But you must cultivate those contacts unless you want to find yourself in a dead-end job in your 40s.)
> My problem now is most of the network of people I have worked with, those who I have impressed over the years, have retired or clocked out.
That started happening to me 20 years ago.
Nobody will ever know if your suggestions would have led to a better situation or to a total nightmare. Unless you find a way to run parallel universes to compare the actual outcome of forks in the road, your "told you so" is worth nothing, it just makes you look shortsighted and petty.
Taking credit for "good decisions" that were not taken is like being proud of your daughter's Nobel Prize before you even fucked her mom for the first time.
lucm, indeed.
Those sorts of mistakes could just as easily be made by somebody straight out of school. The problem is not the age of the people in question, but rather that only one set of eyes ever looked at the code in question....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Have *you* experienced ageism.
case1: You experienced ageism
(yes) -> relate story
(no)-> exit
----
Yes, I've experienced ageism.
It started in 1985 when I saw good programmers unable to find work once they reached 45 to 50 years of age. I realized we had strong ageism in IT.
It continued in the Y2K 2000 layoffs when I again saw many good older programmers unable to find work while younger programmers with the same skill sets were able to find work. In one hilariously bad example, I recommended one dye their hair. They did. And they were hired at the next job.
It continued again when I was passing resume's of highly skilled programmers to INFOSYS and they *required* the high school graduation date on resumes even when the person had years of great experience and recent college degrees. See, they were calculating the person's age since people graduate from college at various ages but they almost all graduate highschool at age 18.
And it continued after H1B labor replaced united states citizen workers (who were forced to train them) at SYSCO FOODS corporation. Those who were young were able to find jobs. Many of those who were as young as 48 too much longer to find jobs or never found work in the field again so far. The skill sets of the younger and older workers were very similar.
And it's happened blatantly here on Slashdot many times-- the worse being in the discussion on Google's age discrimination against the 40 year old female they recruited 4 times only to turn down once they saw how old she was.. 4 times. In that discussion, young people said flatly "But old people won't fit with our youth culture". Let's do some word substitution there for shits and giggles.. "But women won't fit with our male culture"... "But blacks won't fit with our white culture"... Do I even need to ask if you see my point?
----
In 2009, the supreme court absolutely gutted our age discrimination protection. Age discrimination has increased steadily since then.
What I never understand is that *everyone* gets older. I saw that when I was 24 back in 1985 just starting in IT and as a result I saved very hard and retired at 51. Funny story tho-- they laid me off 1 Day before I was going to give 30 days notice for my retirement, so I got close to $40,000 severance plus unemployment. The senior director never knew why I was so happy and when she asked why I was happy I told her that I really couldn't tell her for legal reasons.
Oh.. P.P.S. Sysco's project using indians from infosys recently failed at a cost of over a billion dollars.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Of course everyone over a certain age in today's corporate culture has experienced ageism. The question is do you realize you've experienced ageism?
Ageism is huge in tech.
What sucks is that most of these whippersnappers can't code their way out of box. They write some bullshit java app that leaks memory, counting on GC, and I could write the same thing in C in half the time, no leaks, and at least 10% faster. But do I even get the opportunity?
Hell no.
Or the sysadmin side... I've built some significant stuff in my career, but management always listens to the young guy- even though I have data and thorough analysis to support my arguments, while the youngsters only have buzzwords and double-speak.
It is maddening.
Any company that outsources workers of any kind (including helpdesk staff, programmers, sysadmins, clerical and admin staff, etc) doesn't value institutional knowledge.
This attitude has been fashionable amongst CEOs for decades - they like to see workers as slot-in replacable production units....and they try extremely hard to try to force reality to fit their model, no matter how much in-their-faces evidence there is to show them that it just doesn't fucking work and costs their companies a fortune every year in re-training and the just plain incompetence of new hires and outsourced "contractors" forced into running small-businesses rather than being employees.
Another thing they ignore is institutional loyalty - most employees have some kind of loyalty to their employer (even if only out of self-interest). Outsourced "contractors" have no such loyalty, they're loyal only to themselves, their pay-cheque, and maybe to the contracting company that pays them and finds work for them.
