Phasor Burn

I’ve been reading more and more about ageism in tech.

Probably because I’ve reached a certain age milestone and also have been at my current employer 9 years (2x longer than any other job in my past). Ten to twenty-five years older than anyone else in my department, older than my manager, his manager, his manager, and the CEO.

Reading a thread today about a guy that had moved up in a company 10 years in his past, dev to cto, but he is now having to drop that from resume to get interviews.

Here is a comment on that thread that stuck out to me.

There is less ageism on the operations side. I am a dba. A young dba is 30. There are virtually no entry level dba jobs. People start as a developer or unix admin and move over. I am 44. Have not been on the market in 5 years, but in my late 30s no issue. More demand. Saying 20 years experience in operations opens eyes.

When dbs or servers go down at 2 am, you want the grizzled veteran who has fixed this umpteen times.

I cant speak for developers.

Take off all management experience. It makes you look over qualified. No one checks back more than 7 years. So change all experience to tech and put more tech stuff in it.

I like to think my company appreciates the grizzled veteran in ops … in fact it has been mentioned several different times how I have pulled their bacon out of the fire or helped keep everything calm and helped others cut to find real issue and fix it.

It’s like I’ve always had two personalities and under immediate stress/pressure of something bad on fire I just get all quiet and calm and extremely tactically efficient.

Makes up for being a sarcastic pain in the manager’s ass the rest of the time :)

Perhaps I am experiencing something more than the cometary perigee this time, and recognizing I’m in a good place in more ways than one.

Still got to review and fix up my plans B, C, and D though.

Orbital Oscillations, aka Mid Life Crisis aka WTF am I doing.

I find myself in a strange yet familiar space with my current job, career, life.

Drifting along in comfortable orbital cycles of interest, disinterest, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, engagement, disengagement.

I’m about to hit one of those milestone birthdays. I am not sure I really care or put much thought into it, or worry about it. Except maybe I do. It’s just a number. No it’s not.

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ProTip: Never allow work email or chat systems on your personal mobile devices. You won’t get sucked into ultimately non urgent work things if someone has to actually page or call you during out of office hours. That small barrier is all that’s needed.

Also, leave your company provided devices at the office or turned off when not on active call rotation. Make them work a little at contacting you for an emergencayyyyyy.

This has served me well, except I still fall into the trap of looking at mail/chat via web browser now and then.

21st Century Problems.

I saw this gem today when browsing company reviews on Glassdoor.

You should consider critically how difficult you found the interview process, and what that might mean for the calibre of your peers if you accept an offer.

What they are getting at is the idea of working for/with people that are smarter than you. This will push you into learning more and learning faster than you might otherwise do so. Extending this idea out to examining the interview processes of potential employers is a great idea.

See also I am a comet.