16 ms·

Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

• vhogemann 9y ago
  I don't know how it would make sense for business, unless they're trying to replace you with somebody less experienced because it's cheaper. In that case, it doesn't sound like the kind of place I would want to work for anyway.
  • intellectronica 9y ago
    It doesn't make sense, but often people and businesses are concerned about it being awkward for someone to report to a manager younger than them. Rather than educate and reassure they prefer to avoid this altogether by not hiring older people. For many, there is also a perception that for someone to not have climbed the corporate ladder by the time they reach their 40s is a signal of failure. With younger workers this signal doesn't exist.
    • oddlyaromatic 9y ago
      On the management side (non-tech) I initially felt awkward managing people older than me too. After some time I figured out that it is not that hard to have a relationship where their experience and knowledge is a good part of it. Their expertise is valued and I often ask for input when making decisions. I learn a lot. But also, they don't mind getting instructions, feedback, and training from somebody 20 years younger. We all get how the roles fit together, and my job is both to make the final call on stuff, and serve the people I manage so they have what they need and know they are doing a good job. I used to feel bad saying "good job" to somebody 20 years older than me (like who am I to say it?). Again, though, I figured out how to give more specific feedback and thank people for how hard they work and the impact it makes. This all took a while to get right because of my own hangups. I could see some people preferring to manage younger employees because the authority relationship is more "natural" but that's surface level bs at the end of the day I think.
    • humanrebar 9y ago
      > ...there is also a perception that for someone to not have climbed the corporate ladder by the time they reach their 40s is a signal of failure... How is this not age discrimination? Or do people make the case that age discrimination makes business sense?
      • intellectronica 9y ago
        This is not age discrimination, it is a description of one of the causes for age discrimination. Of course it doesn't make business sense, and it's arguably immoral, but biases exist and the only defense against them is to be aware of them.
      • eric_h 9y ago
        Age discrimination can also be salary discrimination. People with more experience rightfully require more in salary.
        • humanrebar 9y ago
          If employers make it clear what they are willing to pay (like in every other industry), people not willing to work for that will turn down the job. I don't see a lot of "well, we have can offer you $X and let you prove yourself or see if something bigger opens up".
        • intellectronica 9y ago
          This is a view that actually sometimes prevents older people from managing it in market. Because of how fast technology moves, much of your experience from 10+ years ago isn't very relevant today, so if you expect a higher salary because of it you will be disappointed. It's important to be realistic and accept that if you've been working since your early 20s, you accumulate experience that might result in a higher salary, but only until you reach your late 30s. At that point you just compete in a market with other experienced people and your value (based on experience) doesn't increase much. You can still increase your value to an employer by acquiring a skill that is in high demand, but you're not more qualified than someone less experienced who has that skill.
• SeanDav 9y ago
  > "...Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said that young people are more intelligent while speaking to a group of entrepreneurs " I would be fascinated to hear if his opinion changes once he is 40+ ...
  • DrJohanson 9y ago
    I'm curious if any study supports that
  • amptorn 9y ago
    That wasn't an opinion, that was propaganda. It was and still is in his best interests that young people buy that line, because from his perspective young people are not so much smarter as cheaper: fewer commitments, willing to put up with longer hours.
    • hellbreaker 9y ago
      That's quite true. Once people have commitments like a family, they are less willing to put up with companies that demand so much.
      • collyw 9y ago
        No family, but been around long enough to see through the bullshit.
    • gutnor 9y ago
      Less experience to see through the bullshit from companies too and they do not yet really believe they are just a number in the cost center column in HR and that the company they are working with will not waste 1 second before getting rid of you.
  • danellis 9y ago
    They are, aren't they? Doesn't intelligence peak and then drop with age? However, I'm sure it's more than compensated for by experience.
• j10t 9y ago
  There is substantial scientific evidence showing age-related cognitive decline begins relatively early in adulthood. The science is not controversial. http://examinedexistence.com//wp-content/uploads/2013/12/crystallized-fluid.jpg http://examinedexistence.com//wp-content/uploads/2013/12/cry... This is a simplified view but communicates the idea. Some might say crystallized intelligence is under-valued in tech. That might be true. But then we should discuss that, not through the lens of social justice against age discrimination.
  • DrJohanson 9y ago
    Maybe experience can be more valuable than raw cognitive ability?
  • sillysaurus3 9y ago
    On behalf of all old people: Fuck that, and fuck the idea that cognitive performance alone should determine whether someone in our industry can eat. Because as much as we love to tout that every programmer is living with a house and a mortgage and a happy family, I happen to know for a fact that some are struggling to eat. Eh. Not exactly an objective viewpoint, I know. But to maybe drain away some of the energy I just threw into that: Being old is our shared destination. It'll happen to you too. It'll happen to me. How is this a productive outlook? I've known some amazingly productive old people. I learned from one of the best in the gamedev industry. He was my mentor, and basically a mini carmack. When I hear statements like this, I cannot fathom how people believe this myth that old people are inherently less able to kick your ass at programming. I really hesitate to bring this up, but there's this dopey argument that HN trolls love to bring up, where they point to a certain area of science and say "Look! Black people are inherently dumber. The science says so." Yet the one black man that I was fortunate enough to work with in our industry -- one, out of six companies, there was only one -- was the most effective, cool coworker I was fortunate enough to know. It's incredibly easy to point to some science and say "Oh, I'm objective." But I invite you to re-read http://www.paulgraham.com/bias.html http://www.paulgraham.com/bias.html carefully, and realize that if what you say is true, then our industry is populated with stellar outliers. That's the definition of bias, right? They have to be stellar to overcome it. So why would you want argue that the stellar people that managed to get through the gauntlet of discrimination should be looked down upon?