I used to live and work in the Valley, no more
Now you more likely find me in Asia or Europe or Africa
But regarding the issue of 'ageism' it all depends on how you define it
If it's limited to 'job', then no. The decades of experiences that we've gathered under our belt is no match for those greenies
But if 'ageism' is defined more broadly ... something akin to 'social', then it does affect us, all of us, in one way, or another
Not too many 'greenies' like to be around the 50-somethings, and we need to face the reality as the number of the 50+ like us are decreasing (some died, some retired, some just fade away)
As our social circles start to contract, we begin to feel the effects of 'ageism'
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Have You Experienced Ageism?
...I said to my wife. She loves it when I talk formal.
Oh, wait, didn't have my glasses on. Ageism.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Ageism exists, as I've pointed out here at earlyer occasions - but it works both ways. Some "young punk" won't become senior easyer than me - my age is an advantage here.
People react differently to differently aged people. That's evolution and psychology. And really not that dumb if you think about it. If you're showing grey hair and you come in wearing ragged jeans and a printed sweatshirt people will subconsciously react to you in a different way. That *will* spill over into how they consciously think about you.
I'm in my mid-40ies but come across roughly 5-8 years younger. While I'm well off compared to some wasted people at my age - I ride the bike as main means of transport, I've got 10 years of performing arts under my belt, don't smoke, live frugal, don't drink alcohol and am just 3-5kg above ideal weight which go back to normal after two weeks of consciously eating less. That aside I am quickly moving into senior vibe with my whole physical appearance. Grey hair, increasing baldness and wrinkles coming up on me stronger now, ribcage sinking further, skull shrinking (the main cause for wrinkles btw) ...the whole nine yards.
I have no doubt that I'll run into ageism and that I'll have to deal with it in a change of habbits including the way I dress, move and talk. I'm also pretty confident that that ageism will turn to my advantage if I get myself a tailored suit, some dress-shirts, a few more ties and ajust my speaking to be calmer and a little cooler/low key. It's just last year that I wore a shirt and a tie for the first time. I've also grown a slight hippster-beard in the last half year - the change in reaction towards me is palpable and actually quite positive.
A friend of mine once said: As soon as I'm gettig grey hair in Germany, I'll be getting a suit and become a fraud-schemer. That pretty much hit's the nail on the head on German society.
Bottom line: Modern society is just as tribal as primitives are - and as stupid that may seem for a smart guy like me, it's astonishing how smoothly things go with other people if you play along. Act like people expect a superiour elder to act and you'll do just fine. That's my hope anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm "only" 36, but only now finally coming to a point in life where reverse-ageism isn't so much of a plague anymore. You see, I'm cursed with looking younger than I am. Like, much younger. As in if I shave I can sneak into high school and not look out of place among the kids.
For illustration, the last door-to-door salesman I saw asked me if my parents were home. Also my wedding was briefly interrupted by a nice lady who thought I was underage (I was 30 then). It's been slowing my career for more than a decade now. I'm systematically passed for promotion because I'll "get [my] chance later" apparently. As for leading projects ? It seems people who merely look older than me would object to being managed by someone who is actually older & with more experience but who does not look the part. While working in big corp I got confused for an intern several times (err no sir I'm the on-call engineer who's been maintaining your critical 30M-subscriber services the last couple years).
Fortunately it's happening less often now. I think I'm finally at a point where I look still enough like the "fresh blood" but with the decade+ experience and accumulated references they think they need as justification (or future plausible deniability ?) for hiring anyone.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The youngsters in my department have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for me, mostly because I'm their fucking boss. Heh.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
MariaDB is the anti-Oracle. Oracle bought out MySQL which caused the main creator to flee and fork MySQL into MariaDB. There are three keys to MariaDB that would repulse an Oracle DBA. One is that for most use cases any halfway sane developer can conjure up a good enough schema. This scares the shit out of them. Maybe they could even double the performance if they used their skills, except that doubling 20ms queries isn't really worth much.
Second there is no company behind MariaDB to give grand certifications and otherwise reward people who promote the use of their product.
Lastly, due to the above two situations a MariaDB DBA is usually some guy who has a hundred other responsibilities in maintaining the servers. This is in direct opposition to someone who is solely responsible for just the Oracle database and used to be extremely well paid to do so.
At this point the only use case that I am seeing anymore for Oracle is that some fool is trapped in their ecosystem. There are plenty of MariaDB installs with massive clusters of computers happily handling absurd amounts of data. These are installs in the top 0.1% of storage and data bandwidth. I am hard pressed to even understand why anyone would pay for an Oracle DB at this point with all the fantastic options available. Plus MariaDB doesn't compile on Sun anymore.
