'Gen X has had to learn or die': Mid-career workers facing ageism in job market | Hacker News Reader

'Gen X has had to learn or die': Mid-career workers facing ageism in job market

bbc.com

15 pointsandsoitis17 comments

I'm a Gen X developer and the struggle is real. My peers are all having trouble now. They get interviews, but they don't get called back. And you start getting turned down for the stupidest reasons.

It's a bummer for people who really love programming.

A lot of firms value quickly finished code over well architected code, and over correct code. Which is the opposite of what a senior programmer values. It's a tough match.

As a Gen X dev, I think it's more nuanced than flat out age discrimination.

Young devs are naive and optimistic. They'll fall for "we're one big family here". They'll come to the "hackathon" that's just an excuse to crank out low quality feature work on the weekend. You can assuage their suspicion that management is floundering with a town hall full of cheery optimism.

I'm over all that shit. I know how to do my job and I love making things work, but I have no appetite for bullshit. I'm not putting in more than 40 hours and I'm not accepting less than 6 weeks of vacation.

I haven't experienced age discrimination yet, but I have a feeling that if I do, it will be for a job that I shouldn't want.

If only companies valued experience over the latest tech blip or useless coding exercises that have little to do with the skilled ditch digging that is most professional coding.

It is disappointing that this form of discrimination which is very real and impacts so many is ignored at all levels.

Companies bend over backwards to show they are not discriminating on just about every identity trait except for age.

Companies are OK turning away someone based on age when that person would likely be a more useful and productive employee than someone significantly younger.

I’m a xennial and it’s always funny to see genX referred to as some kind of tech-illiterate generation like Boomers

Younger generations are “digital natives”, sure. They grew up using the digital products and services built by GenX

I always felt that most technically proficient people are likely later half of GenX and first half of millennials. The people who could learn the harder parts of technology. And just not the pure web or app world. Like they should know what is a folder...

I like to think I'm part of that group, having learned program on microcomputers in the 80s.

Doesn't do me much good now, though. I've been turned down for programming jobs because they felt I "wasn't passionate enough about programming". Never mind that I've been doing it for 20 years professionally and that I've written books about it and that I started a company to do it.

I always wanted to be a teacher anyway, and now is a good time for that semi-retirement. And the job even has a "pension" (I had to look it up, too ;) ). So it all worked out.

But all you programmers in your 20s having the time of your life right now, be forewarned: you're going to have to make some changes in not too long... I honestly hope I'm wrong and people who love programming will be able to continue to do it until they retire. That's just rare these days, is all.

I'm 40. I've been programming for 30 years. I get turned down for jobs all the time but it's almost always during the coding interview where I get asked to solve some brain teaser that has nothing to do with real work. The most ironic questions are the ones the interviewer doesn't even know how to solve (this has happened 3 times now).

Yeah that’s my microgeneration, xennials, alright.

We grew up with analog childhoods and transitioned to a digital lifestyle during the mid-90s with the early web during our teenage years

I had to teach my parents how to use basic office equipment like printers. Meanwhile my nephew knows everything about mobile but never learned to type on an actual keyboard.

Kinda blessed to be born when I was. I have seen GenZ try to call us digital nomads but I’ll take this any day. Sad to see how kids are growing up today with no concept of privacy or living offline.

I'm in that early millenial/xennials bracket too, and my observations/sentiment of the younger generation are similar to yours. It's funny too, because there's lots of otherwise ingenious, intelligent GenZ out there, but they have a hard time understanding the idea of keeping their data private, even for just some of the time. I'm not sure if its because their experience with computers has been largely through web apps and mobile apps, or if it's more of a nihilistic, everyone-is-tracking-me-anyways-so-why-even-try attitude. To some degree, I don't blame them if it's the latter.

> They grew up using the digital products and services built by GenX

This didn't sound right to me so I had to think it through.

If you google "Is Steve Jobs Gen X" google says yes, but if you look up his date of birth you'll find he's a boomer.

Gates - Boomer.

Torvalds - Gen X.

Shawn Fanning - Gen X.

Chris Sawyer - cusp but Gen X.

Barry Appelman - creator of the AIM buddy list - Boomer.

Kenneth A. Williams - Sierra - Boomer.

Michael Morhaime - Blizzard - Gen X.

I could keep going but... I concede, you're right. Way more Gen X in that list than I expected.

I am also thinking about social media as being the defining digital experience for Millenials and GenZ, an innovation of GenX.

Jack Dorsey/Twitter - GenX

Tom Anderson/Myspace - GenX

Jeremy Stoppleman/Yelp - GenX

Sergey Brin+Larry Page - Genx

There's some elder millenial crossover with Zuckerberg and the founder of Reddit but if you consider them Xennials then it still works for me.

Ah, those tech-illiterate boomers.

Steve Wozniak, b. 1950 Guy L. Steele, b. 1954 Guido Van Rossum, b. 1956 Anders Hejlsberg, b. 1960

(Am I an old, bitter, Boomer? Guilty on all counts, but pleading diminished responsibility on two.)

Yeah, I find myself beating this drum here. My grandparents were greatest/silent generation and half of them did the deer in the headlights thing when a computer came up. My grandfather on the other hand worked on PDP stuff back in that era and my grandmother made a point to learn it all. Perhaps they were exceptional, but it was learnable even for them.

My boomer dad brought home a 486 when I was a kid and told me not to tell my mom how much he paid for it. He probably didn't need it back then, but it was the start of the internet and he thought it was cool.

Yeah I don't mean to malign the contributions of Boomers who were scientists and engineers.

But there is an overwhelming cohort of Boomers who "got theirs" during the unprecedented decades of post-war prosperity who simply never bothered to learn modern technology. I started my career in IT support and even highly educated Boomers simply didn't see any reason for them to learn basic computing skills.

Literally professional office workers who flat out refused to adopt to a modern office environment. Calendars, emails, printers, website updates, no thank you.

The attitude I heard frequently is that they got this far without learning how to send an email, so why bother now? I think it was only when technology became a simple glass slab with no buttons (and their kids/grandkids photos) did you see them start to adopt it.

There is just no way anyone born after their generation could have that mindset.

> I think it was only when technology became a simple glass slab with no buttons (and their kids/grandkids photos) did you see them start to adopt it.

I’m not sure it’s reasonable to criticize a generation for not adopting technology until they had a real reason for them to do it. Why would they?

I’m GenX and its always funny to see Boomers referred to as a tech-illiterate generation, when my father, technically a Silent but right at the cusp of with the Boomers (who spent most of his working life in sales in line/middle management at a large farm machinery company, not “in computing”, though he did both things like physical network setup in the office and mainframe programming in the days before that was restricted to a closed high-priesthood of people with softeare-related job titles) is who developed my interest in computing by involving me in what he was doing.

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