IT Employment

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Funny ageism stories

0 helpful
17 replies

by paron 2 views

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

As a followup to the "Prejudice, cynism in the IT sector? Impossible!" thread, I thought it might be fun to share the most humiliating ageist interview experiences we've had. I had so many to choose from -- the two HR girls who told me stories about their fathers all through the interview, the guy who asked, "There's a lot of walking in this job, would you be OK with that?", and a host of others -- but my favorite happened while I was a 50-year old Master's Candidate.

One of my professors had a call from the Telephone Services office on Campus. They needed someone to munge a file from Excel to another format for import into some program they were buying. He recommended me, and sent me over.

When I told them why I was there, the head of the department said, "Oh we were expecting someone...." and then just stopped and got redder and redder. I finally suggested "Shorter?" (I'm 6'4"). Then we both started to laugh -- she was about my age, so she knew from both sides what the joke was.

17 replies

by jdclyde

Starting to get there.

There are a lot of messes I have to clean up after the young pups come in and screw things up.

The young pups have little work ethic, and no eye for detail. No pride in a job well done.

This is who you want to run IT? ARE YOU NUTS?

Before I took over as the lead admin, our mail server went down. The lead tech was on the job and had tech support on line so I left because I had a "showing" to go to because of a family member passing away.

The next morning I came in and the server was still not up. (server running, mail wasn't) A "consultant" had been called in to handle this, and I was not asked for any help so I stayed in my office until noon, when I had to leave for the funeral.

The next morning I came in and the server was still not up. The $1000 a day consultant had not come back as he had NO IDEA what the problem was.
This was a linux server running Domino (Lotus Notes).

I went in and all that came up on the screen over and over was too many files open, out of inodes.

I started to look this up calmy back at my desk on why we would be out of inodes when I had a thought. "too many files open"? What files? So I did a quick "find" command for all files created with in the last day. This pointed me to a directory that had a symbolic link to it's self and so had created an error file for each time it hit the loop until it used up all the inodes in that directory. (NOT FOLDER!)

Removed the Sym link, deleted the files and MAJICLY the mail took off again.

Went in the other room and told them what I did and the lead started to blame me for this happening and her comment in front of my boss showed to everyone she had NO IDEA the very basics of a linux server (which was how I was able to get the lead roll).

Went back to the .bash.history file and found that the young pup in the department had typed in the command to make the sym link but didn't put in the name of the destination. Linux defaults to the same name, Unix will not except this. So he retyped in the command, WITH the destination, with the link already their. Thus the loop.

Our mail server was down for three days because of a pup in a hurry that didn't associate what he did with the server INSTANTLY going down, and then did his best to try to deny it instead of fix it.

Until the up and comings START to develope an acceptable work ethic, they are NOT the solution but the problem. Colleges and boot camps do NOTHING to instill this.

by jbaker

Is this REALLY a case of ageism, or is this a case of someone with rights that they did not need to have? I think this proves that training and knowledge is needed prior to a user being loosed with SU, admin or root level access to a server. If you (as lead) had been looking over the "young pup"'s shoulder when he created his recursive command, you would have caught the error, and prevented three days of server downtime. Do not get me wrong here, I am not saying that it is your fault for the failure, but it is a failure in the way that many companies operate, in that they expect the administrators to know how to do everything with little or no training or skill enhancements.

by stress junkie

The story clearly states that he was not the lead admin at the time that this happened. It was the reason that he was made the lead admin.

Also, you wrote "If you (as lead) had been looking over the "young pup"'s shoulder when he created his recursive command.." Are you kidding? A lead admin cannot watch every command that another person enters. For all we know the young pup may have been regarded by management as a senior admin.

So jbaker, you are as wrong as you can be in your reply to this story.

by stress junkie

You seem to be saying that the young pup created the problem due to lack of interest in his/her job quality and lack of resposibility AND that those character flaws were due to that person's age. I would say that responsibility does not increase with age. I've worked with a lot of older people who were completely irresponsible. I've also known a few people, myself included, who've been very responsible since an early age.

I think that this story is more illustrative of our culture's devaluation of personal responsibility and quality of workmanship while compensating by attempting to blame others for our mistakes. In many corporations the CYA principle is openly practiced. The blame goes to the person who is least able to lie about their involvement in problems. You can see this openly practiced on Donald Trump's tv show "The Apprentice". The people who lie about their responsibility for failure and who successfully blame others are the ones rewarded. The people who accept blame are the ones that get fired. It's idiotic.

by firstpeter

Can I get an "amen" for Stress?!

Age has nothing to do with level of responsibility. My father brought me up with a solid work ethic - something I'm forever grateful for - and I've lived by that ethic since I was flipping the proverbial burgers (actually these were LITERAL burgers that were flipping) at age 16.

In my experience where youth generally runs in to problems is not knowing what they don't know. Book learning is only good to a point, after which you really need experience or practice to grow. Some "young pups" (I can raise my hand as guilty on this more than once in my past, and I'm betting so can 90% of the people who read this) will jump in feet first and end up in a less-than-good situation because of it.

HOWEVER, I can also raise my hand that _I_ got myself in over my head (not "my boss put me there" or "It's Joe's fault because he didn't do this right the first time") and _I_ get to deal with it.