One thing about the above Sun guy is that he also chose Sun because he would be one of the few masters of that universe vs all the little rats running around popping up Linux machines like weeds.
I work for a tech consultancy and at 49 am the second oldest of the 15 engineers that work for us. I have professional experience with technologies that are literally dead and buried for all intents and purposes and technical experience with technologies still actively being implemented as new in a lot of small-mid size organizations.
What I find with younger coworkers is a kind of full-throttled enthusiasm for "new' technologies which aren't really all that new, just rehashes from a different vendor of what had been implemented before. Where I'm prone to some cynicism about them, the younger guys see them as new and exciting. I still learn them when appropriate, but I'm far more calculating in what I think is worth climbing the learning curve. Basically I've seen this movie before and I know how it ends.
There's also situational/lifestyle aspects where the younger guys can more easily do the death march out of town projects for 8 days in a row because they have nothing else in their lives, where those are just more difficult for someone married with a 12 year old son and a spouse with a serious professional job.
Where ageism works for me is my employer actively employing me over younger people in more difficult clients or situations where they need some gravitas. Most often the decision makers and management are people MY age, and sending a guy who's 28 in to that situation is a recipe for failure because of reverse ageism -- clients failing to take the younger engineer seriously because of his age. They see me more as a "life peer" -- someone with experience who is capable of relating more closely to them. I've also been in enough tight situations that I can take the heat and know when it's appropriate push back against bad client ideas or expectations.
In that case, I think it's a case of an employer fairly respecting my age and experience.
. . . . the "Cleared" vertical. No H1b's. Heavy on older workers, because it simply wasn't cool (or, admittedly, half as lucrative. . . .) as purely private-sector efforts.
And, face it, getting, and KEEPING a clearance is something of a chore. Not to mention the PII colonoscopy you get every 5 years, aka "clearance re-investigation".
OUR biggest problem is finding ANY qualified people, especially on the latest technologies. Way back when, I started as a Windows and Netware SysAdmin. Evolved significantly, simply because (1) the needs were there, and the people weren't, and (2) what used to take a bunch of people, now can be done by 1-2 journeyman-level people at each site. Nowadays, I'm dual-hatted, vulnerability assessment and software assurance. Being an older guy helps: I've worked Windows from NT 3.51 on, Solaris from 2.5, and Linux from the days when Red Hat came on 3 1/2 inch floppies . . . .
The problem I've noted with the younger set, is that they know how to code, but generally not how it all works, under the hood. . . simply because they didn't HAVE to.
When I was in San Antonio and arrived at Rackspace with paper resume in hand, as a long time ISP system administrator, linux geek and early customer of theirs... I was met at the glass door by someone who said that they did not accept walk-ins, the only way to apply was to create an account on the website and submit the resume there and wait for a callback. As with every other on-line job application I have ever submitted, I received no callback or human acknowledgement of my existence.
I can only presume that if there was a job to be had, it may have gone to someone less qualified than I because there was no way in hell they could have made a rational judgement without an interview.
Perhaps I was the victim of Ageism, they were too young to understand the way business has been run for centuries.
Goodbye, Rackspace.
Signed,
50+ geezer who watched the Internet go global
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I have. New tech always went to younger employees. Younger managers always felt awkward around older, more experienced underlings. I was finally weeded out to make my organization look younger and spiffier to potential buyers of my company.
Incorrect. You're millage may vary depending on your situation. But there is always value in history and the knowledge gained through that time.
One of the important reasons I'm valued in my field is directly related to my knowledge of how we got to where we are. Why we do some things the way we do. And no, it's not just to do things the same way we've always done them.
yvan eht nioj
I don't know to be honest. Nobody's going to tell me I'm too old for fear of litigation. What I have noticed is whereas in my youth it'd normally take me 3 or 4 Job interviews before I got a job. It's now more like 12 to 16 but that could just as easily be down to more HR time-wasting muppets being involved these days.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
You are located in what's basically a buyer's market (especially if you're willing to accept equity in lieu of salary). And I question your nerd credentials if you have a social network.
Myself, I live in a smaller market, don't want to migrate, am not at all sociable, and my skills tend to lead the envelope while most local employers are still trying to figure out whether to give up punched cards and HR doesn't understand anything that doesn't carry a certification program or at least an offshore firm swearing that all their employees are certified and experienced whether they are or not.
But the insidious thing about ageism is that they're never going to tell you that that's why they wouldn't hire you - well, except for a few idiots they won't tell you. So you can experience ageism without even realizing it.
