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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

I'm a grey beard who applied to a company specifically advertising for young developers. Got the job without mentioning my vintage. That was six years ago and they still haven't seen my face. I waited a while to gently break the news to them. If you're a technological senior citizen remote work is your friend.

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Heh, I applied for and landed a position on the SRE team of a youngish startup that is almost entirely remote. I'm 55 and there is one other guy in his 40's I think who works out of Northern Cal. Other than him I'm 20 years older than everyone else and it's been a blast. We recently did a week-long retreat and I had a truly good time, which surprised me. Really the only thing I can say after 20 years in the business is you just never know. I got lucky this time around and fell in with a group of people who are perfect for me.

Ah, "Grey beard". The term Microsoft used to separate the old from the young at a conference when they first introduced the .NET framework. Classic "old bad, good new" sales.

As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc."

Yes I remember. Because it was yesterday just before I came to your conference!

I still went home and started learning what the hell XML was though. =(

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms.

And I am relatively young.

WebForms can die in a fire, and thankfully has, for the most part, but WinForms is still plenty good enough for cranking out quick and dirty tools. Maybe I'm old, or it's just because I started out in high school doing VB6 forms applications, but I still prefer it unless I have a good reason, over WPF.

WinForms is also a pretty thin layer over Win32 controls, as well, so if you have to switch between .Net and native C/C++ Windows dev, it's less of a context switch.

WebForms changed the game. ASP was a sub-subset of VB, but WebForms with C# made websites full-scale eventful and stateful programs for the first time. I had never felt such power and freedom programming for the web.

Yes, some people would put humongous data structures in view state, and yes, more-better solutions have arisen, but WebForms deserves your respect!

It really doesn’t. I’ve never seen a good WebForms site / app and I’ve always dreaded working with them. They were a regressive step.

If you worked long enough with WebForms, then you'd know what an inefficient, slow and complicated event-hairball it is.

I curse every time I have to go back to any old WebForms-based project to do some changes.

> WebForms with C# made websites full-scale eventful and stateful programs for the first time.

And that is why it can go die in a fire!

We do a lot of new development in Winforms. Ironically, it's our migration path away from green screen programs.

>> I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms.

>> And I am relatively young.

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who worked on WinForms and never used MFC or ATL or wrote C code to the Win16/32 API :).

And I'm... er... used to be young.

I'm in my 20s, and when I was starting it was the Win32 API, in C. It really wasn't that long ago.

Unity3d is probably exposing tons of people to .net without winforms

Not all development involves GUIs. Well, let’s go even further and say most development is not GUI-related.

Business logic and algorithms is what it’s all about.

Most algorithms are reusable, while most GUI code is not.

Hence, most actual programming is happening on GUIs.

Hm, depends on the business, I guess. Because from my experience, most business algorithms are proprietary and don’t have proper specifications. You can’t just use them somewhere else. You have to recreate them from scratch.

Probably because your devs didn't write them in stored procs like they should.

Only roughly half the world believes in SP's. The other half (like me) believes that writing even the barest of hints of logic into SP's is a serious crime.

So you'd rather write the same logic in every app, and trust that every developer of every app does the same and gets it identical? Good for keeping busy I suppose but if I were your manager I wouldn't pay you for it.

>As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc."

As one who is neither "Grey" nor "Bread," you may wish to check your spelling :)

But yes, it's kind of sad that this is the way things are now :(

Gray and grey are both acceptable spellings. Or were you just talking about "bread"?

Just the bread. Grey is a more automatic way to spell it than gray, for me.

The correct spelling is regional. Gray is a color and grey is a colour.

Hmph. Sourdough life forever!

Hah! Plain white bread is clearly where it's at!

I am not Galdalf the Grey, I am Gandalf the BREAD! Er wait, Gandalf the White!

> you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc.

I remember submitting my BASIC program on IBM punch cards. Using a card punch machine taught one to not make typos. You youngsters with your backspace keys!

thank you for making me smile during these horrible days.

I'm actually not kidding. My first programs were done on punchcards back in 1974 or 1975. I then moved on to ASR-33s (barf), DECWriters (much better) and then ADM-3A glass terminals (heaven - a working backspace!).

Using a text editor today is not much different than an ADM-3A, it just has more rows and columns on it and the font is slightly, but not much, nicer. (Why do the console fonts suck these days? Jeez)

Edit: the first screen editor I had ran on an ADM-3A and was a TECO macro. I think TECO was the first "tty noise" programming language.

You had literal patches though.

Does anyone else remember using a hard-copy terminal? It's hard to even think about how I would edit, compile, debug and run programs where everything you typed or was echoed back, including passwords, was printed out on a paper roll. Want to look at your command-history? just grab the paper and look. Of course there was no fancy vi screen-oriented editor. We had ed and liked it!

We had a teletype machine at my school in 1980 connected to the local authority mainframe. There was nearly always a queue to type your own program but you could write it out on a sheet of paper (one character per box) and get a printout of somebody who had typed it in for you. When they made a mistake your program didn't run and you had to send it again the next week.

and I'm only 50!

I certainly do. I found even punch cards preferable. The awkwardness of the input method meant that I stayed away from tech for almost 15 years after the first quarter of my freshman year in college.

They prefer the young ones, because it's easier to get them to swallow the BS. They'll play the "fire and motion" game [1] with gusto.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

How did they "specifically advertise for young developers" without running afoul of age discrimination laws?

I've seen many job postings with qualitative descriptions along the lines of: "You're a young, ambitious, fast learner..."

Enforcement is, uh, spotty. But the regulatory environment is enough to give applicants an advantage in this situation. Interviewers know they're ignorant of complex shifting rules, so are afraid to ask anything personal that isn't also spinnably vague.

