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It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? I have heard that companies like recent grads be

• leggomylibro 9y ago
  It's a race to the bottom. You could pay more for better work that gets done more slowly (fewer hours as people have families, etc,) or you could pay less for worse work that gets done more quickly. Well, iOS11 needs to ship on its annual schedule, non-negotiable. And the SVP will really complain if I ask for more money this quarter. So, cheap it is. If a bridge falls down, it's really obvious and people die. If billions of computers become vulnerable to malicious actors and a few hundred or thousand people suffer dramatic personal damages, well that's a nice and quiet problem which will be quickly forgotten in the 24-hour news cycle.
  • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    I'm one of the greyhairs. I won't work the insane hours, but I'll still get more done. How? By knowing what to write and how to write it, so I don't have to fumble around trying things for nearly as long. By not writing the bugs that the 20-somethings write, which means I don't have to take the time to try to fix them. By not creating the shoddy designs that other create, which then have to be fixed. By having an idea where to look when bugs do show up, so that they get fixed more quickly. And so on. It's about producing working code, not about how many hours my butt is in a seat...
    • trevyn 9y ago
      >It's about producing working code I propose that working code is necessary, but not sufficient.
    • exelius 9y ago
      I'm not attacking you here (and in fact I agree with you), but from a manager's perspective, I need one guy like you to design it in an architecture modeling tool and 8 young code monkeys to do all the boring work of building and testing it. You can do the code reviews to make sure they don't do stupid shit. The thought is that a team of greyhairs never ships anything, and a team of youngsters ships garbage. But it's better to ship garbage than nothing, hence the bias.
      • oceanghost 9y ago
        Can we just be honest? Us older folks won't build things we know doesn't work against synthetic deadlines, then work overtime to fix what we knew wasn't going to work in the first place, while taking the blame politically. Engineering has in my lifetime become "unwinnable." I'm either not "a team player" or "being negative" for planning for reasonable failure scenarios. Then politically I still take the heat when they happen. This is not a quixotic aspect of engineering, it is a design feature at bad employers. "Heads I win, tails you lose"
        • 9y ago
• draw_down 9y ago
  Labor costs. Labor costs.
• Swizec 9y ago
  > It just don't make no sense. Other fields reward grayhairs. You see some sixty-year-old painter or architect or carpenter, you think he's probably pretty good. You see some straight-out-of-college twenty-something in . . . any other field, you think, "I sure hope he knows what he's doing." Well if the technology you're using has only existed for 3 years, 10 at most ... what's the point in hiring a grayhair? As far as you're concerned they have the same amount of experience as a fresh-ish grad, except they're more expensive. Sure the underlying principles are all the same, but you don't know that if you're not technical yourself.
• flukus 9y ago
  > Now let's address the second reason: salary. I am 10 times better than I was when I started. Can you characterize how you are better? I would say the same about myself, it's not that I can do stuff 10 times faster than I could then, I've just got the experience to avoid things that might seem ok at the time but will cause long term problems. Today I know when I'm over engineering, I know when I'm under engineering, I know the patterns that will make code hard to maintain and I can avoid them, I can avoid technical debt (usually). The powers that be never see that technical debt, they don't know they're groaning under the weight of it, they don't know it could have been avoided, there was/will be a different set of people deal with it. So why would they pay more to avoid problems they don't know they have? Unlike other industries, software development never, ever plans for maintenance.
• trevyn 9y ago
  The rate of change of technological progress is increasing, and many people just have a tendency to... crystallize. Experienced people of any age who can adapt well to change have no trouble getting a job.
  • racer-v 9y ago
    My advice to graybeards: when somebody is excited about a new technology XYZ, don't say "oh, we did that 20 years ago and called it ABC". It annoys people, because generally XYZ has important differences that prevent ABC from being a drop-in replacement. Instead you can say "that reminds me of a similar concept we used to implement using ABC", and quietly appreciate that you got a leg up in understanding because of your experience. If young people are smart and curious, they'll want to know more about ABC, and ask.
    • inetknght 9y ago
      When XYZ is just ABC with additional layers on top which kills performance and/or security...
