Age & ageism - Junior & senior developer dynamics - My experience

Ugh, the comments. The company is bleeding female engineers, and some jerk has the nerve to call it into question because “women like to complain.” I need a shower.

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To be fair, I do live in the south and there are a lot more “traditional” mindsets here. I know it’s prevalent everywhere (the guy who told me “Women don’t do IT” was from California), but it may be more so here. My last IT position was with an oil and gas company which are typically heavily sexist.

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Uber’s CEO is a dick and a jerk… no wonder this sexism mentality travels down and becomes company culture.

This is my biggest fear in trying to change careers. I’m 45 and am working towards being a full stack developer. This article came at the right time to keep me motivated.

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This is something I was worried about as soon as I started learning to code. I’m 30 now, and I knew I’d be competing with 22 year old college grads, and while it certainly isn’t guaranteed that I’ll face any sort of discrimination, it certainly can’t work in my favor at all.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve lost interest in working in web development, and am looking to either get into a trade or go back to the medical field, but FCC is fun to stick around with because coding is fun and the community is pretty cool.

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Oh my goodness, 30 isn’t old…

Did I say it was old?

I said being 30, competing with 22 year old college grads. According to a ton of early 20’s users of reddit, 30 is oldER to them. It’s all relative I guess.

I started my journey here at FCC back in June of 2015. In March of 2016 I took the leap and went to a local bootcamp. What was surprising is that half of the class consisted of job changing 30 somethings, myself included. I finished my bootcamp at the end of May 2016 and got a job two weeks later at the young age of 38.

The last year I have worked for an awesome company that also hired 2 of my classmates who are also in their 30’s. We have shown our hunger and passion and I have never heard anything about age muttered at this company. Its all about the culture of the company. With the severe deficit of developers you’d think this type of thinking some of you have experienced would be long gone. Sad that it still exists.

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There sure is a lot of depressing content on this topic, but I’m not going to let it take up any more of my energy. The world is full of idiots who ruin it for the rest of us, and this is not a new problem either. Check out this widely sited article …

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

My journey started back in the 80’s when sexism and ageism were much bigger than they are today in this industry. Yep, do the math, I’m not 20-something or even 30-something, and I’m battling out there with everyone else attempting to be given an opportunity at working as a software engineer.

I’m hoping that we can all move forward by stomping out the ‘idiots’ out there who are still living in the 80’s doing fist bumps with each other on how cool they can write software.

In the end … I will keep pushing forward to succeed at this, and I won’t let other people get in my way. We should all stay positive, and keep cheering one another on … it’s awesome to have such a supportive group! Go team go, let’s help keep FCC alive and well for others to prosper from also!

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So is the department of defense, where I came from. Seattle tech wasn’t bad, but by that time I was in technical support. So, I’m not sure if it was better there because of the location/mindset or because of the role I had. When I worked for the Department of Defense it was all on the east coast - Virginia and Maryland. Maryland was the worst!

What’s the point? You can never “prove” anything. There are never any witnesses, and if there are, they’re brown-nosing their way up and will say nothing happened. You just pull up your big girl panties and find another job somewhere. Unless you’re in southern Maryland and there are no other jobs. That’s when I moved to Seattle.

Args! I’m 60 and trying to reboot my career after a layoff and being out of the workforce for a long time. I got back to school, learned Java and got the OCA certification, but it is real hard to get into the workforce. I’m beginning to think I will only get freelance work from here on out.

I think about this daily. But I will keep the day job till it pans out. In the mean time I keep coding. I posted this above my desk when I need to focus and push through…“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now”. -Chinese Proverb.

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