Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World | Hacker News Reader

Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

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> Team social events shouldn’t require physical prowess or alcoholic excess—so forget paintball and bar crawls.

As a 57 year-old backend engineer I would like to keep the bar crawls, thanks.

If anything, I have 24 years of experience to pass on to the younger generation.

Of drinking. I am in the same boat.

49 frontend dev here and the occasional happy hour is one of the things I look forward to most.

I love paintball. You can definitely play without physical prowess — plenty of people sit in the back of speedball fields to "spray or pray" or call out upstream opponent positions to their team. Likewise with the woodsball setting even more so. It's much less physically demanding than one might think... you can be successful at recreation level without running. I've never been athletic but I was stable able to play local tournament-level paintball. I'd love to have it as a company outing.

Throughout my career I've always loved drinking with the older (45-50+) engineers. Lots of great war stories and unfiltered bits of context and history around why things are the way they are.

I'm going to be that old engineer sooner rather than later. So yea, I agree... let's keep that going.

None for me, please:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130808111450/http://ryanfunduk...

That culture definitely has a problem, but it's unrelated to having some social events, among many others and separate from the workplace or conference area, where drinking is involved. Even if they're bar crawls.

What an irritating blog post.

I don't disagree with the overall point (have experienced it myself, for sure, at times).

"instead walked around DC, sober, talking and enjoying the great weather with my beautiful wife" why does it have to be pointed out that his wife is "beautiful"? Seems a little hypocritical to me. And some of the stuff he picks on people having done (like posting a Twitter msg with a picture pf a bunch of empty beer bottles) is really scraping the barrel.

Shame really - started off quite well.

And as a 34 year old fullstack engineer, I’ll pass.

Not that I don’t mind drinking, but it’s a net negative to me in general. I’ll drink once every few months with coworkers and that’s it.

As a 53 year old, I'd quite enjoy paintballing please.

A good way to age-proof yourself is to start your own business.

In the dozen years I've been running my SaaS products, despite being Old during that entire timespan, nobody has ever so much as asked me my age. Let alone discriminated against me because of it.

And I've been "Consulting While Over 30" for nearly 20 years now for individual clients. None of which have ever held my lack-of-inexperience against me.

Granted, I've done fine during my occasional forays back into traditional-ish employment with respect to the whole "ageism in tech/you're never gonna work again" thing. But if that ever did start to happen, I wouldn't worry about it happening so much to the entrepreneurial side of my world.

Not everyone has an interest in or aptitude for the additional work needed to run your own business - from marketing to account management to accounting.

Bias toward less experienced but highly technical staff seems to be an artifact of the portfolio management style of the investors and board members. Shotgun investments in a space mean shotgun incentives for managers, which yield shotgun solutions from engineering teams, to whack-a-mole product market fit problems - with randomized, exponential returns.

Profitable, revenue funded companies are more accommodating to the Olds because things like discernment are rewarded. Mature companies (5+ years) that act like startups are as Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, "dressing their best decade." You can usually tell within 15 minutes of entering an office whether it's a place of growth.

Young people are perfect for the former style because they can apply technical know-how without any broader criticism about likelihood of success, strategy, or sustainability. As an old, it can become more difficult to maintain the cognitive dissonance required to thrive in these environments when you have a mental horizon longer than 5 years.

I've worked with olds, and the successful ones recognize the story is no longer about them. They recognize that young people are also like a portfolio of long term investments, so they manage it prudently, and the best ones have learned how to get short.

If you are still doing startups as an employee in your 40s, you are there for the rush and because you love doing it. We should all admit that working for early stage companies is a lifestyle, not a plan. There is nothing wrong with experienced people. They aren't malformed and do not need correction. Some might need more awareness of what they are involved in, but adopting a "fixer upper," mentality is the beginning of death.

I'm in the opposite of this situation, I'm among the 10% of the youngest employees in the company, when around 60% of the company will be retiring within a decade. We're also in one of those high cost housing markets, and while I'm very well paid comparatively to others in my particular part of the technology sector - its still not enough to buy a house, or settle down - but they're somewhat unsympathetic when I talk about things like, working from home, remote working, etc, I generally get a blank stare.

So, there is a corollary here, make sure that pay and benefits are attractive to employees of all ages, not just one group.

If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t until I was 30 that my wife and I had enough for a downpayment for a house. When I graduated, my salary was $40k. And, 3-bedroom houses, in my economically-attractive, but not extravagent, area were around $300k. Rent for a 2br was about $1000 / month, so saving $60k took quite a few years. Of course, several co-workers had well-off parents who bought them their first house (lucky them), but for many of us, we just had to pay off debt, and save, and save, and be confident that it would work out. It took a while, especially considering the two recessions, and it felt like it would never get better. But, it eventually did. So, although I don’t know your particular situation, I’m confident that people in their 20s today will eventually prevail. The difference is that the younger generation is enormous, and all of those people buying houses at the same time puts demand pressure on prices. But, it will work out.