      • user5994461 9y ago
        And then you quote the drawbacks of ABC and it turns out that the interviewer has the same issues with XYZ because it's trying to do the same things. Now he hates you because he really believed in XYZ, maybe wrote it himself.
    • analog31 9y ago
      I'm 53. What I do is learn XYZ at home, and use it in my side / research projects, while the people at work are still struggling with their legacy software and technical debt written in ABC.
  • wwweston 9y ago
    > The rate of change of technological progress is increasing Well, the rate of change seems to be high. Whether it's "progress" is another matter. Progress usually implies change, but the reverse is not at all necessarily true. Who's usually in a position to recognize that and be a judge of it? People with experience. So the question I'd ask is this: when someone with experience doesn't like change, is it because they've "crystalized"? Or is it because they have some defensible reason for disliking the change? If it might be both, how would someone be able to tell the difference?
• che_shirecat 9y ago
  highly skilled professions like law, medicine don't have a problem with age discrimination, because of the marginally significant positive correlation between years of experience and results. these fields also weed out the incompetent early. there's plenty of well-paid >50 software engineers out there who have no problem finding work, because they've made a mark in some way throughout their careers in the field or have transitioned into engineering management. alot of the more average older engineers though looking for jobs at high-growth companies honestly just don't merit the salary premium. the ability to engineer something thats "maintanable long term" is (1) not really a skill that's exclusive to people with 20+ yrs experience, (2) not really demonstrable or quantifiable especially for middle management living quarter to quarter, (3) is often a skill that close-minded engineers that really are just set in their ways and resistant to innovation mistakenly think they possess. most of your average software jobs really aren't that hard, and decades of experience don't really gain you as much as you'd think.
  • didibus 9y ago
    Though there's been some research recently showing that younger doctors are better, because they're aware of the latest research. I wonder if that's going to lead to some ageism in medicine because of that.
    • user5994461 9y ago
      Not a chance. The amount of doctors has a hard limit fixed by regulations, there will always be work for all of them and at good wages.
      • vonmoltke 9y ago
        This is a myth perpetuated by medical schools. There is no regulatory limit to the number of residency slots hospital's can create. There is a limit to the number Medicare will pay for, and teaching hospitals generally refuse to create slots that are not paid for by Medicare.
  • nickthemagicman 9y ago
• Sir_Substance 9y ago
  > It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? They keep saying all the wrong things, like "no, I won't go on call, that wasn't in the job description I applied for", "sorry, but I won't take on the extra responsibility unless you give me a raise", or "I've been down this road before, I'm not going to work weekends because it's not going to significantly speed up the project and I'd rather be with the wife and kids".
• guyzero 9y ago
  "I've worked with people in their sixties, and they're sweet people." Survivorship bias.
• racer-v 9y ago
  There's a perception in computer programming that any experience outside of the specific language, library and toolkit being used on the project is irrelevant. Or worse, an impediment; "I don't want somebody with bad habits and instincts acquired from working on now-obsolete systems". Managers really believe a kid with 3 years JavaScript experience and 1 year of Vue is as good (or better) than a senior programmer with the same, plus 20 years of Unix, C++, protocol implementation, and similar "baggage".
  • lorenzq 9y ago
    If that older Unix or C++ programmer doesn't have a strong bias against Javascript, functional programming, new es6/es7 concepts, and web appliactions in general, then sure. I see many of these types of people even on HN with biases though. Age shouldn't be used as a catch all filter, but I can see how it might be faster to screen those who have been too content to stick to their tools without catching up to industry trends.
    • racer-v 9y ago
      I presume you wouldn't hire someone who expresses a strong distaste for your software stack, regardless of age (unless their job is specifically to replace it).
      • sidlls 9y ago
        And such a person shouldn't be hired. I wouldn't hire me to work on a JavaScript stack. It's not because I don't or couldn't understand it in short order, and very much better than many (most, possibly all) of the 20-something hipsters they're using to fart out garbage. It's because I have strong biases against it and the kind of development style it attracts, some of which (as illustrated in this very comment) aren't really empirically or otherwise similarly justifiable. They're just biases that haven't a good justification. I usually keep this sort of bias to myself because I recognize it for what it is. Honestly though I wouldn't apply for such positions, either, so the bias problem never surfaces.
