@venikunche This is a tricky question. Here's why:
I think what you're asking is "at what age did you experience your age used against you personally."
But ageism has affected my career in tech separately from my personal age. It does this by shaping the ecosystem itself. Examples:
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@venikunche 1. I have never, at a tech company, had a manager over the age of 29, with one exception, who was 32.
It has therefore been impossible for any of them to possess significant management experience. This has affected my experience of, and expectations for, being managed.
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@venikunche 2. I have never had a mentor within my same employer with more than ten years' field experience.
To get these, I have had to specifically go find people outside my employer. Most of them have their own businesses because employers fail to recognize their value as FTEs.
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@venikunche 3. Apropos of #2, most employers can offer very little in the way of helping their younger employees develop professionally. Employees have to go OUTSIDE whatever systems the employer has to build their skills with satisfying velocity.
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@venikunche 4. The vast majority of apps and technical products fail at accessibility because few of the people writing the code absolutely need a non-mainstream accessibility tool.
Older technologists experience the need for accessible software in higher proportions than younger ones.
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@venikunche 5. Similarly, a disproportionately small amount of technical contribution power is allocated to parents—especially parents of not-infant children. So tech also loses access to an in-house understanding of the needs of children of an independently-using-software age.
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@venikunche These are just a few examples of ageism's systemic consequences, but all of them affect not only me, but everyone in tech, and also everyone outside tech who uses what we built.
Ageism's effect on me goes far beyond whether I personally got promoted.
In fact...
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@venikunche ...ageism in tech limits the quality and utility of the tools we build by stymying the ecosystem in which we build it.
All this to say, I think everyone is affected by ageism in tech regardless of whether they've personally noticed or traced their frustrations back to it.
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1. Most meetings already suck. They don't get better because the folks planning the meetings disproportionately hate meetings less due to they have what we call a high Caucus Score.
2. Remoteness EXACERBATES the way business as usual discounts the needs & contributions of low Caucus Score, remote, or asynchronous teammates. If a meeting is recorded, it's also, consequently, remote.
Let's talk about contract work versus permanent roles, specifically as an engineer (maybe it applies outside engineering, but I'll stick to what I know).
I have done, and still do, both of these, and I'd love to bust some myths about them.
MYTH 1: You have to choose one or the other at a given point in time.
I realize that, for plenty of folks with children and other obligations, having anything in addition to a full time job is not tenable, and I acknowledge that.
That does not mean it's always impossible...
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...to try a contract role while in a full time role, if they are curious about it.
Before I started my consultancy, I picked up teaching on the side of my day job. Once I started feeling more fulfilled in teaching than at work, I got A LOT more curious about contract roles.
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Once upon a time, during the dawn of the internet era, early web products often came from some college kid. The kid was almost always wealthy & well-connected, but he wasn't MARKET-savvy.
These people, now billionaires, have given beaucoup interviews on how they got started.
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Look: I'm as concerned about survivorship bias in drawing conclusions from these interviews as you are. But one thing stands out.
Asked how they got started, they all go "I was playing around and made a thing I wanted to use. Other people liked it. That was literally it."
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Often I see execs/directors approach inclusion the same way they approach other business initiatives, and then they're surprised/frustrated when the initiatives don't produce the PR/retention/product quality outcomes they want.
Let's talk about what's happening.
A thread.
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Example:
I worked for a company that poured a lot of effort into inclusive hiring: skills rubric, ads in URM Tech spaces, all that. Fast forward two years, all the URMs they had carefully collected had left and they'd backfilled with almost exclusively CHWDs.
What happened?
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Another example:
Slack. Talks a massive game about how inclusive and great they are. Got DMing across Slack channels BUILT AND INTO PROD before anybody pointed out that this is, like, a PERFECT harassment and abuse vector.