• rdl 9y ago
  Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I think a lot of the discrimination is specifically anti-Boomer or anti-people-who-didn't-grow-up-with-Internet, not specific to age. If true, then 40 will be the 30 of 10 years ago.
  • scaryclam 9y ago
    Which would be funny since the people who didn't grow up with the Internet are the ones who invented it.
    • rdl 9y ago
      A very small percentage of people born in 1930-1955 were involved in building the Internet. I suspect people like Vint Cerf don't get age-discriminated against -- we're mostly concerned with age discrimination against people in the ~35-70 age range who don't have specific major accomplishments. (I was born in 79, but first got (limited) Internet access in 1986 or so, and much more Internet access in 1990. At the time, everyone was ~18-~40yo. There were some BBS people who were slightly younger, but even that only kicked off in the 80s.) There really weren't a lot of people working on Internet technology until the first dotcom boom of the 1990s -- people who were generally young at the time. Even then, it was a small percentage of people compared to today. There were more people involved in UNIX, telcos, general technology, etc. who were early adopters of the Internet in the 90s, or who retained access from university in the 70s or even 80s and continued in parallel with their primary career, but in the mid/late 90s, "knows how to use the Internet" was still a useful selector in hiring, as it was rather rare. There are all the other reasons why older people get discriminated against (perceived and real higher salary expectations, working requirements, location inflexibility), but those aren't as specific to technology. Hence, I think the actual level of discrimination in tech is going to fall to be the same as a lot of other fields.
  • christocracy 9y ago
    I’m 45. I was downloading games from BBSes with my C=64 in 1986; connecting to BBSes with long-distance calls. Yes, we grokked the internet immediately and, as a group, developed it while you were watching cartoons and playing on your XBox.
• ojbyrne 9y ago
  “Indeed found that 17% of survey respondents said the average employee age at their company is between 20 and 30 years old, while 29% of survey respondents said the average employee age is between 31 and 35. An additional 27% of respondents said the average age at their company was 36-40 years old. That leaves just 26% of the workplace roles for staffers over 40, Indeed found.” Innumeracy sucks at any age.
• kayoone 9y ago
  I feel this might change when more of the current young generation of engineers are getting older since there just weren't as many tech workers 20 years ago, so it's still relatively rare to see 50 year old developers. Besides there are many places outside of Silicon Valley or the US were experienced engineers are very welcome.
  • intellectronica 9y ago
    I agree. My experience has been that ageist views (just like sexism, racism, homophobia, etc) are more often expressed by people of previous generations and that millennials are actually more flexible and open to the idea that they would work with someone older (or of another gender, different skin colour, etc).
    • humanrebar 9y ago
      From that perspective I'm mostly hopeful, but I find less tolerance in millennials in other ways. There seems to be less willingness or ability to put political or ideological differences aside when it's appropriate. Maybe in a more long-tail world, there's less practice in compartmentalizing and tolerance (i.e., putting up with things you don't like).
    • bitsnbytes 9y ago
      "I agree. My experience has been that ageist views (just like sexism, racism, homophobia, etc) are more often expressed by people of previous generations and that millennials are actually more flexible and open to the idea that they would work with someone older (or of another gender, different skin colour, etc)." I think millennials are far more open when it comes to sexism, racism, homophobia, etc by far. However, when it comes to ageism not so much.
    • wott 9y ago
      Millenials express a level of hate towards the previous generations that I never witnessed before (apart from the usual teenage rebellion times). Some of the stuff I read or hear honestly scares the shit out of me, some of them would throw people like my folks or older (or younger) in a dumpster if they had the occasion. Some of them bought into the libertarian craze, so they consider older people useless, and anyone useless is garbage that can be tossed away; but it does not only come from that side: other ones consider the previous generations responsible for anything bad (and for a wide definition of 'bad') that happens to them, and those guilty people (indistinctly guilty) should be punished. Are these extreme cases? Probably. I hope so. But I do not remember such a trend in previous generations. To go back to the point about work, I have never witnessed or read the previous generations express any problem working with people older than them, on the contrary, they showed (some) respect and expected some knowledge to be gained from them. I also think that the age stratification in jobs is higher now than ever. The workplace is less and less varied over the years (I do not give a damn about skin colour, I am concerned about age and social origin), and tolerance (and simply knowledge) of people with a different social background goes down.
• code4tee 9y ago
  Startups and such typically don’t want young people because their smarter, it’s because their more gullible career wise. Sure some people get a bit stale with age but some also get far far smarter and their experience can be very valuable. “Hey guys we have no business plan or customers, but please pull a few more all nighters to finish this bit of code.” 22 year old living with 5 roommates is like “yes sure, whatever you say” while 40 year old with lots of experience is like “you don’t know what the F you’re doing... I’m outta here.” That’s why.
  • cjsuk 9y ago
    Exactly this. I’ve always been the “I’m outta here” guy. Never been wrong. I actually worked for a startup a number of years ago and quit after two hours. A big chunk of the startup industry is preying on the gullible.
    • nsxwolf 9y ago
      What made you decide to quit after 2 hours? I'm trying to imagine something. It would have to be along the lines of "CEO exposed himself to me in the stairwell". Anything else I'd probably give it the benefit of the doubt until the end of the day at least.
      • cjsuk 9y ago
        Well it turned out that the legality of what the startup was doing was extremely questionable and ethically a line I couldn't cross. They are a quite notorious outfit still running. Basically the objective was to rip as many people off as possible by buying up a scarce resource and then inflating the price. They have faced legislative and legal battles and protests outside their HQ since. They had to move to a foreign country in the end. Me, I went to lunch in Subway over the road, scoffed a meatball marinara while contemplating the situation, concluded "fuck this" and went home. Plus I arrived to a world of no source control and ADO datasets in .Net which nearly made the meatball marinara come back out again.