Bullshit. it's the 30s and 40s with their 7 kids that cost money to the work place. the Elders' kids have all moved out, and their health care costs are just for self and maybe spouse.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
It's certainly possible my tune will change. Then again maybe not; I don't work in the Bay Area, and it seems to be a hotbed for this kind of thing.
I have not experienced ageism myself, only 37, but my Dad has. He worked for 14 years as an electrical engineer at Applied Materials before he got released in one of their many rounds of massive layoffs. When he went applying for similar work at other companies what he typically ran into was the department manager would say he was the best candidate they had ever seen and was very vocal about wanting to hire my Dad, but then once the paperwork went to HR they would not allow the hiring of my Dad due to his age. He heard from numerous managers the exact same story, that HR would not allow them to hire him.
The closest I have come to experiencing this was an HR department struggle to find an "acceptable" job title to classify my position under that would keep me held back under the particular ranking (I, II, II, IV, etc...) yet still allow my manager to give me a much needed pay raise. As a result, I don't necessarily believe that the issue is 100% the age of a person but the system by which HR uses to classify employees.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Your very lucky. Do you program for a living?
I have had a similar experience. First they asked a question way out of my domain, to see "how I thought" I have not been given too many problems to solve that I did not have a real good handle on how to approach, but, this one I did not have a clue. So I start to wrap my head around the problem, ops your 15 minute are up, its time for show and tell for another 15 minutes. If they had asked me to solve anything like a real world problem for the position I was applying for, I would have been fine
It doesn't help that my skills are dependant on hands-on interaction with the data, code etc, and when it comes to a tag-team of interviewers quizzing me with stupid questions I go semi-autistic like a possum in headlights.
I can help a bit in this department...
The good news is, at least in Portland they *do* usually have a hands-on portion of the interview process (mostly because most employers are sick of being burned by fresh-out-of-college kids who talk a good game, but cannot code their way out of a paper sack.)
But, when it comes to the tag-team interview, if I get hit with a stupid question, I usually answer it with a question expressly designed to show them how stupid their question was. Handle it the same way you'd handle a design session, and use it as a springboard to show them that you not only know the stupid stuff, but also know better ways to solve the stupid problem behind that stupid question.
Note that the point isn't to one-up them, but to show them that not only is there more than one way to, say, skin a cat, but that the other ways are more efficient and less messy when it comes to the art and techniques of cat-skinning.
It doesn't always work (I recall one company rejection that was, shall we say, rather hostile, but they don't exist any longer, so...), but in most cases if you handle it with humor and grace, it works exceedingly well, and even tends to impress them in a lot of instances.
PS: I'm halfway through my 40's, and have only seen 1 instance of ageism, period. Nothing openly hostile or actionable, but enough to give me pause, and to dump the contract as soon as I could (it was contract-to-hire, but I decided that I didn't feel much like continuing that relationship). I am happy to report though that there are more than enough good companies who don't shy from gray hair that I can (at least at the time being) ignore them.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I've 39 right now, and I've been lucky enough to work at one company since college. Like a lot of people, I worry about my job, especially since I work at a defense contractor. I've had friends who were laid off and had a bear of a time finding a job, and I worry that in the next couple of years that will be me. Now, at my actual workplace, I haven't seen much of it; I work on a program that has been in active development since at least 1992, so I think we really value the guys who have been at it since the beginning. Of course, right now we don't have a ton of new hires, since they've tended to be the people who have set sail for more stable ground vs the ones with houses, families and inertia.
you will be. you *WILL* be.
Not if he doesn't put that crack pipe down!
Free Martian Whores!
Most people of average height and/or weight can't or don't see it. Tall people are assumed to be natural leaders despite obvious incompetence. Same with thin people. Ageism in tech does have some basis in that younger people tend to embrace newer tech and tend not to have a that's-the-way-we've-always-done-it attitude. Being short and/or overweight doesn't affect one's ability to create, invent, and innovate.
No, you need to do your homework instead of reading the spoon feed propaganda.
The average tech job posting gets 100-200 qualified job applications from people out of work. How is this happening if everyone is working?
Out of touch. Seriously.
And, in today's economy, everybody's selling something. In tech **NEW** is the product. It isn't just tech, though. Madison Avenue has succeeded in inculcating generations with the "new is better" speciousness. Today you don't have a career, you build a brand, and that brand better have "new" in it.
Ending the H1B program to solve this problem would be a very stupid thing to do.
