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Comment by DodgyEggplant | Hacker News Reader

50+ here. Never had an issue. Many media articles in this context also "consult" or "quote" or "interview" someone from a company that "consult older software developers how to stay in the market". One note: you have to respect it from both sides, and factor out age when young person is your manager or colleague. Your age is not an argument in a technical discussion.

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Not everywhere is a high demand market. Brazil here. The job market really wants low paid workers that will work Saturday nights for peanuts. A lot of my older colleagues emigrate to have good technical jobs. Others become sellers or open a restaurant.

Very much agree with this. As someone who’s managed people 20+ years my senior, it always annoyed me when I overheard them complain about reporting to someone younger. I don’t hold their age against them, it should be reciprocal.

20 years is a huge gap. Those guys were writing operating systems at school before you were born. Of course they'd complain

But the age gap alone is not a valid reason to complain. The young manager could be in their 30's with over a decade of experience themselves, and they may be highly competent at the work they do. Assuming the young person is not qualified to manage veteran programmers is also a form of age discrimination.

If they're managers they should be in management jobs. If they're not, why should they complain about not being management? Management is its own job, not a "reward" granted for time in service. Not even the military works like that.

The point is that it’s still age discrimination. If someone wants their age to not work against them, they have to be willing to look past the age of others.

Besides age is not an indicator of quality of work, nor are college credentials. I’ve seen much older devs run circles around younger ones, and vice versa.

I am sometimes tempted to tell colleagues "well I've done this professionally since before you were born, so...", but so far I've resisted the temptation. Hope I can keep the streak going :)

Even if you're right, it's not a great argument, because there isn't really a rational counter argument.

If the argument is only based on having more experience - the "I've done this professionally since before you were born" argument - it can be correctly rejected as an argument from authority fallacy.

If the argument is based on a pattern you've seen before that's germane to the situation at hand - the "I've seen this movie before and it ends with regret and a data breach" argument - it can be much more convincing.

> I am sometimes tempted to tell colleagues "well I've done this professionally since before you were born, so..."

This sounds like you want the respect due to age alone.

The respect due to age alone is horrible. I wouldn't inflict it on my worst enemies.

The respect due to age and experience, on the other hand, is substantial, and something to strive for.

Back up your gray hairs :) with some relevant knowledge and the intelligent people will listen attentively.

> "well I've done this professionally since before you were born, so..."

This sounds like something coming from the advanced or expert beginner:

https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

You don't influence by pulling the seniority card, you do it with data. If there isn't data to back up your suggested approach being better, it might not be, and you get to learn something new!

Well, often the data is conclusions from my decades of experience. It's not like I can show that in Wikipedia.

What I actually mostly do is saying "Doing X never works, because Y, instead I like to do Z because...", and it has reasonable success.

People want to hear it can work.

Sourcing data is expensive. I think it's best not to underestimate just how much development has to be done based upon gut feel, trust or experience simply because proving it would take too long.

If it's two people arguing their own opinions at each other and neither one has relevant data where exactly do you go from there? The one with 2 years experience or the one with 15?

Sometimes the data is the experience, and it's hard to dump your personal experience on someone and make them ingest it. Sometimes you've tried approach X a couple of times and it always failed, but you don't have a scientific proof it will fail again. You just know from experience if you do X it usually ends up in tears and all-nighters and missed deadlines. Not because you have an Excel table proving it, but because you've lived it.

"Historically this has turned out badly" and back it up.

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