11 ms·

Claims of Age Bias Rise, but Standards of Proof Are High

113 points by DaveWalk 11y ago

kilroy123 11y ago
Personally, I worry about this in our industry. I plan to save, invest, and diversify my income. That way I can get out of the sooner, rather than later. I don't want to end up being a 50+ year old who can no longer get a job.
- manaskarekar 11y ago
  But isn't the number of "old" engineers going to increase with time? (Assuming you mean 'Software/Hardware Engineering' by 'our industry') So wouldn't the future be a little more forgiving when the number of 50-something engineers is quite a bit more than (presumably) what it is today?
  - kilroy123 11y ago
    Maybe, but I'd rather not risk it.
    - pc86 11y ago
      Why would it not? Presumably the age bias is largely the (obviously incorrect) assumption that a person in their 40s/50s/60s simply doesn't know enough or is unable to learn the new things they need to in order to operate in a startup. I think the 55 year old interviewing for a dev job with the 28 year old CTO will have a much easier time 25-30 years from now than today. At that point I think you're fighting against culture-wide age bias rather than industry-specific age bias.
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    The cultural climate will be more forgiving, but the economic climate less so, since there will likely be an oversupply of programmers (of all ages).
- Swizec 11y ago
  > I don't want to end up being a 50+ year old who can no longer get a job So just stay relevant? I'm 28, been coding for 19 years. What was relevant to learn when I was in middle and high school is completely useless now. All those endless hours spent learning how to make games in Pascal, irrelevant technologies. All those endless hours spent learning PHP3/4 and cobbling together websites and crude frameworks, irrelevant tech. But on a higher level, all of that has proven useful. Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant. Keep improving. Be an engineer, not just a coder.
  - terrywilcox 11y ago
    > Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant. I used to think like you. But I'm 51 now. I've discovered that I was wrong. The younger the technical interviewer, the less interested they are in my experience. I'm guessing that the less experience they have, the less value they see in experience. I suspect I was the same way 25 years ago. I now understand why good developers go on to be lousy managers. They get old and get pushed out of development. Mid-level management is all that's available to them. Fortunately I still have a job in an older development group. I still have some value, for now.
    - kamaal 11y ago
      >>But I'm 51 now. I've discovered that I was wrong. When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is. - Oscar Wilde I've seen clear bias in our industry. Though I'm in my 30's. I've seen people in my age group clearly discriminate against older programmers. Save, invest, prepare for your retirement and be safe instead of betting your life on a unforgiving younger generation.
      - 11y ago
mathgeek 11y ago
> The email, from their boss to a colleague at another university, said Ms. Taaffe and her fellow teachers were “an extraordinarily change-averse population of people almost all of whom are over 50, contemplating retirement (or not), and it’s like herding hippos.” This is simultaneously amusing and saddening.
rdl 11y ago
I still maintain there's age-cohort bias (anti boomer, etc.), not strictly age bias. In 2000, I remember most people over 30 being clueless about the Internet (given that the population who were familiar with the Internet in the 80swas so small...that core group was of course super clueful, but was of measure zero vs. people who were learning about it in college every year.) Now, it's largely been the case that anyone in engineering/tech has had extensive contact with the Internet, even if not a CS person, since the 90s. 30s/40s today are a lot different from 15 years ago. In 10-20y, there will be plenty of 50/60 year olds who had grown up with the Internet. So while this might be a problem now, it's correcting itself with time.
- zeroxfe 11y ago
  Sure, although there will continue to be new technologies that separate one generation from the next.
  - kctess5 11y ago
    While this may be true at some level, I'm not sure it will be as drastic a change as no-internet to internet. Young people today (and increasingly many not-so-young people) have been growing up with the concept of quickly changing "high technology" and expect incremental change. I myself feel like if the next biggest shiniest thing comes along, I will be ready to jump aboard, with the benefit of deeply knowing that which came before. This is a sentiment which requires constant learning, which may get old after a while, but for now I consider staying with the times as part of the job description.
    - Retric 11y ago
      I don't think it's going to be any time soon, but brain augmentation / neural interfaces are likely in the long term. Whenever they show up it's probably going to be a much larger leap than the internet. PS: Don't forget in many ways the steam engine was the last major leap and that was in the late 1700's.
- vox_mollis 11y ago
thefastlane 11y ago
it's particularly concerning to see this at a nonprofit, publicly funded research university. we would expect something a bit nobler from an institution of this category. the troubling transformation happening to the american university landscape will, i predict, have significant effects on society at large in the coming decades.
danharaj 11y ago
I think this is caused by how heavily age segregated our societies are, from education and child care to nursing homes and elder care.
- pc86 11y ago
  You're right this would be solved if we had babies in nursing homes and waited until someone was 80 to teach them calculus!
  - danharaj 11y ago