  • donatj 9y ago
• sgt101 9y ago
  Is this to do with health insurance costs? Are young developers cheaper to insure?
  • alkonaut 9y ago
    No, simply because it's not limited to the US where employers pay health insurance.
• throw2016 9y ago
  Something for students to think about, in most other careers you study for, experience is valued and you usually end up being respected and highly paid, think management, doctors, civil engineers etc. In tech it works the other way and you will be insignificant by 40.
  • FabHK 9y ago
    Not sure why this is down voted. It is an important consideration, unless you don't plan to live a long and meaningful life.
    • intellectronica 9y ago
      Because it's not true. The right lesson to learn is that in any occupation, tech included, experience alone isn't enough and you need to always continue to learn and acquire new skills to stay relevant.
  • seattle_spring 9y ago
    Those are not the same things at all. My experience with "older" engineers puts them into 2 camps: * Those that have grown into leads, have become masters of their craft, have major accomplishments, and are still willing to admit there's always more to learn: No problem getting a job, very highly paid and sought after. * Those that have a 20 year resume of 1 to 2 year jobs. No title progression, bad and arrogant attitudes, have completely let themselves go physically. Always talk down to other engineers, claiming how they did it 20 years ago was so much better ("why don't we use vanilla JS instead of this fancy React mumbo jumbo"). Almost always QA "engineers" / SDETs. Cannot find a job because they're not valuable, but claim ageism. If you had a doctor that claimed that we did medicine better 30 years ago, and hopped around to new hospitals every 6 months to 2 years, you bet your ass they'd be hard-pressed finding a new job as well.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• SQL2219 9y ago
  Hmmmm, "shortage of tech workers".
• nomercy400 9y ago
  As somebody who does interviews for developers in a Java shop, a very blunt view of things: Any coding you've done more than five years ago isn't relevant anymore. I can't remember what I did five years ago. It is probably outdated, replaced or not in use any more. Looking back at my projects from five years ago, I would probably not agree with most of the code, as I've learned a lot of new things. I do care about your projects. This is the most important part for me. What projects have you done, what was your role, what did you do, what did you use, what was the result, and what are your proud of. Also, I hope you varied your work a bit, because when I read you worked 10 years on the same system, it tells me you didn't think enough out of the box and I'd worry about your skills outside of that system. Also, surely you did smaller projects in those 10 years than just saying you 'maintainted and implemented new features for system X'. I don't care about your Delphi, BASIC, COBOL or Java 1.2 skills (looking at your CORBA). I do care about your Java 8, mobile, and recent webtechnology skills. You don't know what the technology behind a website is? Then it's a minus, as you've missed out on ten years of technological advancements in your field. I'm not saying you should be expert in web technologies or frameworks, but at least have a basic understanding about HTML5, CSS and Javascript, what they do and what they are used for. Like, the basics. I care little about your soft skill trainings, they might have some value. I don't care about your framework trainings, I'd rather see you use them in your work experience. I do care about your Java (Programmer 2) certification, because you are working in a Java shop and as somebody who has done the certification I know the value of preparing for the certification, and I know you are dedicated for this. I care about what libraries/frameworks you would use, and will ask about the reason for using one over the other. This gives me an idea that you can look outside of your comfort zone, be able to accept other ideas, know how to analyze functionalities of a framework, and know that you should understand a library's internals before using it because of the hype. I care about your theoretical/general skills: Do you know how to structure your program, do you know about SOLID principles, do you know design patterns, etc. These give me an idea if you can write larger programs, that can be maintained. I care about how you answer my questions, how you respond to be challenged on a point, how you will defend a point, how you will convince me to use a new library that I don't know about (which I actually do) and sell me it's good points. This is because I want to see you speak the same language of the team, and can communicate your opinion in a professional manner. Get irritated or super-defensive, you probably aren't a good fit for the team, as you'll have colleagues that challenge you as well, and you will just be irritated all day long. All these give me an idea on how passionate you are about developing software. Not passionate as in 'go spend 70hrs a week here', but passionate as in seeing software development as your craft, your reputation, your skill. In the end I care about three things: Can your do the work in a professional way (hard-skills), will you be able to work well with your colleagues (soft-skills), and will you be happy to work here (retention).
• oldboyFX 9y ago
  I see all these articles about the average employee age at startups being 20-30, and how older developers face discrimination. Now this is 100% anecdotal, but I know a few 45+ year old developers and most of them are long-time corporate employees and are not really interested in the whole startup / bloggosphere / tech hype world. They have good stable jobs (think Perl, .NET, Java), and are mainly focused on their families and other hobbies. It’s well know that people tend to become more conservative with age, so this doesn’t really suprise me. None of them thought they were being discriminated against at all. Moreover, my colleague worked with a 58 year old guy who started programming when he was 50+. He currently works for a super hot "big data" startup as a lead Ruby on Rails engineer, and from what I've heard, he's really, really good at his job (and very well paid). Older developers of HN, what are your experiences? Everyone else, did you ever witness a case where someone was discriminated based on their age?
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    I've seen people looking to switch from "good stable jobs" not given consideration while someone straight from college would be interviewed. Seems to me that an experienced perl programmer would compare well to someone with some academic experience and light project work. I honestly don't understand why the perl programmers aren't offered at least entry level wages with opportunities for advancement and raises if things go well. Instead, I typically see them passed over and lots of focus on recruiting university students away from other employers.
