Show HN: Hire an Oldster
tryoldster.com
tryoldster.com
1) They are typically more expensive than "market" for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc.
2) They are less flexible - they are less willing to relocate, they have kids to pick up instead of "beer hour bonding", unwilling to run the same 60 hour gauntlet that a 25 year old can etc.
3) They have less primary & secondary education relevant to today's enterprise issues. In the specific case of "marketers" - like TryOldster is pitching - the best people will learn anything, but anybody over 50 years old spent their professional training + formative 20s thinking about television, radio, and print - not paid search, mobile advertising, and social.
That we're at the top of HN again with another "hire older people" post (recently we saw OldGeekJobs) demonstrates there's a huge unmet need within this cohort.
I don't think a job-board is the right solution to this problem because the pitch on TryOldster does nothing to alleviate the three principal concerns.
My unasked, probably asinine business advice would be to turn this flow of traffic into a training / education platform where you can VALIDATE and address the very real, foundational concerns of hiring managers around this cohort, and suddenly you've got a machine that can get motivated people trained and placed.
If you're hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an "acceptable tradeoff of competency" unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place.
Also if you're 50 and are relying on a new job's retirement program you're probably in for a rude awakening about when you can retire. That should be pretty close to set by that point. If it's not, the difference between matching 4% or 3%, or 75% match v. 100% is not going to be shaving more than a few months off your working career.
> They have less primary & secondary education relevant to today's enterprise issues.
I'm pretty knowledgeable about paid search and social but I don't think my Political Science degree has anything to do with that. To imply that someone's age precludes them from understanding paid search, mobile advertising, or social is the very definition of ageism.
> I'm pretty knowledgeable about paid search and social but I don't think my Political Science degree has anything to do with that. To imply that someone's age precludes them from understanding paid search, mobile advertising, or social is the very definition of ageism.
I run 134+ branded sites (and maybe 20+ other misc sites) some of which do extensive search marketing (extensive for a university). I am a digital native as much as the next person regardless of age.
These are univeristy sites so they are not complex apps. But there is a lot of backend code and middleware for pushing files to the CDN and to an xml database.
One thing is for sure: there are definitely, 100%, no-questions about it, over 1 people who can be reached and who, at least for a few months, would take over 15,000 pages and 154+ sites. (An early 20s hacker). For under $30,000.
That excludes nearly everybody: but not everybody. There is 1 person you can find who can do it.
However, that one person is not going to be over 50. Over 50 people "aren't stupid" and are not going to do that for you for $30,000 and no other compensation.
You can say under twenty people will be "stupid enough" that you can find someone to do it. But more accurately, they have different motivations. There's nothing stupid about working for $30,000 doing a job that's worth half a million, when your friends are earning $20,000 as barristas at starbucks. People's lives change over time. . . .
That's patently false. Undervaluing your labor because your friends work in a poorly compensated industry makes no sense. If anything the money you are earning when you are younger is more important to secure for ROI purposes.
we're just going to disagree if you think otherwise - we don't have to get into an argument about it. In my world view not everything is about maximizing salary.
In the non-labor market airlines a great example of this. They create tremendous value for their customers (fast long distance transportation), but the industry as a whole is not very profitable.
Same for employment. Many (hopefully most) employees generate more value than their salaries, but that does not mean they can negotiate for that value to be added to their salary. If there is someone else with similar capabilities willing to do the job at $x, then negotiating pay above $x will be difficult.
The worst case[0] is that they don't show up the next day and you are SOL.
0. Assuming they don't actively try to sabotage the company that has been exploiting them.
people at the bottom of the totem pole view money as simply a scarce resource -- when it becomes somewhat more abundant, you have other things to worry about and it becomes a means to an end of hiring and retaining good, reliable people.
one way of doing this is not to substantially underpay someone who's worth a lot more on the open market, because eventually it will bite you in the ass.
No, it's just rational as an individual, yet it ends up driving down wages. If, as a group, this kind of pay was shunned, that wouldn't happen. Don't devalue your job, wait it out.
Employers are in a better position to divide and conquer, than employees are to unionize.
In order to do this, I have had to learn new languages, frameworks and new ways of thinking about things. Some of those "new" things weren't difficult, they just required tweaking old ways of looking at things.
For example, older mobile devices are resource constrained. Having to think about conservation while coding isn't new. I started my career coding on shitty MS Dos system where if you had 640K of memory, it was a high-end machine. The tweaking comes in with the addition of other constrains such as battery life, coalescing radio usage and the fact that the OS can decide to shut down your app and restart it at any time, but the user's expectation is it should be the way the just left it.
Continually learning and reinventing myself is just the way things are now. If you haven't had to deal with that yet, just wait. It will come.
My point. Nobody will ever dictate what I can and cannot do in this complex, wonderful, and growing digital space. Ever.
I completely agree (I'm 32), but what is worrying is the possibility of a fundamental shift that doesn't occur within individual companies but rather manifests itself as a new industry of sorts, and then a slow decline of the industry we're in right now - a paradigm shift, for a lack of a better term. That one is harder to detect until it's blatantly obvious, at which point the early practitioners in the new industry are now the senior engineers and newly minted college graduates are overwhelmingly starting their career in the new industry. Developers in the old industry have to cling on to whatever jobs are left or start over.
My uncle is a good example of this - he's in his 50s and has spent most of his career working in what are now ancient IBM technology stacks (ever hear of RPG?) He saw object oriented programming as snake oil and a passing fad. When there were finally no jobs left near him for working in this IBM stack, he begrudgingly learned Java/C#/JavaScript/SQL and took a major pay/prestige cut basically starting over.
It's not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse). What experience ends up transferring to the new industry? Soft skills, perhaps, but lots of people outside either the old or new industry have good soft skills experience, so what do you bring to the table that they don't?