Lol. My wife and I are 30 and we've still got 50k worth of student loans...

It does, I can afford about 300-350k, which buys me a postage stamp size condo.

I'm 35, the nearest house I can afford is about 30-40 miles away - I cant touch something for less than 500k, in that radius.

This comment kind of illustrates the knowledge assymetry.

We're talking about people in their thirties. People who graduated in 2008 and were amazing candidates but couldn't get a job because there _were none_. People who were then passed up for internships in 2013 as things got better because every hiring manager who graduated in 2006 (with maybe 20 grand in debt easily paid off) or boomer (who had no student debt but even if they did could gasp discharge it in bankruptcy) reviewing CV's thinks "wtf has this idiot been doing the last 4 years; hire that fresh grad".

Maybe they'll be able to afford a house when they're 50. Because paying off a mountain of student loans AND paying insane rent AND saving for a deposit (and god help you if you want children) has gotten to be basically impossible for a huge chunk of the population.

And yeah, there are lower cost of living places. Hope your partner and yourself can find work in the same one. And that somehow they magically make your student loans cheaper.

Thanks for taking the time to educate. I had no idea.

> it wasn’t until I was 30 that my wife and I had enough for a downpayment for a house.

Not sure if that's meant to evoke sympathy, but to me that sounds extremely entitled. I'd be grateful if I had a house at 30.

Is it common for people around you to feel they deserve to own a house?

Entitled to a house? No - I grew up poor, man. My single mom of 4 made less than $8,000 many years (Bet you didn’t know that, as recent as 25 years ago, some Americans still didn’t have bathrooms and full electricity). No, in my family, it was unusual to own a real house (as opposed to a mobile house). I had no entitlement.

But, I also grew up in a place where real houses cost $25-40k. So, I’m a way, yes, I had some expectation that if I got a STEM degree, I’d be able to afford a house. But, a $300k house? No - where I grew up, that wasn’t even a thing.

Thanks for sharing!

there is a point when you realize rent is just a treadmill that keeps going faster.

I live in a high rent area much like yourself and I don't necessarily agree. It's pretty affordable for couples like my wife and I- and we aren't running the risk of having to sell our house at a major loss if and when the housing market falls out due to whatever reasons.

We're saving for a house while pretty aggressively paying off our student loans... but the flexibility of renting has been great.

The issue that I have, is cost of living has been going up higher than wages

It has...I can totally agree with that my friend. I think it is slowly getting better, however.

The cost of college is going up dramatically. The younger engineers I've worked with recently often have six figures in debt starting out, and a lot of them went to state schools. They'll be paying that well past the traditional home buying age.

Yeah, they could have made some different choices and only been, say, $60k in debt, but "it gets better" comes with some pretty big caveats for a lot of people right now.

I think my advantage is that I've seen more engineering cycles. New problems can sometimes be solved quicker by the hard fought for knowledge gained solving older ones.

Mark Zuckerberg famously said young people were just smarter. In my generation it was Abbie Hoffman who said not to trust anyone over thirty. They were both wrong.

What might be "right"?

Having a diverse set of perspectives on a problem.

Young turks full of energy, old cynical farts who have seen failure and can pick out the signs.

The tendency to promote people out of engineering and into management is probably down to the bottom line. At some point, an engineer's economic worth plateaus, and the only way to justify a bigger paycheck is to have him offload the upper management. Managing people is extremely time consuming. Time spent on managing people is time not spent on closing deals, maintaining business relationships, securing investments, etc, so it becomes extremely important to delegate.

Why not just hire a (hopefully) good people manager? It's hard to find good managers, but it's also not entirely likely that your best IC engineer is going to be a good manager naturally either. Whereas you know they're good at what they're doing now.

If they're not going to find a way to be more worthwhile, just don't pay them more. If they find a way to be more worthwhile (teaching, coaching, setting standards, whatever), then pay them more.

You need to know the domain in complex fields. In my area, the non engineers have no clue what is going on and are almost dead weight. The high output engineers now in management aren't always the best at managing people, but at least they make good decisions and don't slow the rest of us down.

