This is the exact attitude that makes tech a shit sector to be in. Its not that people don't want learn anything, its that when you're 40 a lot more time is invested in things outside of work. Kids, wife, house, etc. When you're 20, nomadic, are by yourself, and have a ton of free time.. yes finding time to learn is easy.

... and the medical field, and the law field, and the engineering field. Basically if you want to get premium dollars when trading your skills, you have to have premium skills.

All those other fields value experience very highly. Software engineering is the only field that doesn't care what you've worked on in the past or what you've done. They only care about what trick algorithm that you will never utilize that you can answer on a white board.

Several of those field mentioned also have fairly high barriers of entry in terms of certification. They try to ensure that folks pursuing those careers have a core level of understanding necessary to pursue work in those fields. Whether or not they're successful in doing that is, of course, a matter of debate (as everything is).

I know understanding CS fundamentals and employer expectations about this are a lightning rod here, so I don't want to apply a value judgement on that here. However, what's the equivalent to the board or bar exams in our field (that lets us compare ourselves to those fields)?

That doesn't make sense. If the problem is that we don't have some sort of licensing board, experience should be more highly valued, not less.

I guess where I was going was that there was a fairly high standard to "get in the door" first, after which experience seems to be valued more uniformly (at least more than in software).

We don't have the equivalent in software, and we also seem to have a recurring discussion about effective ways to filter people during an interview process. I've certainly had mixed results in my limited sample set when considering past experience to actual performance of hires.

Is there a good way to translate the value of someone's experience?

EDIT: For that matter, I guess I should wonder how folks translate the value of people in those other fields effectively (or if they do at all).

I don't know, but if you don't have other qualifications to go on, surely the fact that they were able to hack it at other companies for a long time is the strongest signal you have.

I think this is most indicative of poor management. The "real" problem is the not the tech providers, but the tech managers.

What I've experienced is that many of the tech managers either 1) couldn't hack it to begin with, so they pivoted (this pivot may have been in college, or in the workforce), or 2) haven't stayed relevant themselves.

Those fields tend to evolve rather more organically.

You and I know that picking up a new language or framework isn't hard, and getting up to speed in the libs is just a case of some time and google. Recruiters, especially agencies and HR still don't grok this. I rarely had problems if I got past those to the techies or founders.

What is your point. The job market is not meant to cater to people's specific changes in work/life preferences.

This is almost analogous to complaining about construction being ageist against older people who don't keep in shape. Yeah guess what, you need to in order to do the work.

Or, maybe if we collectively push for a culture where employers who expect you to learn new technology pay you to learn said new technology, staying up to date won't feel so awfully one-sided.

Why would they do that when there are people there is a large enough supply of people with the relevant skills?

I'm sorry but even if you know the ins and outs of language or a framework, it still doesn't matter if you do poorly on white board questions. As much as everyone says "its to see your thinking process". Nothing you've worked on in the past or have experienced matters.

Expectations just need to be set accordingly. Either the employer factors in "learning" time for employees to stay up to date as they start new projects, or the employee is told they need to spend some amount of their own time on training.

A good company will hire people who are not just skilled, but are assets to the work environment. If a company believes after-hours beer pong adds significantly to the happiness and productivity of their employees, whatever. Good for them. I don't think it's unfair of them to not hire somebody who works a strict 9-5, nor do I think that makes the whole industry "shit".

Honestly -- more people work in the 9-5 environment than the Sillicon-Valley brouhaha. You just hear about the brouhaha more because it's a much sexier thing to market.

So you suggest that we hire old people that haven't kept their skills relevant out of pity?

No, I think the suggestion is that expecting people to spend every waking hour of their lives reading about programming isn't realistic.

It doesn't require you to spend every waking hour reading about programming.

Your statement is both right and wrong.

1> Wrong, because "something new" is often ill-defined and often not _really_ new. For example, in the area of 'DevOps' (itself ill-defined) there are numerous tools and frameworks. But what you really need to deliver as a Sysadmin/SRE/Devops person, is a strong understanding of exactly _3_ skills: Operating Systems, Networking & Programming.

Because people & companies do not understand this, we end up in situations where they reject a candidate because they don't know Ansible, but the candidate knows a lot about Python, Linux, SSH and so on (ie things that Ansible is actually built on).

Many folks don't need to learn "new" things to stay relevant.

2> Right, because its not easy to actually gauge a candidate and determine that a person will _learn_ and deliver on Ansible simply because they have such good Python, Linux & OS skills. They don't even know that if the candidate doesn't know Ansible, I need to quiz them in other ways. That is often because the interviewer is not up to the par either.

This wrongly places the burden on the candidate to reply that "I'm an expert in Ansible", and "learn" something they don't really need to.

Coupled with the fact that many candidates themselves flat out lie and are incompetent etc.. you get the market situation for 'aged' people today.

It's not that they don't want to learn - they can and do.

When you end up with more commitments and some kids home isn't quite as conducive for learning, and spare time is often a distant memory.

I concede there is a (often reasonable in my view) reluctance to rush to learn the 249th new framework that is the future. Especially when it does all the same things as the 134th just with utterly different semantics and libraries. It'll be dead in 4 months and the 250th will be the new hotness.

I feel ya. After I got married and had a kid my time to learn and experiment was greatly reduced. Now I have a couple of hours on Saturday morning that I reserve as "Dad Time" where I spend time working on my pet projects and trying out new things.

Experience, architecture/design knowledge, and CS fundamentals are a lot harder to learn than the latest flavor of the month library.

Many of the under-40 crowd I've worked with just plain don't want to learn anything new. This attribute isn't tied to your age, it starts early.

You might get down-voted but I agree with you more. In my late 30s I get to deal with a lot 42+ "senior software engineer", majority are significantly slow in adapting workflow changes, what frustrate more is the amount of distractions from wife/kid/sport/news and the amount of time and effort to back on track what she was trying to do half hour ago while co-worker standing next waiting.. Life changes with aging but I think for where there are incompetence, it is not discrimination.

I've been interviewing a lot of people over the past 5 years, some are good some are bad, but I've seen no correlation between age and complacency in software developers.