| I went to a dev boot camp (Fullstack Academy) in my 50s, took a job in Silicon Valley, moved my family out here from NYC, leaving a career as an advertising creative that was lucrative and high-status but hateful to me. Moving out here was a gigantic fail that basically ruined my health and my life. It’s been heartbreaking. Much of the blame for that is mine, and not all of it is due to ageism. But I always find it shocking that people minimize ageism, give excuses for it (older people have families and therefore don’t want to work as many hours etc.), or flat-out deny it exists. Shortly after I arrived here, my boss moved on to another job, leaving me with a new boss in his mid-20s. This new boss made no secret that he hated older people. He made jokes about older workers in staff meetings that, were he to make such jokes about women or people of color, he would have been subject to lawsuits that would have bankrupted him and the company. After I was laid off, I had the lovely experience, over and over again, of seeing young interviewers’ faces freeze into going-thru-the-motions masks as soon as they saw that I was middle-aged. Once I even had the bitter experience of having the 45-old-ish hiring manager phone me on the drive home, telling me she wanted to hire me but could not go against the consensus of her barely post-adolescent staff. Again: Much of my situation is my own fault. I had generally bought into the bullshit 70’s fallacy that “if you believe in yourself you can do anything you want to,” bolstered by the fact that (being young and reasonably talented) I mostly to that point had done anything I wanted to. Having said that: Young people are bigoted against old people, regardless of older peoples’ abilities or willingness to work. It has always been thus. And it is worse in tech than any other profession (including advertising!!!), and worse in SV than any other place. |