    Or maybe child care centers and nursing homes could be colocated near public areas like parks and libraries. The old and the young are good for each other. And maybe people should feel comfortable pursuing further education no matter how old they are. Although that's not what i had in mind when i mentioned education. Grades: Grades are the segregation. We are conditioned from a young age to accept social structures that discourage socialization between people of different age groups. Studies have shown that children learn better when they are in groups comprising a range of ages instead of just a single age. Most people have an aversion towards camaraderie and integration with people who are significantly younger or older for way too long. Children are only supposed to have a few adult authority figures in their life until college, and even then it's weird to be friends with someone older than a grad student. When does age discrimination end? Pretty sure the article highlights evidence that it doesn't end. Alternatives? Not hard to imagine. In other societies past and present (and hopefully future) people of all ages have ample opportunity to make strong social connections with people of other ages. Our social structures actively discourage cohesion between age cohorts.
  - true_religion 11y ago
    As an aside, I think that age-segregation in schooling results in behaviour problems. Teenagers want to take their behavioural cues from older children and young adults, but they simply don't have enough interaction with them so instead take their cues from what they believe to be true via mass media. Imagine how many fewer 15 year olds would ask "what can I do with calculus" if they had to brush shoulders with 20 year old engineering students and could visibly see what kind of projects you'd work on with a deeper mathematics background? Cross-polination programs do exist today, but its not the same thing as having it be systemic.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I am in my mid-60s and I don't feel like I have suffered any age bias either at large companies like Google or small startups I have helped. I sort of grew up with computers. My older brother and I got a mini version of a mechanical difference engine when I was a kid. When I was about 11 my Dad got me occasional use of a time sharing system, so that planted some desire in my brain for using computers. In high school I took a class at a local university. It disturbs me to hear younger people talking pessimistically about their future careers. I advise them to keep learning and working on things that are useful and that they enjoy working on. Edit: I did run into age bias, or at least I think it was: I had done a homework interview assignment and phone interviews for a back end job for Wikipedia and it seemed like they very much liked what I offered. Then, 1 minute into a video conference interview, I was brushed aside. So, I should have said that I have never had on the job age bias.
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  I've noticed that whether you are/were interested in management is a factor. Younger managers can imagine hiring older managers, but rarely engineers.
  - true_religion 11y ago
    I wonder why? Is it because there's something potentially odd about hiring someone with more experience (and perhaps thus a much greater skill level) than you when you are both on the same career track? I have never had to do it, but I'd like to think the 60-year old version of me would be much better at my job than I am. Thus, if I hire them, I'd wonder "why am I tech lead? It really should be the other way around".
    - tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
      > when you are both on the same career track I think this is one of the root issues, the perception that management is somehow the natural next set for software developers. Why should that be the case? It'd be like you trained all your life to be the best violin player you can be, then after some years somebody pats you on your shoulders and tells you it's time to start conducting. I am mid-career, and interestingly I had a couple of short stints in management early career, as much as it helped me quite a bit now with team leading duties and in seeing things from the point of view of my manager when we have 1 on 1s, I would never want to be in management as my full time job. Management and software engineering are, or should be, parallel tracks: there is no competition, so a software manager should be as thrilled to be able to hire an experience software developer as a young hospital administrator be excited if they are able to snag a renowned surgeon for their hospital.
6d6b73 11y ago
I recently realized that when my son in my age (37) I will be 67 years old, and getting (hopefully) ready to retire. This made me realize that in 30 years there is no way that I will be able to stay competitive in this field, and be able to find a decent job.
- outside1234 11y ago
  Why? What is the logic behind that? You will have 30 years more experience than him.
  - kamaal 11y ago
    And less 30 years worth energy, enthusiasm and liabilities. What is knowledge worth in the era where any algorithm can be looked up in a google search. Young people work for longer hours, don't fall sick often, come in on weekends and are more productive.
    - j_koreth 11y ago
      and don't forget about being on call 24/7 for any issues
    - tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
      and how do you know =which= algorithm to look up in google for your particular requirements? knowledge is not only knowing where the hammer is, knowledge is also knowing when a screwdriver would be more appropriate.
      - kamaal 11y ago
        Well that is easy too. Even if you have cursory information about a problem stating that in terms in which you could get an answer is very easy these days. You seem to be describing a situation which existed two decades back where a person's only portal to information was a library.
    - tremendo 11y ago
YuriNiyazov 11y ago
A tech CEO in his mid-fifties once told me: "There is no ageism in the valley - by the time you get to your forties and fifties, you are either a CTO, or you weren't very good to begin with".
- strasser 11y ago
  This is typical bullshit coming from some asshole manager. People who aspire to be managers think they're God's gift and it's the ending point for your career. By definition, there will always be less numbers of managers than technicians. Being a manager is a different skillset and not everyone WANTS to be a manager. Typical comment from a clueless pointy haired boss!