Age is NOT the issue at hand with what's described - it's character.

by tonythetiger

But I certainly see similar attitudes in many of today's young people. Of course, maybe that's their parents' fault, and probably not helped any by teachers. All I know is that most young people think they should start making top dollar right out of college, and go up from there. Long gone are the days when a kid goes in at the bottom and learns the business from the ground up.

It's too bad, really, because they're really missing a lot of learning. Not just about the job, but about people and life.

by tony hopkinson

I've just done something, now it's broke.
First question
Could it have been me, and what did I actually just do.
After being a one man IT shop for about five years, I got used to suspicion always falling on me. Correctly so on more than a few occasions.
The correct response to a screw up is not to do it again.
The first thing any technical lead should know is technology can lead you astray.

by faith_michele

Being in the Army for 21 years does very little for your resume writing ability.

I had already knew that I had gotton a job when the HR person told me that I had a lot of experience on my resume but I didn't have to list the year that I graduated from High School (or any other training dates). She told me that sometimes people figure out your age from that HS date and you might be discriminated against for your age. It makes sence now but at the time I wondered if that was perceived as being dis-honest by trying to omit something. I have adapted to the change but I'm sure someone can look at me and guess close to my real age anyway.

by jessie

When I was in college, took a technical writing course, that covered writing your CV and Resume, was told in that class NEVER to give any dates for Highschool, and that being required to give a graduation date for highschool leaves the company you're applying for open to discrimination suits.

Granted the average age in this course was 35, so I know they were "speaking to" the older group, but I've always thought it was best to let experience speak for itself. If you have no experience, you flesh out your resume with "relevant skills." If you have no skills... you're SOL.

by cedrics

I just looked over my resume. Im 28, have been working desk/retailer support for the technical contract on our state lottery. I recently got promoted to systems operation/admin(one of 8) so I had to polish off my resume. I have since gone in and removed the dates for non relevant activities. While I have military experience and self experience, I am glad that people now cannot see what my 'age' is. Im just finishing my BS after a marriage (mine), family illness(cancer), military service(mine) and change of major program from music/English Lit. to Information Management/Comp. Sci. since 1995, so im a little weak in the employment area and my dates of attendance for school make me look unsettled.

Good idea. Thank you.

by aapjanaya

The last time I had a job interview, the girl complained about my Resume's length, she said they were interested only on my contemporary appliable skills.
About a year ago, when a young fellow saw the date on my college diploma, questioned if in those days machines resembled the ENIAC.
Another kid compared assembly language with Latin, he said it was dead, and aged me for knowing how to code it.
During the late 2000 syndrome years, I supervised a team of new grads, their known languages were C++, VBasic, and Pascal (as a decaying one), to them Cobol and Fortran were in prehistory. The project was meant to recode about 100 'jurassic' Fortran programs into 100 'cretaceous' Cobols along with 2000 year fixings. I made a fast review on the languages, with no restrictions, since we had Object Cobol 96 at the mainframe, which was almost the same we had in our PCs, if we didn't use its Visual features. For a time there were no managment complaints, not until the first tested module was released to the 'cambrian' maintenance guys, "this isn't Cobol code!" we were blamed, they were unwilling to learn anything beyond Cobol 74. Not even Cobol 85 features such as Screen and Report sections were allowed. Reports had to be 'printed' line by line, and 'seudoscreens' formatted with escape codes. When I explained this to my kids all but one resigned immediately. Maintenance seniles were in their late 40's, as well as myself, but my attitude was in its 20's. My manager dropped all projects with this customer 2 weeks later, at that time there were many options elsewhere.

by stress junkie

I also credit my parents for instilling these values into my character. My father in particular wouldn't accept blame passing. Nor would he accept a shoddy job.

by smorty71

The "two HR girls" are probably talking about that same interview in a discussion thread on sexism. :)

by paron

It was snappier than "two women who appeared to be much younger than me and worked in HR rather than any technical area," so my fingers just up and (stereo)typed it before I could get them stopped.

But your point -- that I might have treated them in an equally demeaning manner in the interview -- is a possibility. I don't believe that I did, even after they peered owlishly at the html sample I provided for several minutes before I realized they were looking at the browser rendering instead of looking at the markup.

No, that 'interview' ended in the reception area, as I realized after several minutes of stories about their father's retirements, fumbling attempts to send emails, etc.

This was followed by a whole lot of not-clarifying-the-job-requirements and not-exploring-in-more-depth-my-qualifications. The rest of the 'interview' was a pathetic demonstration of two budding myrmidons trying to dump me without giving me grounds for legal action -- mildly amusing in retrospect, but hard to describe.

by smorty71

I know you didn't mean anything by it.

I once had a male co-worker who used the word "girls" (and to be fair, he uses the word "boys," too). A female co-worker (who used to be his boss) always got a little bit upset when he used it. I had never given it a second thought because he used both "boys" and "girls"; however, she felt it was inappropriate.

Your post reminded me of that, so I thought I would bring it up.

sm

by paron

And then I thought, "Well, maybe that's part of the ageism -- I might diss younger colleagues without realizing it." So, I went ahead and finished the story -- but I have to admit I went to dictionary.com to check the spelling on a couple of those words I used/made up!

This discussion is closed to new replies.