6 ms·

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

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
  Perhaps I didn't make myself clear: I'm not asking companies to pay older employees more. I'm simply pointing out that job-hopping and personal commitments make it likely that older employees will demand a higher salary, which smaller companies may be loath to give.
  - dogruck 9y ago
    I think we simultaneously agree and disagree. I agree that older candidates typically have expectations of higher total compensation. My point is that, either: 1. That expectation is unfounded -- they are looking to be paid out of proportion to the value they would provide back to the company, or 2. That expectation is justified, in which case the cash-poor company should find some way of striking a deal, so that they can bring on an employee of high value.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Tough just because your a small company doesn't excuse you from how the market works or laws on discrimination.
  - jpindar 9y ago
    People used to say that having dark skin made it likely that someone was less skilled. Both statements are prejudiced - pre-judging someone based on factors they cannot control.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  The problem with that line of thinking is that it is extremely hard to measure the value that employees provide to the company. “Pay them what they are worth” sounds straightforward, but in reality you just can’t put a number on a candidate. The younger candidate might be inexperienced but a fast learner; the older candidate might have a lot of experience, but might be reluctant to adopt the companies coding practices... There’s no way to know which of them is going to provide more value in the long term; but you do know that one of them expects a significantly higher salary.
jroseattle 9y ago
These points are all very true. As a hiring manager and someone who would qualify in this study, here's my personal response to all of these: * Salary: you get what you pay for. (Senior folks -- you need to stand and deliver.) * Interview process: it's broken, so we actively de-emphasize rote memorization. We instead look for application of principles to solve problems, because that maps well to our work. * It's hard to gauge experience: we find experience is most valuable when it helps in delivery. Related to interview process, we look for people who can help us deliver solutions, and experience informs us about that. * We devalue experience: yep, and we don't. Thanks, other hiring managers, for leaving us with a pool of candidates you're ignoring! On the whole, we try to identify attributes among candidates that we believe are age-agnostic: curiosity in problem solving, a commitment to continuing to learn, ethical and moral code, etc. It's not perfect but it's our list and we continue to improve against it with each subsequent interaction with candidates.
humanrebar 9y ago
> It's hard to gauge experience I think this could be solved by coming up with a more common vocabulary of tech job titles. In medicine you have technicians, orderlies, surgeons, general practitioners, anesthesiologists, physician-scientists, nurses, physicians' assistants, teaching physicians, and so on. Not to mention all the hospital administrators. They're not all "medical engineers". They don't (at least not to the same degree) require a combination of CV parsing and oral exams to figure out what their experience actually entailed. There's some movement to create separate career paths for DBAs, SREs, etc, though the day-to-day responsibilities there vary quite a bit. I'd like to see specificity in job titles going forward. Someone who assists designers in creating brochure websites probably needs a different job title than someone designing lockless data structures from scratch. And someone who evaluates different production databases and picks the one to ship to production servers probably needs a different job title.
- philipov 9y ago
  I was top of my class at the seminary, and I just don't understand why I never hear back from these jobs seeking a technology evangelist!
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Good example! More of this, basically.
  - itronitron 9y ago
    someone who excelled at their seminary would probably excel as a technology evangelist as well
- wpietri 9y ago
  Stability in titles requires stability in human labor. But our whole job is automation, meaning turning stable labor over to machines. So much of our work is defined by our current perspectives, our current constructed tools; those naturally change too. I think it will be quite a while before things in our field settle down, if they ever do. My dad made software for decades until he retired. My brother and I have been working in tech now for decades ourselves. The taxonomy of job titles keeps changing. If tech people had allowed ourselves to be pigeonholed by some older taxonomy, then a) we'd mostly be unemployed, and b) there wouldn't be many people around to do the new class of jobs. So at least for the rest of my career, I expect hiring will be not about getting an off-the-rack person who fills a highly specific title, but by finding somebody whose past experience is a good match for the current challenges.
tyingq 9y ago
>Salary. ...they've already job-hopped a bit, so their base is a lot higher It isn't just job hopping. Even if you ignore promotions to a new title, many workplaces give out yearly salary adjustments that are a bit higher than inflation. Compound interest over 20 years adds up. Note that I'm well past 40, so I'm in this boat. There are people with a very similar skill set to mine that are less expensive, mostly because they are younger.
DavidWoof 9y ago
All of those reasons sound reasonable, and if I were trying to come up with reasons in the abstract I'd probably come up with a list like that. But as a programmer in his 50s, when I have personally encountered age discrimination, it's been instant. It wasn't just a thumb on the scale or issues with disparate impact, it was an obvious and clear reaction the moment I walked in the door. It's always stunning when a very pleasant and productive phone conversation becomes immediately hostile when somebody sees my face. On the other hand, those moments have relatively been rare, and this industry is currently so competitive that they register as "I dodged that bullet" rather than anything truly harmful, although it's definitely been enough for me to see the words "culture fit" as having the definition "we practice illegal discrimination". BTW, whenever these articles show up on HN we always seem to assume that "tech worker" means developer, but it really refers to everybody: support, manager, tester, etc. If you're a developer, there's tons of ways to keep your skills strong. But the support person who's been keeping a Sybase instance running for the last 20 years or who maintains some spaghetti netware system doesn't necessarily have any marketable skills. There's a lot of people whose skillset is essentially "I've been here a long time".
- allengeorge 9y ago
  Please don’t take my points above as all-inclusive! I can imagine cases where individuals (for whatever reason) have an instinctive bias against older employees. That’s unfortunate, and it means they can lose out on excellent talent by evaluating people in terms of questionable generalizations instead of their specific circumstances. The funny thing is...as the developed world’s population ages they’ll have to unlearn that bias.
zxcvvcxz 9y ago
As an employer in the "newer/startup space", I have some thoughts on this: > * Salary. Older employees are more experienced, but, just as importantly, they've already job-hopped a bit, so their base is a lot higher. First of all, why does job hopping entitle you to a higher salary? A guy who's done 5 jobs of 2 years each, with one of them being most relevant to my position, vs. someone who's done 1 job of 10 years somewhere most relevant to my position is an easy choice. The latter will be more useful for my organization. Job hopping also seems negatively correlated to specialization, which IMO is your key differentiated value as a prospective employee. Why should your career ADHD command a higher salary? > 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. Yeah, I can see this coming from a mile away and so I tend to not waste the time of people for whom this is the case. The easiest way for me to do this is being upfront about salary for the position. > * 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.) Fair. > * 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". True. > * 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. The factor here, roughly speaking, is IQ. Give me someone with higher raw intelligence and they'll often quickly get somewhere that someone with more experience has. Just existing and showing up for 10 years doesn't mean you're automatically better than all the 22-year-olds I have lined up for an interview. --- I wanted to voice some unpopular opinions from the other side of this coin because it seems most people on HN resonate more with the "employee" rather than the "employer".
- scarface74 9y ago
  The latter will be more useful for my organization. Job hopping also seems negatively correlated to specialization, which IMO is your key differentiated value as a prospective employee. That person who has specialized for 10 years probably hasn't been exposed to the five different environments with 5 different ways of doing things and being able to mix and match the best of all of the environments. That person who has specialize may know how to code, but do they have experience talking to different customers in different verticals? Have they been involved in the full life cycle including devops?