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    Yes, but those are the people who run companies.
mathattack 11y ago
I've found that I've had the best luck interviewing with people +/- 5 years of me. This has trumped gender or ethnic differences. (Sample size of just me) I'll also say that I only had a handful of non-college interviews before my mid-30s, so I don't have a ton of data on if this were true when I was younger.
disposeofnick9 11y ago
In the Standford med school, an IT admin named Can______ was pushed out for the treacherous crime of being older, and no pretext was used to pretend it was anything else because their supervisor admitted it openly. People have to realize this will be them, and that normalized hate is unacceptable and speak up against it.
- gaius 11y ago
  They will wish that they'd started the fight back against it, when they were in their 20s themselves...
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
I'm 54. I have just over 30 years of experience. I don't see "ageism", exactly. I see the experience bar being set very low. When "senior software engineer" means 5-7 years of experience, then what are you with 30 years? You're completely outside the comprehension of most hiring managers. If you want to be regarded as more than "old person with a bit more than 5-7 years of experience", then you need to use those years to learn how to do harder things than most people with 5-7 years of experience know how to do. Keep asking yourself "What's the next thing I need to learn to advance my career?" That probably isn't the next web framework (learning that just lets you tread water). It might be Android or iOS, though.
huherto 11y ago
I am 47. 27 years of professional experience. Got hooked in Basic. Fell in love with Pascal, C, C++, Smalltalk, Perl, and Java. Most new technologies are a re-encarnation of something that I did already the first time or second time around. I don't think my resume looks trendy. Still, I feel my skills are better than almost all of my friends and coworkers. They are 21-35. But, I see things that they don't. Subtle things like code organization, error handling, readability. I have a better CS background (compilers, networking,theory of languages,operating systems, relational theory, machine language). I know 100 ways in which a project can fail. My code is terse, I have been working on it for a long time. Yet, I am scared to loose my job. I don't know if the recruiter will look past my age and lack of trendy technologies in my resume.
- sosuke 11y ago
  If you want to feel more assured start interviewing now. See what questions they ask and feel more familiar with it. You don't have to go on site anywhere or actually take another job. The questions you'll be asked might be academic, things you never think about anymore but the wrong answers can bar you from the next step.
- zippergz 11y ago
  This is one of the reasons I spend time on the weekends doing projects in new technologies. I can put Rails, React, Angular, Swift, etc. on my resume and answer questions about them (and point to projects I've used them on). I see keeping up with new technologies as an important part of my career development. If someone is truly biased against me because of my age, there's not much I can do about that. But I definitely have control over whether someone is biased against me because I haven't kept up with technical developments.
  - halite 11y ago
    > I spend time on the weekends doing projects in new technologies. Is that weekends are for? I do that too but do wonder at times...
    - 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
I can tell age stories too. But lets get real: people change as they get old. They have different experiences and different referents. They have seen both more and less of the industry, since its been changing a long time but changes faster these days. Indeed, you get a different employee when you hire an older person. Sometimes that's helpful; sometimes not. We can't wave a wand and make that go away.
ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
Low 40s here. So far the only kind of "age-related" "discrimination" (note the quotation marks) that I faced that I know of have been the "you're too expensive for us, we'll hire a junior engineer and train him" type deal. I do prefer/tend to work for small companies and startups so even though I have a reasonably decent "enterprise development" and "CS" type backgrounds I'm more or less up to speed on (or at least aware of) the latest developments in the industry so if a potential employer wants to see me hack some homework CRUD assignment using whatever hot-shot stack they are looking to use it won't take me long to set it up.
louprado 11y ago
In the OP, the manager is frustrated with the "extraordinarily change-averse" employees over 50. One of the reasons I love being in tech (I am 44) is that you become so familiar with change your start seeing it as an inevitable force of continuous opportunity, instead of something to fear. That mindset keeps you young at heart. I suspect that age discrimination lawsuits are more likely from slow moving industries, like the academia example in the OP. The only place where I felt concerned about age discrimination is at YC. "How old are you?" is the third question on the application even before the question "What will your company do". Having been invited to YC HQ twice now (thank you), I don't think age discrimination is an issue and I can't fault them for asking. But being asked that question upfront still messes with my psychology.
AcerbicZero 11y ago
As someone who works at OSU I can confirm that this place is exceptionally backwards, and change can bring people to tears. Due to the severely broken HR system here young people generally leave within 2-5 years, and the older folks are almost always just waiting out the clock on their retirement. Age discrimination might be a serious problem elsewhere, but with OSU's chronic issues I'd be hard pressed to believe these people were discriminated against.

