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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

As someone who is mid 30s, ageism in the industry concerns me.

What have you observations been regarding your age when interviewing? Have you run into ageism?

I'm a little out of the current state of the art in programming (retired early). That said, I strongly suspect that little has changed in terms of what a _good_ programmer is worth. I stress "good". Good programmers are rare and I suspect will always be in demand. And age doesn't make you not good.

Just as a for instance (statistically valid sampling of one :), I had a guy working with me, Rick Smith, who is older than I am (I'm 55) and he is one of the most productive programmers I've ever met. Just amazing what he can get done, I really don't understand how he does it, I'm nowhere near that good. But he's as good as I was at my best so I think it is possible to be old and good.

But it is a lot harder than being young and good. I used to be able to pour myself a glass of wine in the evening, sit down, and hammer out a couple of really good commits. These days not so much. Forget the wine, it's rare that I have the juice to do anything useful, those really good coding days are not something I can just switch on like I used to. They come to me when they want and I have to grab 'em and ride them as far as I can because it will be a month or more before I get another one. I'm talking about those really productive coding sessions where you have all the state in your head, you see the code, you see the docs, you see the test cases, you see how it all fits together and you are just typing it in as fast as you can. Don't get those like I used to.

My Dad once told me that you are basically done doing anything significant by the time you are 35 (he was high energy theoretical nuclear physics). I've certainly proved him wrong, I did plenty of work that I'm proud of in my 40's, but 50's? Hmm, not so much. It gets hard.

Sorry to be a downer, I guess. If I were to offer up any hope I'd say stay as fit as you can. Healthy body, healthy mind and all that.

You sure you just don't need TRT? Hormone levels get worky by your 50's

I have no idea. My bits and pieces all seem to still work (not that anyone wants them) if that's any indication.

And I stay busy, just with other stuff like this:

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/17/mountain-vigilantes-ta...

Yeah, don't get me started on how my county (doesn't) maintain[s] roads. It's depressing and it's not just here.

But I'll ask my doctor if TRT is right for me. I actually will though I sound like a crappy TV ad.

You sound like you've got potential to be a burner ;)

Sorry to be so old, but what's a burner? Pot smoker? If so, I've never found pot and programming to mix, for me. Might work for other people, I still remember being stoned at a terminal hooked to a VAX 780 runing 4.3BSD. It's when I learned what the hjkl keys did in vi (I used arrow keys, shoot me). A wasted hour or two of looking down, hitting the j key, looking up, thinking "did it move? I'm not sure, lemme try again".

Not my best work :)

Or burnt out? Maybe, I dunno.

So what's a burner?

I believe pugworthy meant something like this:

http://journal.burningman.org/2008/06/opinion/serious-stuff/...

"Still, the majority consensus appears to be something more broadly defined; it seems like maybe being a Burner is not about where you’ve been, or what you’ve attended, but what you do, and how you live."

Correct, thanks.

Huh, well reading the link, if you think I'm a burner, that's a compliment in my book. Thanks!

I credit my youth in Wisconsin with giving me a desire to help other people. You pretty much have to have that attitude in the winter, everyone is helping push each other out of the snowbanks. It was just sort of what you did, I didn't think about it until I moved to California and found that it was less common out here. Much more common in the Santa Cruz mountains, which is part of why I live there.

Thanks for this. Appreciate the advice from your experience.

I have a friend in his early 60's that I recommended for a Hadoop job recently, and he was excluded due to age, despite being very qualified for the role. It happens, and I've seen it :(

Have you provided your friend with the evidence so that they can pursue a discrimination claim?

I'm not sure this is an normal response to these kinds of things, but maybe some context will help: A customer of mine asks for a recommendation on people who could do the job. I gave him a list of names, of which the top recommendation was my older buddy. Customer immediate filters out my buddy due to age but continues through the list eventually contacting and hiring another good choice (also a friend). I didn't tell my older friend that he was being considered, I just knew he was on the market. He doesn't know any of this exchanged happened, and due to his skill/experience level had already found something else in the meantime. No harm was done to anyone in the exchange, but obvious age discrimination was observed.

Gotcha. That's tough, a kind of preliminary discrimination. Maybe the only way to combat it is to only refer that friend to that person in the future. Ugh, but then that's just using your friend as a weapon against the guy, which isn't fair.

Nah, he's doing fine now. I figure this company will just miss out on a bunch of good people because of the attitude. As a whole, they're not known for a good corporate culture or even retaining people long term. The more I think about it the more I wonder if I'm the bad guy now for suggesting my friends work here :)

As Roseanne Barr once said, "The object of business is to keep your buddies working, even if they're fuckin' idiots."[1][2]

1. http://classic.esquire.com/what-ive-learned-roseanne/

2. http://archive.esquire.com/image/spread/20010301/100/3

I have run into ageism and it did hurt the company a lot: We were developing a game in j2me for mobile phones and had to minimize the assembly's size and maximize performance (for a few animations and for the AI's turns) - we had one guy interview for the job who was almost 60, which made him 20 years older than anybody else. Instead of hiring the guy who spent a good deal of his life hand-optimizing code we hired a 20-something guy with good, but in this case, completely useless credentials. The first few months I had to reject everything he wrote, walk him through the disassembly and explain to him how and why things had to be done differently.

PS: I could refer the experienced guy to a friendly company where he was writing assembler for embedded systems until he retired.

I'm not in my 50's yet, but in my 40's. What's worked for me is to network. I've been lucky (maybe proactive is the way to think of it) to land in some startups where I didn't have to do grueling interviews. I knew someone and demonstrated past work, current experience (none of them white boarding) and was able land the job.

I can't stress enough that networking, meetups, community are all to your benefit. If you can become an 'authority' (think Dave Thomas of Ruby fame), then the barriers will drop more.

Everything, for me, since 2001 has all been referral via network.

My experience has matched yours. The best jobs were found by who I knew, not applying with a bunch of other folks. Thanks for confirming for me!

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