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Comment by mahyarm | Hacker News Reader

I'd never hire old engineers, they're stuck in their ways and insist on using SOAP. Software engineering is a young man's game as people on slashdot were apt to say. Old programmers are always complaining about being forced into management. Plus they insist on things like having time for their families. Old engineers can't focus %100 on the company like young geeks satisfied with foosball and beer.

Ageism cuts both ways, and it's never an excuse for winning an argument or evaluating a person. You evaluate people on their merits or you pass over valuable people and pay the price for it.

Older people can be full of hubris too, using appeals to experience and authority arguments to shortcut rational thinking.

Using the I'm more experienced than you argument is the same as people saying you insist on C++ cause that is what your comfortable and experienced with, and you'll cost the company millions in lost productivity.

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I'd never hire old engineers, they're stuck in their ways and insist on using SOAP

Just as a nice case study...

I was "old" when SOAP got popular (late twenties early thirties). Most of my (age) peer group seemed to agree with me in that it seemed over complicated and messy. We were, of course, old stick-in-the-muds who couldn't adapt to the new technology :-)

It was the "young" developers who jumped on it more than anybody else that I saw - the everything-in-xml crowd.

Ten years on, of course, the "young" crowd are now seen as "old".

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose :-)

Ageism cuts both ways, and it's never an excuse for winning an argument or evaluating a person. You evaluate people on their merits or you pass over valuable people and pay the price for it.

Amen. Young and old both have stick-in-the-mud types. It's just that the young folk haven't had the time to demonstrate whether they are stick-in-the-mud types. You don't want to hire them whatever their age.

Using node.js (or whatever) doesn't make you cool, hip, and open to new ideas. I can guarantee that, if this forum is still around in ten years time, there will be somebody complaining about this old fker who wants to do everything in node.js :-)

Did you seriously refer to late twenties as 'old'?

It's been my experience that there's quite a lot of folk in their late teens/early twenties who see 29/30/31 as "old" :-)

Parts of the industry certainly do. I've observed it going down from 40 years to 35 years and now to the early 30s.

In the same way (not industry-related) I've observed that people who are 50+ years are seen as "elderly". That was 60 or 65 some 15 years ago.

There are always bad engineers, which is what you're really describing above.

All other things being equal, I'll always pick the older engineer with more experience and maturity than the young engineer without.

My work place must be fucked up. Me as the old guy is still baffled why the young guys implemented our API in SOAP. a few of us older guys are. And this was in the last couple years. Way after SOAP lost its cool.

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