Ending the H1B program won't solve this problem because there is no magic bullet. Doing nothing sure as hell won't change the direction so we keep driving down. Ending the H1B program is just one of many steps in a long walk.
The H1B program is there for a lot more than hiring tech workers, so it would be a terrible first step! We are not going to solve a culture issue by changing immigration laws.
We all know that Tech is not the only market damaged by indentured servitude, so why do you claim that it's a bad thing to remove? We have 40 years of this bad policy which was denounced by people like Milton Friedman. He won a Nobel Prize for analysis showing how horrible for the citizens of the US our H1B program and lack of border protection was. Turns out we have proof he was right, so your claim of "terrible" is both empty and treasonous.
Much better to look at the issue of why so many companies do not appreciate experience, and why people who are older expect to get paid more, just because they are older.
Companies are not the problem. How about looking at why regulations and laws have been passed which require businesses to screw over employees in favor of overseas "cheap" labor? How about law changes which give foreign entities power over US businesses and interests? Law changes allowing massive land grabs by foreign powers? Hand waving and yelling "look over there!" won't do anything to fix our problems.
The next step for people like you is to claim how anyone who disagrees with open borders and H1B free-for-all policies are bigots and mean, we don't care about anyone or anything. Which is easy to spot ad hominem. The US taking care of the US first is as patriotic as you can get. Demanding that the US Government neglect it's own citizens to take care of Mexico, or China, or Taiwan, or England, or anywhere else is treasonous.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This is what I'm running into. I've always sucked at networking (of the human variety, I can still read raw TCP/IP packets and deal with networking at that level). But for some reason, at 45, I'm suddenly running into a lot of Buzzword Bingo in interviews, as well as apparently with the new frameworks, lots of javascript kiddie teams out there who think that middleware and back ends are for losers. Sadly, most of my recent experience has been in databases and middleware, and I haven't learned the new frameworks yet, which is limiting my ability to find a job this time around.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I interviewed at Google and was appalled at their system. I was told that for my 3rd and fourth interview I needed to go watch about 20 hours of Youtube Videos and study some cruft they wanted me to study. Not related to my experience or even the job in general. I was also told that I would be expected to work 60 hours a week, and should enjoy dinners on campus. In other words, I could be treated just like a H1B worker! WOW!
Google found my resume and called me, I never applied for a job. I heard from HR people inside Google that it's not always that way, and even know someone that took a manager job there. Amazingly, everyone I know from the technical side that interviewed there reported the same scenario I did.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Yeah this frustrates me too- when the real answer is 20 seconds with Google. I've said that in interviews and gotten weird looks like I am admitting to being a copy an paste coder or something. Who remembers all of this stuff-not to mention whatever you remember is outdated in a year or two.
love is just extroverted narcissism
47 years old here... I haven't experienced it yet. I know it exists, though, as I personally know some older IT guys who have have difficulty even getting interviews. For me, I think there are several reasons why I haven't fallen victim to that. Not saying I'm immune, as I'm definitely in the age group where one might expect it. First, being female I'll never have the "gray beard" thing going. I do have some gray hair, which someone might notice if they look closely. Also I am in great shape (thanks CrossFit!) and there is definitely something to be said for being healthy and fit, which helps keep me young physically as well as mentally. I really think what we project to others is an important part of it. Also, I'm fairly immature and I like to joke and laugh a lot, so I fit in pretty well with teams where often I'm the only woman. Being a contractor, managers are looking for an experienced developer with specific skillsets who can jump in, learn quickly and get the job done, and not usually as concerned about the whole cultural aspect of it as they would with an FTE. I'm not looking to join a startup (been there, done that) but I love a fast paced environment and learning new things. So I'm not someone who will let my skills stagnate, or get complacent and stay in one place too long. Will this still be the case in 5, 10 years? It's something that I am very mindful of, and maybe I'll start to see some ageism as I get into my 50s. If so, I'll just have to figure out a way to deal with it.
I'm 40, have no network, work full time, and still get calls from headhunters several times a week.
In the last 10 years, the longest delay between starting to look for work and starting a job was 4 weeks.
But then, I've spent my career building tools that solve real world problems, not useless things like games and social networks.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Ageism for me started in the late 20s. (I'm 32.) These companies want large teams of commodity programmers that they can cram into open-plan cattle pens. They don't want actual elite programmers. They want average people with huge egos who think that they're "rock stars" and will work 14 hours per day to prove it: the macho-subordinate type. They don't want people who are experienced enough to spot bad management, much less people who know what to do about it.
