petsormeat

+1 to this. I'm in my fifties. I advance rapidly in the interview process...until the Skype or in-person encounter, when I'm revealed to be twice the age of the "senior" developer talking with me.

I weathered the dot-com bust; it's the current hiring regimen of proving competence in this month's buzzword that will drive me out of technology entirely.

And nothing is more maddening than hearing about a "developer shortage" or complaints about "how hard it is to hire."

I also graduated high school in 1984. By that time, even my small-town American school had a room full of TRS-80s (cassette tape storage!) and a semester-long class in BASIC.

I remember the class being evenly split between boys and girls, and nobody finding that remarkable--some of us even had moms or aunts who worked with punchcards and mainframes.

The top students in the class were the same diligent girls who prevailed in the honors math and English classes; again, not provoking comment. The understanding was that we were acquiring practical skills for a drab something vaguely understood as "business," so intense interest in programming would have seemed very strange.

By the early Nineties, I noticed that programming had obtained this alienating macho reputation, which I find ironic considering how much GUIs made it so much more accessible, and the Web made it so much more interesting. I haven't read a thorough treatment of this period of computing history--any suggestions?

I attended a bootcamp in 2014. I regret it.

I entered because I wanted to switch from front-end development to full-stack. I'd really enjoyed what little I'd done with Ruby and Rails, so I fell for the pitch of this bootcamp that I could be retrained as a Rails developer in three months.

What I wished I'd known: - everything about the bootcamp (schedule, curriculum, equipment) was set in stone. You are just a widget on a conveyor belt. - the bootcamp's mandatory pair programming did not help me to learn the material at all. - as others have mentioned, bootcamps are untruthful in their statistics. Mine even lied to the state regulators, claiming 90% of my cohort was employed as software developers, when maybe half of us were.

I ended up going back to my previous career.

I'm a fifty-year-old developer, and a woman. Apparently, I was hired by my current company a year ago to be a crash test dummy/scapegoat, rather than an agent of righteous refactoring to a dreadful legacy codebase mostly written by "recent grads."

If your management is moving towards stack ranking, you'll find a couple of us around, because we're like the expendables on _Star Trek_: we're easily discarded.

Heck, that's what I did--25 years ago. The low value of many bachelor degrees in terms of employment has been a common experience for a lot of Americans.

Anybody besides me impressed that they released data about employee age ranges?

I think that explains some of the charm of the old Victorian/Edwardian era flats in many U.S. cities. If unmolested by "renovation," they'll have the original floor plans, which are much like you describe. They're great for sharing with roommates, especially if they have the split bathroom (toilet in one room, bathtub in another).

I'm 50, and an American. I've never owned a car. I can attest to the stigma of not traveling via personal motor vehicle, and the senseless barriers we've erected to getting through one's daily life by means other than car.

I'm cheered by these splashy blurbs, but I'm unconvinced they report a permanent trend: we still have a huge inventory of office park sprawl, strip mall wastelands, and residential "neighborhoods" with no sidewalks, with more being developed.