How I Committed Ageism Against Myself
The cognitive shock of an approaching birthday marking the magic threshold age of 40 did a number on me and my confidence in my career. There, I said it.
If I'd had some solidarity with other coders at the time, I'd be better off now.
If I'd had data and hard evidence, I'd be better off now.
If I hadn't succumbed to the self-doubt borne from an external factor -- my chronological age -- and had kept working like I had ten more earning years ahead in my then-current career, with the joy, determination and discipline of my first five years, I'd be better off now.
I won't take myself out of the game anymore.
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Further Reading:
"Investors, in contrast to employers, are not subject to discrimination laws when deciding whom to fund. And they are among the most outspoken in declaring their age preferences" in Special Report: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias (2012): reuters.com
Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford and started biotech company Theranos at age 19, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors to develop a revolutionary blood-testing technology, allegedly committed fraud, brought her company's worth down to $0 and is asking for more money. cbsnews.com/video/
Report: Disturbing drop in women in computing field: fortune.com
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
My abilities were stronger than ever. But the opaque awareness of age discrimination in my field -- illegal, yes, but prevalent nonetheless -- had me looking at other careers on evenings and weekends, instead of giving my job my all.
Don't let this happen to you.
Because we need to wage a campaign that alerts the partners at Kleiner Perkins, the editors selecting New York Times OpEds, even 61-year-old NatGeo reporter Katie Couric, from saying, often on the record, the blatantly discriminatory things they said within the last two years.
"I'm looking at your resume - you worked somewhere in 1998? How OLD are you?"
That's what one employer who was then only seven years my junior, but below the magic 40 threshold, said to me in a phone interview for a job in 2016.
Let's get to a place where people know how illegal it is to say things like that.
And to get to that place, a 40+ coder will have to keep coding like her resume says she's ageless.
If I'd had data and hard evidence, I'd be better off now.
If I hadn't succumbed to the self-doubt borne from an external factor -- my chronological age -- and had kept working like I had ten more earning years ahead in my then-current career, with the joy, determination and discipline of my first five years, I'd be better off now.
I won't take myself out of the game anymore.
------------------
Further Reading:
"Investors, in contrast to employers, are not subject to discrimination laws when deciding whom to fund. And they are among the most outspoken in declaring their age preferences" in Special Report: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias (2012): reuters.com
Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford and started biotech company Theranos at age 19, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors to develop a revolutionary blood-testing technology, allegedly committed fraud, brought her company's worth down to $0 and is asking for more money. cbsnews.com/video/
Report: Disturbing drop in women in computing field: fortune.com
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