This isn't an "age problem." It's something deeper than that. If my uncle had jumped ship from his IBM world and into e-commerce in the 90s, which he was perfectly capable of doing, he would probably be a senior leader somewhere right now. But how could he have known? When the .com bubble burst, he probably felt vindicated in his decision to stay put.
How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035? I'm not very confident at all. But how do I recognize when to jump ship?
edit: grammar
However, the principles of engineering good computing systems will probably be pretty similar. And the higher level skills needed to be a good engineer will almost certainly be the same.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss soft skills as easy to pick up - well, maybe you mean soft skills like basic verbal and written communication, in which case, sure, they can be learned pretty easily. But there are a lot of very valuable "soft" skills that fall under the realm of engineering wisdom and experience.
A senior engineer can add a huge amount of value for a team - justifying a huge pay check - by having a good sense for how to design things to allow for greater productivity, when to be extra paranoid about failures, which corners can safely be cut, or how to avoid subtle but devastating pitfalls in a given domain or platform.
I think most professions are a bit pyramid shaped, with lots of people whose career trajectories don't always go up and to the right. Software development probably has a bit more of a plateau than some, but it's not the only one. Architecture, for example, is very cutthroat, with a handful of senior people who do very well, and an awful lot of disappointed later-career professionals. Even at big corporate law firms things are pretty much up or out - not everyone makes partner, and not every partner makes senior partner.
I think across all of these professions, if you want to keep moving up and/or stay highly employable (and that's a big if), then you have to always be thinking about trends in the market for your skills, and how you can stay ahead of them. It's not that different from a company thinking about how their products can continue to stay competitive in a changing market.
I have to say that based on my experience I believe very little meta engineering skills would transfer between these two industries. The way software is written for a full authority digital engine control and the way software is written for an e-commerce website have very little in common other than they are both called "software engineering." The process is immensely different, the technology is immensely different, testing is immensely different, integration is immensely different. It's a different universe. If I went back to work for one of those companies I would be starting from the bottom - if they would even hire me. Yes, if you squint really hard, you can see parallels in the two industries - they both test, for example - but to try to extrapolate beyond that is... well, quite a big pitfall.
The things you mentioned - a good sense for designing things for greater productivity, where to be paranoid about failures, what corners can be safely cut, or where the pitfalls are - are extremely different between the two industries.
The nature of computation opens up a boundless universe of possible ways to both run a software project and build a software project. This sets us apart from other engineering disciplines -- there are a limitless number of ways to architect almost any software project, but there are only so many safe ways to build a bridge.
This allows our industry to fork off into places we can't possibly imagine today. I agree with you that in 2035, our field will be very different.
If this is the case, then when someone entered the workforce has absolutely no relevance. What is relevant is staying current. It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.
> How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035? I'm not very confident at all. But how do I recognize when to jump ship?
Thankfully, these days we have data scientists who examine trends in framework and methodology assimilation for fun and publicity. We have metrics like GitHub stars, Stackoverflow questions, and Google Trends to clue us in on the popularity and profitability of new ways of doing things.
I don't know if I agree with that. When I was 25, I was all over every new technology that came out. I was the expert in my group. I'm now pushing 50. The latest tech isn't nearly as interesting. And honestly, I'm getting tired of chasing it. My energy level has dropped a bit. Physically I'm not in as good a shape (though still quite healthy). The effects of age are very real.
I'm 51. Many, maybe most of the tech that's fundamental to my career didn't even exist when my career started. Only Unix and SQL have been constants. http was a lab experiment. The Mosaic browser didn't exist yet. Java? Ruby? NoSQL? Whatever.
If you need to learn a tech to solve a problem, you learn a tech. It's not hard.
What I find interesting isn't new technologies. It's new problems, problems that didn't exist before (often because they're the result of new tech), or problems that could not be addressed before (due to limits of computational power or data access).
Both the browser and Node provide hardly any structure at all compared to Cocoa, WinForms, or even the Java standard library. Experienced developers recoil because it feels like building a house with hand tools, compared to having a team of contractors at your disposal.
This results in JavaScript developers building their own tools. That's why there are so many of them. In iOS no one writes a GUI toolkit, because Apple already provided one and it's pretty good. People have their complaints but they're rarely serious enough to warrant throwing the whole stack away.
In that sense these more robust platforms are superior. But the JavaScript world is like a giant evolutionary system trying all ideas at once, at almost every level of the stack. Lots of repetition, lots of death, but also WAY more ideas floating around.
JavaScript frameworks all look the same to outsiders because they mostly are. But they are different in subtle ways that you simply can't explore on iOS because Apple already decided where the major architectural boundaries will be.
There are painful tradeoffs on the JavaScript side, but I think in the long run the fundamental advantages will become enormous. I believe the web a disruptive (to native) technology in the Innovators Dilemma sense, but we're still very early on the adoption curve. Only a fraction of a percent of people use the web's most powerful feature, which is JavaScript functions.
…What!?
But that's also experience. There is a sameness both the 'new thing' cycle and the new things themselves that largely becomes apparent as we accumulate experience -- which happens to coincide with years, but I don't think it's the years that are the cause.) From that perspective it seems logical to be less interested in chasing all the new things.
So far I've found (~10 yr. younger than you) that if something comes along that is sufficiently interesting, I dive into it just as deeply as ever -- but I'm a fair bit more discerning about what I find sufficiently interesting.
You also mentioned getting tired of the chase. It's hard not to get jaded about the newest javascript framework (for example) when we have been reinventing these wheels in our industry since the 50's. Whenever the next big thing pops up, it will arise out of the oeuvre of a lot of stuff that - taken individually - are a dead ends.
When I was younger, I thought most people over 30 were basically worthless. As I've aged, I changed that up a bit.
Young and old have their place.
When I was in my twenties, and thirties; you couldn't pay me to sit in front of a computer--literally.
