5 ms·

Well it might change a lot as suddenly number of coders in their 40s goes up.

by tn13 10y ago

jganetsk 10y ago
Do you have any data demonstrating this will happen?
- sosuke 10y ago
  I guess they assume, like I do, that the current set of coders will continue to age. Will the current 20 year old coders shun 40 year old candidates in 20 years?
  - jganetsk 10y ago
    Current set of coders will continue to age, but they may also stop identifying as coders. Maybe because of ageism.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Is the software development industry not bigger than it was twenty years ago? Developers still age. Ergo, as development as an industry grows, at a delayed rate, the number of aging developers will also grow.
  - jganetsk 10y ago
    That assumes they remain being developers as they age.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      I suppose, but the cost of a career switch to a job that is similar or greater in pay is quite high. What do you think is the likely place a developer who is 25 today will be in 20 years?
- ewjordan 10y ago
  See http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/images/2-9-chart2.png http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/images/2-9-chart2.png A large number of the people that made up the 3x growth in IT between 1990 and 2000 are just about to hit 40 now. That's a very rough measure, just looking at overall industry size over time (and granted, it's IT rather than startups), but it at least mildly suggests that the demographics are going to start flattening a bit as we hit more of a steady state rather than a period of extreme growth.
linkregister 10y ago
Indeed! The primary reason for the median age in Google and Facebook being so low is that the median age for programmers is low [1]. The reason for this low median age? There are more young programmers than old because it's an expanding field! Though I must admit that the evidence points to current significant age biases in the hiring of these companies. The most successful older software developers I've come across have established themselves as experts in their field. They have successfully predicted their given technology would be successful or pioneered it themselves. I guess the frontend developer practice of changing stacks every six months has some merit. 1. http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#developer-profile-age http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#deve...
- jganetsk 10y ago
  The primary reason for the median age in Google and Facebook being so low is that the median age for programmers is low Are you sure you have the cause and effect going in the right direction? It could be that the median age for programmers is low precisely because of ageism.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    So I'm staring down the bore of my 40th birthday. That means that I graduated college in 1999. When I was looking at colleges (in 1995), many of the colleges that I looked at didn't have a computer science department. Many of the ones that did, had had that CS department for less than five years. My class ('99, again) had twice as many CS majors as did '98. '00 had twice as many CS majors as '99 -- because this was the first dot-com boom, of course. At my college, my freshman year was the first year that every dorm room was wired for ethernet (obviously, wifi was not a thing). I suspect that the arrow of causality goes two ways, and that part of the reason for the low median age of programmers is indeed age discrimination. But it also true that 40 is an age which means that you were college-age during the first dot-com boom, and the occupation "programmer" suddenly was looking a lot more attractive and absolutely no doubt was pulling in a bunch of young people who ten years earlier would not have been interested in being programmers.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
That should have happened long ago. I did CS and programming as high school subjects and am past 50. The tens of thousands of extra people trained up to solve the millenium bug crisis (that mostly didn't happen) are probably around 40 now. Of my tech friends around my age a lot have drifted into other things - often dramatically different. Some because they were sick of IT (often for similar reasons), and some because it was time for a change. Quite a few ran into ageism (agencies and HR rather than the actual techie people as a rule) and staying programming past 40 is somehow seen as failing your career rather than going into management.
- aliston 10y ago
  For us younger, but not quite so young folks... what sorts of things have they gone into? Would you say that there is a general trend, or are they all over the map?
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Much less time in an office or behind a keyboard and clear emphasis on tangible things and skills. Two became tree surgeons (opposite ends of the country and they don't know each other). Those two probably wreck statistical validity. :) Of the rest two are in environmental sector that fitted their views well, one in light engineering. So it goes on. Most haven't moved to other intellectual pursuits. If I paraphrase Feynman, only a little, I think it might nail the underlying: "It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they’re depressed, or they’re happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In IT, it’s sort of general and large" and ephemeral. He was talking about his art, but it seems to fit.
  - wott 10y ago
    In my experience: * there were quite many who understood that engineering jobs would not be for them and who became teachers as their first job. * another lot were those who had no interest in engineering, they only happened to end up in engineering schools because that was the place to be. Since their only goal was money, they moved to business/management before starting an engineering job. Some others started with engineering but noticed that they sucked at it or that it did not pay enough, so they moved to Technical Sales (which is a glorified name for just Sales, since they've always shown little interest and aptitude for technique beyond the buzzwords). * then you have those who gave up after 10/15 years, fed up with the tech environment, the futility of the job, the insane hours, etc. 2 are bartenders, 1 shopkeeper, 1 sailing instructor, 1 gardener, 1 goat herder (caricatured but true), 1 musician, 1 'traveller', 2 unemployed.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
This is something I wonder about. There has always been a bias in tech against people who don't do continuous learning, and often that is associated with being older, so the question is biased against age? or non-learning? But the cohort of people who were influenced in college in the dot com days to go into tech and started graduating from college in the early 2000's is large. And so the cohort of people above a certain age is growing large, and if you actually discriminate against all that talent you will end up giving an advantage to the people who do not discriminate as they will have a better pool of people to choose from to hire. Going to be an interesting decade.