• redcalx 9y ago
  I completely agree with everything you said.
• noncoml 9y ago
  > It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience More experience also means ability to see through management's bullshit. > It just don't make no sense. Other fields reward grayhairs. You see some sixty-year-old painter or architect or carpenter, you think he's probably pretty good The difference here is employee vs professional
• raz32dust 9y ago
  Knowledge in the software industry tends to get outdated much faster than in other industries. While there are timeless software engineering practices that are good and evergreen, about 70% of my knowledge today will be outdated in 5 years. This is not true of other industries. Sure, other professionals need to keep themselves updated as well. But the percentage of knowledge that a bridge architect needs to update is much lesser (say 20%?). The cost of failure is much higher. It is easier to correct shitty software. So the focus is on delivering fast.
  • busterarm 9y ago
    > about 70% of my knowledge today will be outdated in 5 years I really hope this isn't the case for you, and in general I don't really believe it to be true either. Most of what makes me successful as a developer today I knew 20 years ago, in a prior career. You have to differentiate between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. The former changes very little and the latter changes a lot. You're also best off retaining almost _none_ of the latter. Those "Teach Yourself <language/framework> in <number> <days/weeks>" books you used to see were written for serious professionals, not newbies. I can often get more done with less using tried, tested tools that change little than my peers can do with 'the new hotness'. It seems every language/stack has its own implementation of cron. Stop that. Use cron. Networking protocol, binutils and SQL don't really change and that's literally 99% of the "make stuff happen" part of my job. A lot of "Full Stack" developers don't know any of this shit. They don't know what tools will tell them if a client's traffic is coming into their network at all or being rejected at their server. Con artists, honestly.
    • tracker1 9y ago
      Not to be offensive, but the front end is quite often far more work than the SQL that goes on in the back. I've worked strictly on the back, the front, and in between. I've also had to work in a number of platforms and languages. In the end, keeping things as simple as possible is usually best. If that means using language features that someone might not be familiar with, it should still be more understandable in the end.
• random314 9y ago
  Age discrimination happens because your line manager doesn't want a more experienced and higher skilled person reporting to him. You might end up replacing him.
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    Or disagreeing with them when they're making million-dollar decisions. If the manager is right or wrong, they lose if they're highly-paid senior has a serious concern with a strategic decision. It's safer to just hire a bunch of junior engineers that will be team players. To be clear, there is a huge win here. And that's hiring good technical leaders and listening and consulting with them on technical strategy, standards, technical employee evaluations, etc. It's actually lower risk and higher reward to do so, but it is more work than telling new hires how to crank out strung-together features on your rule-the-world custom framework.
• anonemouse145 9y ago
  It's health care and pensions you silly people. The stereotype (which is massively true in most cases) is that this generation of aging people suck up vast amounts of health care and demand to retire, while young people don't want health care and this generation probably won't get any retirement anyway so no worries. Do you know how many companies will string along a part time worker, promising full health care after X months, only to fire them if they start demanding benefits? I've seen dozens of cases.
• felipelemos 9y ago
  Not every person in a position of make this kind of decision are thinking in the company's best interest. And their best interest are not always the same as the company.
• sgustard 9y ago
  They are discriminating against age, not experience. A 25-year-old with 10 years of experience (elite teen hacker!) is far more attractive than a 50-year-old with 10 years of experience (second-career washout).
  • toomanybeersies 9y ago
    That's a false equivalency. They're more likely discriminating between a 25 year old with 3 years of experience, and a 50 year old with 20 years of experience.
    • vasilipupkin 9y ago
      Is there any evidence that companies discriminate between two people with exactly the same experience over the last 5 years, with one having additional 20 in something else ?
  • nickthemagicman 9y ago
    They had another career before this which means they WANTED to go into tech. I feel like the chances they would be more passionate and dedicated are much higher.