I think this is a good general point. Looking at management as "just hire a good people manager" is too myopic. It takes many things to just be a good "people" manager - empathy, high bar setting, ability to negotiate compromises. And that doesn't include the _other_ skillsets a good engineering manager has: understanding the time tradeoffs of the team, delivery management, ability to resolve technical stalemates, ability to communicate effectively up, down and across to ensure people are coordinated, work is non-duplicative and efficient. Being an engineering manager is not a "black hole" for old people who don't program, it's a completely different technical skillset. A good one produces quite a bit more value to the company than _most_ single engineers can. Not because they are bad, but because writing good software requires lots of good engineers working together.

In my case I'm referring to a regular/traditional engineer and not software engineer for my particular industry, but the concepts a as far as management go are the same. One thing that makes me glad I'm not in a software shop is that I see virtually zero age discrimination. It takes years and years to build up industry experience, so generally speaking, the older the better. Where young folks usually do better is with computers/programming/automation as it wasn't common place outside of college for older engineers. This doesn't mean that some older engineers can't write some Fortran though.

You probably don't need to force the _best_ engineers go into management to achieve this - you just need someone with the necessary background and experience - and from that larger pool you can choose the ones that want to do management, and are more likely going to be good at it.

The managers I deal with day-to-day were all once ICs in the same role, but I wouldn't put almost any of them in the same category as the strongest ICs we have in technical skill. And they mostly don't make bad technical decisions - because they mostly don't make any technical decisions - they defer to their strong ICs.

For my own knowledge and perhaps others can understand your comment better, what's an IC?

Individual contributor

Individual Contributor, i.e. non-manager.

You're making the assumption that the company actually has a technical track (or one deep enough to match management) where the only way up isn't management.

It shouldn't be that way, but it commonly is.

promoting people out of engineering and into management is among the worst things that an organization can do

It depends, sometimes it’s a good move to give an unofficial leader an official position.

What often happens is a mediocre but ambitious engineer with only a few years experience tries hard to get into management track and succeeds. Sometimes they end up being good managers; sometimes they don't.

Yes, I am all for technical leadership and giving people additional responsibility based on that but I think more organizations should take the 'people manager' approach managing people. In that case their lack of technical credentials can be accommodated by having 360 degree peer reviews for everyone. That has the added benefit of encouraging everyone to care more about what their colleagues think of them rather than one manager.

> At some point, an engineer's economic worth plateaus, and the only way to justify a bigger paycheck is to have him offload the upper management.

Why not just accept a paycheck that plateaus as well? Mine's been pretty flat since I first (prematurely) got to that "senior" title. I'm not anticipating big gains in future.

Yeah, I peaked in my 30s. I was happy about that - I was making good money. Unless someone at Google has an aneurysm and accidentally hires me, I expect my salary to stay about the same from here on out.

Why not go get a job at Google? If you’re good the received wisdom seems to be to inhale Cracking the Coding Interview and the Algorithm Design Manual. If they don’t have any open positions where you’d like to work that’s one thing but why not take the extra money if it’s there?

It is not just about the interviews.

Google and others in the big five also evaluate "career trajectory".

That means you need to show continuous progression in your career as a non-entry-level hire. Someone who has reached a plateau in salary usually doesn't have that, a "grizzled" tech veteran won't be able to show continuous career progression after surviving ups and downs in the industry (layoffs, failed companies, career changes).

There are exceptions, of course, but those of us who are "olds" have to be more than just "good" to compete with younger talent in many (but not all) workplaces.

That's a misunderstanding.

They want you to show growth at Google, and if you are hired as an entry-level engineer. It isn't about what you did up to that point.

Source: did a lot of hiring at Google.

Do you think Algorithm Design Manual is better to read than Introduction to Algorithms for preparing for programming interviews at the big companies?

I have no idea. Probably just spending some time on Wikipedia is enough. Interviewers ask algorithms questions mostly because it's hard to find programming tasks small enough to fit in an interview which cover all the basics and which aren't implementing basic algorithms.

    >show growth at Google, and if you are hired as an entry-level engineer. It isn't about what you did up to that point.

Wait, do you mean: IF you are an entry-level engineer, they want you to show growth at Google upon getting hired at Google?

What about NON entry-level? That's my point-- career trajectory is, I am told, very important to them.

Yes.

There's an expectation that if you're hired below the level of Senior SWE you will get enough promotions over time to reach that level, more or less, although as long as you show the right trajectory there isn't any deadline attached.

If you're hired right in at director level or something, it's not like you're expected to end up CEO or you get fired :)

Good article. It’s kind of scary to me that “old” in tech means 40.

Only because as people get experience they end up in the “Engineering Manager” role & such.

Plus there’s a GLUT of fresh grads joining each year.

Yeah, I think part of the issue is the horribly broken career progression model that most companies seem to use.

