I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it.
Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately, and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in tech. It was a real shock, as I had always been treated with a fair degree of respect. That is no longer the case. Respect seems to be a virtue that no one practices, anymore (I'm not talking about "worship." I'm talking about simple, basic, courtesy and respect; like I give to others).
I had saved up a fairly substantial war chest, so I just decided to give up on looking for work, and have been spending my time since then, writing a lot of open-source code[0], and learning the latest stuff in the way I want.
Best decision I ever made. Too bad. I'm pretty good at what I do, I would have worked for a lot less than most (see "war chest," above), and would have been happy to take on riskier work with startups and whatnot.
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (and almost every green square will take you to an open-source repo, where I am the sole author, and you can view the checkins)
I could offer an alternative perspective on this as I’ve seen it done to a lot of people that haven’t much choice in the matter.
It’s entirely possible you’re not getting offers because they know you don’t need them.
I don’t mean to say they’re wanting to give the offers to less fortunate applicants - it’s just that you’ll be impossible to abuse relative to someone who they know needs the money.
“We need you to work until this is done.”
“No.”
“Chris, it’s very important and will be reflected on your performance review.”
“Ok. Still no.”
At the start of my career (ages ago now) I had an employer find out that my university progression was tied entirely to their performance review of my placement, and immediately start to insist on my working all the hours under the sun with the strong implication that if I didn’t play ball the note would be “unfavourable”.
When you’re young it’s not always clear how little crap you should take from people in more senior positions.
Actually that happened to me too, it turns out there's such a thing as being TOO confident
I'm getting that vibe from you a little as well, where you're refusing to jump through the hoops that companies put in front of new hires (binary tree crap)
I'd recommend you either knuckle under and play ball, or even better: Get into consulting / make a SaaS business like the Expat Software guy
I sincerely want to help people that help people. The rat race is just too exhausting for me. I didn't realize how exhausting, until I had a couple of years of working on my own to see the difference.
I'll probably never get paid a dime for my work, ever again, and the thought brings me great joy.
Some ideas (from a guy in his 40s who interviews every 6 to 12 months for high paying short-term project work):
- 25 years at a single company is working against you. Remove all that from your cv and just list the recent stuff you built.
- Most of your cv should be description of the repos with links. Cut out and summarise past experience ruthlessly, like you’re refactoring someone else’s old code.
- Remove the link to your personal git page, use the other one. On first sight it looks weak - it has some html files and a lot of docs. My first reaction was “meh”. It took me many minutes of browsing to figure out the real meat was in the other repo And then my reaction was “wow”. Most hiring manager don’t have time for this. People are not clicking on the green squares they are clicking on the source repos, you have about 30 seconds of their time.
- At this stage you might get bored or unhappy real fast in a job, if you are honest to yourself. Consider selling short term access to deep technical expertise - in your case Mobile Bluetooth on iOS.
Well, the long-term work is staying in the CV. I worked for 27 years at one of the most storied and respected Japanese corporations on Earth, at a very deep level. This says a lot about my aptitude, ethics, Honor, Integrity, team dynamics and loyalty. I sure as heck don't want to work for any company that thinks of that as a bad thing. Most of my tech work has been done in the open. I've been doing open-source work for over twenty years; which gives me the advantage of a vast portfolio.
I was a hiring manager for 25 years. Hiring people was a very important part of my work. I managed a small, high-functioning team that did image pipeline "engine" code in C++. Getting headcount was a huge battle, and I kept employees for decades. I loved multi-page CVs. "Draw Spunky" tests were absolutely worthless in evaluating people that would become part of my team. Interviews were often very casual affairs, where I'd encourage people to tell me stories about their work.
I have a Stack Overflow story that lays out my work in a linear fashion[0], or CV fashion[1]. I kind of like the idea of an SO story. It's fairly direct in pointing to my work.
My experience is that the vast portfolio is ignored by hiring managers (recruiters are much, much worse). I used to send links to relevant projects, when applying, only to have them completely ignored, in favor of a 50-line binary tree test. I have come to realize that binary tree tests are "young pass filters," as the only place binary trees actually exist, are in colleges. If a company gives a binary tree test, then I know they aren't interested in me, and are just ticking an "Interviewed old fart" checkbox.
To be explicit here, it sounds like you're saying that you don't think you perform well on data structures questions in interviews, for example binary tree questions. Is that right?
Not really. I just don't practice them. I'm way too busy writing shipping software that has very little use for the kinds of academic exercises in LeetCode/HackerRank stuff.
