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More Software Engineers Over Age 40 May Join a Lawsuit Against Google (yahoo.com)
More trouble for tech giants and how they are dealing with people. Google suffered a setback in an age discrimination suit this week. A judge ruled that other software engineers over age 40 who interviewed with the company but didn't get hired can step forward and join the lawsuit. From a Business Insider report: The suit was brought by two job applicants, both over the age of 40, who interviewed but weren't offered jobs. Specifically, the judge has approved turning the suit into a "collective action" meaning that people who "interviewed in person with Google for a software engineer, site reliability engineer, or systems engineer position when they were 40 years old or older, and received notice on or after August 28, 2014, that they were refused employment, will have an opportunity to join in the collective action against Google," the ruling says. While this isn't good news for Google, the ruling was strictly focused on whether the suit could be broadened to include more people. It doesn't mean that Google will ultimately lose the case. Google says it's fighting the suit.
It is tough to teach an old dog new tricks.
but an old dog knows already a lot of tricks, knows how to implement the tricks in such a way they can be extended later, and will not fall in most of the beginner traps when executing the tricks.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I'm 58, last three years have be learning and developing in NodeJS, CouchDB, JQuery, Lodash, Async, etc. Right now am prototyping an architecture using Swagger and a127.
There are exceptions to every categorization. If you dismiss somebody as unable to learn because they are older, then you are prejudging them. That's age discrimination.
If you post it, they will read.
So, say two guys apply for a job, they're not really motivated and seem quite incompetent ... *but* they're over 40... then they *must* be hired??
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
For no other reason than I flubbed an easy problem during the interview.
Not sure that Brain Fart is grounds for a lawsuit.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Actually, you want those people over 40 because the demographics are trending to a more aged population, and those over 40 want to be working 40 hours a week so the motivation is high to build things that are reliable. I don't necessarily care about redoing something every 6 months in its entirety; I want to build something that can be extended and enhanced without re-inventing the wheel. If the person isn't qualified that's one thing, but eventually the young people will be 40, and if you're male then watch out for Marissa too.
The problem is that few of these "new tricks" are actually new. People are rediscovering bad ideas, over and over again.
That might be a problem if old dogs were interviewing at Google.
If you were trying to refer to older people then I suggest you refrain from painting an entire group with your broad brush.
Even if that were true, so what? MacDonald's made a successful business out of replacing experienced cooks with well-defined processes and inexperienced young staff. Are you going to force MacDonald's to hire 40+ experienced French chefs and operate their automated deep fryers? What 40+ experienced French chef would even want such a position?
Just like lots of other industries, the software industry is constantly changing. Companies like Google are the software equivalent of large, fast-food restaurant chains. There is no point in complaining about it, and there is nothing to be done about it. Just deal with it: there are plenty of other jobs around.
Being white and male isn't an issue, it's a pro.
Being old is a huge issue. Google will learn from this though, they won't even bring in programmers for interviews if they're 40 or older, and if they can't be sure, they won't take the chance.
News to me. I'm over 50 and have had a couple interviews with the googs. But I have a job I like and wasn't terribly interested in the job they were trying to fill, so I wasn't disappointed when the interviews didn't advance to the next round. In fact one of their recruiters just left me a message last week trying to get me to bite....
But maybe I could join the suit anyway – just for shits and giggles – on the basis that they didn't hire me because I'm over 40.
But I have a theory that a lot of these fishing expeditions are just to lure talent away and disrupt other companies. Google, if that's what you're doing, just make an offer. I'm not interested in fucking around with bogus interviews. You can see my work in FOSS going back 25 years. It's all in git, cvs, etc.. If your offer is good enough I might even accept it.
I'm not saying it's boring or unrewarding, I'm sure it's not, but from what I heard, they basically troll you through a dozen interviews or more - ain't nobody got time for that! (If you're in your forties, you likely have a family, etc. that takes up your time - I sure wouldn't appreciate having to go through that many interviews just to not get the job in the end. It would feel like they're just wasting my time after the 4th one - even if I did get the job).
