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Comment by _qulr | Hacker News Reader

"But skills can beat ageism"

I dislike this typical response, because it comes close to blaming the victim, and indeed many people do blame the victims of ageism, attributing stereotypical attitudes to them. Imagine claiming "skills can beat racism" or "skills can beat sexism". No, nothing beats discrimination, because it was never based on the existence or absence of skills. Rather, prejudiced people take one look at you, see your gray hair, and make assumptions about you, and you can't beat your hair color any more than you can beat your skin color.

Well, you could try to dye your hair and get plastic surgery, but again that has nothing to do with skills.

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Well said! My product management take on the subject is that people's perception of you is far more important than the reality. Skills or not, your appearance, mannerisms, relatability, and a thousand other things go into other's perceptions.

Being older and from another generation changes the perception inherently. Can be good or bad it turns out, but it certainly requires human management skills and cannot be simply solved by "being better". That seems like an engineer's solution to the problem. If people were rational then things could be different, but from what I have seen people do not buy the most efficient and effective products, nor do they hire the most skilled and efficient people. They hire someone because they feel good about hiring them and they believe they will make their lives easier.

"Skills can beat ageism" also ignores the fact that many people only have the aptitude for average skills. In a system without discrimination that's not a problem because there are plenty of jobs for average developers.

If you just want to rant against SV, I totally agree. It's certainly not fair, because it basically says you have to "work twice as hard" as they say. But the statement is factually correct. While it would certainly be preferable for society to be the one to change and such that your ageism problem goes away. In the meantime, merit matters, and usable advice for an individual to deal with this problem is by building up their skills. Note that the advice came from a recruiter, not a hiring manager justifying themselves.

> It's certainly not fair, because it basically says you have to "work twice as hard" as they say. But the statement is factually correct.

It assumes that everyone is lazying around basically.

Because of people are not lazying around, no, you can not just work twice as hard. Because you are already working hard, exactly as your competitors do. No people can't double their hard work every time they are treated unfairly. Not if they were actually working in the first place.

That goes for ageism, sexism, racism, whatever-ism we talk about.

"Hard work" is ultimately just a simple metaphor. I would characterize the advice here as maneuvering into a niche in your field with the highest demand for labor and with less competition (i.e. the niche using the most up-to-date technologies).

"Rather, prejudiced people take one look at you, see your gray hair, and make assumptions about you""

Often, I suspect, it isn't even about making conscious assumptions. People just have positive and negative subconscious reactions to certain physical traits.

It's striking that you virtually never hear any discussion of "height discrimination", which I put in scare quotes because it barely seems to a recognized concept in the world of work (although it is somewhat recognized in the dating world). Yet there's lots of evidence that tall people have systematic advantages in life. They're seen as leaders, more likely to become CEOs, more like to be elected to political office, etc.

I'm a software engineer in my 40's. I also worry about ageism.

I don't want to victim blame. There is probably discrimination. But I think the older developers have some responsibility in defeating ageism.

I know a few SWEs who are older than me. They are already feeling the burnout of learning the new languages, frameworks, technologies every 3-4 years. Some of them are set in their ways thinking, "why would you need anything else other than C++/Java/etc.?" They grumble every time they are forced to learn something new. They have a point. After working in the industry for 15+ years, I empathize. But in this industry, that's unfortunately not the right attitude to have.

Another problem I see with older engineers is they are intimidated by the younger kids. I get it. When I interviewed some fresh grads, they seemed extremely talented and smart. I felt intimated by how much they knew. Some of the old guys lose confidence because of that. One old engineer who got laid off gave up looking for another job and faced early retirement. He told me he can't compete with the younger kids who already know all the new technologies and techniques.

Besides skills, I think it comes down to your attitude and how you relate to your younger co-workers. Being in my 40's, I still can relate to the kids. I try to bring a "young" energy. I'll see if I can keep this up into my 50's and maybe 60's.

>Besides skills, I think it comes down to your attitude and how you relate to your younger co-workers

Also an engineer in my mid-40's. This is key. You need to be the "cool" dad in the room, and someone people can go to for hard/difficult problems. You also have to stay relevant and keep your skills up to date. Talk about the great ramen place near your house, not how you had to solve Y2K problems with COBOL 20 years ago.

The worst case scenario is if you're a bootcamp grad at 40+, you're gonna have all the problems of ageism without any of the experience to counteract it.

I don't know man?

Game theoretically speaking, if a tech worker is older it's best to know what younger workers do not. For instance, an older worker is a good deal more likely to be hired if s/he is able to write the firmware for ray tracing video card hardware than s/he is to be hired for knowing how to write web apps in "cool language of the week". In fact, I'd argue that most of the older tech workers in the situation of being discriminated against, are the workers who spent their careers learning "cool language of the week". A few of them may get lucky and get a job doing something that a 22 year old new college grad can do, but what's the likelihood? Should you bet your family's future on those odds? Even if you get the job, what's the pay likely to be like?