What was I interested in? Guess? Girls! And then Girls! And then anything other than sitting at a desk all day, especially looking into a screen. Was I entitled? A bit?
Only as I aged, did computer science become palatable. Do I love it? No, but I haven't loved anything besides a few family members, and my pets.
I think where Hiring Managers get it wrong is assuming all young people will be Rock Stars, with great ideas. They will be happy with free food, and lofty promises. I never bought it. I took what I wanted. I smiled, looked promising, but hated my employers. I would not want to hire myself after college. I finished college ready for med school, and looked back, and could count on my hands what courses weren't a waste of time. I was dissalusioned.
I do think the best ideas still come from mainly young people, but separating the the best from the herd is impossible.
Peter Thiel has the money to throw at young people, and wait for the shooting star. He knows that combination of being young, hormones at full throttle, and angst; might just produce another Mark Zuckerburg. (I used Mark, but he might have just stole an idea, and got very lucky? I honestly haven't figured it out.)
And to be perfectly honest; the young guys, I know, who became rich--all had wealthy enabling fathers. The more I think about it, it was their fathers(50 plus) who provided the idea, and capital, but weren't willing to give up their day gig to see their product through.
The ageism won't go away soon.
I think it will take another five to ten years for the industry to realize you don't need to fire programmer at 40, but who knows?
I personally think in a decade, this profession will be talked about in the past tense. Yes, a few will always have a secure job, but most jobs will be contracted out to the lowest bidder.
Hell, I don't think it will be ten years. Once "Let it go whatever", rehashedidea.com, etc. run out of free money; we will have a huge group of dissalusioned 25-35 year olds. Many will be homeless? Many talking about the good ole days when companies treated you like you were a valuable commodity.
"Rember the free stuff?"
I might be wrong, but I got the sense that the comment you're responding to is trying to make the exact same point. It even says that one point that the uncle's age was completely irrelevant to his not learning the newer technologies.
for how long ? I dont blame him for reading about C++ in 1989 and saying "hrmmmf! hogwash!". But in 1995 ? in 2000 ? It sounds like he got set in his ways, and how is that NOT an "age problem" ? I'm also 32, and I'm getting slightly more set in my ways as I get older.
> he begrudgingly learned Java/C#/JavaScript/SQL and took a major pay/prestige cut basically starting over.
well, had he had an open mind and not shunned new things, he might be a Herb Sutter today. Or even in IBM, had he bet on a different "horse", and moved into As/400 or whatever other IBM technologies there are, he could be earning more than a C++ programmer, knowing some obscure proprietary IBM language and having 20+ years experience backing it up. I've heard of guys like that making $100+/hr because only a few people in the world can do it.
I think his story is one of mismanagement of intellectual capital. Maybe it's naive of me, but I dont see how you could be in software engineering for 30 years and not be worth at least a million, especially from his era. Did he invest in IBM or any tech companies at all ? How could you not see everyone making money in the dot-com era and not be a part of it ?
Christmas of 2002.
>well, had he had an open mind and not shunned new things, he might be a Herb Sutter today. Or even in IBM, had he bet on a different "horse", and moved into As/400 or whatever other IBM technologies there are, he could be earning more than a C++ programmer, knowing some obscure proprietary IBM language and having 20+ years experience backing it up. I've heard of guys like that making $100+/hr because only a few people in the world can do it.
That's actually the big trap. He WAS making good money because of legacy systems and because not many people were familiar with the technology... right up until there were no jobs left. It makes changing fields earlier difficult even though it would have probably been the best long term strategy.
>I think his story is one of mismanagement of intellectual capital. Maybe it's naive of me, but I dont see how you could be in software engineering for 30 years and not be worth at least a million, especially from his era. Did he invest in IBM or any tech companies at all ? How could you not see everyone making money in the dot-com era and not be a part of it ?
I assume he's worth well over a million. It isn't enough to be worth a million when you are 50. When you and your wife will be living for (hopefully) another 30-40 years and social security doesn't kick in until 62-65, you gotta keep working unless you explicitly planned for an early retirement.
As for how to avoid the .com era - well, you miss it by seeing it as a bubble (and feel vindicated when it "pops" in 2001). You also miss it because you are committed to living in a certain geographic area without a significant presence of e-commerce companies.
Not to say there aren't useful features, that would go well with a language like c, like interfaces, but I'd love to get rid of inheritance, encapsulation and mixing data and code.
Personally, I think both java and javascript (yes I know they are entirely separate languages ) are snake oil. But you know, I learned to program in them anyway.
I tried to find a happy medium where I learn about a new technology and see if it sticks. If after 3-5 years its still around, I give it a try. This worked for me for javascript and python. When python first came out (or when I first heard of it ) I said "no way, not learning a new language right now. perl works fine as a scripting language". Then year after year I kept hearing about it, and heard about perl less and less. Then I finally tried it.
But a couple years ago, I kept hearing about "coffee script" and "clojure". I said the same thing, "not touching it". And now, I hardly ever hear about them, and I barely even know what they are.
I think that's a key thing to look at. There is only so much space at the top of the experience chain in most jobs. I doubt most companies need more than 1-2 senior software devs per 5 software devs.
I think the problem we run into is that neither can most people.
> If you're hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an "acceptable tradeoff of competency" unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place.
And, again, the issue is that most people honestly believe that they don't need the extra competency.
I work in a relatively enlightened group. People treat me with considerable respect and I feel that they value my experience (I'm knocking up against 50 years old). Even still, if I say, "You know what, I've tried that before a few times and it never seems to work out" nobody will accept it as an answer :-). These young guys all want/need to make their own mistakes.
Sometimes I've even run into situations where people are doing considerable damage to their careers by making bad choices. Explaining the situation often makes them very, very unhappy. You end up feeling like the dad on a team of teenagers where everyone deep down loves and respects you, but day to day hates your guts :-).