AC comments get piped to
I was rejected by Google at 33. However, I can't join the lawsuit because I'm not old enough. The lawsuit is clearly ageist. I'm going to sue the lawsuit.
Plenty of companies need those "old codgers", and big tech companies, including Google, have hired them: Gosling, Thompson, Weinberger, Pike, plus thousands more.
But memory, CPU, hardware, memory management, etc. don't matter for the bulk of computer programming. That's why these companies need only a small number of "old codgers" and a large number of coding drones who grind out large amounts of Java and JavaScript, and do all the other, boring, tedious tasks that software development requires these days.
The Software development industry is a project-driven industry, exactly like building construction, but without the real-world constraints of material and space. The reason why building architects have to be so well educated and experienced is because simply the cost of material and labor spirals out of control when mistakes are made. We have the same exact problem in the software development industry, except the only input into projects are man-hours and CPU cycles. Nobody ever tracks the number of man-hours or the cost of mistakes in man-hours going into a software development project. Why? Because management is not motivated to respect the cost of time of the developer due to overtime exemptions.
Really the way this industry needs to work is a project is designed and then broken into discrete work units; if you don't dimension your program as a project and are hiring hourly staff to build something, you are going to be spending a lot of money building a shanty. Management then looks at the cost in man-hours of each work unit, and if a framework or programming language makes sense for that component, you compare the cost to develop in a big-5 language vs the cost to develop in the framework or smaller language and determine the cost savings. The business might even hand off a chunk of work to a developer under W9, but we are all familiar with the IRS basically telling management at every organization W9 staff who work IT or software development are employee's, so hiring a developer that built a unique framework to build something for a month or six is a no-go. We end up with 20 and 30 year old languages still being used as everywhere not because we couldn't do a lot better, but because the industry no small 2 or 3 man shop who builds a purpose-built framework has a way to get their foot in the door unless they are also presented as a worker from an outsourcing company or has a contract with an outsourcing company.
Companies then approach the software industry the same way they approach the construction industry; they flood the market with lots of cheap, foreign labor and more often than not, they produce functional albeit incredibly insecure and often buggy code. Classrooms reflect the animal-farm the industry has become; lots of inexperienced people with fancy college degree's who've spent their lives trying to make sense of and impart that sense of an industry that is unpredictable and a complete animal farm.
Largely, the IT industry has become a new way for the financial services companies (read: banks) to infect corporations with debt. IT Startups are given a startup loan and then are forced by the bank to exercise rent-seeking relationships with companies for a marginal return in value, tunneling their way in so if they are ever removed they produce immense damage to the organization. Bigger companies have stocks, and guess who owns those?
Fix the overtime exemptions and restore IT Workers's ability to work as an independent contractor, and a few things happen. First, it becomes really expensive to hire crappy developers, so a lot of bad programmers get fired and the industry immediately begins working on metrics for tracking programming work for which each company is going to be different. Second, management is now motivated to train staff as part of projects, and have staff participate in industry trade groups to help keep the company competitive. Third, government will be forced into recognizing ridiculous EULA are ridiculous because of lawsuits between small companies. Finally, and most importantly, programming and software development become solid middle class jobs again and the classrooms will again have extremely high standards.
There are a lot of good comments about older developers who are more than qualified in numerous ways in the tech world today.
For the younger guys who are developers: Use those long-term thinking skills and remember where you might be in XX years.
Are you a person who loves to learn (and keep up with) new technologies and solve real problems, and has learned a lot over the first few years of your career?
Do you think you'll be any different any years down the road (other than being more experienced and more mature maybe)?
If so, then welcome to the life of may older developers. Granted, some people don't keep up nor want to, but the same can be said for virtually any age group.
My point is simply: Be careful who you prejudge as you will potentially be an older developer one day yourself. Unless you've gone into another role/career or made your retirement $$ before age 40, be kind to the ones who can offer a lot of talent, even at their age.
Thanks for reading.
Most (nearly all) performance issues I have seen are due to naive assumptions built into the implementation. And poor coding. Things like using Exceptions for logic flow, re-instantiating objects that were instantiated earlier in the call stack, building an in-memory database that is slower than the network lag you were trying to avoid, similar logic scattered throughout the code due to cut-n-paste, etc.
