<story><title>Show HN: Hire an Oldster</title><url>http://tryoldster.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DougN7</author><text>&amp;gt; It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if I agree with that.  When I was 25, I was all over every new technology that came out.  I was the expert in my group.  I&amp;#x27;m now pushing 50.  The latest tech isn&amp;#x27;t nearly as interesting.  And honestly, I&amp;#x27;m getting tired of chasing it.  My energy level has dropped a bit.  Physically I&amp;#x27;m not in as good a shape (though still quite healthy).  The effects of age are very real.</text></item><item><author>judahmeek</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse).&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, then when someone entered the workforce has absolutely no relevance. What is relevant is staying current. It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035? I&amp;#x27;m not very confident at all. But how do I recognize when to jump ship?&lt;p&gt;Thankfully, these days we have data scientists who examine trends in framework and methodology assimilation for fun and publicity. We have metrics like GitHub stars, Stackoverflow questions, and Google Trends to clue us in on the popularity and profitability of new ways of doing things.</text></item><item><author>skwirl</author><text>&amp;gt;I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) and it&amp;#x27;s astounding. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.&lt;p&gt;I completely agree (I&amp;#x27;m 32), but what is worrying is the possibility of a fundamental shift that doesn&amp;#x27;t occur within individual companies but rather manifests itself as a new industry of sorts, and then a slow decline of the industry we&amp;#x27;re in right now - a paradigm shift, for a lack of a better term.  That one is harder to detect until it&amp;#x27;s blatantly obvious, at which point the early practitioners in the new industry are now the senior engineers and newly minted college graduates are overwhelmingly starting their career in the new industry.  Developers in the old industry have to cling on to whatever jobs are left or start over.&lt;p&gt;My uncle is a good example of this - he&amp;#x27;s in his 50s and has spent most of his career working in what are now ancient IBM technology stacks (ever hear of RPG?)  He saw object oriented programming as snake oil and a passing fad.  When there were finally no jobs left near him for working in this IBM stack, he begrudgingly learned Java&amp;#x2F;C#&amp;#x2F;JavaScript&amp;#x2F;SQL and took a major pay&amp;#x2F;prestige cut basically starting over.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse).  What experience ends up transferring to the new industry?  Soft skills, perhaps, but lots of people outside either the old or new industry have good soft skills experience, so what do you bring to the table that they don&amp;#x27;t?&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t an &amp;quot;age problem.&amp;quot;  It&amp;#x27;s something deeper than that.  If my uncle had jumped ship from his IBM world and into e-commerce in the 90s, which he was perfectly capable of doing, he would probably be a senior leader somewhere right now.  But how could he have known?  When the .com bubble burst, he probably felt vindicated in his decision to stay put.&lt;p&gt;How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035?  I&amp;#x27;m not very confident at all.  But how do I recognize when to jump ship?&lt;p&gt;edit: grammar</text></item><item><author>pc86</author><text>I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) and it&amp;#x27;s astounding. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an &amp;quot;acceptable tradeoff of competency&amp;quot; unless you didn&amp;#x27;t need anything close to that competency in the first place.&lt;p&gt;Also if you&amp;#x27;re 50 and are relying on a new job&amp;#x27;s retirement program you&amp;#x27;re probably in for a rude awakening about when you can retire. That should be pretty close to set by that point. If it&amp;#x27;s not, the difference between matching 4% or 3%, or 75% match v. 100% is not going to be shaving more than a few months off your working career.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;They have less primary &amp;amp; secondary education relevant to today&amp;#x27;s enterprise issues.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m pretty knowledgeable about paid search and social but I don&amp;#x27;t think my Political Science degree has anything to do with that. To imply that someone&amp;#x27;s age precludes them from understanding paid search, mobile advertising, or social is the very definition of ageism.</text></item><item><author>aresant</author><text>If you take a survey of hiring managers they will point to three primary reasons that candidates 40 - 60 have a harder time finding jobs:&lt;p&gt;1) They are typically more expensive than &amp;quot;market&amp;quot; for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc.&lt;p&gt;2) They are less flexible - they are less willing to relocate, they have kids to pick up instead of &amp;quot;beer hour bonding&amp;quot;, unwilling to run the same 60 hour gauntlet that a 25 year old can etc.&lt;p&gt;3) They have less primary &amp;amp; secondary education relevant to today&amp;#x27;s enterprise issues. In the specific case of &amp;quot;marketers&amp;quot; - like TryOldster is pitching - the best people will learn anything, but anybody over 50 years old spent their professional training + formative 20s thinking about television, radio, and print - not paid search, mobile advertising, and social.&lt;p&gt;That we&amp;#x27;re at the top of HN again with another &amp;quot;hire older people&amp;quot; post (recently we saw OldGeekJobs) demonstrates there&amp;#x27;s a huge unmet need within this cohort.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think a job-board is the right solution to this problem because the pitch on TryOldster does nothing to alleviate the three principal concerns.&lt;p&gt;My unasked, probably asinine business advice would be to turn this flow of traffic into a training &amp;#x2F; education platform where you can VALIDATE and address the very real, foundational concerns of hiring managers around this cohort, and suddenly you&amp;#x27;ve got a machine that can get motivated people trained and placed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beat</author><text>Another way to put it is that the 25 year old thinks all the shiny new technologies are &lt;i&gt;important&lt;/i&gt;. The 50 year old knows better.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m 51. Many, maybe most of the tech that&amp;#x27;s fundamental to my career didn&amp;#x27;t even exist when my career started. Only Unix and SQL have been constants. http was a lab experiment. The Mosaic browser didn&amp;#x27;t exist yet. Java? Ruby? NoSQL? Whatever.&lt;p&gt;If you need to learn a tech to solve a problem, you learn a tech. It&amp;#x27;s not hard.&lt;p&gt;What I find &lt;i&gt;interesting&lt;/i&gt; isn&amp;#x27;t new technologies. It&amp;#x27;s new &lt;i&gt;problems&lt;/i&gt;, problems that didn&amp;#x27;t exist before (often because they&amp;#x27;re the result of new tech), or problems that could not be addressed before (due to limits of computational power or data access).</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Hire an Oldster</title><url>http://tryoldster.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DougN7</author><text>&amp;gt; It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if I agree with that.  When I was 25, I was all over every new technology that came out.  I was the expert in my group.  I&amp;#x27;m now pushing 50.  The latest tech isn&amp;#x27;t nearly as interesting.  And honestly, I&amp;#x27;m getting tired of chasing it.  My energy level has dropped a bit.  Physically I&amp;#x27;m not in as good a shape (though still quite healthy).  The effects of age are very real.</text></item><item><author>judahmeek</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse).&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, then when someone entered the workforce has absolutely no relevance. What is relevant is staying current. It is absolutely ageist to assume that a 50 yr old is going to have more trouble staying current than a 30 yr old.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035? I&amp;#x27;m not very confident at all. But how do I recognize when to jump ship?&lt;p&gt;Thankfully, these days we have data scientists who examine trends in framework and methodology assimilation for fun and publicity. We have metrics like GitHub stars, Stackoverflow questions, and Google Trends to clue us in on the popularity and profitability of new ways of doing things.</text></item><item><author>skwirl</author><text>&amp;gt;I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) and it&amp;#x27;s astounding. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.&lt;p&gt;I completely agree (I&amp;#x27;m 32), but what is worrying is the possibility of a fundamental shift that doesn&amp;#x27;t occur within individual companies but rather manifests itself as a new industry of sorts, and then a slow decline of the industry we&amp;#x27;re in right now - a paradigm shift, for a lack of a better term.  That one is harder to detect until it&amp;#x27;s blatantly obvious, at which point the early practitioners in the new industry are now the senior engineers and newly minted college graduates are overwhelmingly starting their career in the new industry.  Developers in the old industry have to cling on to whatever jobs are left or start over.&lt;p&gt;My uncle is a good example of this - he&amp;#x27;s in his 50s and has spent most of his career working in what are now ancient IBM technology stacks (ever hear of RPG?)  He saw object oriented programming as snake oil and a passing fad.  