113 points by DaveWalk 11y ago

Personally, I worry about this in our industry. I plan to save, invest, and diversify my income. That way I can get out of the sooner, rather than later. I don't want to end up being a 50+ year old who can no longer get a job.

manaskarekar 11y ago
But isn't the number of "old" engineers going to increase with time? (Assuming you mean 'Software/Hardware Engineering' by 'our industry') So wouldn't the future be a little more forgiving when the number of 50-something engineers is quite a bit more than (presumably) what it is today?
- kilroy123 11y ago
  Maybe, but I'd rather not risk it.
  - pc86 11y ago
    Why would it not? Presumably the age bias is largely the (obviously incorrect) assumption that a person in their 40s/50s/60s simply doesn't know enough or is unable to learn the new things they need to in order to operate in a startup. I think the 55 year old interviewing for a dev job with the 28 year old CTO will have a much easier time 25-30 years from now than today. At that point I think you're fighting against culture-wide age bias rather than industry-specific age bias.
- theseatoms 11y ago
  The cultural climate will be more forgiving, but the economic climate less so, since there will likely be an oversupply of programmers (of all ages).
Swizec 11y ago
> I don't want to end up being a 50+ year old who can no longer get a job So just stay relevant? I'm 28, been coding for 19 years. What was relevant to learn when I was in middle and high school is completely useless now. All those endless hours spent learning how to make games in Pascal, irrelevant technologies. All those endless hours spent learning PHP3/4 and cobbling together websites and crude frameworks, irrelevant tech. But on a higher level, all of that has proven useful. Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant. Keep improving. Be an engineer, not just a coder.
- terrywilcox 11y ago
  > Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant. I used to think like you. But I'm 51 now. I've discovered that I was wrong. The younger the technical interviewer, the less interested they are in my experience. I'm guessing that the less experience they have, the less value they see in experience. I suspect I was the same way 25 years ago. I now understand why good developers go on to be lousy managers. They get old and get pushed out of development. Mid-level management is all that's available to them. Fortunately I still have a job in an older development group. I still have some value, for now.
  - kamaal 11y ago
    >>But I'm 51 now. I've discovered that I was wrong. When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is. - Oscar Wilde I've seen clear bias in our industry. Though I'm in my 30's. I've seen people in my age group clearly discriminate against older programmers. Save, invest, prepare for your retirement and be safe instead of betting your life on a unforgiving younger generation.
    - 11y ago