No amount of low-level optimization is going to make up for high-level implementation mistakes.
If you post it, they will read.
Like teaching Google to hire people over 40.
Mostly random stuff.
Exactly. I hear about these "new tricks" all the time, and then it will twig something in my memory; either I did it, or I read an article about how IBM prototyped it int he 1960s or something along those lines.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Even if that were true, so what? MacDonald's made a successful business out of replacing experienced cooks with well-defined processes and inexperienced young staff. Are you going to force MacDonald's to hire 40+ experienced French chefs and operate their automated deep fryers? What 40+ experienced French chef would even want such a position?
Just like lots of other industries, the software industry is constantly changing. Companies like Google are the software equivalent of large, fast-food restaurant chains. There is no point in complaining about it, and there is nothing to be done about it. Just deal with it: there are plenty of other jobs around.
The point is that 40+ French chefs should be the ones to decide whether or not they want to work the fryer.
The hiring company cannot use "they wouldn't want it anyway" as an excuse to refuse to interview/hire a 40+.
I heard that excuse used endlessly as to why we didn't interview blacks or women where I worked back in the 1960's and 70's
The Google interview process is famous for being hard to crack and I am pretty sure they would not object hiring someone over 40 if he passes it with flying colors. They even have on stuff some folks who remember Unix in its infancy. So it seems quite arrogant to claim being turned down only because of age. Whoever is suing will have hard time to provide proofs that Google is accepting less competent people than them just because the other ones are younger. The Google interview is just too rigorous to leave place for such manipulations and they do not have surplus of qualified candidates to discard them easily.
If a 40 year old french chef actually wants the job even at an hourly rate that McDs is willing to pay, why not? It's not as if the employee gets to decide the pay after being hired.
I don't know about your conspiracy theory, but I had a phone interview with Google, and I wasn't too impressed. Personally, my theory is that Google's recruiters are incompetent 20-something girls fresh out of college and sororities, and they're just contacting people to do make-work and justify their salaries. And then the obnoxious and arrogant 20-something male developers who conduct the initial phone interviews are only doing it because it's part of their job, and don't really want to hire anyone.
It's like the old maxim: never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Organizations are always coming up with stupid policies for various reasons, and then the people who work there simply carry them out. That's the impression I got of Google. In my case, my resume quite clearly shows I have a EE degree and hardware background, and all my programming experience is low-level embedded stuff, and the phone interviewer immediately asked me a bunch of CS algorithm questions. I don't have a CS degree, so of course that stuff is not my strong suite nor do I want a job doing algorithmic stuff. But from what I read, that's exactly how Google interviews are. I seriously wonder how they get any engineering work done that doesn't involve heavy CS stuff. Maybe they just outsource it.
The fact he can't hear all the office gossip / bullshit means he's able to concentrate on his work instead of contributing to the problem :)
Need I say more?
The problem is that few of these "new tricks" are actually new. People are rediscovering bad ideas, over and over again.
And so it should come as no surprise that they won't hire experts who argue against them.
Yes, that's kind what I'm getting at, Captain Obvious.
However, companies should be free to screw themselves in whatever way they want.
Well, that's a big "if". Most senior developers wouldn't be willing to be hired into an entry level position at entry level salaries.
Well, you sure missed the whooshing sound.
See, what was getting at is that the "Old Skills" post was wrong both in the literal and in the sarcastic interpretation. In reality, companies do need "old codgers", just not very many of them; that's why many "old codgers" have trouble finding jobs even though their skills are still needed.
as long as you don't dress like a gangsta, walk with the "pimp limp" and aks tings with a grammar of a 4 year old, NOBODY is going to throw obstacles under your feet.
this is a 10 minute video where your indoctrination meets reason - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You would think with the incredible amount of job hopping that goes on nowadays, there simple is no one being hired right out of college, and then putting in 40 year in that company before retiring, that companies would prefer 35-50 year olds who are settled and who will not upend their life's to get a new job in some other city.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Keep in mind that there is also a large group of people (likely with no legal standing) who don't apply to companies that are known in the industry of only hiring below a certain age. Thus they don't even bother applying to companies like this. For this reason we need the government to step in and fine the shit out of companies like Google.