Well it might change a lot as suddenly number of coders in their 40s goes up.

by tn13 10y ago

Well it might change a lot as suddenly number of coders in their 40s goes up.

jganetsk 10y ago

Do you have any data demonstrating this will happen?

sosuke 10y ago
I guess they assume, like I do, that the current set of coders will continue to age. Will the current 20 year old coders shun 40 year old candidates in 20 years?
- jganetsk 10y ago
  Current set of coders will continue to age, but they may also stop identifying as coders. Maybe because of ageism.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Is the software development industry not bigger than it was twenty years ago? Developers still age. Ergo, as development as an industry grows, at a delayed rate, the number of aging developers will also grow.
- jganetsk 10y ago
  That assumes they remain being developers as they age.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    I suppose, but the cost of a career switch to a job that is similar or greater in pay is quite high. What do you think is the likely place a developer who is 25 today will be in 20 years?
ewjordan 10y ago
See http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/images/2-9-chart2.png http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/images/2-9-chart2.png A large number of the people that made up the 3x growth in IT between 1990 and 2000 are just about to hit 40 now. That's a very rough measure, just looking at overall industry size over time (and granted, it's IT rather than startups), but it at least mildly suggests that the demographics are going to start flattening a bit as we hit more of a steady state rather than a period of extreme growth.

linkregister 10y ago

Indeed! The primary reason for the median age in Google and Facebook being so low is that the median age for programmers is low [1]. The reason for this low median age? There are more young programmers than old because it's an expanding field! Though I must admit that the evidence points to current significant age biases in the hiring of these companies. The most successful older software developers I've come across have established themselves as experts in their field. They have successfully predicted their given technology would be successful or pioneered it themselves. I guess the frontend developer practice of changing stacks every six months has some merit. 1. http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#developer-profile-age http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#deve...

jganetsk 10y ago
The primary reason for the median age in Google and Facebook being so low is that the median age for programmers is low Are you sure you have the cause and effect going in the right direction? It could be that the median age for programmers is low precisely because of ageism.
- aetherson 10y ago
  So I'm staring down the bore of my 40th birthday. That means that I graduated college in 1999. When I was looking at colleges (in 1995), many of the colleges that I looked at didn't have a computer science department. Many of the ones that did, had had that CS department for less than five years. My class ('99, again) had twice as many CS majors as did '98. '00 had twice as many CS majors as '99 -- because this was the first dot-com boom, of course. At my college, my freshman year was the first year that every dorm room was wired for ethernet (obviously, wifi was not a thing). I suspect that the arrow of causality goes two ways, and that part of the reason for the low median age of programmers is indeed age discrimination. But it also true that 40 is an age which means that you were college-age during the first dot-com boom, and the occupation "programmer" suddenly was looking a lot more attractive and absolutely no doubt was pulling in a bunch of young people who ten years earlier would not have been interested in being programmers.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

That should have happened long ago. I did CS and programming as high school subjects and am past 50. The tens of thousands of extra people trained up to solve the millenium bug crisis (that mostly didn't happen) are probably around 40 now. Of my tech friends around my age a lot have drifted into other things - often dramatically different. Some because they were sick of IT (often for similar reasons), and some because it was time for a change. Quite a few ran into ageism (agencies and HR rather than the actual techie people as a rule) and staying programming past 40 is somehow seen as failing your career rather than going into management.

aliston 10y ago
For us younger, but not quite so young folks... what sorts of things have they gone into? Would you say that there is a general trend, or are they all over the map?
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Much less time in an office or behind a keyboard and clear emphasis on tangible things and skills. Two became tree surgeons (opposite ends of the country and they don't know each other). Those two probably wreck statistical validity. :) Of the rest two are in environmental sector that fitted their views well, one in light engineering. So it goes on. Most haven't moved to other intellectual pursuits. If I paraphrase Feynman, only a little, I think it might nail the underlying: "It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they’re depressed, or they’re happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In IT, it’s sort of general and large" and ephemeral. He was talking about his art, but it seems to fit.
- wott 10y ago
  In my experience: * there were quite many who understood that engineering jobs would not be for them and who became teachers as their first job. * another lot were those who had no interest in engineering, they only happened to end up in engineering schools because that was the place to be. Since their only goal was money, they moved to business/management before starting an engineering job. Some others started with engineering but noticed that they sucked at it or that it did not pay enough, so they moved to Technical Sales (which is a glorified name for just Sales, since they've always shown little interest and aptitude for technique beyond the buzzwords). * then you have those who gave up after 10/15 years, fed up with the tech environment, the futility of the job, the insane hours, etc. 2 are bartenders, 1 shopkeeper, 1 sailing instructor, 1 gardener, 1 goat herder (caricatured but true), 1 musician, 1 'traveller', 2 unemployed.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

This is something I wonder about. There has always been a bias in tech against people who don't do continuous learning, and often that is associated with being older, so the question is biased against age? or non-learning? But the cohort of people who were influenced in college in the dot com days to go into tech and started graduating from college in the early 2000's is large. And so the cohort of people above a certain age is growing large, and if you actually discriminate against all that talent you will end up giving an advantage to the people who do not discriminate as they will have a better pool of people to choose from to hire. Going to be an interesting decade.