mathgeek 11y ago

> The email, from their boss to a colleague at another university, said Ms. Taaffe and her fellow teachers were “an extraordinarily change-averse population of people almost all of whom are over 50, contemplating retirement (or not), and it’s like herding hippos.” This is simultaneously amusing and saddening.

rdl 11y ago

I still maintain there's age-cohort bias (anti boomer, etc.), not strictly age bias. In 2000, I remember most people over 30 being clueless about the Internet (given that the population who were familiar with the Internet in the 80swas so small...that core group was of course super clueful, but was of measure zero vs. people who were learning about it in college every year.) Now, it's largely been the case that anyone in engineering/tech has had extensive contact with the Internet, even if not a CS person, since the 90s. 30s/40s today are a lot different from 15 years ago. In 10-20y, there will be plenty of 50/60 year olds who had grown up with the Internet. So while this might be a problem now, it's correcting itself with time.

zeroxfe 11y ago
Sure, although there will continue to be new technologies that separate one generation from the next.
- kctess5 11y ago
  While this may be true at some level, I'm not sure it will be as drastic a change as no-internet to internet. Young people today (and increasingly many not-so-young people) have been growing up with the concept of quickly changing "high technology" and expect incremental change. I myself feel like if the next biggest shiniest thing comes along, I will be ready to jump aboard, with the benefit of deeply knowing that which came before. This is a sentiment which requires constant learning, which may get old after a while, but for now I consider staying with the times as part of the job description.
  - Retric 11y ago
    I don't think it's going to be any time soon, but brain augmentation / neural interfaces are likely in the long term. Whenever they show up it's probably going to be a much larger leap than the internet. PS: Don't forget in many ways the steam engine was the last major leap and that was in the late 1700's.
vox_mollis 11y ago

thefastlane 11y ago

it's particularly concerning to see this at a nonprofit, publicly funded research university. we would expect something a bit nobler from an institution of this category. the troubling transformation happening to the american university landscape will, i predict, have significant effects on society at large in the coming decades.

danharaj 11y ago

I think this is caused by how heavily age segregated our societies are, from education and child care to nursing homes and elder care.

pc86 11y ago
You're right this would be solved if we had babies in nursing homes and waited until someone was 80 to teach them calculus!
- danharaj 11y ago
  Or maybe child care centers and nursing homes could be colocated near public areas like parks and libraries. The old and the young are good for each other. And maybe people should feel comfortable pursuing further education no matter how old they are. Although that's not what i had in mind when i mentioned education. Grades: Grades are the segregation. We are conditioned from a young age to accept social structures that discourage socialization between people of different age groups. Studies have shown that children learn better when they are in groups comprising a range of ages instead of just a single age. Most people have an aversion towards camaraderie and integration with people who are significantly younger or older for way too long. Children are only supposed to have a few adult authority figures in their life until college, and even then it's weird to be friends with someone older than a grad student. When does age discrimination end? Pretty sure the article highlights evidence that it doesn't end. Alternatives? Not hard to imagine. In other societies past and present (and hopefully future) people of all ages have ample opportunity to make strong social connections with people of other ages. Our social structures actively discourage cohesion between age cohorts.
- true_religion 11y ago
  As an aside, I think that age-segregation in schooling results in behaviour problems. Teenagers want to take their behavioural cues from older children and young adults, but they simply don't have enough interaction with them so instead take their cues from what they believe to be true via mass media. Imagine how many fewer 15 year olds would ask "what can I do with calculus" if they had to brush shoulders with 20 year old engineering students and could visibly see what kind of projects you'd work on with a deeper mathematics background? Cross-polination programs do exist today, but its not the same thing as having it be systemic.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I am in my mid-60s and I don't feel like I have suffered any age bias either at large companies like Google or small startups I have helped. I sort of grew up with computers. My older brother and I got a mini version of a mechanical difference engine when I was a kid. When I was about 11 my Dad got me occasional use of a time sharing system, so that planted some desire in my brain for using computers. In high school I took a class at a local university. It disturbs me to hear younger people talking pessimistically about their future careers. I advise them to keep learning and working on things that are useful and that they enjoy working on. Edit: I did run into age bias, or at least I think it was: I had done a homework interview assignment and phone interviews for a back end job for Wikipedia and it seemed like they very much liked what I offered. Then, 1 minute into a video conference interview, I was brushed aside. So, I should have said that I have never had on the job age bias.