As someone over 40, I can say that there is a single benefit of hiring people at least in their late 20s and beyond. Most programmers that I have worked with who sucked, sucked because they had latched onto some technology cluster/methodology and would let go. It was group-think at its worst. One of the benefits of hiring someone with a decade or more experience is that it is easier to detect this. So if you see someone who has 20,000 certifications in a single technology stack over a long period of time and a resume with nothing else, it throws up a massive red flag. Then you can explore this in an interview. Is this their only hammer in the toolkit.
What also amazes me is that many people in their early 20s make it clear that they have largely learned all they plan on learning. Thus they have not only picked a technology, but a version of that technology. So I will walk into a consulting job where I have been brought in because the project has gone to complete hell. I will start looking at things like the overall systems architecture, the internal architecture, and finally the code and the methodologies for creating that code. It is not uncommon that it is a fairly good selection of the worst of breed everything. Someone who didn't know what they were doing made a prototype and then an entire system was built on that. So you get some Ruby, a bad choice of cloud provider, some bastardization of Azure, and they are using some slow as molasses IDE/build system that means 5 minutes between making a change and seeing the change work. Except they have 100,000 lines of this crap code.
But what amazes me is that the above story happens regardless of age. There is some myth that 20 somethings chase the node.js type things of the world and that the 50+ crowd is just decades out of date. The reality is that they are often both wrong but for different reasons. The 50+ crowd screw up because of the "This is how I have always done it." and the 20 year old versions of the same crap programmer is "This is how my professor said was the only way."
The key being that crap programmers are crap for reasons other than their age, and as I said, the advantage of getting someone with a bit of a resume is that their bad attitude is easier to detect.
I interviewed for a high-level engineering position at Google last year at age 42, and was hired. Just saying.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
unaided internships are not legal
So what's the need for age discrimination? Let the company make the offer it intended to make and leave it up to the applicant to accept or not.
Of course, the real answer is that they don't want to hire the senior guy even if he finds the offer acceptable because they intend to boil the frog. They intend to have routine "emergencies" and a never ending "need" to all pull together for the team to meet a tight deadline (which will be promptly replaced with a new tight deadline). Effectively they want to silently alter the deal after the fact by demanding a job and a half or two jobs worth of work for one job's pay.
They fear that the older worker will have seen it all before and insist on the deal that was freely offered and accepted.
So if you're in your 20s and considering an employer, look around. If you see signs of age discrimination, you can expect to be scammed once you've settled in. Mentally divide that pay they're offering by 1.5-2 to see what they're really offering you for the standard salaried position then kiss that work-life balance goodby.
Its somewhat hard to believe a winner-corp like gugglez would select based on age or gender or whatever since at that i-beat-yo-ass-like-you-was-microsoft-back-in-the-days-level i think its unlikely they'd not go for the best person for the job regardless what ... im all for gender equality and all that, and all against discrimination but im certainly all againt what they call here "positive" discrimination. It leads to political parties filling ranks to get quota, not to get the best people they can have, it leads to the township leading others into temptation of racism and xenofobia cos they need to fill ranks , regardless of skill, theres HAS to be x women, there HAS to be X ethnics. Its highly unlikely that this does not ever get in the way of getting the best team you could have. and THAT is the major problem
its possible however and this is where i insert my fiendish meme : in a free market in a democracy you can hire or sack whoever the fuck you want since its your company
so if google doesnt want to, they're missing out on the 40+ guys who do it cos they like it cos they're the best at it. If they hire them cos they have to fill quota they will end up with a badly balanced team.
this 'free' world is REALLY overregulated bureaucracy, when i talk to people who live in not-free places like russia or china or vietnam where they get flogged everyday and have to give half their sandwich to putin or get shot i always correct them into it's a western bureaucracy, not a democracy, highly overrated
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
This can't be good for the company as a whole either. They're wasting money on these ditzy 20-something sorority-girl recruiters' salaries, they're wasting highly-paid developers' time on interviewing candidates for positions they're unqualified for, and there've been a bunch of articles about how bad Google's hiring process is and how it's keeping out the best candidates.
