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Startups & Side Hustles
Hey there,

My parents were in town visiting this weekend. While they're past middle age now, they're both likely going to work for many more years, so it was interesting talking to them about age discrimination in their fields.

"It's hard to get hired as a teacher when you're almost 60," my mom pointed out. You're competing against younger, cheaper, and more energetic new hires. "I'm just lucky I don't look my age."

There was a related article I read last week called "Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders". With life expenctancy at all-time highs, I'm guessing the problem of age discrimintation isn't going away.

So I'm wrestling with two questions now:
  • As a manager in tech, how can I avoid discriminating against older hires? and
  • As an aging human being, how can I stay relevant in my career?
There's not one answer, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. What are you doing to stay relevant in the ever-changing tech world?
Recommended Reading*
Product development and engineering best practices are wildly different at a startup than they are in a large corporation. Brikman's "Hello Startup" takes a startup-first approach to teaching product development whether you're technical or not.

Around the Web
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Theranos is under the spotlight again in a new HBO documentary. I read "Bad Blood" last year, so I can't wait to see this.

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"In startup-land, not many people think about minimalism. Growth equals success, and success is the result of focus and ambition. But ambition itself can be the biggest enemy of focus."

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"Choosing a niche is the easiest advice to give and the hardest advice to take. When you don’t have traction, it feels like choosing a niche will exclude the few people who are coming in the door. When we did, everything changed...Messaging became clear, the product roadmap was trimmed, and the prospect lists practically wrote itself."

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"Something that almost works is impressive for an engineer, but unacceptable for a user that needs to get a problem solved."

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Back in 2017, I made a personal goal to get accepted to speak at 4 conferences. I made it and used the experience to launch CFP Land.

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Sponsor*
I wear the same thing every day: t-shirt and jeans. Wohven reminds me every month to rotate an ugly old shirt out for the fresh new one they sent me. It might not seem like a huge life hack, but micro-optimizations like this add up.

Tools
Connect with experts who will support you in perfecting your craft and navigating industries. Unlock job referrals workflows, paid projects and more.

Raising money is a time-consuming process, so while you usually have the best results from personal connections, a tool like Angel Match might be a good place to start anyway.

I've had to build more dashboards and exporters than I can remember, so I could definitely see using this.

When you need to embed data from Google sheets, this is a fantastic solution.

Thanks for reading,

Karl Hughes, Portable CTO