Since the field is growing so fast, we have this influx of young talent. They just can't see beyond where they will be in 5 years. Just the other day I saw an ad on Youtube for some programmer mill -- "I took a 10 month course and now I'm living my dream," kind of BS. Everybody wants to think that they are doing an awesome job and we have pushed back the bar for awesome a fairly long way. There's an expectation that you can do a boot camp, work for a year or two and then it's easy street from there.
The reality, of course, is that 30 years on I'm still reading and hacking and struggling and experimenting and learning -- and I've been doing it for 30 years. I look in awe at some people in the industry and wonder if I will be able to gain that kind of competency before I retire.
I think if I could sum up the advantage of being more experienced it would be to watch the classic movie, "The Seven Samurai", note who survives to the end, think about why they survive and remark on what they plan to do next.
Because that's hand-wavy nonsense about "a few" data points. If you said that whatever you're discussing never worked out because of A, B, and C, and at least once of those is still an issue, then it would probably be accepted.
Is there embarrassing ageism in tech? Undoubtedly. Does ageism explain all of why elder techies on average have trouble finding employment in 'new tech'? I strongly doubt it.
1: The number of ostensibly highly experienced Unix (retrained on Linux) system admins that I have personally, not even exaggerating, promise, taught to use tab completion in Bash in this decade is depressing.
I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30)
and it's astounding. I can't imagine what the difference
between 50 and 25 will be.
In between I used many different languages and tools (c, c++, python, matlab, js, haxe, as3, in no particular order & probably some that I've forgotten) but now I'm using c# which very in-vogue in my line of work (game development, due to the popularity of unity) and it was a virtually seamless transition from java (I actually started using c#/.net in 2009 as a tools programmer independent of unity).
EDIT: nevermind, I realize now you meant you improved drastically in 5 years, not that the tech field has changed drastically.
> If you're hiring 40-60 year
> olds you cannot simply hire
> a 25 year old and get an
> "acceptable tradeoff of
> competency"
And every year, my intuition about what constitutes bloat vs developer convenience, and when to just throw hardware (physical or cloud) at a problem that could be fixed via developer time, gets slight slightly more out of date.
Older people _can_ run 60 hour gauntlets. We're just wise enough to know that it leads to no good outcome.
I'm middle aged, working with some very young people right now, and I'm having an epiphany, because they are running around like chickens with their heads cut-toff, and I see there's no reason for it, they are equating 'sweat and crunch' with 'value' and making all sorts of mistakes. The epiphany is: they remind me exactly of me at that age!
And they won't take any advice. I mightn't have either ... though I did definitely respect my managers ... and they have none ...
These problems are particularly pernicious when the younger teams have no upper management, or have never worked in larger organizations.
Hopefully, we are starting to realize the value of older devs in some situations and can respect their abilities wherein they are valuable.
Maybe you thought you were respecting them, but did they actually perceive it as respect? Or something else?
They knew it.
I always took their direction.
Hence, you won't get hired.
Always ask about how much overtime is expected from a job during interviews. If you don't believe in >40 hour work weeks, except maybe under rare conditions, then don't "hire" your prospective employer.
There's no magic button you can push in your brain that says 'don't form conditional expectations based on protected categories'. If you're a recruiter and older candidates keep blowing you off, would you really continue to put in the same amount of effort to try to recruit them, even if you consciously attempted to?
Being overworked nearly 10% of the time is not "OK"
Unless they offer tons of vacation. :-)
Most managers have trouble recognizing that their job is to make sure stuff is happening well, and not to be in charge. Older people are more likely to bring relevant experience and knowledge to bear on problems, and therefore to question authority. This knowledge and experience tends to be quite valuable, however it is easier for insecure people to discount it than to process it and incorporate the applicable bits.
The result is that it is more comfortable and easier for most managers to find grounds to ignore and discount experienced people than it is to find value in it. Which becomes a competitive advantage for those companies who "get it".
jobboard = take money from company who puts job ad
It's never been about solving the problem. It's about making money off the problem ;)
Solving the problem = 1B
The fact is that I'm currently the architect and sole backend engineer for a mobile app that relies heavily on data mining, search technologies, and social media marketing. I'm also finishing my current degree (one class to go), and then I'll be starting another one right after that. I'll be 50 soon, and I'm a hell of a lot smarter and more capable now than I was 25 years ago.
Having been 25 before, I think 25-year-olds tend to think they know everything, and make the rash assumption that people older than them don't. The truth tends to be quite the opposite though.
But, internally, we think it's very short-sighted and a waste. Almost always, the less experienced candidate has to be guided. They rarely have sufficient experience to be full-stack, and over half of the time they are on the average learning curve. That means that they're only 0-50% on the way to mastery. And, that has the unintended consequence of dragging down the productivity of everyone.
Worse, they come in with very strong opinions and aren't pragmatists. They lack understanding of trade offs, because that flexibility comes only from years of this work.
I suspect that the CTO (and many like him) likes to hire people who know less than him (i.e. B players). Luckily, I don't report to the CTO.
#2 is changing because we are entering the baby-boomer phase of IT. It was recent that that there were not many people programming, and then the field blew up with tons of young people coming out of college. Those young people are now turning into older people. Where I work now we have a median age for the IT staff in the high 30s. I don't think anyone is under 30 anymore.
#3 can be true of anyone, depending on how well they have managed their career. Sadly, I have interviewed people with '5 years experience' who learned their job in 3-6 mos. and have just continued to do the same job for 5 years. Their actual experience ends up not being much more than a recent college graduate.
I got 2 small kids that I try to get home to at a decent hour most of the week, but I also try to go for a quick pint with my team once or twice a week (depends on the team..) I got it down to a fine art of fitting in just one maybe two pints then run to catch my train so that I am only home 30m-1hr later than normal. Also being in London with several pubs across the road and a train station 10 minutes walk away helps.
