The Brutal Ageism of Tech(newrepublic.com) |
The Brutal Ageism of Tech(newrepublic.com) |
I am infinitely more useful as a programmer now than when I was 18. I started when I was about 6, I had put in my 10,000 hours by around 18. I lacked so much.
I play on-line FPS to relax after a day of coding, I get to see the speed at which young people operate, and how they operate. It is limited.
It is hard to remain flexible as an adult, we can fall into the many 'slowdown' traps of ageing. If one doesn't, one can 'kick ass'.
Any community who thinks youth is exclusively valuable, lacks wisdom.
IMHO A combination of 80% experienced and 20% youthful energy appears to operate as the perfect catalyst for powerful progress.
I didn't realise SV was like this, what a shame.
I've been around the block so many times now I can predict the majority of any new block. And spending your time outside of work doing things other than dev-related is great. I am adding a dog to my life on Sunday to help encourage me to keep up with my exercise regimen and get me outside. Enjoy life, we only have one!
I have 2 dogs, a wife and a new baby. I can lend you them for 3-4 years if you want ;) Nah, it's awesome. Thanks, and enjoy your new friend - great move!
I don't feel old at all, honestly!!!! - I know I'm still a yoot basically, I have so much to learn. It was only meant in relation to the context given (the article)
> “This company sends out humans in Priuses three days a week,” one fortysomething programmer groused to me last year.
This was a soft landing for their customers after the USPS shut down their original system of having customers have their mail forwarded. Their long-term goals were 2-fold:
1) Allow customers to easily unsubscribe from unwanted mailings (incidentally, this is why USPS wanted them shut down - junk mail constitutes most of their revenue).
2) Fix USPS - they intended to get their automatic scanning technology into USPS itself, thus saving them delivery costs on mail for anyone who signed up to receive it digitally. This could potentially save them enormous amounts of money.
They originally wanted to do this with USPS, but quickly realized that they had much better chances if they started as a private company.
Great article on Outbox: http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-off...
That of course always helps as entrepreneur. It might also be the hidden reason behind the ageism. I for one would not want to work as hard today as I did when I was younger and did not have a family yet.
As an older engineer you might not get the new, cool, bleeding edge project. But then you might also not be expected to work 15 hour days.
I call that a win.
(I'm mid 30s and while I may not put out as many lines of raw code as I used to, I understand what I'm doing far better, have a good understanding of development process and tools, and place high value on robust, supportable code as compared to most of the younger engineers I've worked with recently - i.e. I'm far more productive, even if I look like I'm doing less!)
Maybe it's just fair to say that age can season, temper and improve a good engineer. It doesn't with all of them.
In short, work somewhere where your ideas and skills matter more than LoC generated per day. There's tons of devs who are younger/faster/hungrier than you who will work for less. Actually, this whole system depresses wages for development as a whole and you should be pissed about that.
Ageism is unique in that it's a game you're guaranteed to lose eventually.
Given that such an article is going to be dominated by anecdotes (which are interesting and sometimes entertaining, but very seldom illuminating broader trends. People often think whatever lot they are in is universal, and that what misfortunes or difficulties they face are always unfair externals), I looked for data and this was the best it had. It's a pretty common proof.
Only the 32 most successful tech companies have gone through generally enormous expansion. Most of them draw primarily from new grads, not least because such recruiting is easy: New grads are available, and are willing to relocate wherever you want them. Established workers are less likely to be interested, and often dramatically less likely to want to relocate.
If you simply polled tech workers across the US who were willing to relocate any distance, much less thousands of miles, the average age would similarly be very low.
I'm surprised the age difference wasn't much larger, to be honest.
From what I've read, there isn't much health-benefit from sun exposure. You have the vitamin D thing, but it seems that that can be taken care of with diet/supplements.
Obviously going for a Dracula lifestyle is a big inconvenience. But it seems that wearing a good dose of sun screen and trying to avoid tanning and sunburns might be a good investment if you want to avoid premature ageing, and, if you don't care about that, at least reduce the chances of skin cancer.
Do remember it isn't only the Vitamin D. The sun also helps regulate a lot of inner processes that artificial light mess up (circadian cycle being one of them).
I, redbeard, read a book nearby under the sun umbrella.