mixmastamyk 11y ago
I've noticed that whether you are/were interested in management is a factor. Younger managers can imagine hiring older managers, but rarely engineers.
- true_religion 11y ago
  I wonder why? Is it because there's something potentially odd about hiring someone with more experience (and perhaps thus a much greater skill level) than you when you are both on the same career track? I have never had to do it, but I'd like to think the 60-year old version of me would be much better at my job than I am. Thus, if I hire them, I'd wonder "why am I tech lead? It really should be the other way around".
  - tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
    > when you are both on the same career track I think this is one of the root issues, the perception that management is somehow the natural next set for software developers. Why should that be the case? It'd be like you trained all your life to be the best violin player you can be, then after some years somebody pats you on your shoulders and tells you it's time to start conducting. I am mid-career, and interestingly I had a couple of short stints in management early career, as much as it helped me quite a bit now with team leading duties and in seeing things from the point of view of my manager when we have 1 on 1s, I would never want to be in management as my full time job. Management and software engineering are, or should be, parallel tracks: there is no competition, so a software manager should be as thrilled to be able to hire an experience software developer as a young hospital administrator be excited if they are able to snag a renowned surgeon for their hospital.

6d6b73 11y ago

I recently realized that when my son in my age (37) I will be 67 years old, and getting (hopefully) ready to retire. This made me realize that in 30 years there is no way that I will be able to stay competitive in this field, and be able to find a decent job.

outside1234 11y ago
Why? What is the logic behind that? You will have 30 years more experience than him.
- kamaal 11y ago
  And less 30 years worth energy, enthusiasm and liabilities. What is knowledge worth in the era where any algorithm can be looked up in a google search. Young people work for longer hours, don't fall sick often, come in on weekends and are more productive.
  - j_koreth 11y ago
    and don't forget about being on call 24/7 for any issues
  - tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
    and how do you know =which= algorithm to look up in google for your particular requirements? knowledge is not only knowing where the hammer is, knowledge is also knowing when a screwdriver would be more appropriate.
    - kamaal 11y ago
      Well that is easy too. Even if you have cursory information about a problem stating that in terms in which you could get an answer is very easy these days. You seem to be describing a situation which existed two decades back where a person's only portal to information was a library.
  - tremendo 11y ago

YuriNiyazov 11y ago

A tech CEO in his mid-fifties once told me: "There is no ageism in the valley - by the time you get to your forties and fifties, you are either a CTO, or you weren't very good to begin with".

strasser 11y ago
This is typical bullshit coming from some asshole manager. People who aspire to be managers think they're God's gift and it's the ending point for your career. By definition, there will always be less numbers of managers than technicians. Being a manager is a different skillset and not everyone WANTS to be a manager. Typical comment from a clueless pointy haired boss!
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  Yes, but those are the people who run companies.

mathattack 11y ago

I've found that I've had the best luck interviewing with people +/- 5 years of me. This has trumped gender or ethnic differences. (Sample size of just me) I'll also say that I only had a handful of non-college interviews before my mid-30s, so I don't have a ton of data on if this were true when I was younger.

disposeofnick9 11y ago

In the Standford med school, an IT admin named Can______ was pushed out for the treacherous crime of being older, and no pretext was used to pretend it was anything else because their supervisor admitted it openly. People have to realize this will be them, and that normalized hate is unacceptable and speak up against it.

gaius 11y ago
They will wish that they'd started the fight back against it, when they were in their 20s themselves...