  • DrNuke 9y ago
    >Older developers of HN, what are your experiences? Over 40 here. The most difficult part is human interaction. Youngsters are obviously well behind their own hype and have their right to try. Mature folks like me take things with a grain of salt and acknowledge hard work is only a part of the picture, often not the most important. From a technical point of view, the headless chickens thing is also common but, again, youngsters have their right to believe they are Einstein, Feynman or Jobs.
    • Clubber 9y ago
• kbos87 9y ago
  At 32, this worries me. I’ve already begun to plan for my eventual exit from tech. When friends nudge their kids in the direction of building skills or a career in tech, I try to find ways to let them know how I look at our industry - a somewhat lucrative place to spend the first 15 or so years out of college, but sadly not a place to build a sustainable, lifelong career. I wish that weren’t the case, but it seems to be true. Our government needs to step up and hold companies who have a dramatically skewed employee age distribution accountable.
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    I've seen plenty of people working well past 40. Lots of them don't work for "tech" employers, though. They write software for defense contractors, banks, insurance companies, etc.
• d--b 9y ago
  I'm 35 and I'm not worried AT ALL that I will be discriminated after I am 40. I think in a way we're the golden tech generation, we screwed our elders by discriminating against them when the industry was in disruption and now we're screwing the younger generation like in any other mature industry. I'm saying "we" as in "my generation", I don't feel I personally took a big part in any of it.
  • Celarnor 9y ago
    I'm 'only' 28 and I worry constantly about this as 30 gets closer and closer. When you're the oldest developer you have to work much harder to justify still being employed, but not so hard that they start to worry about you jumping ship for 5-10k more. The only people around my company that are around your age are the owners and the directors that report to them.
    • d--b 9y ago
      yeah, you shouldn't worry that much, there are an awful lot of tech companies where the average age is higher. And, when you're 30, you're a much better developer than when you're 20, definitely worth the price difference.
    • pdimitar 9y ago
      Stop worrying and jump ship for 5-10k more because it seems you work in a toxic environment.
  • emerged 9y ago
    That's an interesting angle to look at this from. It may be less about age as a number, and more about how the generations are perceiving each other. I'm 36 and haven't even felt the beginning creep of age discrimination. I'll probably always be perceived as someone who was a teenager teaching himself how to code during the years when software was just beginning to catch fire. Our generation will likely continue to hire each other well into old age.
• troels 9y ago
  Article draws a lot of conclusions based of averages and statistics that may as well be correlations as causes. The industry is expanding rapidly. 20 years ago we were a lot fewer people. Even if we had perfect retention, the +40yo's will comprise a much smaller part of the workforce, than in an industry with less growth. It's also not very surprising that older workers are more experienced, limiting the potential positions. But I suppose there could be an issue if you are older than average yet have mediocre skills.
  • Clubber 9y ago
    >The industry is expanding rapidly. The industry had two major contractions, in the 80s and aughts that it still hasn't recovered from based on CS graduation rates. https://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-science-education-explosion/ https://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sc...
• fsloth 9y ago
  The best insurance against age is to find some domain, and excel at that. At 40, it's not so good if your top claim in CV is "I know C++ in an out". "I was part of a team delivering product X, Y and Z which produced this much revenue for our company and which provided this and this value to our clients. I'm experienced contributor in domain W, and am comfortable in providing value using technologies A and B." is much better. That is, in corporate-ese, where it's all about value and revenue. Learn to explain your value, and forge a career that you can explain in terms of value. As an engineer you create value, but no one else is going to help you capture slices of that value financially - you need to do it yourself. It's not 'selling out', it's about being smart with your finances. Your skills are an asset, and if you don't know how to capture value from your output someone else will. At 37, a software engineer, I'm pretty sure my career is more or less secure. I do things which I find interesting, but I make sure as well that I can explain my contributions in economic terms, should the need arise to find new employment. I'm not very wealthy, but neither do I need to stress out about money.
  • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    By specializing in a domain, you live and die by it. It usually happens anyways, but it isn't all upside.
    • stephengillie 9y ago
      [removed]
      • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        We were talking about domains, not technologies. They are very different concepts. Technologies are fungible, domains have people and business experience associated with them. Node is not a domain, it is a tech.
    • fsloth 9y ago
      Domain as in 'aerospace', 'construction', 'finance', 'computational geometry'... If any of those die software is kinda pointless anyway.
• allengeorge 9y ago
  I suspect there are a couple of reasons - especially in the newer/startup space: * Salary. Older employees are more experienced, but, just as importantly, they've already job-hopped a bit, so their base is a lot higher. And they've probably a lot more personal financial responsibilities. All told, they're unlikely to go for the same salary as a new grad. * Interview process. Anecdotal experience, but, the interview process is structured towards new grads. They've studied algorithms recently, so it's at their fingertips. Unless you've brushed up before interviewing you can look sloppy and unsure in comparison. This can be harder if you've an existing job and family commitments. (Note: I'm not saying you shouldn't study; just pointing out that this can happen.) * It's hard to gauge experience. Simply because a person has been in the industry for 10 years doesn't mean that they're "more experienced". It's very tricky to gauge: it's easy to tell when someone is less experienced than you, but much harder if they're more experienced. Plus, how do we evaluate experience? Design questions? Software architecture? Looking at code they've written? It's very fuzzy, and a lot depends on the skill of the interviewer and their own experience. * Finally, we devalue experience. A personal bugbear is hearing hiring managers say that they can train up a new grad to be a tech lead in about a year. Unless you've worked on a couple of largish projects - and seen your own designs evolve in response to requirements, I question that strategy. But, who knows - maybe I'm completely off-base there. EDIT: I'd like to raise a final point: sometimes the impact of experience is only apparent when you've to scale your product architecture or your team. Assuming that most startups fail (i.e. never make it that far), this means most very early stage teams can get by with an ad-hoc process and/or system until they pass that hump.
