As a 38 year old who doesn't need to be hired:<p>I am infinitely more useful as a programmer now than when I was 18. I started when I was about 6, I had put in my 10,000 hours by around 18. I lacked so much.<p>I play on-line FPS to relax after a day of coding, I get to see the speed at which young people operate, and <i>how</i> they operate. It is limited.<p>It is hard to remain flexible as an adult, we can fall into the many 'slowdown' traps of ageing. If one doesn't, one can 'kick ass'.<p>Any community who thinks youth is <i>exclusively</i> valuable, lacks wisdom.<p>IMHO A combination of 80% experienced and 20% youthful energy appears to operate as the perfect catalyst for powerful progress.<p><i>I didn't realise SV was like this, what a shame.</i>
This is a duplicate submission. See <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7455757" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7455757</a> for the original submission (with 349 comments)
To go a little off-topic, the jab at Outbox was horribly undeserved.<p>> “This company sends out humans in Priuses three days a week,” one fortysomething programmer groused to me last year.<p>This was a soft landing for their customers after the USPS shut down their original system of having customers have their mail forwarded. Their long-term goals were 2-fold:<p>1) Allow customers to easily unsubscribe from unwanted mailings (incidentally, this is why USPS wanted them shut down - junk mail constitutes most of their revenue).<p>2) Fix USPS - they intended to get their automatic scanning technology into USPS itself, thus saving them delivery costs on mail for anyone who signed up to receive it digitally. This could potentially save them enormous amounts of money.<p>They originally wanted to do this with USPS, but quickly realized that they had much better chances if they started as a private company.<p>Great article on Outbox: <a href="http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail/" rel="nofollow">http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-off...</a>
> Nick Stamos has no kids, few hobbies, and even fewer extravagances. He works all the time and is consumed by his company every second he’s away from it.<p>That of course always helps as entrepreneur. It might also be the hidden reason behind the ageism. I for one would not want to work as hard today as I did when I was younger and did not have a family yet.
Not true everywhere.<p>As an older engineer you might not get the new, cool, bleeding edge project. But then you might also not be expected to work 15 hour days.<p>I call that a win.<p>(I'm mid 30s and while I may not put out as many lines of raw code as I used to, I understand what I'm doing far better, have a good understanding of development process and tools, and place high value on robust, supportable code as compared to most of the younger engineers I've worked with recently - i.e. I'm far more productive, even if I look like I'm doing less!)
"Brutal", "Ageism", and "Tech" in this headline are all editorializing by the author. Beyond the tech bubble there are countless more traditional companies that depend to varying levels on internally developed software and are happy to employ competent folks of any age, <i>especially those not likely to flee after 6-24mo</i> (per a different post yesterday about how to make money as a programmer). In one of our offices the average tenure is >20yrs, with a couple of guys beyond 40yrs with the company. A few of them participated in the original authoring of a critical business system we wrote in the early 90s (it's been completely rewritten a couple of times since, but still), and having their deep knowledge is extremely important to us. But we're not a tech company and we are happy for folks to work a standard 40hr week, with comp time to compensate for on-call or extraordinary circumstances.
There is another way: become a member of the Guild of technologists, and break away from the commoditized pop culture of programming.<p>In short, work somewhere where your ideas and skills matter more than LoC generated per day. There's tons of devs who are younger/faster/hungrier than you who will work for less. Actually, this whole system depresses wages for development as a whole and you should be pissed about that.<p>Ageism is unique in that it's a game you're guaranteed to lose eventually.
"When a company called PayScale recently surveyed the country’s 32 most successful tech companies, it found that just six of them had a median age over 35. (The median age at Facebook, Google, Zynga, AOL, and Zynga was 30 years or younger.) By contrast, the median age for all workers in the U.S. economy is 42 years."<p>Given that such an article is going to be dominated by anecdotes (which are interesting and sometimes entertaining, but very seldom illuminating broader trends. People often think whatever lot they are in is universal, and that what misfortunes or difficulties they face are always unfair externals), I looked for data and this was the best it had. It's a pretty common proof.<p>Only the 32 most successful tech companies have gone through generally <i>enormous</i> expansion. Most of them draw primarily from new grads, not least because such recruiting is easy: New grads are available, and are willing to relocate wherever you want them. Established workers are less likely to be interested, and often dramatically less likely to want to relocate.<p>If you simply polled tech workers across the US who were willing to relocate any distance, much less thousands of miles, the average age would similarly be very low.<p>I'm surprised the age difference wasn't much larger, to be honest.
My problem is that I'm not willing to go on coding death marches any longer. I also question decisions by management instead of forging ahead toward absolute failure.
> One thirtysomething told me about a friend at Facebook who half-seriously claims to avoid sun exposure for fear of premature wrinkling.<p>From what I've read, there isn't much health-benefit from sun exposure. You have the vitamin D thing, but it seems that that can be taken care of with diet/supplements.<p>Obviously going for a Dracula lifestyle is a big inconvenience. But it seems that wearing a good dose of sun screen and trying to avoid tanning and sunburns might be a good investment if you want to avoid premature ageing, and, if you don't care about that, at least reduce the chances of skin cancer.