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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

The article gives a brief sketch of Huber's downfall:

But at the beginning of the 1990s, his life came crashing down around him. One of his main customers stopped paying. He fought for years to get the unpaid money and restructured his debt to get seed capital for his new business plan. He fought desperately -- and ultimately in vain. In 1997, he was forced to capitulate. By that point, he had already been unable to work for two years and was on welfare. He lost his family home in a foreclosure and his pension and retirement insurance plan was seized. His landlord evicted him. Manfred Huber was ruined.

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He's a college-educated electrical engineer with IT consulting experience. Why can't he find a job somewhere?

Worth noting that Germany was considered "the sick man of Europe" due to its poor growth and high unemployment from the middle of the nineties to a bit into the 2000s. Not sure that is the entire explanation of his problems, but is probably related.

The "recovery" out of that sickness is a bit fake, it's just because 18 other countries agreed to use German currency (a.k.a. the Euro) that Germany now is looking better than the rest of the continent: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/22/greece-...

And Hartz IV is a neo-liberal's wet dream.

It was more like "other countries (aka France) demanded the Germanies to join the Euro in order for them to reunite". No Euro, no reunification. The German people were really scared of joining weak currencies like the Lira and others, having gone through multiple hyperinflations historically and finally having a super solid and strong Mark. That is also why the ECB is a) independent of the member state goverments and b) in Frankfurt and not somewhere in France or Belgium like the other EU buildings are.

> [...] having gone through multiple hyperinflations historically [...]

In the 20s and at the end of WWII? Any other one I missed?

Not to my knowledge. Maybe I should have written "two" instead.

Thanks.

> And Hartz IV is a neo-liberal's wet dream.

Not really. UBI would be. The effective marginal tax rate for poor people is pretty high. (The conventional taxes are low, but each extra Euro earned pre-tax cuts into welfare a lot. That incentive ain't great---especially since welfare is a very stable income once you have all the bureaucracy sorted, but the kinds of jobs poor people get are often less stable. Especially jarring if getting a job involves sunk costs like buying a car or moving to a different city.)

Funny enough, the Euro was a quid pro quo in return for French approval of unification. (The French were basically forced to copy the Bundesbank's monetary policy. Their politicians had hoped to meddle more with the ECB.)

See eg http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-price-of-uni... (lots more to be found with some searching).

His particular skillset might not be quite up to date anymore.

Which is just another way of saying he 's probably out of touch and his knowledge/experience is not worth much.

I'm not in the Bay Area but in Amsterdam, NL, which also has a sizeable startup culture, and I'm in that age group as well. I think both things are true, yes many older programmers have trouble keeping up (hell, even youngsters are complaining about Javascript fatigue), and I see them struggle, but on the other hand ageism is real, and many people in my age group are hit by it. Unwarranted in many cases.

It's a real shame, because if you learned about fundamentals like compilers, data structures and operating systems eg in the 80s and then slept for 30 years, you would still pass a Google interview today.

It's not even that you had to be lucky to guess right. The fundamentals are easy to identify.

But of course, lots of people chased and are still chasing the latest superficial thing; and complain that they can't keep up.

> It's a real shame, because if you learned about fundamentals like compilers, data structures and operating systems eg in the 80s and then slept for 30 years, you would still pass a Google interview today.

LOL, on my own Google recruiting track, it turned sour after I admitted I am significantly older than my LinkedIn profile shows. I believe I was reasonably good on fundamentals during the phone interview as you say ;-)

We have a bunch of self-described old farts working here in the Google office in Sydney without any problem.

They do however seem to expect more seniority out of the senior candidates.

Even if you know all the fundamentals, you're not going to be able to just jump into current programming languages, frameworks, tooling and development processes.

If you're young and looking for a junior position, employers will have no problems teaching you some of these things but there are limits.

Eg Google is a huge black hole, they don't expect anyone from the outside to be familiar with their internal-only tools.

Current programming languages: just stick to the ones that will be around for a while. (Simple heuristic: pick the ones that already have been around for a while. In the 80s, that would have been C for example.)

Incidentally I do hiring and I can tell you that in Munich there is an abundance of ex-Siemens people most of them in their late fifties and early sixties. It is difficult for them to get a job. It's sad, sad, sad.

The more interesting question is why his customers stopped paying, but the article doesn't say. In the end I think many things had to happen for such a fall to take place.