Graduate -> Software Engineer -> Senior Software Engineer -> Team Lead -> Non-Technical Manager (???)

Then again, unless a company is scaling at the same speed as your career, you're eventually (probably before 40) going to hit a wall where there's no higher level for a tech person to go, because there are no bigger problems to solve. If you want to earn more money or get more recognition, you're going to need to move to another company which can offer harder challenges.

Your last line is the single point of failure for this whole issue.

The various systems, incentives, lies - ALL, arise from the growth paradigm.

That paradigm depends on more cheap, energetic fresh meat arriving out of college/recruiters every year.

Fresh grads cost less, have relatively more energy, fewer ties, and probably better cognition responses.

They lack experience, but that's a solvable problem.

The question to ask is this: Why WONT there be work place discrimination, when younger, cheaper candidates show up every day?

System incentives are not in favor of growing old in tech.

And whats laughably worse about this is that humans are TERRIBLE at making out correlation from causation:

people will eventually associate youth with tech work, so an OLD person doing tech - will be tagged as an outlier and assessed on that.

(And Firms would NEVER admit that its just easier for them to ignore work place equality issues in favor of "fit" and "cultural match")

This is also more of a US centric phenomenon, not only because of the investment culture but because it's about the only developed country with a strong young population. That said, as those of us with the experience has witnessed before, these periods of growth focus comes in cycles and when the phase ends the experience of being boring and risk-averse can actually be an advantage for survival if it's combined with skill and experience.

"Only because as people get experience they end up in the “Engineering Manager” role & such."

There's a limited number of those positions, inherently. So most of the people in an age group are probably leaving the profession altogether, not moving to management.

I have mixed feelings about this. I'm 43. I'm definitely still learning things and I feel like I have some productive years ahead of me. Some of the best engineers I've ever worked with have been 45-60. That said, I feel slower now. I feel like my late 30s were a sweet spot of knowledge, wisdom and capability. I'd like to think my people skills are a bit better now though. I'm more and more suited to a lead role where I'm doing dev 30-40% and mentoring the rest of the time.

I wonder how prevalent the whole ageism thing is. It makes good articles because half the engineers are afraid of it, but how widespread is this? Could be just a dozen isolated cases that the media latches on?

Prevalent. I'm applying for jobs. Hot market. Both I and my peers are finding it much harder than as fresh college grads. A lot of this is structural: Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. interviews ask very easy big-O style algorithmic questions and prioritize speed and accuracy.

A lot of us more experienced folk haven't done this in years. We can solve more complex, multifaceted questions, but those aren't asked. It's about speed with things from college. It's important we understand those, and we do, but that crisp sharpness is no longer there.

I will beat someone younger on hard problems which also involve threading, distributed systems, customer requirements, memory hierarchies, code simplicity, testability, business requirements, math, etc. but those aren't the interviews.

Even ML seem to be spot checks of trendy techniques rather than deeper questions about mathematical maturity.

If you spent 4 weeks drilling basic CS problems do you think you will pass the interview? When I look into them I feel like I can pick it back up quickly.

On a tangent: which city are you looking in?

I am passing them now, after having gone through a few. I do still make stupid mistakes more than I would have in my youth. Four weeks drilling would definitely more than do it.

I think the bigger problem is none of the other skills I have seem to even matter for Google/Amazon/Facebook hiring. I would rather practice those skills and find niche openings which value people like me than do prep for a broken process. Plus I have family, consulting, etc, so I don't want to just drill. I'm not desperate. I could be wrong (no offers yet, but just started on sites so don't expect any yet) but I think I have better options elsewhere.

If I weren't actively looking, I wouldn't even consider those types of jobs, and this is the first time in my life actively looking. In other words, Google has no chance of poaching someone like me. I think the word for that is implicit bias or disparate impact.

Boston area.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply.

How do you and yours look for jobs? In other words, where would I need to advertise to have you find me and apply?

Here I posted an ad for a principal engineer, and it drew zero responses [1]. What could I do differently to get attention of (someone like) you and your friends?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055897

When I read a post like yours, it reads like $100k salary, boring system, small company, small total addressable market, so even if wildly successful, not much upside. Boring tech too: Basically a classic database system.

My friends are mostly at Amazon, Google, or Facebook with incomes from $250k up to over $1 million. The others are at startups solving big hard problems with big dreams.

If there is no particular complexity, I'd outsource to India, Ukraine, Pakistan, or similar. If there is, I'd describe the hard problem.

The minimal qualifications aren't a draw either. I want to work with smart people. Microsoft stack reeks of low end employment.

