Ageism is real in many verticals. It is healthy to acknowledge that. It’s equally important to face facts related to age: I am noticeably less focusable, and my memory is not as good. I slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows (or feels). Most importantly, I have many out of work responsibilities - parents (not getting younger) and kids (not getting older in sufficient pace). Consequently, odds of me doing after hours learning are diminishing. I don’t do open source any more, nor do I have time for cool side projects. And all that, not the invented stuff in OP, is what makes ageism a thing.
slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows
For me, it's the exact opposite. Containers? Oh yeah, they're just like zones on Solaris. Kubernetes? Works like a VAXcluster. Cloud? Been there, done that, let's not make the same mistakes. ML? Well we used to call it predictive statistics, the only real difference now is we run it on GPU not CPU. I pick up "new" techs easily because I can step back and see the same patterns repeating.
Experience is the killer app. Ageism is just another prejudice.
Many people (possibly most) don't see the similarities between ostensibly different things. They just don't make the connection.
I once had 2 different classes about stereo-vision (3D reconstruction with different view points). On the same year. One class was ostensibly about ecology. The other was ostensibly about computer vision. Only I noticed they taught the same thing, and everyone looked at me dumbstruck when I pointed this out. They didn't make the connection even when I made it for them.
Learning ability does slow down with age. If you compensate with making connections with past experience, it doesn't translate to less ability to learn new tech. On the contrary, as you pointed out you learn them faster, because you already most of it. If however you fail to make the connection, you will feel that slow down.
Same. At 40 years old, learning something 'new' is much easier now than when I was 20. First, there is not very much that comes out that is completely new and not built on existing foundational knowledge. Second, I can focus on the part that really is new, and not get tripped up on learning all of the foundational elements needed to understand said new thing.
The OP mentioned not having time, but I've noticed as I've aged I have more discipline and thus more time.
Same here. I've seen so many technologies at this point in my life, that picking up new ones is easy.
It's simply a case of quickly grokking which variation (on an existing technological approach) the new technology is taking.
There really aren't that many new groundbreaking ideas in tech; however, there's a lot of tribalism and silos (especially within individual programming language communities) which mean that old discoveries are often forgotten for a while until they are finally resurrected in a new guise.
I see the parallels in the way jobs are scheduled on the cluster rather than an individual node, storage is common across the cluster, nodes and leave and join hot, the manageability of it all... all seems very familiar!
As I've grown older, I've noticed a very strange phenomenon - my memory has certainly gotten worse but my reflexes have grown much quicker, seriously cat-like reflexes now. Perhaps it's time for a career change from tech to . . . circus performer?
I’m not arguing, just mentioning it as a fact. In places where my experience would not play critical role, it would make economical sense to hire someone 20 years younger.
Would you share how old are you? Sorry if you find that question out of place, but I'm 33 and have kids and I don't (yet?) make such observations as yours.
Not @avip, but I’m 47 and definitely feeling the time/family responsibilities crunch. Our parents have all just turned 70+/-2, we have two smart kids in elementary school who need to be fed almost every single day :), a house/yard instead of apartment, everyone’s healthy, but just managing school, activity, and holiday calendars is grueling. In my 20s and 30s, I could code like hell, have time to devote to learning new thing in depth, and play on 4-5 sports teams. Now, I’m still able to function almost the same mentally, but there are 20-40 fewer “free” hours in the week.
Something has to give and we’ve decided it’s not the kids... I wouldn’t go back and change anything, but it’s not the same.
Giving up Facebook was a huge win for me. People just don't appreciate how much of a time sink it is (by design). You might think "I'll just check it" then you look up and a quarter or a half an hour has passed!
For example I have 2x30min train journeys per workday. I used to spend them just idly scrolling the timeline, clicking like, maybe making some comments. Now I use them for reading on Kindle, or doing a module on EdX or Coursera. And that's even before all the other time I would spend on it. I literally got back 5-10 hrs/week, and it boggles my mind that I ever wasted that time to begin with!
Thanks for sharing! Now I understand what you had in your mind is yet to come for me, my children are still toddlers. I'm with you on huge time investment the family is, I am still in the phase where I'm hoping I can keep up by cutting sleep time but at some point during the day body finds its way to take back what was taken away from it...
Ageism is real in many verticals. It is healthy to acknowledge that. It’s equally important to face facts related to age: I am noticeably less focusable, and my memory is not as good. I slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows (or feels). Most importantly, I have many out of work responsibilities - parents (not getting younger) and kids (not getting older in sufficient pace). Consequently, odds of me doing after hours learning are diminishing. I don’t do open source any more, nor do I have time for cool side projects. And all that, not the invented stuff in OP, is what makes ageism a thing.