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Comment by metafunctor | Hacker News Reader

Nah. The fact that this post exists is evidence that ageism is a thing.

What makes you think older people are passionate about the latest and greatest JavaScript frameworks? That is not my experience at all. New frameworks are just the same old stuff in a new wrapper. We've seen it all several times over. Like, backprop was a cool thing in the late 80s.

I, too, find this post sad, but probably not for the same reasons you did. This post, that makes me and you sad, doesn't make it any less of a fact that the young people in this industry think you are a useless dinosaur if you don't know what the new hot thing is about.

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> Nah. The fact that this post exists is proof that ageism is a thing.

Indeed, ageism exists and it's a form of discrimination. There are societies (e.g. japanese, korean, central/southern european) where ageism works the other way around, at the expense of younger people.

In both cases it's still discrimination and we should acknowledge the problem and fight it instead of trying to look/act younger or older.

It's tough to communicate this accurately. I've noticed a trend in engineers self-evaluating as old on HN to say things along the lines "I am having more fun than ever learning about the cloud/TypeScript/webfoo". Several people on all these "old in tech" threads.

I have the feeling these posts are not at all representative of the domain, and neither are the proposed solutions to just learn more, but it's all I've seen so far.

More of the same thing is not bringing us any closer to solving this very real issue.

OK, that's probably where our experiences differ. In my experience, the more experienced techies see that there's nothing really new in the new technologies. Many realize that to stay current, they must learn the new tech. But rarely do they really love it, because it's really a step sideways rather than forward.

I suppose it's a form of competition that forces new technologies to pop up all the time. I just wish people would take a really close look at what's already there before spending their prime bestowing the world with yet-another-framework or language.

By the way, I'm 40. I don't think I'm old. I think Scheme is superior to JavaScript.

> think you are a useless dinosaur if you don't know what the new hot thing is about.

Welcome to the technology industry.

Hi! I've been here since the late 80s. What do you want to learn?

Tell me how you've survived in technology without learning new technologies!

Not sure why you think I haven't learned new technologies.

I have learned them whenever I needed to. Most of the new technologies are not that special. That makes them easy to learn, but, also, kind of annoying because I can see that they're just repeating a mistake I've seen 20 years ago already.

I obviously don't think you haven't learned new technologies in 25+ years. It seemed like the claim to ageism was that the kiddies expect you to know the hot, new technology. Requiring knowledge of new technologies for candidates isn't exclusive to veterans. And it's definitely not a requirement of the other 90% of companies that are using older technologies.

I thought you thought that, because you said it. Perhaps I missed a nuance, English is not my strongest language.

My point, going up this discussion thread a few clicks, was that new technology is not always better than the old. Ageism comes into play when one's opinion about the new tech is dismissed just because one has some gray hair.

I realized this way back in the mid 1990s when suddenly everyone wanted a "webmaster" with 10 years of experience, when suddenly HTML - a document markup language - became the most important "programming language" one could know.

Since then I have studiously avoided specializing in any technology. As soon as I feel like I've spent enough time in a particular stack to start to "know" it, I move on. I have refused to be pigeonholed into any particular tech.

The coding / language skills are the very least important skills I have, I intend to keep it that way. However I can present an extremely long laundry list of technologies that I have built solutions with - the length of the list, not the presence of any particular TLA on it, is the key to demonstrating my learning ability.

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