Posted on 03/24/2014 6:30:52 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
"I have more botox in me than any ten people,” Dr. Seth Matarasso told me in an exam room this February.
He is a reality-show producer’s idea of a cosmetic surgeon—his demeanor brash, his bone structure preposterous. Over the course of our hour-long conversation, he would periodically fire questions at me, apropos of nothing, in the manner of my young daughter. “What gym do you go to?” “What’s your back look like?” “Who did your nose?” In lieu of bidding me goodbye, he called out, “Love me, mean it,” as he walked away.
Twenty years ago, when Matarasso first opened shop in San Francisco, he found that he was mostly helping patients in late middle age: former homecoming queens, spouses who’d been cheated on, spouses looking to cheat. Today, his practice is far larger and more lucrative than he could have ever imagined. He sees clients across a range of ages. He says he’s the world’s second-biggest dispenser of Botox. But this growth has nothing to do with his endearingly nebbishy mien. It is, rather, the result of a cultural revolution that has taken place all around him in the Bay Area.
Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.”
And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO
(Excerpt) Read more at newrepublic.com ...
Yeah right - these are the people that voted twice for the homo in the white house.
And if I try to tell them anything, they lecture me: "I've been doing this for 40 years! Don't try to tell me how to do this -- I could write a book!" Yeah, a book on how computers worked in 1974.
And I'm not a brash young know-it-all. I'm in my mid-50s. I've got experience too and I try to keep up. Not these guys. They are, as we say, "stuck on transmit"; they stopped "receiving" a long time ago.
So -- age discrimination is a bad thing, and many older workers have a lot to offer. Experience can be truly valuable. But let's not lose sight of the fact that in some cases, people do reach a point where bagging groceries at the Quiki-Mart is all they can handle.
Meanwhile, at 59 I'm the youngster in a software start-up where the mean age of the other three is around 80. We've got the technology and the smarts to automate finding latent bugs in software, including the kinds of bugs that produce security problems that plague the software industry.
It's nothing that would appeal to kids looking to develop the next Facebook or Angry Birds, but it has a potential market in the many billions. Let them eat HTML!
Thank you. The article had a lot of info pertinent to my life. As a software engineer in my late 40’s who is not yet successful I realize that my chances for future career success are slim. Statistics say I’ll likely eke out an existence as a salaried guy with a resume rather than be successful. This however is no excuse for not trying. I can either shut up or prove them wrong.
To idiots like Zucker****, we old dudes are the ones who invented everything he’s made his billions from and WE made it what it is. There are still plenty of us out here and thanks to the worthless assholes they’ve voted into office we’re all going to have to work until we drop. Have fun waiting for that opening jackwads.
There’s a newer version of Windows than 95? That’s crazy talk man.
Software comes and goes. Languages come and go. Development systems come and go. I was once godlike in certain computer languages, but at some point, the cost of pounding on a computer 20 hours a day becomes too high. Now I do data. There will always be data, and bigger data, and more of it. Generally, the only programming I do now is done within the database itself.
A heck of a lot of software exists for the single purpose of producing and processing data. Someone has to plan for it, analyze it, organize it, process it, and generally make sense of it. I don’t regret my career focus move.
“There’s a newer version of Windows than 95? That’s crazy talk man.”
All versions of Windows since version 1.0 (which was a real product and I bought it and used it, along with my $150 1980’s Microsoft Mouse) have been upgrades and enhancements.
Amen. I am in my mid-fifties in a tech job and I am the guy they call when they don’t understand the data. I evaluate it with pre-historic tools. And give them the answers they need. God bless the cavemen.
On the Internet, no one can tell if you’re a dog. But somehow they can tell if you’re over 23.
Meanwhile, at 59 I’m the youngster in a software start-up where the mean age of the other three is around 80. We’ve got the technology and the smarts to automate finding latent bugs in software, including the kinds of bugs that produce security problems that plague the software industry.
It’s nothing that would appeal to kids looking to develop the next Facebook or Angry Birds, but it has a potential market in the many billions. Let them eat HTML!
You got that right.
A lot of what passes for software development these days is pretty sketchy.
Kind of like the fast food of the computer world.
And since a lot of the current computer applications are 100% consumer entertainment driven and the coding is not very difficult , the developers tend to be very much like people in the entertainment industry- similar people for similar audience.
If you are developing consumer apps for teeny boppers, it helps to have teeny boppers in the development process who understand the target markets.
On the other hand, if you are developing a travel guide for retirees, it may be a good idea to have a bunch of travel obsessed retirees in the mix.