Sooner or later, the house of cards is going to tumble. The company can only get away with milking its cash cows of search, GMail, Maps, Android stuff, and Adwords/Adsense for so long. Well, I guess we've probably said the same thing about MS for a couple decades now, and they're still chugging along, so maybe Google will too, while constantly blowing money on side projects and then canceling them before anyone's even heard about them, and wasting money on terrible interview practices.
I have had a similar experience with Amazon. Going through their interview process to demonstrate CS101 type questions (which I haven't encountered in over 15 years) only to be told that they chose someone else. I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but they contacted me 4 times after they chose someone asking me if I wanted to apply for an exciting position. I finally had to tell them that I had no interest in working for them ever and specifically told them to never contact me again. I wonder how long this will last.
...trying to explain why you need 100 lines code, a transpiler and knowledge of css+js+typescript+node+whatever they can pile up to write an angular js hello world "application" where the programmer spent 6 months agonizing about "UX", the post-build footprint is a five GB executable (not counting dragging in a few more GB of frameworks it needs to run), which in turn requires a 4 GHz multicore CPU to run it without dragging the computer to its knees, which would fall immediate prey to the first hacker who decides it's a target, will only run on the very, very latest bleeding-edge OS's, and turns out to be infected with the GPL so Corporation X's nest of lawyers forbids its use before it even gets to market anyway.
FTFY. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And you would think that alone would cue recruiters that younger people typically think in much smaller chunks.
But then again, that would require the recruiter to think in larger chunks, and that... lol.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I got contacted by them recently. I responded that I'm an embedded engineer and asked if the position dealt with embedded devices or not, since it looked like the position was for web stuff, and never heard back. Honestly, I expect this kind of incompetence (not understanding that embedded stuff is nothing like web stuff) from Indian "shotgun-style" recruiters, but not from internal recruiters for large, successful companies.
Actually younger employees tend to get married and have children. In terms of medical insurance having children is a lot more expensive. Plus all the high tech companies offer paternity leave or 90 days or more. So I'm not sure who is cheaper.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
This can't be good for the company as a whole either. They're wasting money on these ditzy 20-something sorority-girl recruiters' salaries,
Your attitude does not sound like Google material...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Yeah, I guess if a company really likes hiring incompetent ditzes to do their recruiting, maybe someone who calls them out on that isn't fit to work at their company...
Correct: the more senior an applicant is, statistically, the less malleable and the less flexible they tend to be. Furthermore, the older applicants get, the less they are willing to put up with b.s., if not for any other reason than that they usually have more job options. Hence, companies are not discriminating based on age, they are discriminating based on malleability and flexibility.
Again, correct: this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like. And anybody career oriented with their head screwed on has figured that out since their college days. It's a necessary consequence of having a merit- and performance-based society.
Where is the evidence that that's not exactly what they are doing, for applicants that actually meet their requirements?
Sigh... I'm sure you insult your way to some great jobs...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like.
Incorrect. If it's not too late, spit that cool aid out now. You are talking of the "new reality". This is actually a good illustration. If you were old enough to be discriminated against, you might actually remember a time when people were expected to be productive while at work and then go home at 5 P.M. unless there was a truly exceptional circumstance (not the emergency excuse of the week). For those few jobs where crunch times were intrinsic, the employees were likely to be free to leave early or take a day off between the crunch times.
If management is competent and the compensation is adequate, crunch times will be few and far between.
Maybe you missed the mobile device revolution, but keeping memory and CPU usage within sane bounds matters an awful lot these days.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's not an insult if it's true. Do you have some more polite way of calling recruiters incompetent?
I do just fine finding jobs. The secret is not wasting a lot of time with incompetent recruiters. There's some good ones out there, plus you can easily get a lot of jobs by applying directly with companies (ones which aren't so incompetent with their hiring), and talking directly to hiring managers (who generally *are* competent, since they're the ones with open positions and know exactly what kind of candidates will and won't work).
