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Comment by nahname | Hacker News Reader

>I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30.

Are you sure you are not committing the same ageist judgement here?

There are two kinds of reverse discrimination:

One is an active reverse discrimination that is attempting to tilt the balance back (often enforced with some kind of law or policy). This has all kinds of well-known problems (that arguably are larger than the benefits).

The other is a more natural reverse discrimination that comes from collecting the missed opportunities of your competitors. If your competitors reject candidates for frivolous reasons, then it's easier for you to hire qualified people. I think this is what the parent comment was doing, and it doesn't strike me as a problem.

If you are a founder and aware of this bias, it is a big advantage. But if you're a competent guy in your 50s who got laid off, it's a big disadvantage. Free market economics rarely works like the textbook says, and the man (or God forbid, a woman) looking for a job is the one searching for the needle in the haystack of (1) attractive companies (2) that don't discriminate against older employees.

Depends on what one defines as "competent" and the problem space. A lot of colleges that the thirty and under set that I've talked with don't always have a required path in CS that teaches systems and architecture, let alone C (or assembler). So, if one expect such from someone with a CS degree, that could be an issue.

The tooling accessible to people today as opposed to those that started 10 years prior is also extremely different. Running Windows? Trumpet Winsock, understanding the win.ini, config.sys, and autoexec.bat were important. Linux - a lot of people have wasted a lot of time getting sound and video drivers (as well as xf86config files) to work right, most just work fine now. All these required a level of digging that required knowing more about the system than you may have wanted.

Not saying your point isn't valid, but it does depend on what one's definition of "competent" is.

That works both ways, though -- I went through college from 2000-2004, and aside from some brief forays into other languages (Ruby and Perl, from what I remember) we were taught exclusively in C. I had some VB experience (self-taught) from middle school, but in my day job we exclusively use C and Ada ... and I'd never really had reason to learn another language. A few years back, I decided that I should learn some new languages for a) fun, and b) the diversity that I'd need if I ever wanted out of my industry. I taught myself Java, and then the Android framework. Then C# and VB .net. What really forced me to start learning new stuff was teaching - I started teaching as an adjunct at a local college after work (the only favor that getting my MS has ever done me), and then I had learn stuff to fit with their curriculum. Anyway, my point is that it's just as easy for older people to be oblivious to new tech as it is for young people to have a complete lack of understanding of fundamentals. I actually teach binary number formats, boolean algebra, virtual machine code, etc. to my students just to make sure that they're not completely unprepared ... and I will say that your point is valid - many of them have had no prior exposure.

He's just making an observation and a possible correlation (X competent people, 3 younger than 30), not a causation (X people were incompetent because they were younger than 30).

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