Comment by Tistel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tistel | Hacker News Reader

I'm 42, programming is the fun part of the job (meetings, nonsensical time estimates and travel tend to be worst part of the job). Had a computer my whole life (Vic-20, oh yeah!) I strongly agree with what others have said in the article: Keep learning new things. I did nothing but C++ for 13 years (console games) and felt like a dinosaur. Despite the fact that there are still (a few) C++ jobs out there, I made a point to avoid them. Did a python based app for a year (IPython is fantastic!). Did a GO app for a year (which was kind of interesting, only luke warm on the language for some reason). At the moment I am learning Elixir and Phoenix and still get the excited feeling when the program works. It is strange that such a well paid / interesting field has so few older people in it. One concern I have is that my hair is starting to turn grey so I think the HR process will get a bit trickier (planning on moving to more remote work so they can't see the grey :)).

> One concern I have is that my hair is starting to turn grey so I think the HR process will get a bit trickier (planning on moving to more remote work so they can't see the grey :)

I'm thinking of dyeing hair before interviews when I face the same problem.

I don't think you want to work in a place where they care about such things.

Not all bias is conscious, or intentional. The hair dye may not be a bad idea, just temporarily, during the search. Get a pro though, obvious shoe polish color is, er, obvious.

Would one not have to keep up the dyeing if hired then? You don't think they'll notice a rapid change to grey?

They'll notice, yes. Anecdotal, but my experience is that age discrimination tends to mostly manifest at hire time. They think you're too expensive before even throwing numbers. Or too rigid, etc. Things that shouldn't be an issue once you're there.

As a 48 year old developer with a lot of gray hair...I've never seen anyone with dyed hair where it wasn't pretty obvious. To me it makes you seem a bit desperate.

That's the thing though, if it was done well, you didn't see it. Ask a few women, that already trust you, if they dye their gray... especially the ones you think don't.

Even if they don't explicitly avoid older people, there are biases that they might apply that they're not even aware of.

Kind of funny. I'm going on 40 but look much younger. People think I'm a Millenial. I'd never dye my grey and white hair because looking older helps me close business for my team and I think clients and partners generally feel more comfortable with people that appear to be close in age. If you were client facing they'd want grey hair. But if you aren't the culture seems to disadvantage you. Pretty dumb. I can't discriminate and hire based on having grey, but I can tell you that there are a lot of companies out there that are welcoming. So I think you should rock the grey and you'll land at a better place. :)

I'm 63 and started coding FORTRAN in High School on a GE teletype. Did just a little coding. Went to college and took a FORTRAN class and a PL1 class. I loved PL1. All my undergraduate coding was with punch cards. IBM 360/50.

Im graduate school for engineering I coded just FORTRAN with punch card images but on a terminal. So that was 1000 times better than physical cards. IBM 3090.

Then Apple II, IBM PC, IBM PC-XT, IBM-AT...

First hard drive for IBM PC was $1000 for 10MB.

Punch card images?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

In a character cell terminal editor we would create data files with one line per card image. In essence a punch card for fortran as each line. This is not much different than what we do today. Today we create a line for each line of code (or comments). It was just that punch cards required specific columns for code and other controlling characters.

With physical cards you would carry boxes of card around. If the cards got dropped you were hosed unless the cards were numbers. We had columns for numbering the cards. But when writing a program from scratch you could not number the cards till the program ran correctly. Much fun!

Edit: added details

One of my first programming classes used PL/1. Terminal, not punch cards. I remember liking it OK, but never used it other than that one semester.

I never used it outside of class. I think it was an IBM proprietary language if memory serves me correct.

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