When there were finally no jobs left near him for working in this IBM stack, he begrudgingly learned Java&amp;#x2F;C#&amp;#x2F;JavaScript&amp;#x2F;SQL and took a major pay&amp;#x2F;prestige cut basically starting over.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not just technology stacks - even the methodologies in this industry seem to undergo radical changes every few years (for better or worse).  What experience ends up transferring to the new industry?  Soft skills, perhaps, but lots of people outside either the old or new industry have good soft skills experience, so what do you bring to the table that they don&amp;#x27;t?&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t an &amp;quot;age problem.&amp;quot;  It&amp;#x27;s something deeper than that.  If my uncle had jumped ship from his IBM world and into e-commerce in the 90s, which he was perfectly capable of doing, he would probably be a senior leader somewhere right now.  But how could he have known?  When the .com bubble burst, he probably felt vindicated in his decision to stay put.&lt;p&gt;How confident are we that the web and mobile development that most of HN does today will be big in 2035?  I&amp;#x27;m not very confident at all.  But how do I recognize when to jump ship?&lt;p&gt;edit: grammar</text></item><item><author>pc86</author><text>I look at the skillset between when I was 25 and now (30) and it&amp;#x27;s astounding. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an &amp;quot;acceptable tradeoff of competency&amp;quot; unless you didn&amp;#x27;t need anything close to that competency in the first place.&lt;p&gt;Also if you&amp;#x27;re 50 and are relying on a new job&amp;#x27;s retirement program you&amp;#x27;re probably in for a rude awakening about when you can retire. That should be pretty close to set by that point. If it&amp;#x27;s not, the difference between matching 4% or 3%, or 75% match v. 100% is not going to be shaving more than a few months off your working career.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;They have less primary &amp;amp; secondary education relevant to today&amp;#x27;s enterprise issues.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m pretty knowledgeable about paid search and social but I don&amp;#x27;t think my Political Science degree has anything to do with that. To imply that someone&amp;#x27;s age precludes them from understanding paid search, mobile advertising, or social is the very definition of ageism.</text></item><item><author>aresant</author><text>If you take a survey of hiring managers they will point to three primary reasons that candidates 40 - 60 have a harder time finding jobs:&lt;p&gt;1) They are typically more expensive than &amp;quot;market&amp;quot; for the same role a younger person can fulfill at acceptable tradeoff of competency - higher salaries, higher related costs like healthcare for a family, expectations around retirement programs, etc.&lt;p&gt;2) They are less flexible - they are less willing to relocate, they have kids to pick up instead of &amp;quot;beer hour bonding&amp;quot;, unwilling to run the same 60 hour gauntlet that a 25 year old can etc.&lt;p&gt;3) They have less primary &amp;amp; secondary education relevant to today&amp;#x27;s enterprise issues. In the specific case of &amp;quot;marketers&amp;quot; - like TryOldster is pitching - the best people will learn anything, but anybody over 50 years old spent their professional training + formative 20s thinking about television, radio, and print - not paid search, mobile advertising, and social.&lt;p&gt;That we&amp;#x27;re at the top of HN again with another &amp;quot;hire older people&amp;quot; post (recently we saw OldGeekJobs) demonstrates there&amp;#x27;s a huge unmet need within this cohort.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think a job-board is the right solution to this problem because the pitch on TryOldster does nothing to alleviate the three principal concerns.&lt;p&gt;My unasked, probably asinine business advice would be to turn this flow of traffic into a training &amp;#x2F; education platform where you can VALIDATE and address the very real, foundational concerns of hiring managers around this cohort, and suddenly you&amp;#x27;ve got a machine that can get motivated people trained and placed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhizome</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m your age, and I think a good example of what you&amp;#x27;re talking about is javascript frameworks. Younger programmers might dissect each one and suss out the details like any of us might have done with CONFIG.SYS, but as an older programmer they all seem essentially similar and as far as professional skills go I can probably either just choose one or wait until the dominant one shakes out. This of course is aided by my sense&amp;#x2F;prediction&amp;#x2F;bigotry that JS frameworks are following Hotelling&amp;#x27;s Law.</text></comment>