Right. Leaving out obvious questions like "What exactly happened to this guy?" does a lot of damage to the credibility of the article as a whole.

I disagree. Unless you live in a world where ordinary failures are punished by a lifetime of penury, it doesn't really make any difference. We've all failed projects; we all expect to be able to get up afterwards and try something else.

Personally, I find this talk of age discrimination super scary, and I do my best to ignore it, just because I've spent most of what I should have spent on retirement savings on my business ventures, so I myself plan on working through his age. I already seem to be "not a cultural fit" even in my mid-30s, though I suspect for reasons other than age, but certainly, the social expectations for technical people have... changed, even within my own career.

I hear what you're saying, but if you read between the lines in the article, this guy has left behind a trail of failures of the sort we'd normally give hurricane names to. He had a lot of advantages in life and wasted them all, one by one.

It seems likely he has mental issues, which suggests the system is failing him in ways that have nothing to do with poverty or conventional welfare support. His life situation probably shouldn't be used as fodder for a generic cri de coeur article on those topics. But we can't be sure because the journalist couldn't be bothered to elaborate.

hmm? I didn't see anything that suggested mental issues beyond what most people employed in the industry before the last boom had.

He left a job to work on his own business, and failed, and handled the failure badly. If that's "a trail of failures of the sort we'd normally give hurricane names to." - then I am in serious trouble.

Of course, as you said, there wasn't much detail, but very likely that was because the person in question didn't want to revisit those things.

Again, I'm reading between the lines because the author left no other option. Things like, "A customer (his only one?) stopped paying (why?)"

I don't think you're wrong to be concerned about age discrimination, of course. But maybe this is an example of it, and maybe it's not.

> Again, I'm reading between the lines because the author left no other option.

Sure, there was no information indicating the guy didn't have serious mental issues... but there was also no information indicating that he did. Your "reading between the lines" I think blames the old guy... when there's really no evidence presented, one way or the other.

>Things like, "A customer (his only one?) stopped paying (why?)"

The vast majority of small computer businesses (corp to corp contractors) that I know only have one customer at a time, because they only have one worker to rent out; themselves. It's really common. It's less common for those customers to stop paying after work is rendered, but it has happened to people I trust to not bullshit me on the matter. (It's kind of common for some of these small contractors to get pissed when the "contract" ends early, and to demand compensation for that... One of those mistakes a lot of people make before they learn how things actually work, at least in my jurisdiction, the length of the contract has no bearing on anything at all. You usually get paid for hours worked; really there's no further guarantees.)

>I don't think you're wrong to be concerned about age discrimination, of course. But maybe this is an example of it, and maybe it's not.

I agree. Well, I'm not 100% certain I need to be concerned about age discrimination; it's in my "might be an irrational fear, but I'm not certain either way" bucket right now, but I agree about the article.

He's a college-educated electrical engineer with IT consulting experience. Why can't he find a job somewhere?

Because ageism is real. I finally got hired to a good job, with a boss who appreciates what I do, but before that happened, I got (rather snidely) accused of "googling the answer," had people blow off my phone appointment, was basically called a "fake programmer," and had people angry at me or look at me like I'm a piece of crap during interviews.

I have never, ever, been treated like this in my professional life, except in the Bay Area. Knowing what you don't know is generally best learned by getting some bruises in the process. Really, the lesson is that not knowing what you don't know can be very extremely painful. It's one thing to know that abstractly, another to know it from direct experience. There are some people who just knee-jerk say you can't do this or that. There are other folks who have enough experience to have a good feeling for how to navigate what they don't know, in such a way that the team can see it coming.

I'm sorry, but that is just not an acceptable excuse in this case. I acknowledge that ageism is real, but I've also worked in companies where we went out of our way to hire older engineers.

That said, the article makes it sound like this guy has been out of work for close to a decade or more. Maybe he can't get a cutting-edge IT or engineering job, but he could do tech-support, an entry-level job, or even drive for Uber or a taxi.

Don't forget that people do not want to work after reaching 60-70...

Careful. There are many people over 60 that would like to work though maybe not full time. Personally I know my father would love to work but really can/should not as he has dementia. My mother wouldn't but volunteers as a dance instructor 10-20 hrs/wk and loves doing it in her retirement.

Yeah, I empathise with you. Once the crystal embedded in your palm starts flashing red(1), nobody in the industry even wants to acknowledge your existence, let alone your experience. I have a youthful voice and went to university for CompSci long after graduating from a technical high school, so when I show up for the in-person interview, the atmosphere often gets sucked out of the room.