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
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear: I'm not asking companies to pay older employees more. I'm simply pointing out that job-hopping and personal commitments make it likely that older employees will demand a higher salary, which smaller companies may be loath to give.
- dogruck 9y ago
  I think we simultaneously agree and disagree. I agree that older candidates typically have expectations of higher total compensation. My point is that, either: 1. That expectation is unfounded -- they are looking to be paid out of proportion to the value they would provide back to the company, or 2. That expectation is justified, in which case the cash-poor company should find some way of striking a deal, so that they can bring on an employee of high value.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Tough just because your a small company doesn't excuse you from how the market works or laws on discrimination.
- jpindar 9y ago
  People used to say that having dark skin made it likely that someone was less skilled. Both statements are prejudiced - pre-judging someone based on factors they cannot control.
jakobegger 9y ago
The problem with that line of thinking is that it is extremely hard to measure the value that employees provide to the company. “Pay them what they are worth” sounds straightforward, but in reality you just can’t put a number on a candidate. The younger candidate might be inexperienced but a fast learner; the older candidate might have a lot of experience, but might be reluctant to adopt the companies coding practices... There’s no way to know which of them is going to provide more value in the long term; but you do know that one of them expects a significantly higher salary.

jroseattle 9y ago

These points are all very true. As a hiring manager and someone who would qualify in this study, here's my personal response to all of these: * Salary: you get what you pay for. (Senior folks -- you need to stand and deliver.) * Interview process: it's broken, so we actively de-emphasize rote memorization. We instead look for application of principles to solve problems, because that maps well to our work. * It's hard to gauge experience: we find experience is most valuable when it helps in delivery. Related to interview process, we look for people who can help us deliver solutions, and experience informs us about that. * We devalue experience: yep, and we don't. Thanks, other hiring managers, for leaving us with a pool of candidates you're ignoring! On the whole, we try to identify attributes among candidates that we believe are age-agnostic: curiosity in problem solving, a commitment to continuing to learn, ethical and moral code, etc. It's not perfect but it's our list and we continue to improve against it with each subsequent interaction with candidates.