Midwest, rural, Deep South, etc. beats Seattle too. Lower cost of living draws many developers of the sort you want. Problem is a minimal living salary broke $200k in Boston, SF, NY, etc. You don't want a low end job.

That’s a lot of prejudice for someone who just a day earlier complained about prejudice. :)))

Thanks for feedback!

I'd be curious if you interviewed at the company I work for (DraftKings) or not yet. If you have, I'd be interested in any feedback you had on our process, and if you haven't, I'd be interested in why you hadn't considered the company. Either way, it's worth getting in touch.

My personal email is in my profile.

Incredibly prevalent.

Anything to back that up? Stats? First-hand / second-hand experience?

Several years ago, in my mid 40's, I was on the job hunt. I interviewed at several companies that seemed to love me and even flew me to the HQ for an interview (D.C., Utah, etc.) Most of the companies were the same; lots of young people sitting/standing at long tables in open offices. I didn't receive a single offer from any of them, with most of the replies being along the lines of "not a culture fit". I can't say for sure what that means but it sure sounds like ageism to me.

Interestingly, I landed my current gig with only phone interviews. I didn't even see my co-workers until 2 months after I was hired and we all met at a central location for a 2 day "summit".

I can easily imagine this happening. Makes me wonder what can society do about it?

Google for example takes hiring decision away from interviewer - the committee receives interview feedback in written form and makes a decision based on that, not seeing the candidate. You do lose a few bits of information that what, but it takes like half the bias off the table (the other half is allowing the interviewers to ask more difficult questions and being more nit picky in grading answers).

Everywhere I go, people are begging for more, better devs.

They cry that the market is dry, that the GAFAS bough all the best and that only fizz-buzz worth students remain.

I doubt the whole industry would refuse to hire an expert based on age when they are so much desperate for one.

But I'm young so I have to way to check this yet.

I think a mix is the best. I worked in different teams, but with teams where the age were mixed I felt good and well thought out decisions was made.

Young devs are eager to learn and think older devs are in the way for new tech. Older devs have more mature look on life and know more about consequences of different decisions in the long run.

Ageism in a company makes it more shortsighted and plain out stupid. They make more mistakes, lose customers more, and make decisions that they regret later.

older devs are in the way for new tech.

Asking those awkward questions like “what problem, that we actually have, does it solve?” And “will it still be around in 3 years? Won’t even you be bored of it in 6 months?”

As a salesman who is constantly told he is "too young" and is habitually underpaid/fired, I can tell you that age discrimination is both real and highly arbitrary.

If anybody out there can see the value in having an enthusiastic customer advocate, rather than just another sales guy, please do reply :)

I know a lot of folks hiring. Happy to pass your resume around. Email me: Hn (at) strapr (dot) com

Also check out Albert’s List on Facebook. There are a lot of non tech jobs posted on there.

Thanks so much for writing, I will email you shortly!

It sure is. I can remember always being too young. Being too young to go to after hours drinks. Too young to rent a car. Too young to do so much.

Funny thing is when you are old enough, people won't tell you.

Good article. I fail to visualise this; tech-people between age group 25-40, who are already at the peak of their career, like some are already CxOs, others are VPs and higher positions in large orgs. What are these people gonna do after say 25-30 years from now? I am sure there would be a high tech professional life cycle something similar to tech product life-cycle. Though this is very subjective phenomenon.

20 years at a CXO salary in a reasonably mature organization (not seed or series A) is long enough to save up plenty to retire on.

Make a bet and invest in a new, upcoming technology like Rust. If Rust takes off big, you'll have a head start on teen programming wizards.

This is true and also helps keep you fresh. Personally I got involved in containers and container security 4 years ago and so even at my advanced age (44) I'm involved in what is a pretty hot topic at the moment.

I also recognize that I need to keep investing in my technical development as I go along.

Is there a good word for when a member of a group is biased against the group that they're a part of?

> I wouldn’t want to work in a place where management is close to my age without a gold-plated guarantee they share the “Let’s try it and see” outlook of younger companies.

The correct term is "Auld". "Old" is demeaning and insensitive.

The preferred nomenclature is "wrinkly"

In the UK, we have "twerly" (derived from the free bus trips available to pensioners, but only after 10am, hence "Am I too early?")

Excellent - I'm in the UK, but haven't heard that one. Not that far from a bus pass myself

It's not complicated: the costs of software development are almost entirely in labor. As long as that remains true, older people will be at a severe disadvantage simply because they cost 2-5 times as much as a new hire. Once Moore's Law slows down (or whatever we want to call the current golden age we're seemingly still in), this will change, but until then you're just fighting against exponential growth.