That first interview is what I've always informally called a "bozo screen". They mainly exist to keep from wasting a bunch of interviewers' time on somebody who has no prayer of getting hired.
This is where it helps to know somebody at the company where you want to work who will vouch for you. Most companies will skip the phone screen if you have good internal recommendations.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I'm in this category (40, interviewed and rejected at Google). Everyone who I spoke with during the day I was there was around my age (+/- 5 years). Yes, Google is a fairly young company as a whole but there are plenty of old farts like me in management.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I'm 58, last three years have be learning and developing in NodeJS, CouchDB, JQuery, Lodash, Async, etc. Right now am prototyping an architecture using Swagger and a127.
There are exceptions to every categorization. If you dismiss somebody as unable to learn because they are older, then you are prejudging them. That's age discrimination.
I always think it's a young developer's thing to name drop technologies they are learning.
The great older developers are past that phase and actually have created or worked on creating or improving the modern software technologies, not just merely learning them.
I'm 45 and have not noticed any change in my ability to learn new stuff. What I have noticed is a decline in my willingness to put up with BS. You want me to work 14 hours per day? Uhm. No. I have a life. Ask that 22-year old fresh out of university without any serious experience, he'll fall for that.
Does that make me less employable? Not really. Of course employers will know I have this attitude, but everyone over 40 does, so the fact that I feel that way doesn't change much for me personally.
Once again, it is not about being able to learn, it is about what you will put up with. Once you are over 40, the kind of treatment you will accept shrinks dramatically, and with it, your employability.
That's a losing battle, since the frameworks (Java, JavaScript, Swift, etc.) themselves end up being extremely bloated. Furthermore, phones have GB of memory these days, which is vast overkill for the trivial little programs people tend to write for them.
There is nothing "new" about it: if you want to be on the top of your field, whether it's music, science, engineering, computer programming, business, law, medicine, or anything else, you have to work very, very hard. Some of the hardest working and lowest paid workers are, in fact, grad students and early career academics. I don't see why it should work any differently for some of the top corporations in the country.
FTA: "She also presented evidence to the court that the median age of Google's workforce is 29 while the median age in the US for programmers is 42.8 years old."
... today, most, if not all, companies are well versed in anti-discrimination and make great efforts to ensure their written policies comply with anti-discrimination law."
And, "Having such a policy does not necessarily shield a company from a discrimination suit, particularly in light of the evidence and allegations presented here
There should be nothing shocking about this, unless you think discrimination doesn't happen, which according to your post, you don't.
Enjoy your cool aid slaveboy. Do try this tonight when you're working late again, look around and ask yourself who's there to notice. Especially look around and see how many people who already got ahead of where you are are still there with you.
Now consider all the productivity studies that demonstrate diminishing returns after 6 hours in a day.
Actually, I'd like to extend it to everyone. I haven't received special treatment, only good treatment, and although I'm not the one to ask (I have no experience not being a white male) it appears that lots of people who aren't white or male get treated worse.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yeah, but on occasion the tricks didn't work back in the old days and will now. My wife wanted something like an iPad back in the 1980s, to give a hardware example.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And you sound like a fucking arrogant moron who's shooting his mouth off about something he knows nothing about.
I didn't apply to a job requiring a CS degree, dipshit. Google didn't show me any kind of job requisition with any kind of detail about the position being hired for or its qualifications. It's no different from when I interviewed at Intel years ago; they just interview people willy-nilly, then bring them in and have them talk to a bunch of different managers and see who wants the candidate in their group. Intel's interview was pretty grueling, but nothing as ridiculous as Google's, and I got hired at Intel too.
It's the recruiter's and interviewer's responsibility to look at a candidate's resume and decide on an appropriate method of interviewing, given their skills. If they can't figure that out, they're wasting everyone's time. So fuck off with your shitty know-it-all attitude. It's not my fucking job to know how some company works internally. I've worked at multiple large companies (and interviewed at a bunch more) and I know perfectly well how interviewing works at them, and it's not all the same by a long shot. Some have fairly reasonable processes, but Google doesn't.
