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Comment by oppositelock | Hacker News Reader

I'm almost 50. I've been working in tech since 1996, and at this point, despite being a strong and seasoned engineer, I'm getting comments like, "it's different now", or "back in your day", etc, and the very young engineers fresh from school are the ones throwing this around. Those with a few years of experience under their belt don't.

It's really disheartening, but it's also my job to train these bozos and turn them into good engineers, which they most certainly are not coming fresh from school.

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I hope these people are in the minority. I'm 21, I have my first internship coming up in the summer, and I am ecstatic to learn from engineers more experienced than me, no matter what age.

Yes, definitely in the minority.

A vocal minority unfortunately, and hiring is so driven by the fear of hiring the wrong person that just about any pushback is given a large amount of credence generally.

I am going to say this is an artifact of people not self-learning things on their own before the school or from a job.

I find in my earlier teenage years that internet was great source of knowledge. I read lots of blogs/articles etc from people 3x-4x my age. It made me appreciate them, not disrespect them. And for the most part, when you are on the internet, you really don't know what otherside even looks like for the most part - you only know in retrospect...

Yes and no to fresh engineers being good. I’ve met many fresh engineers that integrated and soon outperformed their older peers in a couple months. My first engineer position I went from new hire to lead on most projects in about a year. I was surprised and dumbfounded how much better I was than my peers (expect one he was amazing and I learned a lot from him). There a lot of good and bad engineers and experience doesn’t make up for bad engineers.

Certainly, the variance between engineers is huge and can offset experience.

Over time, though, the bad older engineers get managed out of the profession, or leave out of frustration or lack of satisfaction, so you end up having fewer. The selection function for good engineers has had much longer to run on them.

Think of experience as a trend line which pushes everyone to be better relative to what they were. School teaches algorithms, languages, tools, but it doesn't teach things like engineering approaches and how to keep a team productive, which doesn't always mean the most awesome algorithms. School teaches how to get the "correct" answer, experience teaches how to get "good enough" in a short amount of time. You need both!

About algorithms: It very much depends on the thing one works on, whether one ever needs to look up what a good algorithm is for a problem, which needs solving. Often it is more about how to put pieces together, using APIs, building an API, making a service, etc. Similar for data structures. For most you only need to know the basics like when to use a hash table, when to use an array or whatever of the data structures that are often available anyway in the standard library of the language.

This even more diminishes the gains that engineers get from their expert knowledge.

Usually only when in a position to develop something ground up, does the expert knowledge of data structures and algorithms come into play.

Algorithm and data structure questionaires rather seem like mathematics in many cases. A filter to weed out people, but not often of use at the job.

Obviously I might be biased due to personal experience.

Single data point. It doesn't prove or disprove anything. I have seen 60 yo folks jump on a project and literally turn it around in weeks.

> I was surprised and dumbfounded how much better I was than my peers

Self-Humbled

Not really, I really expected to be very lacking in experience and aptitude. I did poorly in school and I have really bad ADHD and Tourette’s. My expectations as an engineer were to do well enough to keep a job; never expected I’d be a natural at writing software.

I'm sure there is ageism from younger devs, but be sure not to confuse it with respect. In my experience, younger devs (like me at the time) were always excited to learn from older devs.

But what if that older dev is only at par with the younger one: will she or he be treated equally, if everything else was equal? In other words, is an old person expected to compensate for her or his lack of youth by an excess of wisdom?

I think there is a certain expectation that after 10-20 years in the industry you bring some added value a fresh grad won't bring. Surely you must have learned a few things, no? If not that's not a great sign.

Impact. Impact is #1.

Interesting thought though, what if the product in question is a product geared toward a younger audience that younger devs are more "in tune" with? Assuming they have more impact as a result.

If the older dev is compensated more/has a higher level position, they are expected to provide more to the employer/product, whether it is through their excess wisdom or knowledge or responsibilities or otherwise.

They shouldn't be expected to compensate for their lack of youth in any way, as youth isn't a metric that has any relevance to their work in software development. And if they are of the same title/total comp as the young dev, there is nothing wrong with them being on par in terms of skills/knowledge/responsibilities.

Recognizing seniority is hard. Computer Science is a field were a teenager in front of a computer quickly feels like a god. You can do anything!

But getting that out of their thinking takes time. And that is IMHO what you experience. It is disheartening that they lack the respect they should have socially independent of profession for an "elder" person.

I am in my early 40s as an architect arguing with our mixed-age teams to give me the necessary rationale before making stupid "it's different now" decisions.

I think part of the reason for feeling like a know-all can-do-everything in junior years and afterwards as well is, because of not reading the right books. I am talking about really good books about the core competence of programming. I have read books authored by people with more than 50y of experience. The ideas and wisdom they come up with is unparalleled. Reading about such great ideas and how to avoid issues with code makes me feel like: "Woa that is sooo neat and clean! Why did I not get that idea myself?" and there you have the humbling experience, that should introduce respect for seniority.

Of course it is not a blanket. A senior should adapt to new ways as well, if they make sense. For example functional constructs have become more popular in recent years. Just because one is a senior, does not mean, that they should go on writing their sequential do-while loops (usually it would be for loops, but exaggerating here), when things could be written with multicore in mind and using map reduce style. That is not seniority, it is lack of self-education and development of ones skills. No need to join the web framework churn either though. One should understand their essence though.

>It is disheartening that they lack the respect they should have socially independent of profession for an "elder" person.

Especially when you consider the fact that the tools and concepts they've learned and made them super awesome were developed by people in their late 30s-50s. James Gosling was 40 when he came out with Java, Bjarne and Guido were both 35 when they came out with C++ and Python respectively. None of these guys, by the way, have stopped working.

I'd still consider myself a bozo (3 years out of school), but may I offer a humble thanks for your shoulders that many of the rest of us stand on!

I'm in my 50s and haven't seen it in that overt form. Maybe a silicon valley thing? I've only worked on the east coast. On the other hand, I have missed out on jobs because of culture fit concerns that have an age component: I'm not sensitive enough. Not mean, but not as...nurturing?...as companies seem to now expect. Things were definitely more rough and tumble when I got into this field and I really do prefer that, so I can't deny, I don't fit into modern company cultures as well.

Oh and do not give up on them. Junior engineers are like teenagers. You need to raise them even if they are their worst.

wow man - thats sucks... As an older engineer, I hope you hang in! There ARE good companies out there!

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