If you don’t factor quality of code/architecture in there, then yes.

But that would be folly long term.

From being on HN for years, folly is ok for a lot of VC backed startups. "We know Ruby! Let's do everything in that!", said the team at Twitter. Then performance took a nose dive since the language was known at the time to not scale. Now it's Java or Scala.

Absolutely! Short term a startup will make a lot of fuckups - that’s a good thing, it’s learning!

But once the product is set having sane architecture and good code quality often become a deciding factor in being successful - because they allow you to iterate faster & outmaneuver your competition.

Sometimes you can get away with it for longer, but eventually you’ll grind to a place where you need to fix these things and it’s easier to do earlier.

Twitter is arguably successful so why would you consider their decision to be folly? It worked for them.

Startups have limited resources. If you devote them to solving tomorrow's problems then you'll be beaten by someone who devotes their resources to solving today's problems.

I wouldn't use Ruby/Python for web development given their know issues. I'd use Java/C#/Go/Closure; two of these existed at the time Twitter was made. While those two are more verbose, the IDEs make most of that easy (I use Eclipse and AOP to generate almost all of that bulk). So picking something that's good at the start will save you in the end.

People tend to think, "We'll architect it later" means "We don't have to think now". You need to think at every step. You don't need to know how you'll deal with everything, but there is a lot of rooming for being rational. You should think about fault tolerance when you start. It could be that you think you don't need much since everything will deploy to one box (and you're okay with loosing the whole thing). You need to be rational. You need to know why you did what you did and what the impacts would be.

I'm going to stop picking on Twitter since they are the case study in what not to do. They learned from themselves and taught us all much in the process.

Many startups don't think all this through (even if they only need to think 2 moves ahead). They over-hire. They under design. They make lots of poor choices because they think they have the runway and want to be cool with the latest frameworks. All of these actions I'd place squarely in the folly camp since Uncle Bob and other resources have been free since at least 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsjsiz2A9mg).

Wow I don’t even know where to begin with this. Perhaps the biggest flaw is confusing language with architecture. Twitters scaling issues had to do with non-trivial architecture issues that are much more widely understood now than they were a decade ago. It’s very easy to sit in your armchair now with your pipe and claim how bad their approach was, but the fact that you think it has to do with choice of language shows you aren’t as smart as you think you are. If Twitter has used 2006-era Java they likely would have moved too slow to even get traction and we’d never have heard of them. It’s a pleasant fantasy land to think you could survive early Twitter hypergrowth, but actually dealing with it is not simply a matter of correct up front planning.

I've seen the "move to slow" argument bandied about here all the time. The all modern 3GL languages support fast development (they might need some help with code gen). Twitter suffered language level scaling issues. Period. They suffered architectural issues. When I see someone wanting to go to prod with Python/Ruby project, I know they will have to rewrite.

I do want to nuance this a bit. If you're doing AI or stats, Python makes sense. There are ways to scale that too. Use the right tool. My general argument is that Python is seldom the right tool for any at-scale web system.

Do you think any system goes from 1 to a billion users without being re-written? It never happens, if you go if into that architecture astronaut mindset from the beginning you will not ship the features necessary to get traction. Saying that Twitter faced language-level issues is absolute nonsense. Any stateless web front-end scales trivially whether it's Rails or anything else, it's the data flow and caching that needs to be designed properly to solve Twitter-type scaling issues.

Why does an older person cost more? Either they produce more, or they’re overpaid. The first type is definitely worth finding and paying... I’ve seen companies built solely by 22-year old script kiddies and usually the stack can’t scale. At that point, you’re in a trickier spot because a 40-year-old who can inject some good sense at the beginning of a project is a lot more abundant than a 40-year-old who can lead a turnaround effort on a fucked up stack while keeping the company and stack operational for existing customers.

So this is a nuanced question and requires a detailed response. But the gist is that older folks don't necessarily cost more. I've seen many older folks continue to work as developers for most of their lives (albeit this is outside Silicon Valley). But for many older developers who continue on the technical track, they have accumulated a lot of experience building software and they do bring a lot to the table, in terms of design, or prescient thinking, or knowing the internals of certain stacks very very well. That kind of knowledge is certainly useful for firms that operate on scale, have systems that cannot tolerate downtime, and so on.

In other words, it depends on the individual.

More experienced developers are also more willing and able to take on a pre-existing production code base and clean it up and plan how to divide and conquer to improve, migrate and replace it, while younger developers often prefer to work on greenfield projects or want to throw out and replace existing work. Younger management doesn't always understand this difference, and more experienced developers might be contributing in avoiding a lot of costly mistakes but this benefit is mostly invisible.