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

I'm 54. I have just over 30 years of experience. I don't see "ageism", exactly. I see the experience bar being set very low. When "senior software engineer" means 5-7 years of experience, then what are you with 30 years? You're completely outside the comprehension of most hiring managers. If you want to be regarded as more than "old person with a bit more than 5-7 years of experience", then you need to use those years to learn how to do harder things than most people with 5-7 years of experience know how to do. Keep asking yourself "What's the next thing I need to learn to advance my career?" That probably isn't the next web framework (learning that just lets you tread water). It might be Android or iOS, though.

huherto 11y ago

I am 47. 27 years of professional experience. Got hooked in Basic. Fell in love with Pascal, C, C++, Smalltalk, Perl, and Java. Most new technologies are a re-encarnation of something that I did already the first time or second time around. I don't think my resume looks trendy. Still, I feel my skills are better than almost all of my friends and coworkers. They are 21-35. But, I see things that they don't. Subtle things like code organization, error handling, readability. I have a better CS background (compilers, networking,theory of languages,operating systems, relational theory, machine language). I know 100 ways in which a project can fail. My code is terse, I have been working on it for a long time. Yet, I am scared to loose my job. I don't know if the recruiter will look past my age and lack of trendy technologies in my resume.

sosuke 11y ago
If you want to feel more assured start interviewing now. See what questions they ask and feel more familiar with it. You don't have to go on site anywhere or actually take another job. The questions you'll be asked might be academic, things you never think about anymore but the wrong answers can bar you from the next step.
zippergz 11y ago
This is one of the reasons I spend time on the weekends doing projects in new technologies. I can put Rails, React, Angular, Swift, etc. on my resume and answer questions about them (and point to projects I've used them on). I see keeping up with new technologies as an important part of my career development. If someone is truly biased against me because of my age, there's not much I can do about that. But I definitely have control over whether someone is biased against me because I haven't kept up with technical developments.
- halite 11y ago
  > I spend time on the weekends doing projects in new technologies. Is that weekends are for? I do that too but do wonder at times...
  - 11y ago

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JoeAltmaier 11y ago

I can tell age stories too. But lets get real: people change as they get old. They have different experiences and different referents. They have seen both more and less of the industry, since its been changing a long time but changes faster these days. Indeed, you get a different employee when you hire an older person. Sometimes that's helpful; sometimes not. We can't wave a wand and make that go away.

ChemicalWarfare 11y ago

Low 40s here. So far the only kind of "age-related" "discrimination" (note the quotation marks) that I faced that I know of have been the "you're too expensive for us, we'll hire a junior engineer and train him" type deal. I do prefer/tend to work for small companies and startups so even though I have a reasonably decent "enterprise development" and "CS" type backgrounds I'm more or less up to speed on (or at least aware of) the latest developments in the industry so if a potential employer wants to see me hack some homework CRUD assignment using whatever hot-shot stack they are looking to use it won't take me long to set it up.

louprado 11y ago

In the OP, the manager is frustrated with the "extraordinarily change-averse" employees over 50. One of the reasons I love being in tech (I am 44) is that you become so familiar with change your start seeing it as an inevitable force of continuous opportunity, instead of something to fear. That mindset keeps you young at heart. I suspect that age discrimination lawsuits are more likely from slow moving industries, like the academia example in the OP. The only place where I felt concerned about age discrimination is at YC. "How old are you?" is the third question on the application even before the question "What will your company do". Having been invited to YC HQ twice now (thank you), I don't think age discrimination is an issue and I can't fault them for asking. But being asked that question upfront still messes with my psychology.

AcerbicZero 11y ago

As someone who works at OSU I can confirm that this place is exceptionally backwards, and change can bring people to tears. Due to the severely broken HR system here young people generally leave within 2-5 years, and the older folks are almost always just waiting out the clock on their retirement. Age discrimination might be a serious problem elsewhere, but with OSU's chronic issues I'd be hard pressed to believe these people were discriminated against.