Sometimes, I do great at them. Most are common sense.
Usually, I'm mediocre.
There's thousands and thousands of energetic folks out there; young and old, that practice these every day, and can usually ace them in an interview.
There's no way that I'm even gonna try to compete with them. They'll smoke me. They worked hard for that, and I respect them. I would hope this is indicative of them being good employees, but I can't really see how these tests would indicate that better than a simple conversation.
That said, since I've been writing deployed/shipping/sold software for decades, I suspect that I might be doing something right.
In fact, today, I am polishing up a simple Observer infrastructure[0] for a mesh networking driver that I'm working on. One of the basics of my workflow, is if I'm working on a project, and see that the part I'm working on might be more generically useful, I stop work on the main project for a day or two, while I break that section out into a general-purpose module. It helps me to write much better software.
I'm rather obsessed with Quality, and this practice is one way to get that.
I'm not sure that there's LeetCode for that kind of practice, and I can't really see it happening in a timed whiteboard test.
It is, however, very easy to see; simply by looking at the GH repo.
I’m a 25 year old developer that’s only been working full time professionally for ~3 years and I came to a very similar conclusion about you regarding the LeetCode style interviews. I’ve always been allergic to bullshit and smelled it clearly and instantaneously when I began wading into that process.
Undoubtedly I’ve closed doors and passed up opportunities through my refusal to contort myself to the LeetCode regime. At the same time, the time that I would’ve spent drilling myself on superficial coding puzzles I’ve instead invested in building practical applications for my friend’s business, learning and applying machine learning theory to automate a boring task during an internship, implementing a processor in Verilog and writing an assembler for its ISA that I managed to get running on an FPGA, working on an open source digital contact tracing app, and several other projects.
The projects I’ve spent time on are those that I deem to genuinely valuable to society and to my personal skill development in the broadest, most fully integrated conception of ‘valuable’ that I can achieve. To clarify, I could see an counter point being made that LeetCode skills are “valuable” in the sense that I could use them to get a higher paying job at $TECH_CO. But from a higher level perspective, those skills are tailored towards a system (the LeetCode hiring gauntlet) that I think is fundamentally corrupt, and so to spend my energy practicing them for the sake of that system would be corrupting of my integrity.
And despite the admonitions I’ve received from supposedly more pragmatic-minded people, I’ve been able to pull together a living and have a budding career to speak of. My job hunts have perhaps been more drawn out and frustrated than the LeetCode crew, but I believe my focus on genuine knowledge and skill development has contributed to my high performance at the jobs I have managed to land. And by being straightforward about my disinterest in hoop jumping and interest in “real skills”, I’ve managed to befriend and work with companies and people that share similar values to me, who in my view are more rewarding to work with and tend to be more likely to succeed in the long run.
While I don't think that whiteboarding aho-corasick from scratch is a good quality interview. I don't think algorithms and data structures are useless or impractical. IMO a basic understanding of the main data structures is important and useful in the day to day.
Granted, some applications will involve more or less use of data structures/algorithms than others, but if you discount them completely you mark yourself out of a whole subset of work.
I would want most of my fellow employees to know what a trie/binary tree/linked list/vector/array/etc is, and I would want them to know how to evaluate space and time complexity of the code they write. What is a good style interview for that is an open question, but I don't think the content is impractical.
By all means, spend your time however you like. I just think it's unfair to call knowledge of these sorts of things "impractical". Impractical for whom?
Those two, yes (and vectors really only apply -as such- in C++), but the rest? It depends (the best answer to every conundrum).
I write consumer/developer software; not ML or Big Data Mining stuff. My work is generally in device control, user interface, SDKs, APIs, etc.
That means, that, in over thirty years of writing software, I have encountered exactly 0.000000 binary trees. BTW: Binary trees and linked lists can be an issue in parallel-type programming. We had some image processing algorithms we did that used similar structures, and we had to be very careful. We often had to back out optimizations.
Writing consumer software has issues that don't seem to occur to folks writing engine software. These are things like localization, security, adaptive user interfaces, aesthetic design, information architecture (hoo-boy), responsive controls, branding, testing (all kinds of testing), etc.
That "information architecture" one is a big deal, and almost everyone falls down on it. This is most obvious in settings. Engineers design settings to match the underlying architecture, and don't worry too much about how they will be perceived by users. The result is the infamous "Find the hidden setting" game. I just went through that, yesterday, helping a friend set up a Zoom meeting. Fun! I also just went through it yesterday with my wife, and her Mac. Apple has started to segregate settings the same way, and there be dragonnes.