humanrebar 9y ago

> It's hard to gauge experience I think this could be solved by coming up with a more common vocabulary of tech job titles. In medicine you have technicians, orderlies, surgeons, general practitioners, anesthesiologists, physician-scientists, nurses, physicians' assistants, teaching physicians, and so on. Not to mention all the hospital administrators. They're not all "medical engineers". They don't (at least not to the same degree) require a combination of CV parsing and oral exams to figure out what their experience actually entailed. There's some movement to create separate career paths for DBAs, SREs, etc, though the day-to-day responsibilities there vary quite a bit. I'd like to see specificity in job titles going forward. Someone who assists designers in creating brochure websites probably needs a different job title than someone designing lockless data structures from scratch. And someone who evaluates different production databases and picks the one to ship to production servers probably needs a different job title.

philipov 9y ago
I was top of my class at the seminary, and I just don't understand why I never hear back from these jobs seeking a technology evangelist!
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Good example! More of this, basically.
- itronitron 9y ago
  someone who excelled at their seminary would probably excel as a technology evangelist as well
wpietri 9y ago
Stability in titles requires stability in human labor. But our whole job is automation, meaning turning stable labor over to machines. So much of our work is defined by our current perspectives, our current constructed tools; those naturally change too. I think it will be quite a while before things in our field settle down, if they ever do. My dad made software for decades until he retired. My brother and I have been working in tech now for decades ourselves. The taxonomy of job titles keeps changing. If tech people had allowed ourselves to be pigeonholed by some older taxonomy, then a) we'd mostly be unemployed, and b) there wouldn't be many people around to do the new class of jobs. So at least for the rest of my career, I expect hiring will be not about getting an off-the-rack person who fills a highly specific title, but by finding somebody whose past experience is a good match for the current challenges.

tyingq 9y ago

>Salary. ...they've already job-hopped a bit, so their base is a lot higher It isn't just job hopping. Even if you ignore promotions to a new title, many workplaces give out yearly salary adjustments that are a bit higher than inflation. Compound interest over 20 years adds up. Note that I'm well past 40, so I'm in this boat. There are people with a very similar skill set to mine that are less expensive, mostly because they are younger.

DavidWoof 9y ago

All of those reasons sound reasonable, and if I were trying to come up with reasons in the abstract I'd probably come up with a list like that. But as a programmer in his 50s, when I have personally encountered age discrimination, it's been instant. It wasn't just a thumb on the scale or issues with disparate impact, it was an obvious and clear reaction the moment I walked in the door. It's always stunning when a very pleasant and productive phone conversation becomes immediately hostile when somebody sees my face. On the other hand, those moments have relatively been rare, and this industry is currently so competitive that they register as "I dodged that bullet" rather than anything truly harmful, although it's definitely been enough for me to see the words "culture fit" as having the definition "we practice illegal discrimination". BTW, whenever these articles show up on HN we always seem to assume that "tech worker" means developer, but it really refers to everybody: support, manager, tester, etc. If you're a developer, there's tons of ways to keep your skills strong. But the support person who's been keeping a Sybase instance running for the last 20 years or who maintains some spaghetti netware system doesn't necessarily have any marketable skills. There's a lot of people whose skillset is essentially "I've been here a long time".

allengeorge 9y ago
Please don’t take my points above as all-inclusive! I can imagine cases where individuals (for whatever reason) have an instinctive bias against older employees. That’s unfortunate, and it means they can lose out on excellent talent by evaluating people in terms of questionable generalizations instead of their specific circumstances. The funny thing is...as the developed world’s population ages they’ll have to unlearn that bias.

zxcvvcxz 9y ago

As an employer in the "newer/startup space", I have some thoughts on this: > * Salary. Older employees are more experienced, but, just as importantly, they've already job-hopped a bit, so their base is a lot higher. First of all, why does job hopping entitle you to a higher salary? A guy who's done 5 jobs of 2 years each, with one of them being most relevant to my position, vs. someone who's done 1 job of 10 years somewhere most relevant to my position is an easy choice. The latter will be more useful for my organization. Job hopping also seems negatively correlated to specialization, which IMO is your key differentiated value as a prospective employee. Why should your career ADHD command a higher salary? > 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. Yeah, I can see this coming from a mile away and so I tend to not waste the time of people for whom this is the case. The easiest way for me to do this is being upfront about salary for the position. > * 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.) Fair. > * 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". True. > * 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. The factor here, roughly speaking, is IQ. Give me someone with higher raw intelligence and they'll often quickly get somewhere that someone with more experience has. Just existing and showing up for 10 years doesn't mean you're automatically better than all the 22-year-olds I have lined up for an interview. --- I wanted to voice some unpopular opinions from the other side of this coin because it seems most people on HN resonate more with the "employee" rather than the "employer".

scarface74 9y ago
The latter will be more useful for my organization. Job hopping also seems negatively correlated to specialization, which IMO is your key differentiated value as a prospective employee. That person who has specialized for 10 years probably hasn't been exposed to the five different environments with 5 different ways of doing things and being able to mix and match the best of all of the environments. That person who has specialize may know how to code, but do they have experience talking to different customers in different verticals? Have they been involved in the full life cycle including devops?