I notice. I love what I'm doing, and it benefits me as much as my company (since I get paid to work on open source projects).
Of course, this may be hard for you to understand, given that your business appears to be supporting outdated Linux cluster solutions.
You're sounding more than a little defensive there.
Unless you are writing your own performance reviews and get to decide on your own raise and other advancements, you noticing makes not one whit of difference and adds no support to your previous argument.
How would leaving on time hinder you from working on free software in your free time?
So that leads to the next question, who notices if you leave promptly at the end of office hours?
As for my work, it's quite interesting actually. I have at various times delved into supercomputing, BIOS, embedded hardware and microcontrollers. Hardware and software.
Really? What argument did you imagine I was making?
Sure--a decade ago.
If you don't remember the argument you were trying to make it's probably because you keep working past the point where fatigue saps productivity. I suggest you scroll up a few messages to remind yourself what you were saying.
As for the rest, This month actually except for the BIOS. Working smarter has it's advantages.
I suggest you do the same thing. You'll find that I simply concluded that these complaints lacked a rational basis and even if they were true, wouldn't matter.
I'm sure you "delved" into these things, they are simply dull and boring, that there are tons of other people with similar skills, and that there is little demand or need for those skills in the job market anymore. If you interviewed anywhere, companies wouldn't discriminate you based on your age, but based on your skillset and your attitude, and they would be perfectly justified in doing so. On the other hand, being an older worker, you managed to find an economic niche that (apparently) works for you and have learned to be satisfied with it, so you don't need to go job hunting.
Actually, you claimed that the 40 hour workweek has never been a thing for professionals.
As for the rest, if you think embedded devices and microcontrollers are somehow obsolete, I would say you're either living under a rock or you have a bad case of the sour grapes. If it's the former, perhaps if you weren't so busy making charitable contributions to your employer's yacht fund, you would have time to notice these things.
Very funny. Sharing at work.
"Web speed" is still going at web speed. Our servers are still running Node v0.11.4, and I believe the current version is 4.6-something. Keeping up with the versions is work in itself.
If you post it, they will read.
I'm sorry, but you need to read that more carefully. What I said was "this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like." Do you understand the qualifications "starting", "successful", and "competitive"?
You misunderstood. I was just referring to your skills, based on your web site.
Now if you can explain how a comment about starting a career is applicable to a seasoned veteran, you might just weasel out of it.
As for the rest, you are being snotty because I didn't fall on my knees and kiss your feet when I saw your obviously divine correctness. Mighty big attitude for a willing slave boy. I doubt very much that you have any relevant knowledge to judge what is or is not current technology in any of the areas I mentioned.
And note, while starting a career has always involved some after hours studying, it didn't always involve working stupid long extra hours. The new guy went home with everyone else.
Just deal with it: there are plenty of other jobs around.
Given the push to avoid hiring citizens:
[Citation needed]
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It is decidedly not applicable to a "seasoned veteran". That is the point: seasoned veterans tend not to be willing to do the kinds of things that kids starting out are willing to do. That was your very own diagnosis. That means that companies like Google are not engaging in age discrimination, but rather that older workers are objectively different from younger workers.
Honey dearest, you are a boring engineer eeking out a living in the South and apparently feeling bitter about it. That's why you keep chiming in about what politicians should do to address supposedly horrible injustices in high tech. And, to be certain, I wouldn't want you to kiss any part of my body.
Yeah, you do need a citation for your bullshit claim that there is a "push to avoid hiring citizens".
Seasoned veterans don't NEED to do the things students do, because they're already up to speed. Anything beyond extra study to come up to speed you imagine is another word for being taken advantage of by a sleezy employer.
Enjoy your sour grapes and cool aid.
Studies that are coming out now are revealing that learning ability is not as impacted by age as "conventional" wisdom suggests. These same studies also show that older workers are MORE productive than younger workers as they tend to focus on the work. Even accounting for age-related costs increases in insurance, older workers are a good deal