Maybe I shouldn't have said "premature". We don't really know what is more healthy, whether it is how people normally do things or whether they should take care to do something else. We've done some things historically, perhaps due to adaption or necessity, but that is just a testament to the fact that it works, not that the practice is healthy or optimal. So I'm not immediately sold on what is average or normal.
[1] http://nautil.us/issue/14/mutation/america-is-getting-the-sc...
> “There wasn’t and there still isn’t absolute evidence” that supplements are bioequivalent to sunshine.
which means that I can't necessarily get away with just vitamin D supplements. Other than that, the article hardly emphasizes Australia's stance on vitamin D supplements, only that right now only dark-skinned people are advised to take it. But they don't say if people were advised to take supplements when avoiding the sun, which might be a crucial thing to do if they were to avoid the sun altogether. So I can't be sure if the vitamin D deficit was due to lack of sun exposure, or mostly due to one-sided marketing (avoid the sun, but don't do anything else to compensate).
Last summer I read a chronicle by a doctor that said that 10 minutes of (naked) exposure was adequate. There was a lot of fuss about getting enough vitamin D.
> People regularly exposed to daily sun have a lower risk of getting melanoma and also have a higher survival rate if they do3 because regular sun exposure protects against burning,
Well this doesn't actually seem to apply to someone who is mindful of the amount of sun exposure he gets. It is of course more sensible to have a little exposure over time to the sun to build up a tan than to spend spurts of time in the sun and risk getting sun burnt. But that doesn't really apply to a person who might be very careful to put on sun screen when he is spending more time in the sun.
Not really. Norway has roughly the same rate is the US and quite a bit lower than France (but quite a bit higher than Spain). The whole darkness leads to suicide is largely a myth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...
Short answer: no. Longer answer: sort-of, but not recently.
In the mid-20th century, there was a lot of suicide in northern latitudes in the summer, which actually led some to believe that too much light (16-20+ hours per day) was the culprit. Spring and summer have always been the peak seasons for suicide, violent crime, and new mental illness. So why is there less of that in warmer climates? The culprit isn't sunlight (either winter's lack of it, or summer's abundance of it) itself, but alcoholism (which is a contributing factor to a shocking percentage of suicides). Harsh winter climates can contribute to alcoholism-- however, a lack of economic opportunity is more devastating-- which is a chronic problem once developed, and can lead to a summer suicide.
In 2014, the Nordic countries take alcoholism, mental health, and social services very seriously (much moreso than, say, the US) and don't have an unusually high suicide rate. In fact, people in Scandinavia and Canada are, on average, happier, healthier, and less suicidal than Americans.
The other half you have more sun than in Spain.
The main problem in Norway are bone cracking because serious vitamin D deficit. They make children eat pills for that.
It is a great business for fracture specialists. :-D
I don't know. Probably more occurrences of SAD. But then, it might be that only certain people are affected by it.
I've grown up in Norway and yes, it isn't very fun for me to wake up at 0700 in the winter, pitch black outside, and then go to school. My area also got a lot of overcast and rain in the winter which, though UV radiation might have come through the clouds, it only compounded the gloomy weather. I wonder if I'm actually more bothered by the chilly, rainy weather rather than the darkness. If there was more snow, it would be a bit lighter.
In return, you get more sun in the summer.
I lived in Spain for 5 months. I wasn't particularly happy during that time, though there were other factors impacting that. More sun and less rain was certainly nice.
I guess it may also depend on the difference between your winter and summer. I'm assuming a New York or London summer wouldn't be the same as a Florida/California/South of Spain summer.
I lived in Madrid for almost 5 months, but I don't quite long back to the sun and warmth. It's nice, certainly nicer than where I am most of the time. But I don't pine for it.
> I guess it may also depend on the difference between your winter and summer. I'm assuming a New York or London summer wouldn't be the same as a Florida/California/South of Spain summer.
I live in coastal (more or less) Norway, so while the temperature differences aren't that great, there is of course a marked difference in the amount of sunlight. Also less rain in the summer, I think.
Makeup foundation plays a similar function as the melanin the skin produces. When sun exposed the amount of melanin is high and hides the small imperfections in the skin. I'm from the caribbean so during the winter, when the sun is less visible, my melanin levels drop. Parts of my skin look ashen and spotty since they have less pigment then other area.
Come summertime I seriously look 10 years younger.
Some people go too far and seriously distress their skin, producing wrinkles, premature aging, and increased chances of cancer.