  • dogruck 9y ago
    Some of those points are actually age discriminatory. For example, why assume that an older person should earn more than a younger person? Instead, it's better to think about paying people in proportion to the value that they provide to the company. I understand that many startups simply do not have the cash required to pay a high base salary. But, that's what equity compensation is for.
    • allengeorge 9y ago
• purplethinking 9y ago
  Not sure if it'll be a problem for the millenial generation, but I'm sure not going to wait to find out. My goal is to not need a job by 45. If by then I still have to "beg" businesses to employ me, I will have failed. That means either enough money in the bank + low enough expenses, having my own stream of income, or be good enough that I can do consulting for multiple businesses (and thus diversify my across employers).
  • toyg 9y ago
    Good luck doing that with kids and a mortgage.
    • purplethinking 9y ago
      Have a kid and mortgage, but saving 60% of household post-tax income. We do what we can to stay lean, and have been doing that for the past decade. That means some sacrifices (e.g. no car(s)), but it's worth it for the peace of mind. Most people on this site are highly paid software engineers. If you have one or even two of those salaries but live like the mean or even median family, you will be able to save quite a lot. If you choose not to, that's fine too. But to me, living like the median family is quite comfortable already. I'd rather use the rest of the money as a safety net.
      • toyg 9y ago
        Something like living without car is very difficult to pull off in suburban UK, I can’t even begin to imagine how one could do it in places like US or Australia. We have one car and already it limits our opportunities and the ones of our children so much that we’ve been discussing getting another for years. I’m sure I could save more (we do eat out a bit), but nowhere near 60% of income. You must be making waaaay more than the median.
        • sokoloff 9y ago
          In fairness to you, the UK (and rest of EU) doesn't have the outrageous levels of pay for SWEs that coastal US seems to enjoy. (Starting salary for new college grad of 100K USD is far from unheard of here.)
• kartan 9y ago
  For an informed answer you can see: "Uncle" Bob Martin - "The Future of Programming" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc Please, see the video. It is an awesome informative and it will give you a lot of insight on our current situation. It is not about startups, but about the maturity of the industry itself.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• bengalister 9y ago
  I am 41 years old, still doing software development and enjoying it for the most part. I work in France. Actually I enjoy it better than I used to since I find myself much more productive and I make less bad design decisions than I used to. I code daily in Javascript (NodeJs), Java and from time to time in groovy, python and golang. Being able to switch from 1 language to another, deploying in different cloud platforms also contributes to my enjoyment. Recently I have had some bad experiences however when I had to work with exclusively young developers in very small teams (3-4 people). I did not like it mostly because either they were not really competent and did not recognize it (wanting to code on hard topics when they showed poor coding skills on easy ones) or because they were very arrogant (notably a Javascript dev who thought that NodeJs was the alpha and omega of the server runtimes) and were showing some signs of ageism. But I blame mostly the weak recruiting process of my company and management persons (for not constituting well balanced teams). Working with exclusively inexperienced (and not well recruited) people can become a nightmare. But I am mainly worried because in France (and I think the situation is the same in all Western European countries) even if there's a shortage of tech workers, companies are very reluctant to offer decent wages and still prefer to hire young low paid people. Developers are still seen as blue collars in the IT industry and developers tend to hit very quickly the (salaries) glass ceiling. I tend to think that management persons do not recognize the added value of experienced developers. (I admit that things like maintainability or good design decisions are hard to assess). I keep my skills up to date, but I am also considering about exit plans, well at least moving away from doing exclusively development.
  • JohnnyConatus 9y ago
    I agree with everything you said except for one thing: developer salaries later-on are not artificially kept down vs the value they create. The are artificially inflated when they are younger due to the scarcity of developers. This is why one can become a "Senior Developer" at 24 (such as I did) because the title is matched to the salary as opposed to the actual amount of experience it would take to be a "senior" anything in any other field.
    • Can_Not 9y ago
• m23khan 9y ago
  If you are applying for a Development job with 10+ years experience, that is wonderful. But what is not wonderful is to fill up your resume with tools/languages which are either dead/obsolete or which are not relevant for the job posting itself. As part of a team in my office who currently interviewed and hired DevOps Engineers (I admit it is different than hiring a Programmer): there were quiet few older candidates we reviewed and interviewed but majority of them (as per their resume) seemed to be stuck in the past or it seemed there peak was 10 years ago. And oh yes, we hired a 40+ year old whom we are extremely happy to have in our team.
