Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> One excuse for pushing out older workers is that technology changes so fast that older people simply can’t keep up. Veteran coders don’t know the latest programming languages, but young ones do. This is bunk. There’s no reason why a 50-year-old engineer can’t learn a new programming language. And frankly, most coding work isn’t rocket science.

There's plenty of reason why it'd be more difficult for a 50-year to learn a new programming language, here's a big one: time

As people get older they have more time constraints and generally have "better (or just other) things to do". This is true for 30 vs 20, 40 vs 30, and probably 50 vs 40 (you could argue that as your kids get older you have more free time but then again people have kids at an older age now). A young person is more likely to be able to forgo those other things and learn the latest transpile-to-js-lang-of-the-week (v2.x).

Sure, people need to be evaluated individually but if I interview 100 people I'd bet dollars to donuts that the older crowd would have less free time than the youngins.

Let's concede that older programmers in their 50s may have less free time to learn new technologies than a 20-something. Shouldn't we also consider how much less time it will take an experienced dev (who has perhaps already learned several new languages and frameworks over their career) to learn something new when compared to the 20-something who is learning their first or second one?

The number of hours required to learn a second language or framework - which may rely on entirely unfamiliar paradigms and principles - may be much higher than the time required by someone who has already learned several over many years.

When considering the learning ability of any developer, free time is only one consideration. Past experience learning has to be another.

Sure, but generally the older have more experience, so a lot of the concepts they need to learn is just a rehash of the same concepts in a different paradigm. So it takes people with more experience less time to learn a new technology / language / domain.

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt

I don't even know if that quote is true. I suppose it doesn't matter.

I'd propose in software development the bottom tier is languages and frameworks, mid tier is paradigms, and top tier is algos architecture and debugging war stories. Plenty of room for alternate interpretations. I'd accept an argument that algos or debugging are mere mid-tier.

Anyway the world is full of ditches that need digging so don't be surprised if when you interview, you interview at a ditch digging company, and furthermore they have a laser like focus on shoveling, when you thought you'd be talking about civil engineering finite element analysis of bridge girders. Well, they shovel, thats what they do, best you find out now rather than after starting work there. And there's nothing wrong with the world being full of diggable ditches, other than the general population on average being massively too intelligent, over educated, and over experienced to spend their lives digging ditches, and the world having a distinct shortage of bridge girders needing a finite element analysis vs the number of people who can do it.

Ignoring your age generalization, the amount of free time should not be a hiring consideration. The only question is "can you meet our expectation of working X amount of time." Of course, some workers are more willing to work more hours uncompensated, but ethical companies shouldn't exploit this and pragmatic companies realize that long hours aren't productive anyway.

Yes, but older experienced developers will not need that much free time to relearn how to do an if or a for loop in that new language. The older you get, the more you go to the point, so your argument is not quite good..

These are just lazy assumptions. Plenty of 20-somethings have young kids (the most time-consuming phase), and plenty of older people will never have children.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com