The other bit about unwilling to do 60 hour gauntlet now as a 40 year old compared to me at 25 is bollox though. I didn't do it then and I don't do it now.
No matter what level of training/education the candidate has (and likely his existing skill set far exceeds the value of a ruby boot-camp), the preconception will preclude it ever being seen at certain shops.
Rather than pretending there is no ageism and it's all the candidate's fault, what is needed is a list of companies that simply will not hire people over 35. That way we can all stop wasting eachother's time.
What primary and secondary education that gets out of date matters much for a software developer? Algorithms, complexity etc. don't change much. The technology changes so much and is do vast that what fresh graduates know won't help much.
The only thing I as a hiring manager value about a university degree is that it signals that you have enough discipline to see something through even if you don't always like it. There are plenty of people who can't or don't want to do that. If you can't do that no amount of smarts is gonna make me want to hire you.
We tried it like that before and this is what will happen. But instead if you do it this way you will be more successful.
Some bosses may not like the push back and see it as questioning their authority. However if they can overlook that the teams they manage will be more successful.
If you're unemployed in IT over 50, especially in Silicon Valley, you're going to have to adjust your salary expectations down. The older programmer may not want to work for less but it is far better than the alternative.
our team is exclusively 35-60. i wouldn't hire a non-genius 25 year old to run anything critical. nope, no way. sorry, kids.
Though maybe you have a really loose definition of genius?
wait, how'd you know??
No that was not the point.
The point is that new employees, students, practically live in a different world that older employees. The point of the system was that students would teach older employees how to operate within this "new world". It's an approach to make sure that older employees don't get stuck in their ways of thinking.
What kind of organization is it (what's the business).
i know employers aren't supposed to take those things into account but i think they do anyway.
Otherwise here in the east coast there are many of jobs in insurance and government, so much so more then of half the workforce is from India because they have the skills needed.
For those not able to find work where are you located and what are you skilled in/how many years of experience?
How exactly is this a concern for a hiring manager? I thought a company's employees were insured as a pool. In any case, discriminating against someone because of their healthcare status is pretty scummy (in my opinion), but I don't even understand why this is a concern, let alone a legitimate one.
However, for small companies (e.g. 10 employees), the premiums to fund the health insurance pool will change drastically depending on which employees it has. For example, let's say after a candidate interview, the employer (owner) checks Facebook and notices the wife just had a premature baby or birth defect, etc. Let's say that preemie baby's medical costs is $46000 more[2] (or $1 million more in AOL's case[1]) than a normal healthy baby. We as society may want the employer to ignore that costlier number but we should'be be surprised if he'd rather not pay it and hire another cheaper candidate. Yes, it's illegal discrimination, but we have to be realistic about self-interest -- especially when the employer's (real) reason for rejection can't be proven in court.
If you're bringing in big profits like Google Inc, you have the luxury of not having to make distasteful decisions with finite amounts of money in regards to employee healthcare costs.
[1] Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/02/tim_a...
BI: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-tim-armstrong-knew-...
[2] http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/womens-he...
Older programmers are worthless, simply due to their age? Ridiculous. I hope to someday be as skillful as this guy.
Sometimes I would spot something he didn't, but it was frequently because I was approaching from a position of ignorance. It worried me that someday I'll lose that edge, but I guess it's why a good team will be diverse and balanced.
The best ones are also pretty enthusiastic to share and educate. This group was very much like that and I'm incredibly grateful for all the things I learned.
Of course nobody believes me about any of this and I've long given up trying to explain. I just quietly go about my work. It's frustrating though because I have no real leverage, no way to demonstrate my experience other than to just keep plodding odd glacially. I've utterly failed in any kind of management role but at the same time am having a hard time letting go of being a "hands on" dev in the trenches. I just hope that the level playing field of the internet dissolves agism before I'm faced with its ramifications.
An added bonus of brain age is being able to remember people's names. I never used to be able to do that, and I never tried to learn. It just happened one day. I guess I care more about people now and it seems like the least I can do is remember their fricken name.
Keep trying to share what you know. He couldn't figure how to teach what he knows either, but really I think mentorship is more about showing and sharing. You'll find someone who appreciates the skill, and you'll be that guy who sets them on track for their career.
Also kudos on the name memory; I have been well instructed by every good engineer that clearly mirroring people's name back. I don't, but I see how much that helps (just wish I could memorize labels).
Edit: Context is America and also obviously this isn't a thing in software but is very much the normal way of doing business in classical engineering.
I would LOVE to have it in software.
Sounds good at first thought. Reliable quality and ethics for software engineers, right?
On the other hand, you're inviting a special interest group to restrict the supply of software engineers and dictate university curricula. These professional programs/societies tend to be very conservative (engineers, doctors, lawyers) and have their members' interests possibly before society as a whole. Overall it probably still makes sense for the traditional professions.
But as a CS prof watching my engineering academic neighbors struggle with scheduling, staffing and difficulty updating things, I really don't want the external constraints on our academic program.
Overall, the community has not yet agreed that professional software engineering is a thing, though there have been several attempts to kick start it.
Startups usually, though anecdotal, don't discriminate based on age or length of experience. In fact most of the awesome startups that I know hired solely based on experience and that "fit" into the cultural diversity of the company.
It's just breathtaking when you watch an experienced engineer slap together a well architected, highly optimized project that passes all tests on the first try. They even keep track of things like code size in the cache, opportunities for vectorization, etc.
Where "proper" is critical. I've had a lot of managers, but few effective ones. And almost none who led the department. I found my mentors in other departments. It's a real shame, since a great manager will do more for learning and quality of life than anything else, I think.
In my country we have a saying: the Devil knows more from being old than from being the Devil.
Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time.
http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.h...
brilliant. what's the origin there?
So, I wonder if it's just a universal Spanish proverb?