  • wwweston 9y ago
    I'd be surprised if the average 50yo applicant seeking a development job was a second-career "washout" (whatever the word washout means for someone who actually has managed to stay working in any career for a decade). In fact, I'd guess that among 50yo applicants, more of them were teen hackers and have 30+ years of software development experience than have <10 years of experience, though perhaps the median might be more like 20+.
• dboreham 9y ago
  Health insurance costs more for old people.
• jstarfish 9y ago
  > It just don't make no sense. Other fields reward grayhairs. You see some sixty-year-old painter or architect or carpenter, you think he's probably pretty good. You see some straight-out-of-college twenty-something in . . . any other field, you think, "I sure hope he knows what he's doing." It still works this way in tech. When you need someone who knows what the hell they're doing, you're going to consider hiring a consultant, and you're likely going to get one of those same grayhairs.
• yourapostasy 9y ago
  In the highly distorted US employment market, older employees are more expensive even at the same salary level as younger employees. Big factor I haven’t seen discussed in these comment threads yet is healthcare expenses. In average aggregates, older employees in the US will tend to consume more and more expensive healthcare services, products, and pharmaceuticals. Unless you are an outlier, and somehow signal lots of health oriented choices by mentioning struggling to maintain 15% body fat over the holidays, how proud you were to join the 1000 pound club as a milestone, or how you’re looking forward to the tough mudder in four months with your buddies, it is rational for the hiring side to be led by the statistics, and presume average American health complications at each successive age cohort. I’ve yet to peer behind the curtains of corporate axings, though. So I don’t know when the lists of employees to fire are drawn up, whether or not the fully-burdened costs (especially medical insurance) are somehow accessible by line managers. The per-employee breakdown of medical costs is definitely available to companies.
  • nickthemagicman 9y ago
    1099..problem solved
    • yourapostasy 9y ago
      You should clarify what part of the problem is solved. Under individual 1099 wage treatment in the US, the healthcare cost shift is generally not in favor of the employees in older cohorts. If you are claiming to use actual individual freelance-style contributors engaging with clients as 1099, then you should look at the pricing and coverage constraints of individual healthcare plans in the US for older employees. 1099 corp-to-corp is done all the time of course, but that simply shuffles around the pieces on the board. The cost only appears to get magicked away in most 1099-oriented arrangements because the vast majority of 1099 individuals I've worked alongside and gotten to know have compromised pretty extensively on their benefit plans, compared to most conventional big group-based benefit plans. In the US, volume discounts don't cover just price, but all sorts of other transaction factors that simply do not show up in economic statistics. There are some individuals out there who are comfortable doing 1099 work, while meeting or exceeding benefits plans of big groups, and I've done it myself in the past. It takes a lot of discernment, judgement, and work to navigate the thicket of options and constantly-changing regulatory landscape from many different jurisdictions. It's easy to wave the magic wand of the free market and say make everyone a free agent, but in reality it's not for everyone, and I would not promote it as a general policy for the general population. Ronald Coase's work on the economic effects of transaction costs at individual and firm level illuminates some rationales behind why encouraging individual 1099 transactions would not produce optimal results.
• sidlls 9y ago
  Here's my take: in the world of software products speed of delivery trumps quality almost every time. Customers seem to be happy with a flaky, feature-lite products and pay for it. They'll pay to have something that kinda-sorta works now and pay to improve it on an extended basis in the B2B space. Development companies recognize this and structure themselves accordingly.
  • QAPereo 9y ago
    Customers are unhappy, but ignorant of the causes of their unhappiness.
    • Terr_ 9y ago
      The tyranny of low expectations: "Oh, it broke and I have to start over? Well, computers are like that, right?"
      • awshepard 9y ago
        > Customers seem to be happy with a flaky, feature-lite products and pay for it. They'll pay to have something that kinda-sorta works now and pay to improve it on an extended basis Yea, I was going to say - do customers expect flaky products, and companies have structured themselves accordingly? Or have companies produced flaky products, thereby getting users accustomed to paying for flaky products with promises of "we'll fix it in the next version," thus allowing companies to produce ever flakier products? Chicken and egg question I guess.
