The problem is that doesn't fight ageism. It panders to it.

Ageism is when you don't get treated fairly just because of your age - no matter how curious and open minded you may or may not be.

If somebody things I'm closed minded and incurious because I'm in my forties they are being ageist. They are the one with a problem. Simples.

You fight ageism by pointing out bigoted asshattery when you encounter it. You fight it by not staying quiet. You fight it by lobbying to make it illegal. You fight it by giving people concrete advice on how to deal with it in the workplace.

You don't fight it by trying extra hard to demonstrate that their bigotry doesn't apply to you. That's a coping strategy. Not a fighting strategy.

The fact is, most of the older people I know (my parents, grandparents, etc) still listen to the music they were listening to at age 25. Many of them (such as my aunt) are still working at jobs that use technologies they learned 30 years ago. It's not because they are incapable of evolving. I think it is because they never made it a point to sharpen their openness & curiosity.

If I saw a 55 yo engineer with a Github portfolio of Ruby and Python projects, hell yes I would interview that candidate. But the reality is that when I've interviewed older candidates in the past, they are in general more likely to be behind the curve when it comes to speaking the language of the latest tech and developments. My hunch is that complacency breeds this attitude. It is hard to constantly learn new tech for 40+ years, because so much of the learning process is about being wrong repeatedly.

My solution personally is to try to constantly force myself to understand and appreciate the zeitgeist of music, programming, and design as I age. In terms of personal empowerment, it seems to me one of the most sensible routes to fight ageism.

Calling out others who promote ageism is good too, but it doesn't directly address the fact that someday we will all be old, and we'll need an actionable strategy to succeed in spite of that.

Intentionally taking on an attitude of openness and curiosity is, of course, a good thing at any age. I read (possibly misread) it in this context as meaning that you have to demonstrate this in some more extreme way if you're old. That, to me, is pandering to bigotry.

The fact is, most of the older people I know (my parents, grandparents, etc) still listen to the music they were listening to at age 25. Many of them (such as my aunt) are still working at jobs that use technologies they learned 30 years ago. It's not because they are incapable of evolving. I think it is because they never made it a point to sharpen their openness & curiosity.

I know people like that. My experience has been though that those people are just as inflexible in their 20s as they are in their 50s. It's just that it's trickier to spot - because they've been stuck for a shorter period of time.

If you're in your twenties and look around your peers now I bet you'll find some folk who are still really into the same bands they were into when they were in their teens. They'll still be into those bands in 30 years time.

My solution personally is to try to constantly force myself to understand and appreciate the zeitgeist of music, programming, and design as I age. In terms of personal empowerment, it seems to me one of the most sensible routes to fight ageism.

That's a fantastic approach to living an interesting and fulfilling life.

It's a lousy strategy to fight ageism.

Ageism is what others do to you. It's bigotry. It's not looking at you because of your age, not because of how open minded (or not) you are.

Being open minded doesn't help you since the person on the other side of the table doesn't see an open minded person. They see an old one. And they assume.

Then you'd guess wrong. Take it from somebody in their forties - and I'm fortunate enough to be mistaken for being in my 30s quite often (the fat hides the wrinkles ;-)

I'm pretty skeptical that many startup entrepreneurs have a "if you're over 40 we don't want to talk to you policy" but instead decide based on 50 year olds coming into their door telling them in their interview how relational databases were figured out in the 70's

And there is the problem in a nutshell. That is ageism.

The assumption is that they're saying it because they are old. Not because their an idiot (or not ;-). It's http://xkcd.com/385/ - but for age not sex.

There are older developers who suck. But it's not because they're old. It's because they suck.

"I'm pretty skeptical that many startup entrepreneurs have a "if you're over 40 we don't want to talk to you policy" but instead decide based on 50 year olds coming into their door telling them in their interview how relational databases were figured out in the 70's"

I read it as roughly: "Young entrepreneurs don't have a <40 policy. They're making a rational decision not to hire old people after encountering lots of old people telling them things they think are incorrect because of their age.". Which, I think, we both agree is dumb logic.

[edit; Actually said "sorry" ;-)]

It's a hard balance. In the long haul, you often want people who are careful and diligent and have experience that tempers their urge to jump into things too quickly. But, this type of attitude can actually hurt in startups. In an interview where the particular 3 or 4 things you touch upon are extrapolated (correctly or not) to be the main self-identifying traits of how you work and how you think about problems, if you tell even just one story about superior databases from the 70's or seem to be overly-pedantic when it comes to blowing holes in ideas this can be a 'red flag.'

In a startup environment, I'd rather have the engineer who I think will fall in a hole 3 times and figure out a solution eventually than another who I think will think too hard and fall in one in 3x the time due to their fear built up from previous failures. In an interview, if I am spending my time with the person mostly talking about things that have gone wrong and how everything new is old, I will worry they will be too paralyzed to just hack on and break things -- and this type of focus, while obviously invaluable in many situations, tends to come from more experienced engineers since they have seen more shit go wrong.

You've hit on one of the most important quality filters here. If someone is really, deeply intelligent, one of their analysis tasks will include a diligent try at making your idea work. The weirder your idea, the more curious about it they will be.

This is so very true. I was pretty young when twitter first came but remember being incredibly skeptical about the idea. Although to be frank, the way twitter is being used to consume information (as a news feed) was not how it was being thought of then. However, the greater point still remains: If you are skeptical of nascent ideas, you will never let them grow or become mature.

The problem is when these problems re-appear, problems that you personally grappled with for many years, it's easy to just want to throw up your hands in frustration because you thought the issue was settled. But of course, in reality its not about the issue being settled or not, it's about the capability of technology evolving and macroscopic design patterns falling in and out of favor due to the particular tradeoffs available with the state-of-the-art. But it's hard to see this objectively when you had a lot of emotional investment into any problem, developed some expertise, and see your entire way of solving problems being thrown out for what you perceive as a fad.

A contemporary example that I've mentioned already is the recent abandonment of the relational model/ACID in databases. A cynic will tell you the people doing this are stupid because it's an inferior solution. But they fail to mention the reason people are doing this: it's because the relational technology has not caught up with the scalability requirements of many problems faced by engineers today. An experienced engineer with the right attitude can have an excellent perspective and hedge their technology bets accordingly: the people deploying NoSQL are not stupid, they are just getting their jobs done. But at the same time, this too shall pass, since the relational model and ACID are fundamentally good ideas, and eventually someone will swing the pendulum back that way once other problems are solved. So, for the experienced engineer who takes a longer view, certain types of NoSQL databases can serve a role but are likely going to be considered a transitional technology and systems should be architected accordingly. The inexperienced engineer will not recognize this and will go all-in with NoSQL and fall right into the traps that relational modelling and ACID are designed to solve. Lo and behold: Google Spanner paper is published -- but we're not on the other side of this cycle yet until this tech is commoditized.

This tendency of cynicism is particularly worsened because engineers are naturally repulsed by the idea of reinventing the wheel, particularly a wheel as giant as these "big problems I thought we solved already." It's also worsened by the fact that within any new technology cycle, there is often more noise than signal, and so it's easy to latch on to the noise as evidence that there is no signal if you're biased to believing it's all noise. It's also much easier to tell yourself that there is no new innovation happening, it's all noise, when the people building the new stuff are all younger than you and many seem to be unaware of history.

So yeah, it's an opinion. YMMV.