[smokestack]

Almost every ageism post I've read on HN ignores the hundreds of thousands of others jobs that exist outside of [hot SV tech companies] (avg age at FB is 28? no way!), and also don't mention those people who are right of the bell curve and working at companies like that (because their experience actually is valuable).

Some of these posts are real ageism claims, but most are "I'm old, I'm scared, how am I going to survive with a highly valuable skillset?" It's fear mongering. If you're concerned with job security, go find a job with security in government or in some monolithic non-tech company based in Go-Fuck-Yourself, GA. The "Hi, Fellow Kids" hipster-posing BS isn't going to land you a job at Facebook no matter how old you are.

[gaius]

I'm old, I'm scared ... some monolithic non-tech company

Wait, your solution to the problem of ageism in tech is "get out of tech, old fogey"??

[amyjess]

Not so much "get out of tech" as it is "stay in tech, but not at a company that specializes in tech".

Non-tech companies need specialized software, too. When I was in college, I knew multiple people who had internships working on internal tools for a major bank. I imagine those banks also employ senior people to work on their internal tools, customer-facing web portals, etc.

And it's not just banks. I once interviewed for a job working on e-commerce stuff for Neiman Marcus. I'd imagine that other retailers like Walmart, Target, etc. need people working on their portals.

And if you want to work with technology but get out of programming, everyone needs IT.

[gaius]

Not so much "get out of tech" as it is "stay in tech, but not at a company that specializes in tech".

That's not exactly a solution tho' is it? Why go to a company where you are a cost centre, just because you reach a certain age?

[amyjess]

They tend to be more mature environments, free of the "brogrammer" culture that's hostile to older people, women, LGBT people, etc. There's not attitude of "let's have a cool, hip office full of cool, hip young people". It's an environment where "culture fit" isn't used as an excuse to discriminate against older people.

It actually turns out that more corporate environments are actually friendlier to marginalized groups than a quirky freewheeling startup.

Job security is great. Big, established juggernauts don't have the kind of churn startups have... there's no worry about "what if the VCs don't go for another round of funding?", and the markets are well-established and slow to change. And if you go into defense contracting or public sector, you might even have lifetime employment.

The work environment is probably going to be nicer. Traditional corporations don't do open offices and don't require engineers to work 60+ hour weeks. Some of us would prefer do to 9-5 in our own cubicle. Banks are also especially generous with PTO (and remember that the "unlimited" PTO you get at startups is a scam)... I'm just going to quote a friend of mine on Facebook when I decided to post a general question of "how much PTO do you get?":

> I used to work for a bank, and they're notorious for giving tons of time, but when in my first position, I had 2 weeks paid vacation, 10 holidays, 10 sick days, and 2 WTFever days. When I was rehired further up the food chain, I got 4 weeks paid vacation, 10 holidays, 10 sick days, and 2 WTFever days, and I could buy an extra week off by lopping a week of pay off my annual salary. If I'd stayed longer, climbed more, I could max out at 8 weeks paid vacation with all the rest of it.

Not all of us care about doing interesting or ground-breaking work. We just want to stay employed so we can fund our lives, and we want a work environment that doesn't make us hate ourselves and want to die.

Honestly, I'm pretty happy at my employer -- we're a tech company, but the environment is very corporate (we're a telecom), and it doesn't feel like a startup at all. The work environment is highly praised, we're ranked as one of the top work environments on Glassdoor, and half of my team are graybeards. I don't want to leave here, but if it ends up happening anyway, I'm giving serious thoughts to pursuing public sector work after this.

[che_shirecat]

I think he's trying to say that ageism isn't as much of a big deal as people make it to be (outside of SV's alternate reality) - everyone in the industry deals with the constantly shifting landscape that engenders feelings of job insecurity for programmers young or old. It's just tougher on older techies that haven't carved out their niche. If you're trying to fit in and compete with fresh bootcamp grads working new frameworks at age 60, you're probably due for retirement - there's a reason why the traditional career path was to engineering management positions for senior engineers. Either management, or something you're really good at that isn't the most hip new tech but still in high demand.

[treehau5]

I really dislike this constant caveat that people keep placing against SV. "Well it isn't a problem outside of SV!" I keep seeing this appear in comment after comment on this article

[rdiddly]

I guess you're allowed to dislike a fact, but any particular reason you dislike this particular fact?

[infinite8s]

Because it isn't a fact? There's definitely an age bias outside of Silicon Valley as well.

[treehau5]

That too, but also, a lot of us outside the valley have to deal with the unfortunate consequence of everyone looking towards SV as the "trendsetters" or sort of the ones who set the "meta" for "modern" software development, if you will, especially since most major confereneces are out in SF/SV area. At my own company, directors and above take frequent trips out west.

What this all boils down to, is if SF/SV is going to be seen as the beacon of software development, it is almost worse to me if it is ageism is being exemplified there. To give a rather rough corollary, consider if Washington D.C. never hired another underrepresented group, such as females, or minorities. It's sort of like, "well maybe I halfway, sadly expect that to happen in some small town somewhere", but C'mon! D.C.! Everyone's looking to you!" -- Same kind of thing.

[mindcrime]

Maybe, but maybe it's less pronounced? It's hard for me to say, as I've only ever not lived/worked in SV (hello from North Carolina). But FWIW, I am 43, and I don't feel like ageism has been a problem for me. I just went through a job search and had no problem landing a new gig in short order.

OTOH, to be fair, I am obsessive about learning new stuff, and I've been working with some "trendy" stuff the past few years (all big-data, hadoop, storm, kafka, etc. stuff) and I've been doing a lot of machine learning / data science MOOCs over the past year or so. So my skills are a good match for what there's demand for. But that would be valuable if I was 20, 30, or 80.

[otaviokz]

Agreed. The deliberate ignoring the whole world outside FB/Google is a alarming sign that the idea is just to get blog reads by piggybacking the last bombastic statement by someone famous in the sw industry.

[falcolas]

> ignoring the whole world outside FB/Google

The whole world outside of GAFA looks to those companies for "how to do software development right" - no matter if they are right or not.

I've watched more than a few well established companies start to ape Google's hiring practices, or Amazon's churn, or Facebook's development practices just to try and attract new young developers.