  • aryehof 9y ago
    It's not that customers (stakeholders) are happy, it's more that they just don't (immediately) know that what they are getting is mediocre or worse.
• bogomipz 9y ago
  Certainly 1 and 2 but I believe younger people are more likely to work longer hours because they are less likely to have families. Even if you didn't have family obligations I think when people get older they are less impressed with beer in the kitchen and ping pong tables and would rather not be in the office after 7:00PM.
• macrael 9y ago
  Older employees are significantly more expensive for your employer provided health insurance in the US. Not sure how that translates to bigger co's but it's significant for small firms.
  • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    No women and no non-whites = no HR problems /s
    • megaman22 9y ago
      You're being sarcastic, but... A company of entirely 20-something dudes is not going to generate any sympathy. If there's a problem, it's not going to generate headlines or blow up outside the walls.
      • grzm 9y ago
        But what? Finish your statement.
• busyant 9y ago
  Doesn't YC have a max age for founders? I imagine there is similar logic for their cutoff. Not saying it's valid, but last I checked (long ago) they had a max age. Disclosure: I am a bootstrapping old fart.
  • nickthemagicman 9y ago
    Do they? I dont think they do.
  • CobrastanJorji 9y ago
    It does not, no. The average age is 29, and they've brought in some people in their 60s. https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/#q42 https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/#q42
    • 3chelon 9y ago
      Paul Graham is no spring chicken, so it would somewhat hypocritical to be ageist when you're old.
      • lmm 9y ago
        Maybe Graham believes he couldn't start a successful startup himself at his current age. Maybe that was his reason for moving into VC.
• GreyestBeard 9y ago
  Recent grads = Shit eaters. Typically 20-something, from a mediocre 2nd or 3rd tier univ, first job, invariably 2nd gen umherican, reporting to 1st gen immig manager who couldn't care less how much shit he feeds these swines. Endless hours, lotsa BSs, moving target requirements,... Often I have queried the eaters: "Why do you take that shit?" The look on their face says: "Isn't this how it's meant to be?" No. Oh fuck, no!! Of course, the 20+ has smaller balls than a squirrel. It'll be years before he can grow some and stand up to the manager who's chewing his meagre hangings.
• seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Tech is especially bad, but other fields don’t necessarily reward gray beards. Many industries have career path pyramids that get much narrower as they go up and no tolerance for not advancing. The military officer corps for one.... Anyways, yes, that grey haired architect probably knows what they are doing, but how many architects didn’t survive to that point?
• Consultant32452 9y ago
  >It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? It's worth considering that, statistically, the discrimination might be justified. Of course the only way to know for sure is to get rid of age discrimination laws and see what happens to the market. Companies bias "incorrectly" at their own peril, to be outcompeted by companies without said bias.
• randomdata 9y ago
  The ultimate goal of advertising is to target the people most likely to take an interest in what you are offering. What if it is simply that, statistically speaking, younger people are more likely to be looking for work or willing to change jobs? I certainly don't have data in front of me, but it seems like a reasonable assumption in my mind. The youngest people just starting their careers are highly likely to be looking for work, naturally. Slightly older people often start looking to change jobs to move into higher paying roles. And by the time someone is moving beyond 40 they have reached the top of their career mobility and are happy to stay put at their current employer, plus an increasing unwillingness to uproot their family to move to a new town for a different job. There are always exceptions, of course. If, for argument's sake, we assume this is true, I can completely understand why they would only want to target those under 40. Statistically, the ads shown to anyone else are just a plain waste of money.
• joshamania 9y ago
  I think it's more about the commoditization of employees than anything else. Big companies seem to have trended to thinking of and treating their employees as commodities. A piece of furniture that can be swapped in and out at will. I don't know that it's willful discrimination against older workers so much as willful disregard as to whether or not they're getting the best employees. A company like Facebook probably doesn't really care that they get the absolute best employee for 90% of their open positions. They go with the group that's going to get them the largest number of acceptable hits so they don't need to work as hard to filter out candidates that they're not interested in. This is all speculation on my part, I have nothing to cite in this regard. I think it's fairly obvious that if Facebook filters out over-40's for these 90% of jobs right up front they will have less work to do gleaning the wheat from the chaff. For the remaining 10% of high-productivity/high-value workers they probably wouldn't use such pre-screening and do more targeted recruiting. Again, this is all a guess on my part, but it makes sense. Not saying it should be legal, but I can understand why they do it.
