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.
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.
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.
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