I see our age discrimination problem as the fundamental sign of us being a defeated tribe. Ageism is one of those horrible traits of management culture (i.e. if you have a younger boss, you're a loser) that we wouldn't face if we had kept our tribal integrity (because "bosses" would be coordinators and mentors, not hierarchical superiors, making age irrelevant.)
Good programmers aren't ageist. We look up to the gray-haired badasses. (Ok, old bad programmers are annoying, but so are young bad programmers.) Ageism is a managerland prejudice. What the fuck is that shit doing in our industry?
Most of us are intellectual whores: massively overqualified for the work we're assigned to do, but hired because it makes the boss feel important to be able to say things like, "I have four Ivy Leaguers working for me" even when the work could be done by one script-kiddie. Meanwhile, the work that could actually use our talents is hard to find, because our society is in such a depraved state that social media gets VC-megabucks but cancer research gets peanuts.
It's perverted. When you're young, it's hard as hell to get a good job but getting a job is easy. But that's exactly when you care about getting the good jobs that will build your career. When you're old and have actual use for the crappy jobs (you need to sustain an income) you can't get them; and if you were sidetracked by taking too many crappy jobs (and that's not hard to have happen) you're not qualified for the good ones either.
> Meanwhile, the work that could actually use our talents is hard to find, because our society is in such a depraved state that social media gets VC-megabucks but cancer research gets peanuts.
Not only that, but social media will hire the college dropout with an impressive Github portfolio while the cancer research institute will shitcan any resume that doesn't have an MS or PhD on it.
It's really disturbing to realize what has happened to the sciences. The death of the scientific/academic job market is why us smart people hate "business douches" so much; the fuckers shut down all the R&D. Those assholes struck first.
(To be fair, plenty of businesspeople do more good for the world than bad and aren't douches. It's the shitty ones that have no better ideas than to cut costs recklessly. The problem is that no one shuts them down.)
In the 1970s, there were Bachelor-level science jobs. There was an expectation, of course, that most people would go back for graduate degrees; but it gave people a chance to spend a few years in the field and figure out what they wanted to do with their lives before committing to a graduate program.
Those Bachelor-level science jobs still exist. The problem is that they're all filled by PhDs.
Even most of this Silicon Valley "innovation" in social media isn't half as interesting as the stuff marketers did in the Mad Men era. M&A replacing R&D is one of the worst social developments around.
Who's going to bring back Real Technology? Someone will see the value in doing so, I hope.
Good programmers aren't ageist. We look up to the gray-haired badasses. (Ok, old bad programmers are annoying, but so are young bad programmers.) Ageism is a managerland prejudice. What the fuck is that shit doing in our industry?
Most of us are intellectual whores: massively overqualified for the work we're assigned to do, but hired because it makes the boss feel important to be able to say things like, "I have four Ivy Leaguers working for me" even when the work could be done by one script-kiddie. Meanwhile, the work that could actually use our talents is hard to find, because our society is in such a depraved state that social media gets VC-megabucks but cancer research gets peanuts.
It's perverted. When you're young, it's hard as hell to get a good job but getting a job is easy. But that's exactly when you care about getting the good jobs that will build your career. When you're old and have actual use for the crappy jobs (you need to sustain an income) you can't get them; and if you were sidetracked by taking too many crappy jobs (and that's not hard to have happen) you're not qualified for the good ones either.