• gaius 9y ago
  I'm talking completely about the company's own interests The mistake is this: the interests of the company and the interests of its management are not always the same thing. Sure, the company would be better off in the long term with experienced workers producing quality working sustainable 40-hour weeks. But in the short term, Jo(e) Manager can earn his or her bonus by burning some cheap people out with 80-hour weeks, then just getting fresh ones in.
• a3n 9y ago
  Possibly the people hiring want similarly aged people to themselves, or the people hiring want to hire people of similar age to who they already have. Or maybe they believe Zuckerberg when he said that younger people are smarter than older people.
• debt 9y ago
  Yeah you don’t understand business. Code quality is vastly, vastly overestimated. Many very powerful systems that you rely on everyday to do even the most basic of shit, contains some of the most well-tested, battle-hardened shitty code you can’t even imagine. Writing “good, high quality code” is intangibly, unquantifiably expensive. Sounds like you’ve only worked on very small projects.
• katastic 9y ago
  I'll tell you right now. There is ABSOLUTELY discrimination against older workers. Even though most workers these days don't stay at companies for more than 5-10 years, if a worker is "too old" they think they'll be too hard to train, or "just looking to retire"--even if the length of time is the same. My father is the pinnacle of excellence and professionalism as a plant engineer. Everything that got me ahead of my fellow students and into a Ph.D. program, I owe to his teaching and critical thinking. He walks into a building and immediately notices things that can be improved and will save them money. (And he's not a jerk about it, either.) He worked for a company for 25 years, and others almost as long. And ever since that 2008 recession? He's been out of a job. His plant got bought out and sold off. They kept him on longer than anyone else because he was one of the best employees they had--but the company eventually went away. And now? Nobody will hire him even with countless references from management to coworkers. "He's too old." And one recruiter literally told him that. Imagine how depressing that must be, to work your ass off your whole life and doing "the right thing", putting in 110%, going into work at 3 AM because "the line is down!" and what's he got to show for all that extra work? A dwindling savings account that was supposed to be for retirement, and countless rejections from companies who wouldn't know a good employee if it smacked them in the dick. That's not how you treat the people who literally built the infrastructure you grew up on. It's reprehensible. And I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone (with a brain) would really care about age when all that matters is: "Can you make me money?" Someone may say, "Well, they can pay a junior engineer less money." Yeah, and a junior engineer is going to have less experience reducing costs, and improving reliability. There's a reason we pay experienced engineers more. Because they add more value for a unit time. It's not like we just go "Oh, you're older now. So here's some more money."
  • 77pt77 9y ago
    > "He's too old." And one recruiter literally told him that. How old is he?
    • katastic 9y ago
      60's.
• BurningFrog 9y ago
  I think you're right, and I also think the age discrimination issue is overblown. Take this article. It says that some companies ("dozens") place some ads targeted at younger audiences. NOTHING indicates that it's a major trend or that they do this a lot. The article is written because of a legal issue. But if you only read the comments you get an impression of the streets filling up with discarded old ultracompetent programmers. I don't have the whole picture either of course, but a long life in the industry gives me the impression that it actually mostly does work just the way you think it should.
  • vasilipupkin 9y ago
    My dad is 67 and his phone rings 5 times a day with recruiters begging him to take a call. He codes in c++, C sharp, python, you name it.
• godzillabrennus 9y ago
  You can pay less in a salary on average to young people. They don’t challenge you. They don’t tend to need expensive healthcare benefits.