• scioto 9y ago
  I'm hitting another 0-year shortly, but I have few worries about my losing my job. The thing I worry about is not having shiny assignments to put on my resume. I haven't seen a shiny assignment in years. That's probably because my employer and I have unintentionally agreed upon my best fit. What do I do? I clean up after the cowboys are gone. We start a new project that has bells and whistles and does nifty cool things, and the young guys come in and work it because it's shiny, and they gladly put in the hours. They ship version 1.0. They add the tech TLAs to their resumes. And then they leave. Often times they go on to new shiny projects. Often times they go to newer shinier companies. And they leave their software behind. We all know that time-to-market is everything. And the cowboys deliver the product. It may not be the highest quality work, and it may not be the most maintainable bit of code. But the product shipped, and that's what mattered. Then comes sustaining. Time to address the warts, and when you address the warts, you see that the code has a lot of symbol names like "a1" and "b2". Yes, I know fireable offenses in some coding shops. But it shipped! And this is where I come in. I clean up what the cowboys left behind. Usually this happens when we start addressing issues after the stabilization period is over, or start adding features the customers asked for but never got since we had to get the product out the door. What do I do? Give symbols meaningful domain-specific names. Refactor code to remove antipatterns, mostly the copy-paste pattern. I also apply our company's coding standards with which the cowboys didn't want to be bothered. I add unit tests to code that changes. I comment the code (though it's mostly self-documenting when I'm done). I replace ad-hoc functions with calls to standard libraries our company uses that the cowboys didn't bother to learn. I apply idioms and frameworks that our company uses to allow code to take advantage of cross-cutting functionality, such as automated logging. I make the code aware of the daylight-savings-time transition. I remove egregious pattern uses people put in to say they used a pattern. I also try to not be the expert at my applications, since I don't want to be called at 3am to resolve issues. So I maintain notes on our wiki pages as to what it takes for the software to run, and a list of frequent issues that have more to do with environment and upstream issues than with the code. I've trained our Ops people and given them analysis tools such that it's been years since I've been called at night. I also maintain a list of lower-priority code issues that weren't worth addressing, but that could use work some time. I don't mind the cowboys. I've had a couple of them compliment me on my refactoring since they had long-forgotten what their code did. I still have this dream of being one. But for now, this is what I tend to do. My only concern is that one day we'll get a shiny CTO who'll figure out that it's better to outsource all the IT to save money (and to give his buddies where he came from the outsourcing business), and I'll be on the street, after training my replacements. How marketable are the above skills? "Hi, I can keep your software running and maintainable." In another five years I figure I'll have made my numbers and the only thing I'll have to worry about is another 2008.
• nickjj 9y ago
  I'll be 40 in a few years but I give zero fucks about age discrimination. I've found that most people don't really care how old you are as long as you provide them value. But I don't work at a corporation so I guess that puts me in a slightly different position. Instead I record and sell video courses that teach modern development practices. All of that started after I was 30. I guess my point is there's plenty of ways to live a fulfilling life as a software developer without ever being put in a position to be discriminated by anything.
  • adventurer 9y ago
    You don't really have the opportunity to be discriminated against in the same way, so you probably don't really count.
    • nickjj 9y ago
      Honestly I would say there's more chances of being discriminated against. Instead of potentially dealing with HR reps or developers behind closed doors people are consuming my content out in the open and judging every video / piece of content.
      • 5ilv3r 9y ago
        So... you're not a developer then. You're one of those "full stack rockstars" everyone is talking about not talking about.
        • nickjj 9y ago
          I spend about 50% of my time doing freelance dev work and 50% course creation. Then another 50% coding side projects, blogging and contributing to open source. But Nick, that's 150%. Yeah I know. What can I say. I love writing code. :( It's all in an Indie Hackers interview btw if you google my name you'll find it.
      • Can_Not 9y ago
        That might be bullying, but it's not employment discrimination.
• lttlrck 9y ago
  Maybe the concerned workers could lay the groundwork for their own future and enact change themselves by putting ‘culture fit’ aside and become proponents for older employees.
• 1065 9y ago
  Lets look at the recruiters' situated logic. People who agree with me and readily comply with my will are more intelligent. Who you gonna hire?
• lightedman 9y ago
  Not a surprise when there are job recruiter sites out there that explicitly discriminate against older applicants, going so far as to actively remove profiles of anyone older than say age 26 (JobRivet was one of these sites - they're now defunct.)
• acty1 9y ago
  No one owes you anything in life. Do not buy into the whole victimization of you based on your age. Resist this temptation. The truth is that some "old" people are actually "weird" as are some really young people may be "annoying". Of course the typical 60 year old will not fit in with a bunch of mid-20's people working on the next Godforsaken social sharing app. DO NOT FALL FOR VICTIMIZATION TALK. Everyone has a choice of how they save, invest, learn and who they associate with. Do not like many companies and how they operate? Good, me neither. Do not like drab catered lunches amd having to eat with assholes and listen to their vapid conversation? Good, I hate it too. Don't want to work with know-it-all 20's kids (one that you probably were too at that age). Good, I don't either. Therefore I don't. I'm an independent software developer and stashing away as much of my money into Rental properties, Bitcoin, dividend producing investments and boring but safe bonds. If you are worried about losing your job for ANY REASON, then it is your fault amd responsibility to fix your own emotion state: - why did you take on a bigger mortgage than necessary? - why did you spend 10's of thousands of dollars on a fancy car (or borrow the money for it) - why did you not invest your money to work for you. Instead of you working for money (by 40 you should be able to pull in minimum wage for sleeping and doing nothing). But most people screwed their 20's and then maybe realized late 30's that there's a thing call Passive Income (as defines by tax code) and Investment Income. We have a generation of men and women who made terrible life choices and now are shocked that they feel the need to continue working with young people. Now the victimization brigade is coming to tell you that "It's not your fault you are being discriminated for your age". Fuck yes it is. Why the hell are you working with assholes? No one is preventing you from starting your own business, doing amazing work as an independent consultant or pursuing additional lines of income. What did you think was going to happen when you got older? That's right, you will be treated as you treated older worker when you were young. Heck, I just called my father "old man" for his birthday last night. Is that discrimination? Yes. Is it UNFAIR discrimination? NO. He did live a longer life and is factually older. Who knows, I may not experience as many years as him. It is FAIR discrimination in a lot of cases. Only unjust and unfair discrimination is what we should concern ourselves with. The article makes no attempt to articulate beyond a bunch of numbers cuz "discrimination" You are not a victim.
