Comment by readonthegoapp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by readonthegoapp | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak from the point of view, directly, as a current web dev, but I'm 100% confident that the landscape has completely changed -- from the point of view of someone who looks at, evaluates, prototypes in new stacks all the time, and product/project-managed modern web stacks.

I complain here and everywhere about the insane complexity in modern-day web app dev.

The truth is that, after you learn the 20 new tools/technologies you'll need to become semi-competent in only one stack, it won't seem like such a massive shift anymore.

I think competition is not that fierce -- honestly speaking as I can -- but that's for corporate jobs, etc.

And you _have_ to be competent or good or really good if you're older.

Else, you're just going to sound...like you sound -- old and washed up.

Not saying you are, or I am, but once you're 25+, if you bring the 'Get off my lawn' vibe, your 27-yo manager-to-be is gonna smell it a mile away, and he's gonna be feeling awkward enough already.

So I think you can be fine, but you gotta actually know what you're doing, and you have to get/be modern.

Is ageism really that bad at the companies where you all work? Dang. Can't imagine working someplace where turning 26 puts you at risk of sounding old and washed up.

I think he's exaggerating. The workplaces I've seen aren't nearly that bad (and definitely don't have 27 year old managers).

I took a contract once at a mobile handset mfgr that had this. This sysadmin-cum-manager dude (with zero previous management exp) thought he was hot sh*t because of his title. Dude was robotic/patronizing fake, arrogant, useless, and just got in the way. He thought his role was to unsolicited "coach" mission statement BS and insult my intelligence.

Oddly enough, I was fired from that gig for witnessing a senior manager repeatedly mute the conference call to make racist remarks about overseas staff.

> for witnessing a senior manager repeatedly mute the conference call to make racist remarks about overseas staff.

This sounds like the perfect opportunity to have your phone in your shirt pocket such that the camera just barely peeks above the cuff of that pocket. As long as you are in a one-party-consent region (most states, all of Canada), you can have some pretty juicy stuff that HR can make “go away” with a golden parachute of sufficient size.

Sadly, it was in a two-party consent state. ):

I'm now in a one-party consent state and have a trusty-dusty digital audio recorder.

I’d be on a conference call to a lawyer as soon as my feet hit the street.

Plenty of companies where it's not like this...

If a place has 27 year old managers floating around in turtlenecks and preaching everyone how their eco-friendly-furniture-plant-sharing-tech-corp will change the world, you probably realise it's not a good place to work anyways..

I think it's an attitude thing more than anything. Many people I meet think I'm 10 years younger and refuse to believe otherwise. It's fun to come in as the instructor and everyone thinks I'm the student.

But it's more that if you come in and say that MySQL and PHP is good enough for everything, you're going to sound washed up. It might be true, but it's not good team chemistry when everyone wants to do one thing and one person keeps pulling them back. You don't even have to be 40 for this; 26 is "old" enough.

> Get off my lawn

xD

I'm a 43 yo autodidact + BS EE/CS. Haven't had a problem except for resume gaps when doing side-hustles and unnamed startup consulting for too long, HR at shops raise their eyebrows. When it gets to in-person interviewing, I may have a leg over with ~10 years of neanimorphism, look somewhat between a neohippie artist and an idle trustfunder (definitely neither, LOL!), and (obnoxious bragging here) date college students which might help with youthful-seeming attitude.

Oh and worked on nuclear reactor simulators, infosec research, compilers, industrial mining embedded systems, HPC biomedical informatics, and just about every permutation of AWS/hybrid cloud startup scaling (Prod Eng/SRE). Rust, Haskell, C, Ruby, TS/Elm, and so on.

There's always learning, new approaches, and shifting standards to handle.

The more you know, the more you know that you don't.

Buying into one's own ego / being the office jerk are the biggest enemies in high-productivity tech. Relentlessly resourceful go-givers tend to win out in the long-term as the most valuable employees because the big name celebrity rockstar whatever tends to write checks their hubris can't cash.

Lol I think you mean "a leg up" a leg over is something quite different :)

> I complain here and everywhere about the insane complexity in modern-day web app dev.

As a frontend dev, I don't think complexity is the issue. I _love_ the new tools at my disposal and am grateful that time has done away with many issues we used to have, such as poor cross-browser compatibility.

Rather, I think the main problem has to do with layers. The bottom layers - the hardware, the kernel - they just work. It's the topmost layers that are the problem - there's a constant battle with dependencies, configurations and tools.

I'm sure that a lot of this frustration would go away if people weren't forced to do yak-shaving every time they wanted to develop an app.

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