Also, both the abuse of the H1-B program and ageism are rooted in an unspoken but powerful fear: unions. H1-Bs are attractive because they can be threatened with deportation and come from countries where unionbusting is a lot more aggressive (as in: in the Third World, you get killed if you're a union organizer, rather than just illegally fired and blacklisted) than here. H1-B abuse is more about union prevention than it is about wage depression. "Culture fit" is code for "we don't want to hire people who know that we don't have our employees' interests at heart". These companies fear that if they hire someone in his 40s, he'll let the young'uns know too much about how the world actually works, and it won't be as easy for employers to take advantage of them. So they put out a bunch of propaganda indicating that 40-year-old programmers "are resistant to change" and "can only write in COBOL". Anyone halfway intelligent can see that this is ridiculous, but it sticks, because a lot of the people in the contemporary startup scene aren't halfway intelligent.
The problem is that technical excellence, in 95 percent of these supposedly technological companies, does not matter. (If it did, these companies would value technical ability and experience, rather than young bluster.) The era when startups were small teams whose technical excellence gave them a 10-100x force multiplier against competitors (and, to be truthful, it often helped that these startups were attacking niches than larger companies didn't care about, but that later proved to be important) is over. These days, startups are VC-fueled built-to-flip insta-behemoths. They're not teams of 15 doing the work of 200. They're sloppily-built 200-person companies that didn't exist two years ago that run on this misplaced middle-class belief that these horrible "tech startups" are the companies of the future. (I mean, they might be, but if that's the case, I want no part in that future.)
I doubt that this particular brand of perversion is sustainable. The reason for technical excellence to be severely undervalued is that the effects of technical sloppiness usually take a long time to have a macroscopic impact, and the managers who impose horrible practices and sloppy hiring expect to be promoted away from their messes before anything happens that could be attached to them. Founders don't expect to be running their companies 10 years from now; they want to be cashed out, diversified, and working 10-to-3 jobs as venture capitalists or executives at Googly mega-corps. The sad thing is that, for several years, sloppiness has at least seemed (survivor bias?) to work. The managers who have shoved the perma-junior Scrum culture down our throats have been able to get promoted away from their heaping piles of tech debt.
I'm betting that, some time in the next three years, the tech bubble will deflate (it may be a "crash" and it may be a slower deflation) and that a lot of the bad actors will have egg on their faces. Right now, there just isn't enough dirt flying around, because even though there's a ton of unethical behavior going on, no one wants to expose it and become unemployable. That'll change when the easy money is obviously gone and people get angry. Y Combinator (also known as, "where founders learn how to be unethical, and how to get away with it") managed to miraculously escape blame for the Zenefits disaster. Very few people have even made the connection. That's easy to do when it's a one-off. When a large number of people realize that they've been lie
During the Bush recession, I was out of work for years... and, before you twits get started, I *am* a better programmer and sysadmin than you. Do you *really* think someone with only schoolwork and a year or three of job work knows more than someone who's been in the field for decades? In most other industries, that idea is a non-starter.
Let me assure you that in my career, I've had to deal with plenty of code from you young'uns... and too many have *never* been taught extensive error handling and recovery. I've fixed something where the previous three people massaged the data once or twice a year, the *same* data, as well as new data, rather than arranging to HAVE IT FIXED AT THE SOURCE, so that it wouldn't come back again.
Oh, that's right: the longest term job I had in that dry spell was *after* I dyed my hair, and lo! I got a job!
Then there's a friend: she's in her mid-forties, and was between positions... then she died the few gray hairs in her head, and right after that she got a job.
Friggin' arrogant kids, who already know everything... they think. Y'all remind me of a friend's daughter, around 15 years ago: they were running Win98 *bleah*, and the daughter was 16, and *sure* she knew more than me, and wouldn't let me help... and would get made and think that having to reboot the computer once or twice a night was "normal"....
mark
I was flown at a company's expense from San Diego to Paris, France for a two day interview. My resume was US style, with no indication of my age, and when they met me they openly asked my age. I was simply told that they did not want someone as old as me, despite my extensive skills.
I've been in and around the silicon valley since the late 70's. Hiring engineering talent has been the single biggest issue since then. I have yet to observe ageism anywhere I've worked. What I have seen is techies that fail to keep up with the industry and complaining that they can't find a job. Skills and experience have a short shelf life. 30 years ago Novell CNE was a hot ticket. 20 years ago people with CNE's started complaining about ageism. It wasn't their age, it was obsolete skills that made it difficult to find a job
THIS!!