Testing is another big one. Everyone is fixated on automatic testing and unit tests. If a project comes with a bunch of unit tests, then everyone thinks it's "high quality."
Also, if we write device control, or a lot of communication software, unit tests can be worse than useless. Usability and accessibility testing are also something that can't really be automated.
Shipping software is really boring. There's a lot of "'snot mah chob, man!" stuff involved, that, nonetheless, needs to be done by someone, or we end up with steaming piles of crap.
Some of that involves the programmers directly. For example, do we habitually autodoc document our method headers and class/struct definitions? Do we use tokens and localizedVariant calls for all displayed text? Do we follow good secure programming practices from the start? How would a blackhat use this function I just wrote? Do we throw dependencies in as a first resort? Is that good, or bad? Do we know what that dependency we just committed the company to does? What's our testing strategy? How will we integrate this, and when? etc.
Also, power usage. That's a big one, if we do mobile or embedded software. Sometimes, highly optimized code is the worst code to run, as it can drain the battery, or end up with really strange race conditions between chipsets.
That's practical stuff. When you're a one-man shop, like me, you get to deal with all of it. I was also quite involved in all of it in my last job, where we were a huge, global team, supporting some pretty intense hardware products.
> Those two, yes (and vectors really only apply -as such- in C++), but the rest? It depends (the best answer to every conundrum).
I think other systems langs make the distinction, Rust does also, this is what I've been doing at my day job lately.
> That means, that, in over thirty years of writing software, I have encountered exactly 0.000000 binary trees.
I've been doing it for a third of that time and I've encountered binary trees and all kinds of other data structures a bunch of times. I don't do any big data or ML stuff, I was writing React frontends for about half of that, the last few years it's been systems programming with Rust; I still encountered these types of structures writing JS though.
> BTW: Binary trees and linked lists can be an issue in parallel-type programming. We had some image processing algorithms we did that used similar structures, and we had to be very careful. We often had to back out optimizations.
When sharing any memory between threads or tasks you have to be careful, I'm not sure there's anything special about binary trees or linked lists. Consequently Rust makes this sort of thing very nice.
I'm not sure how to respond to the rest of the comment. Personally, I'll take an expressive type system over a comprehensive unit test suite.
I'm not discounting your personal experience but I find it hard to believe you aren't encountering these types of problems, unless you are but just not noticing it. Curious about what kind of 'optimized' (optimized for what?) code is 'the worst'?
edit: I just re-read this and realized the tone was a little aggressive, I don't mean to come across that way, my bad.
I ran a C++ shop for 25 years. We wrote “pipeline” software for image processing. REAL heavyweight data processing/DSP stuff. Optimizations were crucial, and we often took advantage of things like GPUs, and threading.
There be dragonnes...
I learned that explicit threading is a scary place, full of surprises.
Nowadays, I write in Swift (which I love -I think that Rust is similar). Explicit threading is barely supported, which is just fine, by me.
I can get defensive, because I have been treated rather badly, simply because of my age. No one ever bothers to look at my portfolio. They just start with the condescending drivel, sometimes, even accusing me of “faking” ten years of commit history, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, dozens and dozens of repos, hundreds of pages of articles, documentation, prose, and training modules.
It was exactly this kind of behavior that convinced me to not even bother trying to get work.
I’m not arrogant. I’m actually a really decent person; warm, compassionate, and a great team member. My LinkedIn profile is jammed with testimonials. I worked on a team with some of the finest engineers and scientists in the world, and had their complete confidence and trust.
But that doesn’t mean a thing, if I can’t give a proper answer to a “Draw Spunky” test.
It's not just age-ism about people, the same prejudices are also applied against software.
I'm currently #1 in "clean EPE matched" on the Sintel AI benchmark - by re-implementing a 2006 paper. I'm taking advantage of the additional computing power that we have nowadays by brute-forcing what used to be a gradient-descent solver. It appears that people have re-invented the AI wheel many times, but nobody checked to see what was there before deep learning became fashionable.
I see the same issue everywhere. Companies have a large agile web 4.0 team using obscure frameworks that I had never heard of before. But all the stuff that they built would have been included in a $9 WordPress hosting plan.
There’s a surprisingly massive amount of money being spent making more expensive, less stable and feature deficient versions of Squarespace everywhere.
I like to think I understand my work pretty well but in all the years I’ve been in this industry I can’t give a genuine reason for 90% of jobs in this industry to exist at all.