• peterlk 9y ago
  I have found that working with older engineers has made me a significantly better developer. For example, it's really easy for new devs to become caught up in the latest libraries, even if they replicate functionality that's been in the OS you're (or whatever) using forever. I was guilty of this with databases when we had the NoSQL fad; why was I giving up ACID compliance? "Because we're entering a new generation of database design, also, what's ACID?" Shameless plug: at Aha! we have pretty decent age diversity on our engineering team (and in the rest of the company). If you want to work with us, check out http://aha.io/jobs http://aha.io/jobs
• curtis 9y ago
  My last job search (in Seattle) took me months longer than I was expecting. This could be ageism at work (I'm 48), but I'm still inclined to think that there's a more mundane explanation: The recruitment and hiring process for software engineers has gone from crappy to damn near broken. If ageism is a significant problem right now, it's possible that it is primarily a completely unintended side-effect of how were doing hiring in the industry. I don't know for sure, but we need to be careful about looking at obvious problems and then simply assuming that we know the explanation.
  • tiggybear 9y ago
    Thank god we don't unionize (part of our salary might go to under qualified colleagues instead of under qualified executives...the horror). My sister, a nurse, takes about a 20minutes-1hour phone call every time she needs a new position. That's it. Then she gets an answer. That is what being in an in-demand field with workers rights looks like (nurses tend to be (are all?) unionized). She also makes 6-figures in the bay area in her mid-20's with a bachelors from a no-name school. But tech workers will shout down unions while it's currently feasible to make them. Unfortunately, when they finally realize they need them they will no longer have the leverage to unionize.
  • seattle_spring 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, why does your LinkedIn not list months for all of the 1 year jobs you have? It seems really suspicious to me, and as a hiring manager it would almost certainly have been a red flag.
    • curtis 9y ago
      My LinkedIn profile is not my authoritative job history -- my resume is. Your first job as a recruiter or potential hiring manager is to find my resume. It's not hard. I should also mention that when I'm looking for a job, I'm usually contacting you. If I email you I will include a direct link to my resume. If I'm applying through a portal it will ask me to upload my resume. Either way there's no excuse for people in the recruiting/hiring pipeline to consult my LinkedIn profile rather than my resume. (Sorry if there's a little bit of attitude leaking through here, but this is a personal soapbox of mine.)
• nul_byte 9y ago
  I really don't worry about this as a 46 year old engineer. For me I still feel young and I still love tech and my age just does not factor , and for anyone who it would factor, I don't want to work for. I have always had quite a good positive opinion of my talents / knowledge (but not to the point that I am a narcissist arsehole) and that has carried me well.
• toephu2 9y ago
  It seems like no one is talking about the obvious move here: becoming an engineering manager. Can anyone share their two cents and pros/cons of being an EM vs IC? Any regrets?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• asdfasdfasd333 9y ago
  This is much bigger problem than gender discrimination in tech. Until this is addressed, I won't take the latter seriously.
  • zengid 9y ago
    Discrimination is discrimination. If you're not going to stand up for others, don't expect anyone to stand up for you.
  • seattle_spring 9y ago
    Do you have any proof to back up this very large claim? As my own personal anecdote, I would say that it's the exact opposite. The only time I see claims of age discrimination are from people who have grown into a very awful attitude.
• fecak 9y ago
  I recruited in tech for 20 years and now I write resumes, mostly for tech professionals. I generally start talking to my resume clients about ageism around 40 as well. I may ask if we want to keep the oldest jobs on the resume (which tend to be irrelevant anyway) or to list graduation dates that reveal age. I go through a quick exercise with clients to show how old they are "on paper", the basic formula being that we assume you were ~22 when you graduated college (or if no grad date or college education is listed, we may assume you were between 20-22 when you started the first job on the resume). If we remove the oldest job(s) and delete graduation dates, we can often mask age a little bit if that is desired. Many clients decide not to try masking age, as any company that might discriminate based on age isn't a place they would want to work. I respect that as well.
  • pdimitar 9y ago
    > Many clients decide not to try masking age, as any company that might discriminate based on age isn't a place they would want to work. I respect that as well. That's exactly my attitude. I am aware of age discrimination and I am not gonna hide my age. The people who do it aren't pleasant, and work is not only about the money. You have to like your workplace else your life becomes a wide-awake nightmare.
• brightball 9y ago
  I’ve operated under the assumption that I won’t be able to get a job as a programmer after age 49 from the beginning. It affects how I plan for retirement, how I look at investments, how I view my career path, etc. My wife is well aware of this and we both plan accordingly. That’s why we have a 15 year mortgage. It’s how we plan for our kids college, etc. The goal is that as soon as the kids get out of school our monthly expenses will be as low as possible so that we can live very light or seek alternative income if needed. Either that or I’ll complete a multimillion dollar side project. :)
• xux 9y ago
  Sorry, I don't buy this whole "older workers more likely to see through bullshit" narrative that many presumably older folks on HN push. It sounds awfully like the arguments that traditionally nationalist groups use against immigrants, contending they're less intelligent and accept lower wages because they're culturally inferior and just don't know better Maybe it's just that younger workers legitimately provide better labor for lower cost. For a small startup, you really don't need someone with 30 years of experience, and it's better to spend your money on someone demanding a lower wage and will work fast.
  • mythrwy 9y ago
    Maybe I don't understand but it sort of sounds like in the last sentence you validate what you don't buy in the first.
  • manigandham 9y ago
    Cheap and fast can cost you more over the long run, a truth I've seen play out over dozens of companies that could've used the wisdom of someone who did it all before. There's a legitimate concern over age discrimination which you seem to have underscored with your comment that you "dont really need someone with 30 years of experience".
  • hamstercat 9y ago
    From my point of view, seeing through bullshit is not about being intelligent, but rather having experience. After you have lived through different situations, some of them shitty, I believe you can get better at identifying them from the get-go. I'm not old myself, but I definitely understand things now that would simply go over my head when I started out. There's no silver bullet of course, but usually a company should strive to have a mix of both experienced and less experienced workers. Less experienced workers cost less and will be more willing to "deal with bullshit", but more experienced workers bring knowledge with them that can prove invaluable to a company. They've lived through different situations, and they've seen success and failures. Finding the good balance depends of each company's situation of course.