(Sorry, I couldn't help it. Normally I hate this modernism but it's so appropriate here.)
Raytheon, paying to relocate? Good luck with that. From what I've seen, big defense contractors do not pay that well, and usually do not pay relocation bonuses.
Why can't you understand the horror that the rest of us feel when confronted with your millennia of slavery, homophobism, and misogyny?
How do you know he isn't gay? That'd really make your head explode, wouldn't it?
(I know, you're being sarcastic, I'm just running with it.)
Nepotism and a bachelor degree in any discipline get you the job, and you can't call it a career unless you are as incompetent as the next guy. Note that your credentials are first checked by the bubbly secretary at the front desk (human resources). You are screened to fit the profile of a venture capital company that is driven by tax evading bean counters, not technology or product. Your dissatisfaction with the company is proportional to your intelligence.
This. An awful lot of what's called 'new and different' is based on computer science theory developed in the 1970s or before ("Fundamental Algorithms" anyone?). The tech has gotten snazzier but the ideas are similar, and the programming languages aren't hugely different. Computer science theory is mostly the same.
A friend of mine was doing that, until the new CIO decided he wanted a conversion from COBOL to Java that he could pretend went well on his resume. Personally, I hate COBOL too much, and I'd rather make a bit less doing something more interesting.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
InfoWorld ran an article about 25 years ago asking "Can people over 40 work in IT?", that is, can they keep up with the technology. The article, written by someone much younger than 40 answered the question "No, people under 40 can't work in IT." They shouldn't be hired and they should be fired (buy-outs, layoffs, downsizing, firings).
Someone should track down that author. He's got to be well over 40 now. Hopefully he's living under a bridge.
I'd be happy if AMD could just make a decent profit. Competition in x86 processors is a good thing for the consumer.
But the more annoying ageism is a general assumption by some of the kids that if there is a difference of opinion on an engineering question, it's because the old guy is clinging to his anachronistic ways. Version control? Testing? Even a one-page design doc? Don't be such an old fuddy duddy!! :-)
Huh?
Are you saying that they do or don't want to do version control?
The old fuddy-duddy way is to NOT use version control. It's actually a somewhat new concept in software, which was mainly only used on larger machines (such as VAXen which had it built into the filesystem, sorta, and Unix's RCS). What we have now with everyone using git for software version control is a new phenomenon. Before about 15 years ago, CVS was about it as far as free version control, and for really serious firms, they used shit like ClearCase which cost an absolute fortune and requires a full-time administrator now matter how small your team. It's only been recently that we've had a plethora of extremely effective and free (and FOSS) tools for doing version control. Go back to the 80s and look at how microcomputer programmers worked; they didn't use version control at all.
There's still a lot of places where older engineers aren't using version control.
And how many of those HR workers ever work 80-hour weeks anyway?
So far, my experience in life is that anyone who seeks out a career in HR is scum.
You want job discrimination? Try going into a tech interview in your mid 40s while using a wheelchair. I'm 46 and have been doing this work for almost half my life. I'm familiar with current technologies (i.e. I don't need to work on an AS-400 or a Vax to get the job done) - but I recently interviewed for a job where I had everything in the job description in spades - plus other stuff that was brought up in said interview - yet was passed over for a guy who was a month or two away from finishing his CS degree ... and wasn't even a zygote when I started working in the software industry. It's frustrating, to say the least. Like someone mentioned on this topic earlier, I'm getting close to bankruptcy and a Top Ramen diet. And I'm far too old to eat Top Ramen.
My disability affects neither my mind nor my ability to write good code, my age doesn't either. I refuse to believe that it does.
Ageism can only be experienced during certain rites at their temples.
And you have to be initiated. Like Pastafarianism or the Cargo Cult of John Frum.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Depending on which sector of industry you're looking at, the 30s-40s people aren't having any kids these days.
(This is much more true of Silicon Valley industries than, say, the defense industry.)
Clearly you overlooked the fact that the system in question worked well enough to stay in production for about 20 years.
Now, hard coded anything is bad, even back then it was poor practice. A proper code review in 1997 would have generated the same criticism.