The other side of this, is that we are living in a "dependencyshpere," where people can't build projects on their own. This is a bit jarring to me. My first computer was an MC6800 STD Bus board, screwed onto a piece of wood, with a hex keypad and an 8-digit LED readout. I got pretty used to knowing what was going on under the hood. I can't even imagine looping in a bunch of code without understanding what it will do.
Dependencies are great. They are how we can do huge things with small teams. They are also bad (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/).
If you consider that almost every job in the tech industry is utterly useless, it makes sense why there is so much ageism.
Tech jobs these days are not about adding value, so your additional experience is worthless... The things that are valuable to companies are youth, optimism, loyalty and self-delusion.
Companies need a big headcount to give themselves leverage over governments and banks. Companies need a young workforce which they can influence and use as bargaining chips to make deals to get access to cheap money from the Fed.
The role of big corporations is to take people in when they're young and distort their worldviews so that they stay passive, childlike, compliant and docile as they get older - They're not going to rebel against the status quo, they're not going to complain about unjust government regulations which drive up the company stock price but at the same time diminish their freedom to leave the company and be independent.
Old people are not good because they can't be indoctrinated as easily and the benefits are much shorter-term since these old people don't have so many years left on this earth. The investment of brainwashing them doesn't yield so much and not for so long.
These big tech corporations are engaging in pure macroeconomics. They don't care about details like projects, clients and customers. In their world, the only things that affect their bottom line are:
- Governments
- Banks
- Investors
- Public opinion
Everything else is a detail which doesn't concern them. Everything that everyone does in those companies is ultimately about pleasing or manipulating these 4 entities in the most superficial way possible.
I'd like to add on that everyone's retirement plans are held hostage by the same four groups that you were talking about. The 401(k) and IRA were both introduced in the 1970s, and now colossal amounts of money flow into those accounts, ensuring the financial future of Americans. They are low-risk investment plans for the future. Why are they low-risk? Because they invest in the "entire market" via mutual funds, and as we all know the market always goes up. Loosely- give your money to the banks, and they'll make sure the valuation of the companies that make up the index funds will always increase, thus giving you your year-on-year +10%, or whatever.
The corollary, of course, is that if you support any societal changes that would threaten the valuation of "the market", you'll tank everyone's investment accounts. Good luck reversing outsourcing trends, enacting progressive labor laws, or lowering the price of healthcare.
I don't even want to call it "investing" at this point. It's speculating. That's why I plan to buy land and live off of it as much as I can. I'd rather be poor and independent than rich and dependent.
That seems to be the logical conclusion. The current system is artificial, every piece is carefully stacked like a house of cards; this makes it very brittle.
We're in an Orwellian nightmare. By now, if the system collapses, it could be the most devastating crash in human history.
On the other hand, if things keep going in the same direction, we will end up in a horrible dystopia where life will only be worth living for the rich; everyone else will be slaves.
Also, I think I've figured out what the "defund the police" movement is really about; it's to allow Corporations to later step in and privatize the police force. Then they can claim the credit for restoring law and order and further gain people's trust whilst gaining more control over them. Seems kind of far fetched still, but few things would surprise me these days.
There's a saying about "Why look for conspiracy, where incompetence explains so much?"
That may be something that comes from it, but it really is about people that have been taking it in the shorts for decades, and have felt completely powerless (by design) to affect it. The "defund" thing is a blunt instrument that they hope would work; more as leverage to effect change, than anything else.
Of course, there are anarchists, who want all restraint removed from society. Those types of folks can usually be found in The Darwin Awards.
The rich are just really good at leveraging anything to their advantage, and have the tools to do it. They'll usually come out on top; regardless of what happens.
It's just that nowadays, "The Rich" includes a lot of young folks that look a lot like their employees. It isn't just a bunch of old robber barons with handlebars and muttonchops, anymore.
What percentage of income do you think young people should be saving? Because from what I see, this is the age of freely available personal finance advice, and more people seem to be following it at whichever age they stumble into stable income. Sure, there would be splurges here and there, but as far as I can tell, people are saving well.
As much as you can in my opinion. I know someone who’s been saving 50+% of their income since they started their career 10–15 years ago (software engineer, well paid so they can afford to save that much, etc).
As a result, they don’t take shit from anyone. They don’t have to. They can afford to say « no » to overtime and spend time with their family. They can afford to quit when it sucks too much with no hope of improvement rather than destroy their health.
It’s a good position to be in.
They still live a good life. They just didn’t buy a new car ever three years, or brand new 700$ smartphones or computers but rather used ones that are a couple years old, packed their lunch instead of eating out at work, etc.