Since most of the early adopters in the digital zone tend to be younger, the development talents tends to be on the younger side as well to better align with the target market.
On the other hand, in a lot of industries such as military aerospace, there are not a lot of engineers and technicians under the age of 40 who know their a** from a hole in the ground.
However, I have to say that my current situation is quite heavily populated by people who are very obviously coasting to retirement. They have not learned anything since Windows 95 came out. Why should they bother? And if I try to tell them anything, they lecture me: "I've been doing this for 40 years! Don't try to tell me how to do this -- I could write a book!"Now, this is true too. I have to admit that about 3/4ths of the people we've moved off into "mandatory retirement" or "departmental changes" are people that still thought copiers operated like they did back when they were analog. They don't understand why SMB protocols are being updated or why people want to integrate all this technology together into a document solution system.
A heck of a lot of software exists for the single purpose of producing and processing data. Someone has to plan for it, analyze it, organize it, process it, and generally make sense of it. I don’t regret my career focus move.Good move! That's why I started transitioning to document imaging and document solutions. While you can't have a perfect paperless office, there's always more documents that need to be stored, organized, accessed. Especially if it's government, medical, or legal.
[...]
But let's not lose sight of the fact that in some cases, people do reach a point where bagging groceries at the Quiki-Mart is all they can handle.
And then you self-identify as a ClearCase abuser? Isn't that contradictory WRT fast pace in a technical environment?...;)
In my case, I truly enjoy learning new things. Else I would have burned out decades ago. Occasionally when the industry gets too set in it's ways and is repeating some true nonsense (there is no new technology which can put an end to the practice of automating buffoonery) I will go off into an "I hate computing" fugue. This is in fact why I love open source, life is so much better with source code. Heck, I haven't had a serious episode of computing-ennui since 2002 (which was the last time I used ClearCase, btw).
There have been a number of research papers that correlate scientific journal citations with the age of the primary author.
Frankly, young people are “smarter” in at least one area - raw creativity.
Most of the seminal papers in mathematics and in the theoretical sciences were produced by authors who are under age 30.
Most of the seminal papers in engineering were produced by authors under age 40.
Well, I look at technical skills as somewhat analogous to pitching skills in baseball - when you are young, you have the fastball and raw, overwhelming power. But that almost always doesn’t last and takes a physical toll. The vast majority of pitchers who are _still_ fearsome in their late 30’s and 40’s have developed smarts, finesse, control, and a deep body of knowledge of the sport and of the batters, long after their fastball is gone.*
*Nolan Ryan, in my time, being an exception here.
RE: Most of the seminal papers in mathematics and in the theoretical sciences were produced by authors who are under age 30.
Most of the seminal papers in engineering were produced by authors under age 40.
______________________________
Most of the Olympic and Sports Record holders were produced by athletes under 30...
In fact, I suspect Roger Federer will NOT win any more major Tennis grand slams at this point in time. He is 32 years old.
And so it goes.
Can’t believe I read the whole thing, including all comments.
Worth noting that the writer is a committed socialist apologist and Obama fan. The article is a long whine about a particular type of loser and victim — par for the lefty course — no critical thinking or contrast of situations, no statistics, nothing from outside the ideological bubble of “why isn’t his entitlement (to developer fame and fortune) working?”
Age is a problem in the work sphere, and ageism is real; however, on one end of the spectrum there are viable reasons for it, just as there are viable reasons against it at the other end of the curve. Therefore it is a problem to be solved within the expectations and work processes of each individual.
Part of solving a business problem is to understand and develop solutions for the entire problem; not just cherrypick the parts that you like and hope the other parts will solve themselves. Being perceived as an over-the-hill developer is a part of the problem to be solved when looking for funding.
Another of the impressions I got from reading this is myopia about the implicit definition of success: the Stamos guy is attempting to hit big with an app that will garner huge capitalization and become a rapid 7- or 8-figure success. It reminds me of the generation just prior to the dotcom revolution, in which every pimply teen with a guitar aspired to be the next Dylan, Springsteen or Rolling Stone and live the millionaire drugs and groupie lifestyle. Now that we have seen the downside of that lifestyle, most recently illustrated by the collateral damage in Mick Jagger’s entourage, doesn’t such an aspiration seem equally vain? Only a few can survive even the journey, much less find the mountaintop and have things continue to go well even from there.
I also see the ageism trend described here in many other sectors of the workplace. One should hang one’s sense of self-worth primarily on what skills one possesses. One must always be a human being, not a “human doing.”
-PJ
“Youth is wasted on the young.”
- George Bernard Shaw
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