Probably! The older exact match I could find in Google Books is from 1846, in a Yucatán periodical: https://books.google.es/books?id=VNgtAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA8&dq=%22p...
1) As a software person your are employed to Solve Business Problems - NOT to write code, NOT to write tests, NOT to hack on platforms, NOT to be Agile. Solve the problem (or add the feature) - never lose sight of this. The value you bring is directly related to this.
2) People outside software development don't give a flying f* about most issues software related - but everyone has a computer, so most are poorly informed about technology and terrible at making right software choices - build products accordingly.
My chemical engineering degree really instilled this idea in me early on, and it's by far the biggest motivating factor as to why I love to work at software startups. When a scientist discovers something in a lab, the ChemE's job is to then come in and figure out how to turn this discovery or innovation into a legitimate business. How do we scale this reaction up from a petri dish to a 10,000 gallon reactor? Where and how do we get the reagents? How much do they cost? Are there any hazardous byproducts? How do we dispose of them?
I like to operate the same way as a software engineer. I'm an engineer, not a scientist. My job is to use technology to produce value for the business, while mitigating risks of that value eroding over time. All the work done should be focused on those two things. And it's not about focusing on those things instead of other things, it's more about realizing that anything worthwhile to do at work that you can come up with actually filters back to those two things anyway in some indirect fashion, so you might as well keep those ideas front and center.
Nothing made me scoff at the idea of a "Software Engineer" more than when I started digging into some of the EE stuff. When you have a $1M tape out that goes wrong if one transistor is miswired.
I just throw crap at the wall and see what sticks, EE and stuff like that is real engineering.
That's one of the things I really love about writing software. You don't have to plan too much before you start to see some results and so you can really get creative quickly. If your thinking was wrong, just undo and try another angle.
"No matter how much you try, you can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose." https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-noses/
The earlier you accept this, the farther ahead you'll be.
I couldn't agree more with this. When I was very young, I secretly wondered why people would pay me money to play with computers all day. Once I understood why, I was able make myself more valuable because I understood why I was valuable.
Delivery of working software is supposed to trump everything else in theory, but in practice it often doesn't.
I quit school that semester as it was clear that I would be far more effective learning on my own. What was true in my Java class turned out to be true in my Linux class, my networking class and my generals. I was WAY ahead of the curve. I now work in the industry as a full-stack Javascript developer and continue to learn each day.
Of course, if you simply rebranded to talk about "experience" rather than "age" then solvelem probbed.
Also, age != experience != skill.
"Company X isn't looking for anyone seasoned"
"Company Y is open to seasoned individuals"
Companies would also look for people who were a certain number of years of out school. Like, "5 to 10 years experience post-degree." Sure, that could technically mean a 45 year old who went back to school at 35 is qualified for the position, but there is a 0% chance the company would hire that person.
The other recruiters would talk about these things pretty explicitly outside of emails. There were a lot of interesting justifications:
Older people are harder to train
Older people are difficult employees because they are stuck in their ways/used to getting their way
Older people expect more benefits/vacation/pay
Older people use more sick time
Older people don't keep up with developments in the field
Discrimination wasn't limited to age. The recruiters were just as happy to help their clients discriminate on race, or gender, or familial status. Really anything.
In my experience, age was the only protected class that recruiters would try to suss out how the hiring managers felt about while they were trying to determine the ideal candidate. It seemed to me that the other prejudices would only come to light after the recruiter had a relationship with the hiring manager and had sent them a number of candidates in the past. There were still a lot of euphemisms though.
This was just my experience though, and I was working for a small firm. I have no idea what the rest of the field is like at all.
They were just working within the system, they don't have any ability to affect the system
Hiring managers aren't going to work with us if we send them candidates they are prejudiced against. They'll just work with someone else, or run their own ads, and they'll still be prejudiced.
Interviewing with that person would be a a waste of the candidate's time, and they wouldn't want to work for someone like that anyway.
Some of the recruiters didn't have justifications, since they didn't feel it was wrong. They just felt they were getting their. Their attitude was pretty much that's the way the cookie crumbles / them's the breaks.
Or, as a former boss of mine put it: "He has one year of experience ten times."
Some older coders I work with might not have obsessively learned the latest framework, but they can identify issues like "that's the kind of subsystem that one person ends up maintaining, and then they leave and it's awful", or "We did something similar in the 1990s, and it didn't go so well because it is overly complex. Is there a simpler way to do this?".
That's a good take on it, and the application of it vary with companies and industries.
A waterfall EE project at a old school company could hardly deliver any stage in 6 months.
A software project at a fast executing startup could have gone through 2 major delivered projects in that time.
Never understood this thing.
One learns the most when he changes company and learnt about a new industry, with new problems, new tech, new people.
You don't see the results of that year that you were there. You don't see the results of of long term maintenance. What worked, what didn't, where you wasted time, what was used, etc.
Even the tools you used, you only used that to get it into production at some level, but you don't fully understand the full long-term impact.
So when someone looks at that, they don't see production level experience. They see that you've done the first years worth of work 10 times, and that you don't have experience with the results. That your experience doesn't mean you can build something that works in the long term. That you can even be counted on to work on something in the long term.
That's just one of the ways it can be looked at.
It means the person isn't learning from their mistakes and is still making the same types of errors a first year programmer/engineer/nurse makes.
To put it another, my age is not coupled to my value. It's up to me, at any age, to focus on what it takes to make my employer more successful.
Employer: "I need a developer who can do A, B, and C."
Me: "That's me!"
Employer: " I can't ask you how old you are, but maybe sometime you can tell me what it was like to start your career at a time when computers read your code off punchcards and ran it on vacuum tubes."
Me: "Nah, I started when computers ran on steam and looked like a building sized abacus. All kidding aside, why do you need A, B, and C? Let's talk about how I can help you make mad stacks of greenbacks."