Easy. Ask questions that only someone who has recently revised for exams would know. No-one enforcing this has any idea that coding a red-black tree from scratch on a whiteboard isn't something that any working programmer actually does...

You could just take your job hunting seriously and do a bit of studying. Though the details of a red-black tree are a bit much to ask anyone.

Generally speaking, there's nobody out there proactively enforcing antidiscrimination laws. The enforcement pathway is reactive. You get penalized for discrimination (in theory) when someone you've discriminated against brings legal action against you.

In this case, someone would have to sue them. For instance, an older developer who interviews, believes he or she is being discriminated against on the basis of age, and uses the advertisement as further evidence in the complaint.

Plastic surgery is another option for onsite jobs.

Sadly, there was an article a while back specifically about tech workers doing just that. Might want to lighten up on down voting given the truth of the statement.

Are you referring to this article? https://newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brut...

I think that might be it, and it was submitted to HN.

how do you work for someone without them knowing your age? Do you keep that out of your CV? How about credentials and signing your contact? Seems very strange to me.

> Do you keep that out of your CV?

My understanding is that it is not only possible not to mention your age in your CV, but even illegal for companies to ask you what your age is as part of the application process.

Putting your age isn't necessary when your experience goes back decades and you graduated from university before your hiring manager was even born. Similarly, your name can convey a lot of biases as well, such as gender and ethnicity.

You can truncate your cv and not list graduation year, though name is tough.

The last time I shortlisted people for interview, HR had removed names and any other identifying information.

"So, candidate 24892 looks strong."

I don't know if I have unconscious biases, but this method was unlikely to make things less fair.

That sounds like a very good move to let people have an equal opportunity to "get a foot in the door", so to speak, but I'm genuinely curious how biases may be reduced during the interview process (be it telephonic or direct) and interview questions that may be directed at one's experience? Is this even possible without having dedicated "how to interview people" learning sessions and monitoring?

Yea definitely the company can do that on their end. Harder for you to do as an applicant though.

Is it really, though? It's possible they'd never need your real name until you filled out tax forms after being hired.

I amputated my birth year, education and about 20 years of experience from my CV. Health insurance paperwork went directly to the broker. This is an outfit that hires by test and interview and cares not about aught else. Turns out they're not that rare.

Your age or birth date probably shouldn't be on your CV. Unless you think it's relevant to the job somehow, but it probably isn't.

Not only should it not matter, but it's illegal for employers to ask about it or consider it in their hiring decision, so having it right there on your CV puts them in a bit of a tight spot. I think some recruiters will actually remove that type of thing before forwarding it on to the interviewers and hiring people.

Many people put college graduation year on their resume, and hiring managers reflexively subtract ~20 from that year and aren't wrong 99% of the time.

Interesting! I graduated much later in life, don't put my DOB on resume and I've often been told that they expected me to be younger when they see me - now I get it!

One of the few perks of not finishing your degree until much later is the fact that you can put that date on your resume and people assume you're younger. It's expensive, though, considering how much and how fast college tuition has been shooting up in price the past 15 years.

That depends on what country you're in. In Japan it's very standard to include date of birth, gender and a photograph on CV's.

On the whole I hate the practice, but you have to consider cultural norms when doing the job-hunting dance.

It's also customary in Germany, although I've never had a problem getting a job and I've never attached a photo to my resume.

It's quite customary in Getmany to even have a picture on your CV.

Not really anymore, the latest version of the DIN norm on CVs has no photo or birthdate anymore, and in some states, it’s being discussed to ban it even.

Is there a a norm on CVs? The only remotely relevant I know of is DIN 5008 which concerns letters but doesn't contain anything regarding CVs.

There is one since the EU standardized CVs and created a webapp to build standardized CVs.

I have never seen a Europass in the wild and I wouldn't cite that as a German standard CV given its European nature.

Depends on where you work. Anything influenced by the English-speaking world (IT, multinationals) – never attach a photo. A small local company – always attach a photo. Anything else – good luck deciding what to do.

Really? That seems very odd to me. In the UK I've never put my birth date, gender or photo on a CV and you're advised not to, unless you're applying to be like a model or something where I guess gender and photo is needed.

When I was in the 6th Form in the UK we were told we had to include a photo with CVs. Another reason you should never take careers advice from someone who became a careers advisor!

Immigration is still a pretty new thing for most of central Europe.

There weren't a significant number of visibly-foreign immigrants in Germany till the 60s or 70s and it took a couple more decades before those were seen as anything other than 'temporary guest workers'.

The UK and France (and even more so the US and other "New World" countries) had at least a few decades head-start for culture to get around the idea of immigration.

In Hungary, it is standard to include a photo on the CV, so I do that. Recruiter friends told me how they consider non-photo applications secondary to ones with photos, and how a human face helps building a connection right from the start.

So my only reason for including my age on the CV is because I look like I'm 24, whereas I'm pushing 31.

Not just Hungary, most of Europe outside of the UK seems to do this. I remember finding it a bit odd the first time I had to sift through developer CVs and most of them had photos.

What's the story in Asia? I only know about Thailand where a photo, age, sex and religion(!) are standard on CVs. Most advertised jobs state requirement for male or female of a certain age.

That is because many European country's are still a bit un reconstructed when it comes to issues around race.

Photos make it easier to hire people like us :-(

Graduation dates need to be there for any role that involves a background check.

If someone is doing a background check and can't find out when you've graduated, then why bother?

Yeah, that's kinda the point: you can't realistically conceal your age in many if not most job applications.

They gave you a job without ever seeing you in person? That seems kind of rare.

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