This isn't necessarily an indictment of you. I'm just a little sick of people stereotyping younger developers on Hacker News when the truth is that most of us get great value for our time and are well aware of the choices we make.
It feels more natural if it progresses through asking what games I've played
A. Turnabout is not fair play; two wrongs do not make a right, especially when your wrong is to discriminate against people other than those who may have discriminated against you
B. Inflated expectations != discrimination
C. Discriminating against someone because they are too old is illegal; discriminating against someone because they are too young is not (both are equally wrong).
D. "I'm rather bitter and sometimes it shows" - Get over it.
It is completely discriminatory in B. when the only people who could possibly meet those inflated expectations can not logically be under the age of 30. I've seen this far too often to dismiss it as occasional - it is/was systemic.
It's the burden of the accuser to claim they were discriminated against because of age, and as we can see, there's no qualms with making lots and lots of articles and "think-pieces" out of the hypothesis. Sometimes "older" workers have unreasonably inflated senses of skills and/or worth, and can't take the ego blow, so, off to coping (see A) above.
Haha thanks for the armchair therapy with D., it's worth every penny from your barely 30 perspective.
I've seen this more with younger workers. In fact, that was me exactly 10 years ago.
My problem is when that site is accompanied by an attitude of old developers being better. Likewise, I would absolutely object to a job site for black people marketing itself by disparaging white people: "give tech companies your white and naive to burn them out and make them piles of cash."
I, for one, have a lush neck beard and am seriously contemplating going with the sandals with socks look.
It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.
There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year).
Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and home-buying wasn't terribly different 15-20 years ago than it is now. Still plenty of opportunity to go into incredible debt. And hell, 2016's 45-year-old who bought his first house in, say, 2000, may just have watched his home's value crash in 2006/2007.
So maybe just tone it down.
i'm one of these, and i don't consider myself a millennial.
anyone who's legitimately used a rotary phone (or even just seen one in use) in a non-ironic way should not be considered a millennial.
The last rotary phone I saw for sale was, I think, in the 1980s, the last one I saw in use was in the 2000s. Its quite possible that someone could be a millennial and have used one (IIRC, we used one in my house until 1986 -- the other phones in the house were touch tone -- and only ditched it because we happened to move.)
Really, the oldest are mid 30s, and I think even that is a stretch.
Most sources put the end of generation X as 1980. So unless you want to come up with a micro-generation for people born between 1980-1985, we're stuck in the millennial group.
The thing is that if we stick with a 15 year span, the youngest people who should really be called millennials are around 21 or 22, but it seems like each year the lower bound for millennial grows (I occasionally see news reports referring to children as millennials).
I'm assuming this trend will stop when we settle on a name for the next generation.
Tuition for the college I went to is around ~18% more expensive now than when I went in inflation adjusted terms, the loans you can get now to cover them are around half of what I paid between 1996-2000 (at a state school). I haven't done the math to see how that all breaks out for real cost differences, but I'll concede college is more expensive now.
Also if you've graduated in the last 6 years or less, you've come into a job situation that is phenomenally better than that of someone who graduated from 1990-94 or from 2002-2006, which has probably a bigger impact on your lifetime earnings than your generation (think how capricious that is).
If you're truly ignorant of the subprime mortgage crisis a few years back, you can check out The Big Short (book or movie, but I'm told the book is much better) for good insight into history and mechanics.
Point is that the economy has changed a LOT in the last 15 years, and lots and lots of people suffered. Generation X is not the Baby Boom generation. I think you sound a bit foolish/ignorant appropriating the "Baby Boomers ruined the economy!" rhetoric and applying it to the generation-and-a-half that followed them.
You are trying way too hard to make yourself sound like a victim.
The usual starting point for the Millenial generation is a birth year of 1980; if 36 is "starting 40 in the face", it is not from a particularly close distance.
And that's the absolute leading edge.
I've been a part of hundreds of interviews for dozens of engineering positions at a variety of companies and organizations. While I have witnessed clear-cut ageism with qualified older candidates, it's with the distinct minority of older candidates, and typically only with borderline ones. Compare to even the most qualified female candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of sexism, or non-Asian minority candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of racism^.
So I won't deny that ageism is a problem but - in the case of white dudes - it's the jolt of a sudden uphill at the end of a couple decades of easy slightly downhill coast. Compared to continuous vertical climb that women and non-Asian minorities have to put up with in engineering, it's a pretty modest problem that the affected have both ample time and opportunity to prepare for.
^- The tech industry isn't, at least in my experiences, blatantly racist/sexist these days. Anecdotally, women and minorities have an easier time making it through HR/recruiter screening. It's a more subtle and pernicious effect in tech interviews, where correct answers are overscrutinized for flaws and even marginally incorrect answers are blown out of proportion. Never seen this with older (white/Asian, male) candidates.