> "What percentage of income do you think young people should be saving?"
As much as they possibly can. 16% is thin considering the salaries software developers commonly get.
The awareness that you don't have to tolerate the bad parts of your job one second longer than you feel like is the most liberating feeling in the world. It allows you to do the right thing instead of the most career-expedient thing at the workplace and to try out jobs you wouldn't dared to take a risk on before.
Aside from that, right now the money is good for developers but there is no guarantee that situation will last or your skills will continue to be valuable. Remember when COBOL was a ticket to a stable career? Remember when Flash development jobs were everywhere? A lot has changed over the past fifty years and there's no sign of that slowing down. If you zig when the job market zags, you may find yourself relying on your own savings earlier that you expected.
I would add: "As much as they possibly can in tax-advantaged accounts, and then more!" And it turns out, you can save a shit ton in a tax advantaged way.
Let's look at 2020 limits, and assume a married couple, under 50, with one person earning as a software engineer:
$19,500 max contribution to a pre-tax 401(k). Many companies match. You should contribute all $19.5k, not just what you can to get the full match. If you're over 50, do the $6,500 catch-up.
But that's not all. The IRS limit on combined employer/employee contributions is $57,000. So if your employer allows it, contribute the remaining $37,500 post-tax and then convert it to a Roth IRA to at least get the earnings and withdrawal tax advantage (commonly known as the "mega-backdoor Roth").
$12,000 to an IRA (or Roth), $6,000 from both you and your spouse. If you like Roth but are beyond the income limits for the Roth, do the "regular backdoor Roth".
$7,100 to a family HSA. If your company offers it, do it. It's triple tax advantaged when used for health expenses.
Although they are old-school and don't yield much, US savings bonds can be a decent way to fill up an emergency fund. They are exempt from state taxes, and interest may be excluded from Federal income tax when used to finance education. There are a few to choose from, I particularly like the Series-I bonds. The government limits individuals to $10,000 per year for a total of $20,000 for a married couple.
So, if you are a very high earner, and are fortunate enough you can max all of these, you can save $96,100 per year, with some kind of tax advantage. There is probably more that I'm not thinking of. You should probably do all of these before you even think about looking at fully-taxed investments like your retail stock broker.
Its different for everyone but I'd say 10% minimum which is still more that the US average.
This is a bit oversimplified but savings rate is the one factor to how long it takes to become financially independent. Most people will want to enjoy life a bit but a high paying thrifty SWE could theoretically save 80% of their income and retire (or be financially independent and work on whatever they want) in about 6 years.
I think it’s hard to save a percentage of your income when your income is low.
If I’d been saving 10% of my income until 4 years ago (some 16 years of work), I would have more than tripled the savings in the last 4 years. Instead, I saved a higher percentage for only the last 4 years, and have a substantially higher amount.
Create a spreadsheet! I did this 25+ years ago to get my own customized answer to this question. One row per quarter (4 rows per year). Each row takes previous row's balance, adds % ROI, adds contributed savings to get the next row's balance forecast. Not a complicated spreadsheet. As each quarter passes, replace the forecasted/calculated balance with your actual savings balance.
Don't hard-code the % ROI and quarterly contribution in each row; put them in cells at the top. You can then play with % ROI and quarterly contribution values to see how much you'll have when. Take each rows balance and divide by (85-age) to get a conservative estimate of annual income if retired (conservatively assumes future ROI == inflation).
Fyi, I'm a 59 yo who knew ageism in hiring was coming and is so happy that my otherwise foolish self came up with a basic plan 25+ years ago to know if he was on track or not (and managed to stay well ahead of it). Helped with spending decisions too: if I was ahead, I'd buy that motorcycle; if not I didn't.
I don't know how true that is. Of the ones we hear from/about, how many were acting discriminatory 25 years ago? I think we'd have heard from one or two at least, writing confessional blogs or tweetstorms or whatever, but I can't recall reading anything like that.
No, see they are gonna be retired by 38. See, this line they drew extrapolating their stock and salary since starting work in 2012 will keep going up and up...
Depends if parent means a single stock (like the one given as salary) or a more diversified portfolio. While on aggregate the stock market had a rather stable growth, this is not the case of individual assets.
That’s because GDP is very tied to population growth, which essentially stoped in Japan and the EU. It still happens in the US due to immigration, but once that stops, then we will stall out as well.
Funny, I'm also 58. I have also hit the ageism wall (although I'm currently at a place where I'm not the oldest, but then the software is also decades old). My plan is to build a bigger war chest while I can then go back full time to my first love, writing Free software. It's what used to be called "retirement" back when businesses were not run by 20-year-olds who plan to live forever.