I feel like a lot of tech workers never ask themselves these questions. It's never too early to ask them either, in fact you should ask them early in your career. Getting too comfortable doing things everyone knows how to do will make you decidedly uncomfortable once you hit 35 or 40.

Perhaps. But it's rare that an industry just sits around and stagnates to the extent that 20+ year old knowledge is applicable to current day problems. Even in the graphics industry, 20 years ago we were still discovering perspective correction and shaders were but a pipe dream.

The problem set keeps evolving, and the tools we use to solve those problems keep evolving as well. Handwritten HTML -> vanilla JS -> jQuery -> Angular -> React, etc. It's not just the languages, it's major paradigm shifts in solving problems.

If you want to get out of that rat race, then jump on the management track and stay there. Even then, though, you need some familiarity with what your team will be working on.

I agree. You need to be the cool uncle or older brother who shows them new tricks and cool stuff.

You need to have a mentor like quality for their career growth yet still talk about the latest movies, technologies, games, memes, random geeky stuff, etc. to them

There are two very different versions of this.

People who refuse to learn any new tech or tooling while on the job will find fewer and fewer positions. That's fair. The key thing is that there is a second group, that doesn't know the trendy technology and would be able to easily learn on the job but doesn't get hired because they didn't learn it on their own time. Failing to hire the second group is a problem.

I've never encountered a skilled engineer that couldn't pick up a new language/framework/architecture/workflow/process relatively quickly.

If an engineer with 20 years of experience is intimidated by a new grad then that’s not ageism, and not what this thread is about. If a new grad performs better then there is literally no point in hiring that engineer. They don’t bring anything to the table and there is no room for growth. If you’re in your 50’s then ideally you’d be at least a principal engineer at a big tech company by then.

So You propose that the future for every developer is either go up or go out? Am I the only one that this reeks of pyramid scheme?

In reality only one in ten can become "principal engineer". But it does not mean that the other nine does not have any skills and should not work in the field.

I have seen this sentiment many times and I'm cannot understand why so many people is blind to the fact that this attitude creates serious systematic problems and is inhuman (because some abstract efficiency takes precedence over well-being).

It's not technically ageism. You're right.

But there's an engineer in his 50's, who worked in his company for many years. He had intimate knowledge of its systems and domain. But his company got bought out, and the new owners decided they don't need that group anymore and lays off the entire group. Suddenly, his domain expertise is near-useless unless he can find another, similar position.

He interviews for other positions, but he is hit with questions he's not familiar with. He drones on about his old systems/architect like an old fogey who not up to date with the new, shiny stuff. He tries to study the new stuff, but he's tired, overwhelmed, burnt out, etc. His interviewers realizes he has a lot of experience and probably highly skilled, but his skills and experience aren't relevant enough to what their company is doing. They offer to hire him at a junior rate, or not hire him at all. Is this ageism, or is he not good enough?

No, that's not ageism - Also that's almost never how the story goes.

The last paragraph is more commonly:

He/she applies to a position relevant to his/her skills, and makes the mistake of listing all is previous experience in the resume - No response. After a while, he downplays his resume - gets responses. In the interview he/she answers every question with great accuracy, but something just doesn't "click" to the interviewer (the interviewer is sure he/she is filtering on skill alone, but is very wrong about that)

The fact is, recruiters and interviewers hire people they like, people that are similar to them. If you're from the same place look similar and from a similar age it generally has a lot more weight than anything skill-related.

In my 50's and keeping it up: it's easier to be cheerful when you've seen much much worse, it's easier to take the new hotness with the right amount of curiosity when you've seen the same product in different packaging five times, it's easier to relate to younglings who have passion and curiosity when you have passion and curiosity, it's easier to not get stuck being of a given generation, eg. the Java or C++ crews, when you grew up at a time when things were like now, more in flux than they've been during the 2000 aughts and earlier teens.

There was a research in Canada about hiring discrimination. One of those ones where they send mock resumes to employers with similar contents but different applicant names: some had English names, some had non-English (mainly Asian IIRC) names. Then they compare the number of callbacks they got from employers.

The result of this particular study was that: 1) the resumes with non-English sounding names had much fewer callbacks than the ones with English names. 2) the resumes with more education and experience got more callbacks than the results with less education and experience. 3) if you had a non-English name and a master's, you almost but not quite, had the same rate of callback as someone with a bachelor's and an English name.

I imagine some people see this and conclude that skills beat racism. But if the reality is that you have to get a PhD and a couple of years of extra experience under your belt to have the same chance of finding a job as an English Canadian who has newly graduated from good BSc, then this is not skills beating racism. The fact that some people have to do a lot of extra work for the same outcome is the epitome of discrimination.

Sure you can dislike all you want but what its gonna do?

Which is more practical and useful: Change people perception or skills ?

It's a scientific fact that fluid intelligence peaks early. Crystallized intelligence peaks later, but that comes with the assumption that you acquired valuable experience.

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