So you "refactored" something to not have hard coded values... wonderful. As you should. But did you stand up the system from scratch? When we come back in 20 years will we see YOUR work in production... or will it be a cleaned up version of the original developers work?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I guess you mean every time I find they want someone with 5 years current experience in a language that hasn't been taught in an American College in 30 years. Or put the term "energetic" in the job add. Or when I reply to a recruiter and he offers me a bounty on a COBOL programmer who has just a little less experience than me, because the client will say I am "over qualified". How about being told to train my replacement, so I can be freed for other projects, only to find out the other projects were a myth and "freed" was "allowed to seek other opportunities outside the organization*"
*one company didn't layoff older workers, they cut off their accounts and access with the idea they should quit before they were fired for their sudden drop in productivity. Layoffs of older workers while hiring younger replacements had to be explained. But locking their accounts out and then firing them with cause because they hadn't written a line of code in weeks didn't.
No...never seen ageism.
Everything is a dead end, eventually.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Back in 1997, I lost a very lucrative contract. I was 56 at the time. I went looking for work and not a single one of my efforts was responded to. I finally found a job for less than half of what I'd been making. The job entailed web design and development. I was an expert in network design and development at the time. But, any port in a storm is better than not working.
I had a new boss that let me figure it all out, i.e., he valued experience, even if not directly related. Then he resigned for a better position. The second new boss didn't think old guys were worth anything. At one point during a meeting he said, and I quote, "Why should we listen to you? You're retiring soon." Then he quit too. The third boss was another old guy. He let me do what was needed to get the project complete. As far as I know, it's still running.
11 years ago I retired at 65, and am now completely obsolete.
In my opinion, there's two sides to ageism. One, if the old guy (that's a gender neutral term if anyone is offended) keeps his skills current, and is willing to learn, then that guy is a good candidate for whatever job being offered, even if the guys current skills aren't relevant (I stand as a good example). On the other hand, someone who's just waiting to retire and not keeping up with technology, is a waste of time and money.
We did version control. With a bunch of subdirectories, XCOPY and DIFF. It sucked, but was still necessary.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Several years ago I had this experience.
At the end of the second interview I was asked the question how did I feel about having a younger person as my boss, the idea that I might have any issue with that had never even occurred to me and I said there was no issue.
I didn't get the job, the boss who was an Asian female in her (I'd guess) early thirties was the only one with an issue, my guess is its a cultural thing.
Now days I run a team of folks of various ages, my boss is younger than me though, not by that much mind you.
As usual YMMV
Be wary of strong drink, it can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss.
I am so glad I did not pursue a career as an Oracle DBA. What a nightmare it must be to have to be in that position.
Expel Brahmin from USA http://wh.gov/iyhMK
Casteism
Here's the NO side... I'm 55 and work with an older team, the team ages are 45, 55, 56, 58 and 63. We hired a 64 year old as a PM a few years back, he turned 69 recently and retired. Our manager was trying everything he could to keep him from retiring because he was a great asset. This is probably not your typical IT team working on cutting edge technologies. But, its my current situation.
Here's the YES side... I would very much like to get back to a Java/Weblogic/Oracle world. The leading edge technology we chose is extremely green. Its frustrating using new technologies to solve problems that could easily be solved with more mature technologies. I've had some interviews, but definitely feel that age is a problem. I'll most likely be stuck here until retirement.
like being proud of your daughter's Nobel Prize before you even fucked her mom for the first time.
Is that an Obama joke? I like it!
Obama, Al Gore... same same. People who got a Nobel prize for not being George W Bush.
lucm, indeed.
Overrated -1?
Pathetic.
Some years ago (remember 2008 any one?) I was job hunting for the first time in many years as my contract with IBM (a bit of name-dropping to show I'm not in the Little League ;-) was not renewed. I could not understand I did not get any responses to my applications despite an impressive CV. A friend suggested that I removed all dates from the CV (like year of graduations and such) ... Guess what? ... Suddenly I got responses/interviews, so ageism? Ya betcha!
In my experience and what I have gleaned from talking to other people, it seems that large companies and public organizations are less prone to ageism than smaller companies. That could be due to the fact that larger and public organizations normally have anti-discrimination policies that support dinosaurs like me.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Right. Confident people hide their successes. Idiot.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
No, they stalk people on the internet and accuse them of lying every time they express themselves.
Go fuck yourself, loser.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Strongly recommend Ashton Applewhite's new "This Chair Rocks" for a well written and vigorous refutation of arguments against full rights for older people: http://amzn.to/1TuHAjq