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Comment by thegayngler | Hacker News Reader

This reads like you seized one sentence and stopped reading because you didnt like what was said so dismissed the whole article. Thats not fair IMO. I read the whole thing and the article uses the first sentences to set the backdrop for his argument that older engineers and programmers are forced into early retirement and companies in tech world and outside of it make rookie mistakes that could be avoided by treating engineering as a life long profession.

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Alternating between complaints about White overrepresentation that aren't even true and politically correct terminology like "People of Color" and the entire article being a love letter to an underrepresented group is just jarring. It makes me wonder about how informed the author is about tech if he thinks Whites are overrepresented generally. There's either a lack of accuracy or moral consistency. Why the hell is the author even bring up his poorly informed opinions on racial topics in an article about ageism anyways?

Anyways the article as a whole is heavy on anecdote and low on data & facts. There is an emphasis on outcome metrics but the author doesn't bother to examine any data on productivity vs age.

The problem with your argument is that there are other diversity initiatives in the programming world which are mainly gender and race focused. That is undeniably true. There hasnt been the same thing at the same scale for older programmers. In fact there have been many articles on this very forum about how many tech companies filter out older engineers when searching for talent. Its not the first time this topic has been brought up. IBM was actively phasing out older workers and long term workers. Lets not act like data isnt there to support the claim even if it is just anecdotal.

I didn't really see anything substantiating a claim that eg 30 years engineering experience in tech is more valuable than say 20. It was just an assumption.

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