Comment by terrywilcox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by terrywilcox | Hacker News Reader

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I've been a programmer for 20+ years. For the longest time I didn't see any discrimination in tech, probably because everybody I worked with was also a young white guy.

Except those over the hill freaks with their comb overs and sandals with socks. Fortunately their skill sets were rapidly obsolete, so we got rid of them.

On the other hand, my wife (a senior Oracle DBA with close to 20 years of experience) sees it on a regular basis. It's disheartening to hear her talk about it because I realize I'm guilty of many of the same behaviours.

I guess I could try to protect my ego and claim it's not sexism, but that's not who I want to be. I don't want to be the guy denying something I know to be true.

I went into an interview a couple of years ago and realized I was about 20 years older than everybody in the company. I don't have a comb over and I don't wear socks with sandals, but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there. That's the day I realized my job opportunities are becoming limited. I should have seen it coming.

Hmm, maybe it's possible women don't want to be in tech because of the sexism they face.

I think that's the easy answer.

"but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there"

Who said that? Did they say that to you? If they did that was definitely wrong. However it sounds more like you imposed that criteria on yourself, and then attribute the blame to them.

If gender diversity in tech is a good thing, why not age diversity? Sounds like they needed you there.

I certainly didn't impose that criteria. I wanted the job. I certainly had the experience they were looking for.

And no, nobody came out and said I was too old. They just reacted like I used to react when old people told me they understood computers. Pleasant, but patronizing. How could an old guy possibly handle any modern technology when he's got COBOL and FORTRAN on his resume?

Discrimination is rarely blatant. I'd guess that most people are never aware they're doing it. That doesn't mean it's not happening.

Well for starters, COBOL and FORTRAN are effectively ancient technologies are far as much of modern business programming is concerned. I would omit them from your resume. State them for interest sake only.

Also they are not a charity organization, the business goal is to get value out of you. Perhaps you did not demonstrate sufficient value, or seemed out of touch with current technology. I have found that programmers are a fairly meritocratic group of people, but you do have to stay up to date with tech, and that is a battle that gets harder and harder as you age.

Fortran, while it might be ancient in computing terms, is still an actively-developed language[1] with multiple open-source and commercial compilers. I started writing Fortran professionally when I was 26, nine years ago. In certain scientific realms it is still used heavily, and it generally still kicks everything else's ass at linear algebra.

Kind of a tangent, but I have a soft spot for that language.

[1] Most recent standards rev was 2008, current draft standard slated for release in 2016.

Fortran is not used at most businesses. I doubt Fortran is used much anywhere outside of possibly engineering. Even then Engineers probably use some type of AutoCad like software that does modelling, and therefore nobody needs to know FOrtran anyway.

Engineer here. I work at a large industrial plant Fortran is used quite a bit. We have numerical simulation code which runs and feeds back into our operating process written in Fortran (mostly Thermodynamics and Chemical kinetic's simulations). Plant Operators make descions based on the output of Fortran models all without knowing or caring that the things are written in Fortran.

You can trace the herritage of the code back to the 80's but it has been more or less constantly maintained since then there is a lot of company IP wrapped up in the code. You certainly don't need to know Fortran to use or understand the models (it's wrapped in a 'modernish' C++ GUI) but the engineers working on improvements to the backend definately need to know Fortran.

I suspect there is a lot of reasons for the prevalence of Fortran in Engineering code. Industrial plants tends to operate continously you can't exactly replace all the infrastructure without large downtime. A large part of our plant was built in 1996, so the technology is very much what you'd expect from that era (RS/6000 Unix boxes everywhere in the control system). The Libraies and compilers etc all have to link against that vintage. It's not slated to get upgraded until 2018 and we will probably try to push that as far back as we can. When the upgrade happens I suspect we will be on Wintel (and in another 20 years that will probably be just as outdated).

The other reason for Fortran is that Engineering processes tend to be stable. A chemical reaction does not change so once some code is written and it works very low incentive to replace it. At my plant our models were first written in the 80's (when personal computers began to become ubiquitous) by senior engineers in the company - these were guys who grew up in the 70's and were raised on Fortran. Eventually the code was handed to the junior engineers to maintain. The juniors passed up the ranks to become seniors and when it came time to write the next generation of models "I'll base it on this existing Fortran Model which I know inside out and works really well" became the mantra and so Fortran become self perpetuating and entrenched across the industry. If it had been a decade later would probably have been C

but you do have to stay up to date with tech, and that is a battle that gets harder and harder as you age.

Wait what? That right there is blatant age-ism.

You know what helps learn new technology? When it's the same shit we did 15 years ago repackaged. WSDL is coming back around right now, just in JSON or Protobuf form. Don't you think mobile apps that have to sync with the server are a lot like server/client apps from the 90s?

To think that it's hard to pickup a new language just because you are 50 is really missing the forest for the trees of what it means to be a software engineer.

I think his point is more related to the learning curve.

If you're in your fifties it doesn't mean that you are stupid but it does mean that you're going to have to learn a lot of technologies from the recruiting company's stack.

Now if they can find someone that already know's them, their return on investment will be faster and safer.

The older developer will also most likely not program on his free time for family reasons or because he has more interesting hobbies.

Now this is controversial but I still would say that this is career / life choice which means that not having a very sexy resume won't get you everywhere no matter what your experience is.

This of course sounds very "hipsterish" but if you loot at the kinds of companies that are talked about here (start-ups and ex-startups that grew), it does make financial sense.

I'm not a psychologist but I would also wager that age gap is lowering team performance due to a lesser bond / closeness between the members.

So many bigoted assumptions I don't know where to start...

I tried to formulate a response to it as well, but it was impossible to even figure out where to begin. I'm thankful I'm at a company that proves all of his assumptions wrong.

Apparently having an actual conversation with real arguments is too much.

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