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Comment by jfmercer | Hacker News Reader

I know a woman in her mid-60s who has been programming since the late 1960s. She's much more than an "experienced dev": she is a sage, a teacher, and a grand-master of the art of computer programming: a true engineer in the very core of her being. Yet she can't find steady employment. She believes that is because of age discrimination, and I cannot help but to agree with her.

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Is she a badass engineer or is she a sage? I don't mean it to be offensive but I've worked with oldtymers that wanted to coach more than actually do. They have tremendous knowledge and experience but if they're advisors or extra managers, they aren't building; some companies need and can afford that and value it, a lot of startup type places see that as an extra cost.

Our industry has these polar ethos that are pretty deep: one group sees old product that has stood the test of time as an indicator of quality. Like "UNIX has been around over 40 years, it clearly did some things right." The other, and it's insanely popular right now, thinks that anything that is too old clearly has some damage and its no longer good technology, like the neovim crowd, "vim doesn't even use the newest C standards features.." Some times you have to believe that you're doing something different and everybody did it wrong before and that's while you'll succeed this time, that's how you take the risk and ignore the downsides. being old can be a detriment to that belief.

To evaluate whether age can be used as a descriminator for those attitudes and behaviors, I suggest you substitute "woman" or "black" and see how that reads.

There are young people who will only use the tools they are comfortable with. Ageism is the mistaken belief that this is somehow associated with your most recent birthday, akin to astrology.

I'm not endorsing or accepting discrimination, I simply offered up a meek rationalization as I see it.

Honestly, if you find and older person that wants to work at a startup, there is a good chance that they could be doing a few things right to have that energy and drive. You want to know how they live and what they do.

Ahistoricity is one of the things I find infuriating about this profession. Because everyone's an autodidact. I don't mind the argument that "everyone did it wrong before" because that's sometimes true, or something underlying is really different, but it needs to come with some actual awareness of what constraints "before" was operating under, and what was and was not achieved.

Don't know if this is the case in the US. But generally, mid-60s people are shied away from being hired because they will retire shortly. Investing in an employee that will be gone very soon is a thing few companies would do, and not unique to IT by any measure. The exception being when they have a need for her exact talent.

Which will end first, the employee's career or the startup? Funny that this is a consideration given how short most runways seem to be.

That's a great point I haven't seen anyone else bring up. It's worth bringing up again in any discussion involving startups. Many barely last a few years. Who are they to talk about what an employee will do in the next 10 years lol?

Answer: "If you're good and VC's like you, I'll be working with you on your third startup by then."

How long do younger people stay at a job, on average? I'd imagine it's 5 years or less. In fact, I'd argue that a person closer to retirement might be more likely to stay longer than someone just starting out. The younger person doesn't have kids, a mortgage or roots put down, so it's much easier for them to leave.

On the flipside, neither does a person in their 60's, most likely. Kids probably have all moved out, mortgages are probably paid off. As a person ages, they become more able to shift themselves, barring special circumstances like a sick spouse.

>How long do younger people stay at a job, on average? I'd imagine it's 5 years or less.

Yet if you admit that, it counts as a mark against you while being hired. It is one place where those hiring are outright ignoring reality, and instead prefer that everyone pretends we are making life long arrangements. Anything that breaks the playing pretend game counts against you; be it honestly stating you think there is a better chance than not that you'll have moved on in 5 years or being of enough age that the interviewer thinks you will retire within 5 years.

Looking at industries, I'm starting to feel that at the age of 50+ you can't really expect to pop up out of a blue with a nice CV and get hired. You have to keep in the flow - change projects, jump companies, build a network of people who know your skills and can recommend you when there are people needed for a new endeavour. It's probably not good, but it seems to me it works this way everywhere.

An issue with 50+ is, everybody looks at your resume and says "Why do you want to work at our position?" Because, you've done so much at so many levels they assume you should be a VP or something, and no longer be developing.

Inverted funnel: suppose there are ten programmers to every VP. As the programmers age, what happens to this ratio?

Is she looking now? What does she want to do? My company has lots of openings.

Does she have any prose or code online?

Could you link her GitHub profile?

Github profile is pretty meaningless as an evaluator of professional skill, outside a very small number of fields.

Almost everything I've written professionally in my 15 year career so far is closed source and not going to turn up on Github.

Not mutually exclusive. Why can't you have some hobby stuff on github ? I guess you might have to get permission in some companies, but not impossible anywhere I would think.

Also isn't programming one of those fields.

'pjc50 by "field" probably meant a subfield of software, like "sexy websites built on node.js". Not all types of software jobs yield Githubbable results.

That said, she definitely has something to share - if not open-soruce hobby projects, then at least interesting stories from jobs she did and battles she fought. I'd love to read such account.

I suggest Philip Hazel's technical memoir (http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/ph10/CIHK.pdf), which goes through his career.

Downloaded and saved to my "to read" folder, thanks!

> Not mutually exclusive. Why can't you have some hobby stuff on github ?

So now a professional programmer also has to program as a hobby too? Doesn't that set the bar a little high? What if your 'hobby' code is also closed source because it's for a side project?

What if your hobbies are thinking hobbies but not programming? What if your 'building stuff' fascination is more multi-faceted than just software?

I get that GitHub is great for employers because it allows them to evaluate a person's chops, provided that they have a substantial enough body of code published. But that only works for people who have some way to publish their work or personal code. Not everyone does that, nor is it practical to expect everyone to do that.

> Doesn't that set the bar a little high?

What kind of argument is it that an employer has the bar 'set too high'? Put yourself in their shoes; obviously you're going to hire a photographer/contractor/programmer who can show off a portfolio over one who just talks about it. It's silly to suggest otherwise.

If only 20% of programmers have a portfolio that they aren't bound by a contract not to reveal, does that mean programmers should be 80% unemployment?