I won't say ageism the main reason I moved from programming to tech writing, but it's certainly been something on my mind. I look younger than my 53 years, but I'm pretty clearly not in my early 30s anymore. But, I haven't experienced any real ageism in this field, at least yet.
Chis,
If somebody hires you based on this thread let us (or me) know who the employer is.
Like 'headmelted' pointed out, part of 'agiesm' is that it’s just that you’ll be impossible to abuse relative to someone who they know needs the money.
Programmers, especially the young are insecure douche bags, and I suspect that their insecurity leads to hiring docile individuals who can be coerced.
Thanks. I suspect not. I'm more interested in things like working on NPO projects and whatnot.
I like helping people help people. What I'm just beginning, now, is a Swift SDK for goTenna devices. These are the types of things that first responders to disasters often use. My goal is to make it open-source, MIT-licensed. I may also work on the Meshtastic project. It's entirely possible that the project may not make it. goTenna likes to play their cards close to the chest. Meshtastic looks good, but I need to get around to flashing these devices, and that's just a pain.
I have some prior art in this kind of thing. I have another project that I did, that is taking off in a big way. It finally got to the point where a bunch of really energetic and talented people piled on, and now it's becoming a world standard.
When projects don't make money, they tend to take longer to get in the air. I started that project over ten years ago. I play the long game, which I learned that from working at a Japanese company.
Not sure if this will help, but I'll share my very recent story of how ageism looks from the other (youngish people) side, which contains some pitfalls to avoid.
I'm 32, and the technical lead of a mid-sized research computing / ML team in quasi-academia. I'm the one who tells the boss whether a hire is technically competent, performing up to standard, is meshing well with the team, etc. So I don't make hire/fire decisions myself but have substantial influence on them.
Usually, when we hire people > 30, they are PhDs with a specific specialty, like statistics. But recently we hired a guy from industry in his early 50s to do some programming, web dev, and light ML. He had, obviously a long CV with programming and some practice with ML/statistics, although nothing related to our field. Here are some of the things this guy has done in the ~1 months before and since his hiring:
1. He frequently bullshits in presentations and meetings, pretending to know things he doesn't know.
2. Very shortly after joining, he has recommended we radically rebuild several of our systems in different, "better" ways -- ways which he's familiar with. For example, we have a web app on AWS Ubuntu, and he has repeatedly asked why we can't just run a Windows server.
3. If he doesn't know something, he insists on getting step-by-step tutorials from technical people in the lab, but tutorials in how to do things HIS way. For example, we all use Linux and an SSH client, but he wasted 2 hours of my time asking how to SSH into AWS using PuTTY on Windows, how to copy files using WinSCP, etc, since of course he only uses Windows. He claims he'll learn Linux eventually, but wants to use what he knows "for now", "so that he can more rapidly produce results".
4. The first time I met the guy in person (not immediately due to COVID), he had plopped himself and his laptop down in my desk, without asking, and even readjusted my chair settings, and complained about my office being messy. I'm #2 in seniority...
Any one of these alone would be...annoying, but all together he is almost a caricature of every ageist stereotype in tech. He expects a level of respect he feels is due his experience level, while simultaneously he resists learning anything about the way his new organization does things...presumably because he knows better?
It puts me in an awkward situation because I'm kind of his technical supervisor. If he were a new graduate student, I would tell him to cut out the bullshit, figure things out, and quit wasting my time (and commandeering my desk). Since he is almost twice my age it is too awkward to read him the riot act, though, and I don't really know how to deal with this.
My takeaway is that an older person in a new tech job should really, really avoid displaying arrogance and entitlement. Respect is earned, not given; even if you've spent 30+ years in the field, we whippersnappers don't know how competent you are (or not), until it's demonstrated. I'm not saying you made any of these mistakes, but sometimes it is easy to do some of these things unconsciously. Probably you are perfectly competent, but people like this guy are working against you.
I'd say that's the type of stuff that insecure people do. As a manager (the one that made hire and fire decisions), I saw this type of behavior from folks across the age range. I'd gently suggest that, were you to look around, you'd see others behaving in similar manner; but, for whatever reason, you are noticing it more with this chap.
I remember seeing that attractive folks (of any gender) tended to have these types of behaviors ignored, and "attractive" doesn't just mean someone with whom we want to bump uglies, but also people that satisfy our confirmation bias.