The absolute worst experience was a technical phone interview that was going very well, I thought I connected with the interviewer(2). So I was shocked after being complimented on the breadth and depth of knowledge I had, near the end of a 45 minute conversation, there was a pause and he asked "so, when did you graduate from high school?" Needless to say, the tone changed somewhat and I didn't get the in-person interview for the position that "wasn't really a good fit for me," and he, "wasn't really sure [we're] going to actually fill this position," forgetting that he earlier said he wanted someone as soon as possible.

(1) See Logan's Run -- it's a documentary about the Bay area companies' solution for aging software engineers. /s (2) And I knew him, but only in the sense I knew him from several mailing lists stretching back to the days of USENET as a knowledgeable, respectable guy with a good reputation.

TL;DR ageism is a thing everywhere.

A friend of mine, aged 46, recently graduated with an IT degree.

He has had many interviews, and in about half of them he tells me he was rejected by the interviewers at the end because they're "looking for someone 'fresher'." One interview he had started out with a phone interview, and they loved him and his experience. He turned up for the interview, and the first question it was some time before the first question was asked because of all the awkward ways the interviewer tried to broach the topic of my friend's age.

I'm 41, with a Computer Science degree, and I don't even get half the number of interviews he has. He previously worked for an educational institution, I worked for what turned out to be one of the least reputable employers in town. That guy's business practices destroyed any hope of finding work that I've had. (In my country, if you're unemployed and signed up with the government support agency, whether receiving financial support or not, you agree to accept any reasonable job offer.)

Aside: in the last eight years, I've had three interviews. The first one found out that I have a disability, and much like your interview, he forgot that he'd told me I was well suited to the role due to my knowledge and skills. He turned bright red and started screaming at me, literally screaming. He was threatening me with legal action and bills, for wasting his time because I didn't have enough experience, threatening to lay a formal complaint with the referring agency.

Please tell your friend that most engineers have no business interviewing anyone. They may be intelligent in some ways but my experience in interviewing 100+ candidates for various positions is that most of my fellow engineers should stick to computers.

Perhaps you should too..

@tamana

I'm a great interviewer because I have a bit more empathy and interest in understanding other people.

You can downvote me if you like but my words still ring true.

>Aside: in the last eight years, I've had three interviews. The first one found out that I have a disability, and much like your interview, he forgot that he'd told me I was well suited to the role due to my knowledge and skills. He turned bright red and started screaming at me, literally screaming. [...]

wat. I presume this was after you called him out on his contradiction?

I'm sure unemployment is worse than paid employment , but it sounds like people who do work with that hiring manager would also have a pretty bad time of it. Hateful ill-tempered people rarely compartmentalize it (except when sucking up to power)

FWIW my company does embedded development and we take in many older engineers because of our skill base working with low level hardware and unmanaged code that much of the younger crowd is lacking.

I suspect that the trouble is that, while work like yours does favor the pre-Ruby/JavaScript generation, there just isn't a whole lot of it. It is probably growing in absolute numbers though, while the supply of low-level near-metal experience is not.

Yeah, I can imagine. About half the kids (adults, really -- it was a grad course) in a systems programming course I took had that deer in the headlights look in the computer lab sitting at a Unix prompt. Not that they couldn't figure it out, but there was a definite learning curve.

Wow, that's bizarre. I am not aware of such a culture existing here in Seattle. I hope it doesn't spread, because that sounds just... obviously maladaptive.

Apparently he was out of work in 95. At that time in Europe, IT was not that hot. It was starting but he probably didn't have the proper profile. Germany was not great at the time either anyway.

Then the hiring mentality in continental Europe is not as openminded as in the UK or the US. Being out of work alone is a big red flag on your resume. Moving from independent to employee is another one.

The cardinal sin is being over 50. When I was a kid, losing your job when you were in your 40s was the nightmare of all families - the event you do not recover from like the family terminal cancer. It is getting a lot better, but even 20 years later finding a job when you are over 50 is ridiculously hard. In my home country we even have the concept of pre-pension (i.e. unemployment payment with an extra added by the company) to get rid of older workers easily.

> Moving from independent to employee is another one.

I've heard/feared this as well, but in light of the statistics on startup infant mortality it seems crazy to stigmatise.

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