I hear what you're saying of course, the easier a person makes it to have their work evaluated, the easier they will be hired.

But I think it's obvious that there are a great many good programmers who do solid work but don't program as a hobby too, and whose professional work can't be released because it's proprietary.

What I'm suggesting is that the notion advanced a couple of comments up of "everyone can have stuff on GitHub" isn't realistic for a variety of reasons and I tried to touch on what those reasons are.

EDIT: I of course agree that an employer should be able to set whatever standard they want to hire people, too. What I'm suggesting is that it's not really practical for every employer to hire to this standard.

>If only 20% of programmers have a portfolio that they aren't bound by a contract not to reveal, does that mean programmers should be 80% unemployment?

No. There is no should or should not, there is and is not. And the 'is' of the matter is that a candidate with a portfolio will be ranked higher than a comparable candidate without. That is only one factor, and other factors can still override that factor. And sometimes, you may be applying for a job where no programmer with a portfolio has applied.

I see no problem even if every employer wanted to use this standard, as long as the employer realized it was only one factor of many and not some gold standard.

>So now a professional programmer also has to program as a hobby too?

If they want to get hired easily, yes. (NB: I don't have any code up on github)

Hiring sucks, interviewing sucks. Existing code on GitHub - which can be discussed makes it easier. It creates an online reputation that an interviewer can judge you on without asking 20 extra questions. People are people and are going to take the easy way out rather than come up with good ways of interviewing people who don't have their hobby projects online.

"Any inventions, innovations, or ideas, conceived solely by the employee or jointly with others, relating to any current or future business of the company, at any time during the term of employment, are considered property of the company."

That was part of the employment agreement I had to sign when I worked at a large electronics/telecom company a number of years ago. So anything that could have been put on a public facing site (including technical articles) was not allowed. Of course, you could get a waver for individual projects but that had to be granted by I believe a VP level employee. Oh, and if you were to seek out that permission, unless you were already a superstar performer, you'd hear thing like "How do you have time for these side projects when you are behind on xyz project".

> "How do you have time for these side projects when you are behind on xyz project".

Nights and weekends ?

derekp7's comment is spot on: most workplaces have restrictive IP clauses. I've negotiated mine away so as not to impair spare time projects, but it's been years since I've had the inclination for serious recreational programming. Not that I don't have a couple of ideas. I have seriously considered making a 'portfolio' project if I were to start looking for jobs, although I'm now at the kind of company where I could just sit and wait out the quarter century until I retire if I wanted to. But I just regard that as pushing up the cost and effort involved in jobseeking. My most recent round of jobseeking I relied on finding a non-evil recruiter (HN passim), but I did have one company ask for my github.

TeMPOraL is correct that by "field" I meant "websites" or "ASIC design" or "CAD software" or "embedded". Even at my previous employer (small consultancy), only one of 10 of us had a github with anything on it. Currently I'm in an environment with technologies like MFC and Borland Delphi.

I have >8000 HN karma and >17000 electronics.stackexchange karma. Can I trade these internet points for job offers? Possibly the latter.

I do have a bunch of war stories ("linux upgrade escalates into needing to solder a floppy drive", "three ended ethernet cable", "structured exception handling isn't", "how many managers does it take to change an SSL certificate"), but like most people I'm not Richard Feynmann and don't think they'd be entertaining enough. I'll talk about them in interview if relevant.

(I'm hoping the 99 in your username is a disambiguation number like mine and not an age like some people's!)

Please do share those stories. You don't have to be Richard Feynman to write something interesting and entertaining!

What if you don't like to write code as a hobby?

> Why can't you have some hobby stuff on github ?

I see two reasons:

1. Your employment contract forbids it. My previous job had a stipulation that they reserved all rights to any related outside work and until permission was explicitly granted by the CEO who deems it is unrelated, no code written during your employment could be released. It sucked. It was part of the reason I left. But those types of contractual requirements exist

2. You don't write code as a hobby. This is me. My GitHub has a Redmine theme fork that I maintain for our installation and a simple project written in ArnoldC because it's ridiculous. I don't leave work and immediately go work some more. I'm already putting in 45-50 hours a week. When I go home, I want to read, watch TV, go to the movies, play video games, blog, etc., not code. As far as I am aware, this is common on my team. I think only a single person has anything of worth in their GitHub and several employees don't have accounts at all.

The growing trend of seeing "GitHub Account (Required)" on job applications is worrisome. Yes, it can be a good indicator if they use it, but a lot of people don't. A lot of people can't. A lot of people simply do not want to.

I have a bunch of code on GitHub, but I sometimes wonder about taking it down or making it private... A lot of it is old and hacked together (not as much attention to detail for a quick side project), so I wouldn't want to be judged solely on the quality of my GitHub account.

Point being, even if the person has open source code, it's not necessarily an accurate reflection of the work they will do for you.

Very little of my work is on GitHub either (I haven't really touched it since last time I actively applied for a job, years ago).

The general point I wanted to make is that it's much easier to make the age discrimination case if the person in question is doing all the same things that people who get hired do. Maybe all her work is in COBOL and no one wants to hire COBOL programmers. If you are a master and a sage etc. and you can't find a job, and you don't know to throw some stuff on GitHub or otherwise signal that your skills and practices are modern, you might be out of touch.

And there it is. The first inexperienced thing you could say. Assuming all work in your little world is on github.

I was expecting this response. :) I assume none of her work is on GitHub, actually. But there's a difference between not hiring someone because she's old and not hiring her because she's out-of-touch. If she isn't doing the things that people who get hired do then I don't think it's fair to assume she's being discriminated against due to her age alone.

(I work for Google, which I assume is not what you meant by "little world", and haven't touched my GitHub profile for years, FWIW.)

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