I know that I had to constantly be examining that. I worked in an extremely diverse environment, and managed a lot of folks with a lot of quirks (and brains).
"but, for whatever reason, you are noticing it more"
Most societies indoctrinate people to "respect their elders" to varying degrees.
A younger person having authority over an older person is a role reversal many are not equipped to deal with, from either side of that equation.
So it is noticed more.
Further, this elephant in the room has to be acknowledged before either side can move on meaningfully. But you can't "discriminate based on age" or you might end up in court depending on where in the world you are.
Makes it a tricky problem that I am not surprised people just "avoid".
> I'd gently suggest that, were you to look around, you'd see others behaving in similar manner; but, for whatever reason, you are noticing it more with this chap...confirmation bias.
I agree, I'm well aware of the possibility and am trying to combat it the best I can. But @CarbyAu is right, no one trained me in how to deal with this kind of situation and it is just inherently difficult for everyone.
That said, from his side, if I were a member of a $GROUP that had certain negative stereotypes about it, I'd consider it wise for my own personal interests to try to avoid playing directly into the stereotype.
I'm not sure this is an age thing, but a personality thing. I've worked with several people in their 20s and 30s who have had one or more of these traits, as well as older folks who had few or none.
I'm stopping short of making any generalizations, because in my experience the evidence (for me at least) isn't there to make any. Perhaps things are different elsewhere, though. I'm only speaking from my experience, as I suppose we all are.
I don't think age is the problem there; the guy just sounds like a narcissist. #1 and #2 are huge red flags-- "fake it 'til you redefine success [on your terms]" is a sign of someone mimicking competence.
Just wait until one of "his" solutions fails to perform-- then it's inevitably going to be your fault. Somehow.
“I only want to do what I want to do,” is pretty self-limiting.
Not only does it cut off any way for you to grow, it makes it hard for companies to hire you over programmers willing to do anything. And I don’t mean that in a bad way but a realistic way - companies hire and want to keep you on but know you’re not going to be interested in any of their projects so the time investment has been wasted.
To the "Mike" that sent me that wonderful little note:
I replied, then realized that you had used a honeypot email as the address, so I'll post what I wrote here. It would have gone to your email, otherwise. I would like to mention that I stand behind every post I make, and every email I send. I deleted my last anonymous account many moons ago.
> You still sound insecure.
:)
Probably. It's not your problem, though. It's mine. I am constantly working on that.
I will say that it was pretty devastating to get assaulted for my age. It totally rocked my world. I'm definitely still recovering from that, and I am still quite angry about it.
Thanks (really) for taking the time to look at my HN page and sending this. I regularly get attacked by some pretty savage folks (comes from the NPO work I do), so your note doesn't bother me at all.
Heck, maybe we have a lot in common. You know where to reach me. I'm a pretty decent chap.
Have you ever considered working in government? The pay isn't the best, but the work can be satisfying. I'm specifically thinking about the US Digital Service.
I'll have to look at that. Right now, government work is profoundly unattractive to me. It seems that every single branch has become a political weapon. My father was in the CIA, and became quite disillusioned, for exactly that reason.
I have been doing a lot of work for mutual aid organizations, and my work has had some tremendous impact. I seem to be able to make a difference, there.
You hear responses from younger generations like "Ok Boomer" to their elders' opinions and it is so cringe-worthy.
I don't think everything my parents taught me was perfect or even always correct but there's an irreplaceable amount of wisdom that comes from being alive twice as long.
I don't like it but I can see some of the tensions that create it. The UK in particular seems to be going down a road where all the political decisions are being made for my generation. This won't work out well in the long term.
The idea that "ok boomer" is supposed to be dismissive of opinions and personal assertions based exclusively on age is a red herring.
It makes as much sense as asserting that the "Karen" meme is dismissive of women.
That was never the point, was it?
The "ok boomer" meme is dismissive of ideas that are forced onto others based on absurd appeals to authority and in spite of their lack any substance or support or rational basis. We're talking about the type of arguments that boil down to "shut up you little brat I know better than you just because."
Sure, that's the original context. It's just that "ok boomer" is very often used to dismiss an older person [older than the person responding] asking someone to do anything (or giving advice in anything). Just as "Karen" is very often just a coded "bitch", used when an woman [older than the person responding] asks someone to do anything
It's extremely disingenuous to try to assert that the "ok boomer" meme is used to dismiss questions or requests or opinions made by older people, or that the "karen" meme is used to dismiss questions or requests made by women. Its in fact a gross misrepresentation of what those memes are and have always been.