Employer: "I like making money! OK, I here's what we're working on..."
State laws may vary, check your local jurisdiction to see if they add more.
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) only forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states do have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination.
If your state or local jurisdiction doesn't protect young(er) workers against discrimination and only the federal law applies, then an employer can discriminate against the young but not the old.
However, aside from that, they do seem to toe the line with phrases like "veteran," "Experience never gets old" and "senior advertising professionals" without explicitly referencing age anywhere. And, at least arguably, an "Oldster" is any experienced professional who uses their site, regardless of age.
But really, I mean I don't feel even slightly threatened by the technical ability of 20-something coders. I was warned throughout much of my career that I'd eventually have to head off to management to keep afloat, but, nope, that was bogus advice.
I can go into more detail here but I'm derailing things slightly already. It is not my contention that ageism isn't a thing. I'm sure it is --- I mean, I'm confident it's a real problem.
I'm just pushing back on the "40 is 1000 in tech years" snark. No, it isn't.
Perhaps the problems are more at the margins (junior level devs, choosing between people of similar ability), but unless the market changes drastically, I can't see a competent engineer having too much trouble regardless of age, at least in locations with a big enough tech scene.
I see my friends from the same age group go different ways; quite a number stay in tech as employees, getting more senior and climbing the engineer ladder. They're the ones who are affected by age discrimination, particularly as they get into their 50's and over.
The other group takes what they know in tech, and become a super experienced tech-guy in another industry, doing things like machine automation at car manufacturing plants, or optical quality control at meat packing plants, etc. They use their skills in other industries, but by silicon valley standards, they leave tech, since making pistons or making sure chicken breasts don't contain wing aren't tech problems. This second group of people don't stress anywhere near as much about their jobs as the first group, but their highest attainable pay wherever they work is definitely lower.
The third group retires early and pursues their dreams, but they're not worth talking about in this context. Tech is amazing in that it enables people who are moderately successful to retire earlier.
There is ageism and it's completely unfounded, but some recruiting leans towards younger workers for whatever reason.
I think this is similar to H1-B's getting jobs for lower wages. Companies tend to believe that adding X developers to problem Y will produce a better/quicker product. They believe this of younger workers at times as well.
They are always wrong. I'm pretty sure my 40 hours is significantly more productive than most 25 year old's 60 or even 80 hours.
1. older folks are less flexible, can't relocate, etc. When we have kids in high school, that's valid. But high school doesn't go on forever.
2. older folks cost more. You'd be surprised. Salary doesn't have to be an always-upward ratchet. There are plenty of us who are able and willing -- even delighted -- to work for less than the executive-level pay of the biggest jobs on our resumes.
Unlike many of our juniors, we aren't scrambling to pay off our edu loans any more, nor are we scrambling to cover those costs for our kids, or pay big mortgages.
You know that dream about being motivated by the work, not the money? It's a real thing. Many of us are living that dream.
3. older folks are a protected class (in USA, anyhow). That's true. We are nominally harder to lay off when things get rough. But we've been through a few cycles of things being good, then bad, then good, and we've survived. We are as willing as anybody to stop drawing our pay when things aren't going well. Some of us are willing to agree to that in advance. Ask whether we'll accept contractor status, rather than employee status.
See item 2 about being motivated by the work.
4. older folks drive up health insurance pool costs. true. sucks. But I, for one, am on my spouse's insurance so the startup I'm with doesn't have that problem. Many of us have similar setups. You can't ask in an interview, but we can tell you voluntarily. Plus, when we hit 65 (in USA) we go on this decent national single-payer health plan and out of your pool altogether.
5. older folks can't manage 80-hour work weeks. Of course we can manage crunch time. We've done a lot of it, and we're skilled at getting it done.
Can we manage sustained 80-hour weeks for years at a time? No. Neither can you and keep your quality up.
6. older folks' skills are obsolete. Not true. Maybe that was true once, but many of us put a lot of work into keeping up to date. Safari Books Online, and online tutorials, and community / dev versions of various tools, have made that possible.
7. older folks would rather play golf than work. For many of us, that's just nonsense.
So, don't just screen out that resume showing a MS degree from 1980. Take a look.
Thankfully for my next job, while the staff is still older, they work smart instead working hard.
In order to keep their labor costs depressed, VCs are incentivized to promote the lie that a very young workforce is an inherent asset, but there is simply no replacement for experience. As the industry continues to mature, that will be self-evident, as it is in all other mature industries.
Put it another way. When you board an airliner, are you happy to see a fresh faced pilot?
Or my (old) dermatologist. He said he could spot skin cancer from across the room. I asked him how, he said half his business was skin cancer - he looked at it for hours every day.
What I have observed first hand is that if the job requirements are relatively stable then older people are fantastic, but if the requirements change from month to month (or week to week) then they struggle. As I know from personal experience fluid intelligence declines with age and as you get older rapid change gets increasing difficult to deal with. I wish it were otherwise :(
There are of course exceptions, the problem is that it is really hard to know who can adapt to rapid change in an interview or from a CV. A service that could test the fluid intelligence of job candidates would be very valuable, but it would almost certainly be sued out of existence for discriminating against older employees.
As much as we'd like our job to be engineering, it's usually more like craftsmanship. Craftsmanship goes back a LONG ways, and the traditional approach for learning a craft is for apprentices to learn from experienced masters. Those masters can teach you what to do, and what not to do, in the traditional ways that they've learned over many years. What they can't teach you is new techniques that they've developed, unless they're among the few masters that are advancing the craft.
I suspect that works for our craft as well. Most experienced developers can do the work very well, and can also help you to avoid bad practices that they've seen before and can predict the likely outcomes. But only a subset of those experienced developers are able to advance the craft. They have a mixture of the drive and creativity of the younger inexperienced developers, along with the experience to quickly weed out bad ideas and see the potential of the good ideas.
