[sjdchid]

Except old people are objectively better off in the US.

It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.

[mattdeboard]

I mean we're not talking about Baby Boomers here, chief.

There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year).

Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and home-buying wasn't terribly different 15-20 years ago than it is now. Still plenty of opportunity to go into incredible debt. And hell, 2016's 45-year-old who bought his first house in, say, 2000, may just have watched his home's value crash in 2006/2007.

So maybe just tone it down.

[beachstartup]

> There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now.

i'm one of these, and i don't consider myself a millennial.

anyone who's legitimately used a rotary phone (or even just seen one in use) in a non-ironic way should not be considered a millennial.

[hatsix]

My parents still have a rotary phone (because it still works even when the power goes out)... I get what you're saying, but in areas with tetchy power, most homes have kept old phones.

[mattdeboard]

Why?

[mixmastamyk]

Rotary phones are from the 70's and earlier.

[dragonwriter]

> Rotary phones are from the 70's and earlier.

The last rotary phone I saw for sale was, I think, in the 1980s, the last one I saw in use was in the 2000s. Its quite possible that someone could be a millennial and have used one (IIRC, we used one in my house until 1986 -- the other phones in the house were touch tone -- and only ditched it because we happened to move.)

[mixmastamyk]

Sure, I remember rotaries hanging out for a while after that, but they were gone most places by the mid-80's in the US. Not to mention those in museums.

[serge2k]

and people born in the 70s aren't millenials.

Really, the oldest are mid 30s, and I think even that is a stretch.

[learc83]

It's not a stretch, generations generally span about 15 years and millennial is what people settled on. I'm 32 and we were always part of generation Y/millennials.

Most sources put the end of generation X as 1980. So unless you want to come up with a micro-generation for people born between 1980-1985, we're stuck in the millennial group.

The thing is that if we stick with a 15 year span, the youngest people who should really be called millennials are around 21 or 22, but it seems like each year the lower bound for millennial grows (I occasionally see news reports referring to children as millennials).

I'm assuming this trend will stop when we settle on a name for the next generation.

[kodt]

Yet rotary phones were still very common in the 80s, and my grandparents still had one in the early 90s. So people born in the early 80s, which qualifies as millennial, very likely used them.

[sjdchid]

Tell me more about all the places where a home bought in 2000 is worth less now, and all the colleges where tuition was not 50% cheaper in the 90s.

[kasey_junk]

My home bought in ~2004 was recently appraised at half what I purchased it for in real dollars (in Chicago)...

Tuition for the college I went to is around ~18% more expensive now than when I went in inflation adjusted terms, the loans you can get now to cover them are around half of what I paid between 1996-2000 (at a state school). I haven't done the math to see how that all breaks out for real cost differences, but I'll concede college is more expensive now.

Also if you've graduated in the last 6 years or less, you've come into a job situation that is phenomenally better than that of someone who graduated from 1990-94 or from 2002-2006, which has probably a bigger impact on your lifetime earnings than your generation (think how capricious that is).

[mattdeboard]

Sure, tuition was cheaper. Doesn't mean it was cheap. And when future you is talking to a 20-year-old, they'll be lambasting you about how easy your life was when a 4-year degree from a public instituion only cost you $80,000.

If you're truly ignorant of the subprime mortgage crisis a few years back, you can check out The Big Short (book or movie, but I'm told the book is much better) for good insight into history and mechanics.

Point is that the economy has changed a LOT in the last 15 years, and lots and lots of people suffered. Generation X is not the Baby Boom generation. I think you sound a bit foolish/ignorant appropriating the "Baby Boomers ruined the economy!" rhetoric and applying it to the generation-and-a-half that followed them.

[sjdchid]

I'm aware that home prices dropped in 2008. I'm also aware that they settled at a level significantly above the prices of 2000. Check any of the home price indices if you don't believe me.

[mattdeboard]

Yes, home prices tend to increase on average. Not sure what your point is. Are you implying that when you are ready to buy a house they will start depreciating?

[sjdchid]

Unfortunately for people my age, home prices have been growing faster than incomes recently.

[dragonwriter]

> There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now

The usual starting point for the Millenial generation is a birth year of 1980; if 36 is "starting 40 in the face", it is not from a particularly close distance.

And that's the absolute leading edge.

[AStellersSeaCow]

Yeah, this. There is ageism out there, and it happens younger in tech than in other industries, but it's far less of an issue than all other forms of hiring discrimination I can think of.

I've been a part of hundreds of interviews for dozens of engineering positions at a variety of companies and organizations. While I have witnessed clear-cut ageism with qualified older candidates, it's with the distinct minority of older candidates, and typically only with borderline ones. Compare to even the most qualified female candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of sexism, or non-Asian minority candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of racism^.

So I won't deny that ageism is a problem but - in the case of white dudes - it's the jolt of a sudden uphill at the end of a couple decades of easy slightly downhill coast. Compared to continuous vertical climb that women and non-Asian minorities have to put up with in engineering, it's a pretty modest problem that the affected have both ample time and opportunity to prepare for.

^- The tech industry isn't, at least in my experiences, blatantly racist/sexist these days. Anecdotally, women and minorities have an easier time making it through HR/recruiter screening. It's a more subtle and pernicious effect in tech interviews, where correct answers are overscrutinized for flaws and even marginally incorrect answers are blown out of proportion. Never seen this with older (white/Asian, male) candidates.

[learc83]

I know that women have many problems working in tech. But are you sure they have a harder problem interviewing in tech overall? I'm absolutely sure there are engineers who will overscrutinize their interview solutions, but there are also many companies who have initiatives targeted specially at hiring more women. I've even heard first hand of companies specifically hiring women to train in order to boost the number of female engineers.

[AStellersSeaCow]

Like I said, anecdotally. And I'm not talking about company policy, I'm talking about the behavior of individual engineers/managers during and after interviews. Even if a company has a policy that it WANTS to hire more women, it needs the people actually conducting the interviews on board for that policy to be meaningful.

[Retric]

Life tends to compound good and bad choices. Mistakes you made in the last 10 years (student debt) has nothing like the mistakes you can make over 40 years. ex: Making my student debt payments is hard, I know I will just defer them.