This is really down to what side of the tech industry it's happening on and what that side needs. Working with new web and mobile technologies delivering novel applications for consumers are more suited to younger people as opposed to say developing, maintaining and evolving systems for aviation, transport and military automation and safety or certain parts of finance.

The catch is it's hard to measure & value the experience the older engineer brings to the table.

> Why does an older person cost more?

Let's take an example case where two engineers are working in a second tier city earning $85,000 per year in salary. One is 25 years old, one is 53 years old. The company covers the entire cost of the employee health insurance. The health insurance for the 53 year old will cost a minimum of 2x what it does for the 25 year old. The cost of health insurance begins to aggressively increase after roughly 38-40. By the time the 53 year old employee reaches 60-63 years old, the insurance cost is now 3x that of the 25 year old.

The 53 year old will solidly cost an extra $6,000 to $10,000 in health insurance on top of that $85,000 salary, versus the 25 year old. The 60 year old might cost $12,000 to $18,000 more in health insurance.

All of these figures are minimums, the numbers get much worse if you have a nice health plan.

If you're in a second tier city paying your engineers $85k, $15,000 per year in extra cost buys a ridiculous amount of training to improve the 20 something engineers.

If you have 20 engineers, over ten years the cost of employing all 55-63 year olds, versus all 20-30 year olds, could easily be a minimum extra of $3 million in just health insurance costs (with a total salary over ten years of $17 million). The more likely cost is far higher.

You make a great case for why health insurance shouldn't be a part of compensation. A single-payer healthcare system is long overdue in the US, and might actually make age discrimination less likely.

Are plans really priced liked that? 4 years ago, I secured a policy (PPO) for my small company (15 employees in NYC) and they did not ask the age of any employee, just the total number. All people were covered at the exact same cost. The cost to insure an employee with a family was obviously higher, which is something younger employees often to not have.

Because older people have lives, children and more - coming in over the weekend is not an option.

Spending extra time to "Show you love your work" is not something they care about.

On the other hand that is something most American Techies in SV firms or on HN already are part of.

Just sitting here on HN for so many years I know what it takes to look like an up and coming coder - and that is to breathe and live code.

Weekend projects on XYZ project. Work efficiency on ABC tasks.

Plus older people are not going to accept the usual promises of riches at the end of the rainbow, so may usually ask for better deals.

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I think people are too quick to run from here to blame -

Instead this is a systems/people problem.

Theres certain cultural expectations of work culture in tech. There are also unending flows of graduates to tech.

While this remains, this problem will continue. Firms are responding to the resources at their disposal and optimizing

Should some magic new industry arise, which absorbs all the smartest minds in the world - you will see tech change.

If you want to work fewer hours but don’t contribute more per hour, get used to working for less pay or being unemployed.

I have a better idea - why dont I hire people for Jobs instead.

Its your/their choice if you/they want to work on the weekends. I am not forcing them. Its just that promotions will go to the people who do.

And if you don't earn more, and get that promotion - well how are you going to stay relevant in this industry or pay for that rent?

I mean its totally your "choice", to effectively throw away your future if you don't play ball.

Thats why we employers prefer young guns. They have that "go get em" attitude. Great cannon fodder.

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When people talk about agism and finding it hard to find a job as an older person, they're generally comparing against someone with the same capabilities and salary expectation going for the same job. (Edit:) And they're not complaining about companies not matching their salary, they're complaining about not getting an offer at all.

It isn't in comparison with the job available to new grads.

(Of course, there's the question of whether a senior industry hire is actually only worth some factor of a new grad hire.)

I'm not sure what you're comparing but it sounds like you're comparing experienced vs. inexperienced and not necessarily older vs. younger. I'm 57 and I don't think I am that much more expensive than younger experienced backend engineers and SREs. We're all as a group a lot more expensive than people who are just starting out but that's hardly surprising. Between those of us who would be considered senior in terms of experience I might be $10k or $20k more expensive just due to salary history and growth over time but I doubt that amount is a deal breaker for the average tech company.

Agreed, it's actually kind of awful that it takes about ten years to hit the pay ceiling. 2-5x, if only!

Which just goes to show:

Software development isn't "knowledge work", if the additional knowledge of experience isn't valued. It's more like "typing work".

It's refreshing to see a positive (but nuanced) take for once.

wow, I'm not sure how good the article is, but my browser threw a hairball trying to load that page. Rarely do I see a page fail as hard as this one did. Has Wired just collapsed under the weight of ad trafic nonsense?

Not just wired. Almost every news site. Ad block, update your host file, etc. Ever since forbes had viruses/malware for ads a few years ago, I don't visit a news site without protection.