That is rather an impossible question to answer as the two causes ultimately have the same end outcome. I certainly never introduce change for changes sake - 95% of management change I have been responsible for have been due to outside factors out of my control. When the market tells you that you need to change you must change.
I can say on average I get more direct pushback on change from younger employees than older purely because many younger employees have not learned that arguing with your boss about something when you don’t have a full understanding of the situation is not that wise. I have found that my older employees have understood the need for change, they just find it hard.
I am certainly not immune to this effect myself - the thought of learning React or Angular (or the next JS framework de jour) does not fill me with joy.
If indeed it is physical health that is the crucial factor in preventing the decline in fluid intelligence, and older workers are becoming more healthy (relative to the older workers of the past), you might say, rather, that the exceptions are those that experience a decline in fluid intelligence.
Why go with "A Qureshi Media startup. Contact us at contact@qureshimedia.com" in the site footer?
It made me wonder "hmm, why haven't I heard of Qureshi Media, let me check them out, they are probably some huge media conglomerate." To my surprise, http://qureshimedia.com/ appears to be the website of a consultancy that includes the less than inspiring text "Our new site will be up soon."
If you are managing multiple established brands, having that in the site footer makes sense to me. For what appears to be a company's only brand, I wonder if it might be better relegated an "About" page. Thoughts?
Best way to predict the future is create it right?
This kind of thinking is why there are a hundred Javascript frameworks and more being made all the time, thus creating the problem you're trying to solve by joining in...
An experienced engineer, who can prevent the above is worth their weight in gold.
Because ultimately, the fundamentals of software engineering haven't changed for decades, like abstraction, modularization etc
WTG putting this message together, good luck!
Well, I'm 42 and I believe I'm 20... until I spend any time hanging around 20 year olds.
Venues which seem to explicitly encourage candidates/jobseekers to focus on age violate the spirit of the law if not the letter (29 U.S.C. § 626).
I suspect that's less a trend against age discrimination against them and more a trend that they are progressively less able to retire acceptably.
Or, in more plain terms, why shouldn't a person use critical thinking to ask if a person over the age of 55 is smart enough and/or has good judgment if they haven't positioned themselves as able to retire? Does this register at all?
You're 30, and I'm 32, which means that in a decade we'll both be in a federally protected class. I don't think there would be federal protections if ageism wasn't a huge problem for 40+ people. In another decade, we'll both be in our 50s, where ageism is definitely a problem.
I think all younger people, myself included, have a responsibility to fight ageism now so we don't get bitten by it ourselves later.
Also, as you get older: LEARN TO WEAR A SUIT. Not all the time - suits are going-out clothes, not things you waste on an office - but every now and then show that you can present well and be convincing. Your stock with the non-techies in the office will go through the roof.
I'm a 37 year old self-taught backend dev (a fallen physicist) and I seem to be able to talk myself into a job with relative ease, both big and small companies.
I worry sometimes that a significant factor in this is that I still look and dress relatively young. I think this body has about 5 more years before it starts to look unambiguously like a grownup.
What I found to work is grow a beard when I need to appear older, then shave it to appear younger :-)
Surprisingly our hands don't suddenly fall off when we get to 32 :)
But I don't expect to convince anyone (over 25) to go out and learn Lisp
I wonder if there's a broader solution to the problem that might involve more outreach and educational efforts to communicate to the younger folk that us oldsters have something valuable to offer, despite our encroaching senility and decrepitude :)
Perhaps however, the proof's in the pudding. Nudge some of the bigger corps. like Facebook & Google to expand the upper end of the age range a bit, and then people will rub shoulders with people possessing different and possibly broader life experience.
That said, I do find lots of 20-30-something techies to be quite smart and experienced so am not trying to knock them here. Quite often it comes down to the individual's qualities and not merely their numerical age.
We power many many branded niche staffing firm career portals. There are basically niche job boards but with recruiters backing it. For example I believe there is one just for retired nurses. It is very akin to all the different dating services.
It is absolutely amazing how many of them there are and how well they still do despite Indeed and Linkedin.
I imagine one of the major staffing firms (randstad, manpower, etc) will probably pick up this niche soon. Probably through an acquisition. The major staffing firms have thousands of niche job boards.
It's not a perfect 1 -> 1 to between kids and age obviously, but working with older engineers (and managers/TPMs) has been invaluable for the growth early in my career and I wish we had more of them.
Just my 2 cents.
Best of luck.
Should there be sites that zone in on a particular discriminating aspect of a person? Hmm, like www.hireanoldveteran.com for old veterans that are having trouble looking for jobs.
And the idea that an "oldster" is a thing should not be legitimised by people in the tech industry. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas.
It's a Swedish site that's been around for quite a few years.
Translated it means exactly "hire an oldster", or rather "hire a pensioner".
I would think in web development it could be as low as say, 35 but in sales, 50 may only be approaching it.
they wanna hire the youths. it sucks but it's reality.
also, you get more bang for you buck by hiring young workers(no family, kids, house, obligations, etc.)
1. Retired
2. A principal dev
3. Managing
4. Doing your own thing
5. Raising kids
If you say "I just like to code," fuck off. I'm growing a business, not "Just coding."
If you say "I have super powers," I say you're probably delusional. I'll get someone who has 15 years' experience who isn't delusional.
If you're still writing ifttt code at 50, yeah, I can find someone with literally 15 year's experience to do the same thing who is more than qualified for the job, but who won't either die or fail to grow with the role. I'm sorry if that's a shitty thing to say, but let's embrace reality.
If I can't find anyone else, I'll take a chance on you, but I want to hire people who will grow with the role, not people biding their time doing service-level code work.
If you think that's cruel, try getting a job in law.
Edit: p.s. If you're 50 and just starting out in programming, none of this applies. I'm interested. It's not age that concerns me, it's failure to grow.