  • georgeburdell 9y ago
• pm24601 9y ago
  I have personally experienced it. I had happen when interviewing - the person very explicitly said that he didn't think I could do the job because I was older than 35. This was the most explicit, but not the only example. This is why I am so happy about the recent turn against sexism in the bro-workforce. Bros are ageist not just sexist.
• ThomaszKrueger 9y ago
  We may be looking at this the wrong way. It isn't a question of ageism, rather did that person keep up with the evolution of languages and ecosystems? It is OK to be old(er) as long as one has what companies are looking for. Waiting for the time go by and count on "seniority raises" alone is counterproductive. I am 55. I am as current as I can be, including when it comes to cloud, nosql, APIs, and the javascript renaissance. I try to do what companies need. My experience is a bonus because of the things I don't do, because of the problems I did not cause, because of the things that didn't happen. These in my experience are valuable even though almost impossible to measure.
• bdcravens 9y ago
  Being 40 years old, can I play the devil's advocate? Many older developers I know are often unemployable due to the fact they have let their knowledge stagnate, but as a 40 year old looking around and seeing older developers taking longer to find that next role, perhaps you chalk it up to discrimination.
• leroy_masochist 9y ago
  > Indeed found that 17% of survey respondents said the average employee age at their company is between 20 and 30 years old, while 29% of survey respondents said the average employee age is between 31 and 35. An additional 27% of respondents said the average age at their company was 36-40 years old. > That leaves just 26% of the workplace roles for staffers over 40, Indeed found. Seriously? This conflates "range of average ages among companies" with "range of ages of employees at companies" to a galling extent. There's no way this whole argument is a typo...how does something like this get past an editor?
• dba7dba 9y ago
  Ageism is not really the problem. The problem is looking for that someone that will fit into the elusive culture fit. And I see this culturism as worse than any kind of discrimination practiced in the past and now (racism, sexism, etc). What is culture in a work place as we know it these days in the realms of startup shops? It's stuff like: - can you be a good drinking buddy? - do you look young and hip? - can you carry on a small talk and talk about stuff like favorite rock band, movies at company events? Never mind that to be a rockstar coder at your young age, you never watched a movie or went to a concert BUT instead spent all your time coding and learning how to code faster/better. - do you have any interesting hobby like rock climbing or traveling that makes you an interesting person? Never mind that having an interesting hobby will actually damage your chance of becoming a good coder, cause it will take so much time away from coding. With so many things to learn and keep up with, how do you have the time to have an interesting hobby? - oh also, can you give a good talk on a tech topic? like a good tech sales person? But why would you want to be a coder that will surely hit an arbitrary salary cap while working full 50+ hr a week, when a salesman will make more than coders due to sales commission (while working practically a part time job)? And don't forget about all the extras salespeople get like traveling. - are you an extremely pleasant person to deal with? Buy why? Are you hiring a sales clerk or a coder? Can a coder be just a normal human being, not one with a forced smiles on face? - are you all of the above so that ones you refer to the company as potential hire will be clones of yourself? - oh and can you code? All this in workplaces that are automating human interaction out of daily work and personal life. And now increasingly shops that encourage/tout remote working where coworkers don't see each other in person.
• cyclonetiger 9y ago
  I find so many things wrong with this article. This is coming from Indeed, which is a job searching site. I think its fair to infer that younger people would always look for jobs more than older people since younger people are just getting out of college and/or trying to figure out what really interests them by job hopping. I would imagine an older developer that has already his/her interests figured out, and has a network built out would visit a site like Indeed less. I'm only 26, so you would think that I'm the "prime" years of my career, but I work for a large enterprise tech company, where I'm the only one under 40 on my team. I would say the average age overall is around 40 for the people that sit around me. They all seem to like place they work, and much more relaxed about their career future compared to me or my friends that are still deciding what we want to do.
• mr_tristan 9y ago
  I'm 40, worked in the SF bay area, San Diego, Vienna, and now Portland. Office cultures are definitely different in each city, but the chances of running into a major-league asshat goes up significantly in the areas where there's a ton of money and risk taking. Things often become wacky are when you have a massive glut of growth, thus, you get a ton of people hired into "senior" positions without actually having to know anything. I remember my first "senior" title was after having about 1-2 years of experience. Everyone was like that, they threw titles around like mad, in part because I think it made the company look smarter on paper for an acquisition. Anyhow, I avoid places that seem to inflate egos and expectations, and I've had far fewer issues with age-ism. You just have to be prepared to move on when the environment gets toxic in any way.
• alpeb 9y ago
  Considering there's a shortage of labour supply in this industry, if you're good enough, at some point it is you who is screening candidate companies you'd like to work with and not the other around. And just as it's hard for companies to find the right candidates, it's hard for you to really tell how work is gonna be like with any given company. Things like ageism, culture-fit crap, ping-pong tables benefits (instead of better pay) are all great hints that give away places you don't wanna work in. Not just because those things are bad by themselves, but also they reveal a lack of moral principles that's gonna be reflected later on in the job in many other ways.
• onlite_67 9y ago
  I am nearing 40 and hard of hearing. So far I have survived with fellow people's help, but not sure how it would go, going forward when I am expected to be in supervisory or managerial position attending meetings, conference calls and managing people, which I am not good at, because of the handicap. I am good with technology, though, and fairly updated with cloud skills and other latest stuff. Hmm.
• ben_utzer 9y ago
  two popup in less than 5 seconds after I opened the link. Goodbye theladders.com