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Comment by drillsteps5 | Hacker News Reader

Multiple issues. One of them is reluctance of younger hiring managers to hire older people. At 35 you don't necessarily see advantages that hiring 50 year old will bring you, as you don't have experience to be able to see that.

Not sure if there is a "solution" for that as a 35 yo hiring manager will probably have an easier time managing under-35 individual contributor comparing to a 50 yo one. Different perspectives, experiences, etc. So by hiring younger IC the manager makes a correct decision. Sucks for us older folks but that's life.

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When the CEO is 28, it is the head where the fishrot starts.

In The Days of Old, the folks running the corporation were almost always in their 50s. They might have been prejudiced towards folks my age (60s), but they didn't have issues with hiring what are now considered "older" folks (40s and 50s), with the only issue being cost (they might be ageist, simply for cost reasons).

The prejudice from younger folks is cultural, not cost. They don't want people around that make them feel uncomfortable. Many younger folks at tech companies, these days, make boatloads of money. It's not about cost.

From where I stand, it looks like a lot of modern tech companies are establishing a "college, but being paid" culture. It seems that many modern tech companies resemble idealized college campuses, more than traditional professional production environments.

I agree that mismatch is cultural, and my point was that there might not be a solution because it might not necessarily be a problem. 50yo is MUCH LESS likely to work well with bunch of under-30 yo, esp, if the leadership is all in that age.

Is the company that much more likely to blow up and go out of business due to inexperience of the younger guys at the helm? Perhaps, but it's their company and that's how you gain experience in the first place. And IF it blows up in their face they'll learn (hopefully) and their 2nd, 3rd, 4th shots will be so much better.

50yo+ just need to stay away from these places to avoid becoming collateral damage. We don't have our entire lives ahead of us to make up for the lost time and wages. So not getting hired there is not really a problem.

Of course it leaves 50yo+ with fewer places to work and earn salary. Sucks, believe me, I know.

Good points. One of the reasons I stopped looking for work, is because the places that did stuff I wanted to do, didn't want me around. The places that would have hired me, didn't have stuff I wanted to do.

They didn't want me, because I'm who I am. In a couple of cases, they didn't even try to hide it.

I took it personal, because it was personal. That's the thing about cultural bigotry. It's an emotional, reptile-brain thing. Right back to the lungfish. Not even primate-level thinking.

But what's done, is done. In the aggregate, it ended up being all good for me. Nasty-tasting medicine, but it cured the ill. I don't really want to go back to the rodent rally. I'm having way too much fun, doing my own thing.

A couple of the places I looked at, are no longer viable concerns, and I seemed to have dodged a couple of bullets. Could I have saved them? Maybe, but I seriously doubt they would have listened to me.

You sound like me. I gave up looking for work, created my own CMS and had that basically in a ready state when ChatGPT4 came out, and I've turned my CMS into an AI integrated office suite. A family law firm needed tech support, so I made my "AI CMS" attorney friendly and started looking around at investors... everyone is insane. I've professionally been through a serious gauntlet in my prior career, where people start to fail to believe when I list the famous projects I have been a key part. I know serious hard work, and the investor class today is expecting no less than creating an institutionalized economic slavery engine. The professional institutional abuse expectation is ripe. None of this can stand, can last.

With the loss of zero interest financing, this industry is about to meet reality. Say good by to "campus" appearing work environments for the majority.

>When the CEO is 28, it is the head where the fishrot starts.

I had the misfortune of working for two "30 under 30 CEO" led companies. I was in my 40s at the time. Never again. I can relate to the "college, but being paid" description, but for me it was more like "high school, but being paid".

Oooh I relate so much to this. But I know my boss is an under-35 CEO that browses HN so I can't say too much haha.

Thats why, me at 40`s, now am I working in a german auto industry where they still got more traditional views and p promote people with time inside the company.

Hip companies dont hire me, maybe some tech consultants, that would not be considered cool, like accenture or IBM.

A few years ago I was one of the first people in my country tomigrate my company android app to Kotlin, this helped me land in the app development team of a big bank in my country and I was by far the oldest dude. Everybody called me "uncle" there, very common to young people in my country to call older people that, because most where college kids.

I worked for a Japanese corporation, for the majority of my career.

They have "reverse ageism." There's some levels that you can't reach, until you are a certain age.

I worked with older people that would have a lot of folks around here, drooling. That company hired some of the best in the world.

That's why ageism is stupid - in my experience age is uncorrellated with technical chops and productivity, with people who actually know their stuff and care about the job they're doing coming from every possible age bracket.

One of the most productive guys and all around technical wizard I know is a father of 3 in his 40s.

I do know a few people straight out of college who are rather excellent devs, but the problem with a lot of them them is that they have inflated egos and don't take feedback at at all, and/or they move around a lot.

Imagine building up a guy who works like crazy with a huge body of knowledge, then he's out of the company the next year, and nobody knows what any of his code does.

The irony is working with inexperienced senior engineers has absolutely made me see the benefits of hiring someone who's 50, the person who can't see the issue is the less-technical management doing the hiring who thinks having a PhD is the highest form of experience anyone can have.

I'm an EM right in the age range you're talking about and I've got some very senior open roles on my team that I'm hiring for and you're spot on. I'm sure not every EM is like this, but for me, it's so true. I don't want to feel this way, but I can just feel myself start making excuses for why I shouldn't consider a candidate if their resume goes back to the 90s.

I've now got a checklist I create for myself to go through when reviewing resumes for the role. It includes a number of legitimate reasons it's okay to reject a candidate and I try to make myself pick one of them. I also have a thing under the rejection section that just says "Are you sure you're not rejecting this person because they're older than you?"

I realize how stupid it is to feel this way, but it's hard to un-train an emotional response.

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