No it's not -- it's not my fault people are misusing the memes! They definitely are heavily used to dismiss in the manner I've described as well as being used in their correct original context. You might not like that people aren't deploying the internet memes the way you think they should be deployed, but it's definitely not disingenuous to point out that's what's happening. It's dismissive and mocking (for good reason!) but it's also something that's blown up, and when that happens the original intent and subtleties get rounded off or lost, so in many cases it's now used in any context, not just the ones where it was originally totally applicable.
> You hear responses from younger generations like "Ok Boomer" to their elders' opinions and it is so cringe-worthy.
The problem I see is that some elders feel that their personal opinions hold some kind of authoritative value over everyone else's in spite of their lack of substance or reasoning or connection with reality just because they were born further in the past.
In fact, the term "OK boomer" originated in elders systematically dismissing and criticizing other people's opinions based on their age. Thus it's quite ironic how that meme is criticized for the very same regrettablr pattern of behavior it criticizes.
Being alive for longer doesn't correlate with wisdom or knowledge or insightfulness, and if you have a hard time presenting and defending your point of view with rational arguments and facts that you feel compelled to resort to absurd appeals to authority to force your views onto the world then your attitude itself is the problem.
Wisdom is not a function of age. It's not a present you open on your birthday. You may get wiser as years go by, but that doesn't mean you get to be wiser than those around you. There are plenty of people who are wiser and more knowledgeable and insightful than those who were born earlier. There are also plenty of people that in spite of their age they attained very little wisdom to show for. The "ok boomer" meme originated in cases where this particular blend of people started to rant about younger people basing their attacks and criticisms exclusively on their age difference.
There's good reasons alright. But as with everything humans adopt, it's also abused to oblivion in many situation where it doesn't even remotely apply.
The meme arose out of the reality that a vast majority of wealth/power has accumulated to the boomers. When they give advice, it is to be taken with a grain of salt, because their life assumptions will be vastly different (and wrong) for the current context of the youth (who are poor, on average).
> Disrespecting elders is a time-honored aspect of nature. Even critters have it (watch puppies and kittens ignoring their parents).
Nonsense. Puppies and kittens are not adults, are they? The "ok boomer" meme originated in people from older demographics criticizing adults in their 20s and 30s based on blanket and entirely baseless assertions that somehow they knew better just because they were born earlier.
If you want to take metaphors out of nature, you can start off by learning how young lions expel older lions from their pride.
Its one thing to show respect to everyone around you, but its an entirely different thing to have members of that community systematically insult and aggravate younger members for absurd reasons and using ridiculous arguments, and still in return expect that that sort of antisocial and downright sociopath behavior should command reverence from the community, specially those who are directly attacked by streams of insults.
I think you're replying to someone else. I never mentioned "OK Boomer."
My comment on social media applies to many different things; not just ageism.
And, as is being amply demonstrated by thousands of people all over the world, it's not particularly helpful for people that aren't in a certain class, to dismiss the experience of people that are in a class.
I'm not a woman, black, brown, gay, or disabled, so it is not helpful for me to judge whether or not those folks experience difficulty from people that look like me.
I am, however, an older tech worker, and can confirm, from personal experience, that people like me, get a lot of friction; sometimes, from other people like me (It's not just young folks that engage in ageism).
BTW: I grew up in Africa. I'm familiar with the way lions deal with each other; including the practice of new pride leaders killing all the cubs from the previous pride. I think that may also resonate in our industry.
While I agree with that, I also think there’s a substantial amount of old idiots out there (same as for the younger generation), and I have little issue saying or hearing ‘ok boomer’ instead of ‘ok idiot’, if the topic is relevant enough.
The state and change of culture and technology is quite different.
I consider age like time an illusion. There’s biological considerations but I reject all the age cliches and sayings. Defy labels, limitations, distorted reminders — focus on living.
I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it.
Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately, and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in tech. It was a real shock, as I had always been treated with a fair degree of respect. That is no longer the case. Respect seems to be a virtue that no one practices, anymore (I'm not talking about "worship." I'm talking about simple, basic, courtesy and respect; like I give to others).
I had saved up a fairly substantial war chest, so I just decided to give up on looking for work, and have been spending my time since then, writing a lot of open-source code[0], and learning the latest stuff in the way I want.
Best decision I ever made. Too bad. I'm pretty good at what I do, I would have worked for a lot less than most (see "war chest," above), and would have been happy to take on riskier work with startups and whatnot.
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (and almost every green square will take you to an open-source repo, where I am the sole author, and you can view the checkins)