I'm using an adblocker, all I get is a brief flash of something and then a blank page. Maybe I'm too old for Wired now.

Ah, not just me then. I assumed it was some GDPR block as wired UK works fine.

Via outline: https://outline.com/mGVbG6

Indeed. And there are two calls to JSON.parse() with about a meg of text. I'm clearly much to old to understand why.

It happens to me too, even after I log in as a subscriber. Clueless.

With the arrival of Conde Nast and the departure of Anderson, WiReD truly has lost the last of its mojo.

I use an adblocker and tried turning it off. No dice either way. Some Javascript bug is causing it to happen when I check the `console.log()` output. Luckily Wired is slow enough that I can refresh the page and hit the 'pause' button in the debugger and then read the content. Funny that the links don't work if you hit 'pause' too soon.

Loads fine for me with uBlock Origin enabled (and blocking 28 URLs).

It's working now for me too, I suppose they fixed something, or it was just overloaded.

Excellent candidate for outline.com

uBlock shows me 49 foreign scripts there. That's... a lot.

WTF: "an Old"

Is that supposed to be "millennial" lingo?

It's not supposed to be; it is.

I've even seen older people pick it up. It's a good syntax.

I mostly see older people use it in online contexts that are perceived as predominantly younger. "As an old ..."

I think old is a gender now.

Somebody's trying to fit in and say what they heard somebody else say. Thence are these things born and propagated.

This one takes an adjective and makes it a noun. Sounds more like 1950s lingo (a black, a white, a gay etc.) but with the illusion of freshness with its being applied to old people for the first time. Call me a rude, but it's a sucky. At least "old person" acknowledges they're a person.

I think it's more a simulation of an older person using awkward youth slang.

At least, when I see it, it's usually an older person saying something like "As an old I really don't get this fashion for tattoos that look like someone scribbled random doodles all over you."

I don't have a definitive memory of this by any means, and searching old websites in 2018 is like pulling teeth now that Google "unlaunched" custom date ranges (yet another step on the long journey toward making Google search the pinnacle of vapid "relevance"). However, I seem to remember first seeing it on left-leaning political blogs in the early '00s as mockery of the pattern of complaining about "the gays", "the Jews", "the blacks", etc.. So when pundits complained about welfare, it was paraphrased as ranting about "the poors", when they railed against pensions or Medicare they were angry with "the olds", and so on. It's a very short hop from there to people posting comments that start like "As a poor, [...]".

"young people are just smarter"

Mark Zuckerberg

I've often wondered how Zuck is going to feel about that quote in the long run.

That implies he can recognize hubris. So far that’s not been a theme.

Also Zuckerburg:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks

So "young people are just smarter", and "anyone at Harvard is a dumb fuck"...

I think you are replying to an ironic post to begin with. Doubt that quote was to prove a point, but to highlight the problem.

Sure - I still find it amusing tho - totally worth the downvotes...

It's not worth defacing the community with, though, so please don't.

Please don't introduce recycled ragebait for the millionth time. It never leads to anything new.

Yeah but that was from when he was young and not as smart.

More like, young people have a good smart to self worth ratio, making them easier to exploit.

Not necessarily self-worth - when you're just starting out and you have no track record, no matter how good you know you are, the rest of the world won't believe you until you've proved yourself. So you start wherever you can.

A fair point. So either a feeling of a lack of self worth resulting in reduced assertiveness, or just being rebuffed a bunch.

And what brilliant things were you saying in 2007? Yeah, that was an asinine thing for him to say, and insulting to . . . well, to people like me. I'm 53, and I happen to work at Facebook on the strength of things I've learned in the last 11 years or so. I dare say many of the people around me, including those who hired me, might have learned a thing or two as well. Maybe those who want to champion the idea of life-long growth and learning could make their point some way other than bringing up a quote from 2007 as though it represents current belief.

And what brilliant things were you saying in 2007?

If Zuck had said “whites are just smarter” or “men are just smarter” he would not have gotten away with it then and it would not be forgotten or forgiven now.

It’s a valid point because it illustrates ageism is considered acceptable even today.

He might not have gotten away with it then, but it wouldn't be harming him much today. It might well have earned him a cabinet post or "senior adviser to the president" role in the current administration.

it wouldn't be harming him much today

Oh it would. Eich is still feeling the fallout from what he did in 2008. Rightly or wrongly is up to you, but nevertheless we see that people have long memories.

Please don't introduce recycled flamebait for the millionth time. It never leads to anything new. We're looking for thoughtful reactions, not mechanical reflexes.

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