  • vasilipupkin 9y ago
    Sometimes, it's the opposite. A 67 year old developer with a pension from a previous job and grown kids doesn't need any benefits
• angel_j 9y ago
  It's a managerial move; and most of these companies are still quite manager led; it's the reason for frameworks like Angular, which is a manager's tool, not a developers - the manager can replace one react developer with another, and stay the (fr)agile course; There's probably a bunch of managerial bias as well about the type of person they can control easier; young eager dummies, or folk with experience who know better than be treated badly
• nurettin 9y ago
  Here's my experience with an elderly coder in his mid 50s. He was a decent delphi and .net coder, he was a decent human being, but he had health problems. Most of the week he had hospital appointments. He required nose surgery. His blood levels were low. He needed vitamin d and iron supplements and during our four month acquintance, he never got any better. He constantly forgot things and he feared his lack of iron had caused a permanent damage to his brain. He was a diabetic which gave him license to be more hot headed and harder to persuade. He had accumulated a lot of debts which gave him license to be more hectic and disturbed. Overall, his long life and experience did not outweigh his negative properties.
  • michaelpinto 9y ago
    I hate to tell you this but you're looking in the mirror at your future self (and your peers) as coding isn't usually in most cases a healthy lifestyle choice.
    • nurettin 9y ago
      That may be true, but it leaves me with the frustration of having no other choice as I haven't developed interest on any other subject that would possibly give me a more healthy lifestyle. Perhaps being rich with no worries in the world would help?
  • PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    So you met one guy with a lot of chronic health problems and assume that everyone else in his age group is similar? Or if not then I'm not sure what your point is. People who miss a lot of work and make excuses for being belligerent don't make the greatest employees, but there's not as much correlation as you think between that and age. I feel like you really have given a clear answer to combatentropy's question "why do employers discriminate against older people", but it's maybe not the answer you thought you were giving.
    • nurettin 9y ago
      It is the other way around. I didn't understand why companies would even consider not hiring old/experienced software engineers until I met him. And now I am on a diet and quit smoking :-)
• dorfsmay 9y ago
  Insecure middle managers. They know seasoned workers are not going to put up with their shit and will make them look bad, possibly make higher management wanting to replace them, possibly with the season worker.
• StreamBright 9y ago
  Have you been wondering why so many companies fail? They artificially limiting themselves with such things like not hiring people based on age.
• oh-kumudo 9y ago
  To be the devil's advocate from employer perspective, old folks: 1. Work fewer hours, because of age and family 2. Pay is higher, because of experience What this implies is their wage per hour metric is higher than younglings. So didn't veteran coder get stuff done more swiftly? IMO, yes, some of them are extremely valuable and irreplaceable. But they are RARE, and doesn't need Facebook Ads to find another job, they cultivate connections or head hunters find them. So the rest of the old folks are the one that suffer most from ageism. Their career growth stuck when they are around mid 30s, as the scope of their work doesn't expand, their experience also stagnate, they end up doing the same stuff for many many years. At some point, the age is going to catch upon them, when their years of experience becomes a liability other than assets. Sad part of this is it is not necessarily their fault. They get caught up in their own comfort zone, not because they like it, but often time subjects to circumstances. And software is a field moves so fast, talking about relevance of skills in 5 years term doesn't make too much sense. Solution? Better social security net could help, but won't solve the problem, unless you go to the Japan model, at the expense of suffocating the younger generation, which is not only costly yet not feasible in western societies.
  • stareatgoats 9y ago
    I'd like to add just one thing to this explanation: Many younger managers simply don't like having their authority challenged by experience. Vanity aside, managers like to build 'their own' teams, with people that they can manage. Older, more experienced people add a level of complexity to that need.
  • syshum 9y ago
    >Work fewer hours, because of age and family I think that is generally false today. "Millennials" demand more of a work life balance than GenX or Baby Boomers, they also demand greater Maternity and Paternity leave when they have children I think most 40-50 GenX's will work MORE hours than a Millennial that has a younger child...
  • alkonaut 9y ago
    > IMO, yes, some of them are extremely valuable and irreplaceable. But they are RARE, and doesn't need Facebook Ads to find another job, they cultivate connections or head hunters find them. This is a great point. Older devs are generally "better" than young ones on every metric (including per hour costs). BUT you won't find these. The people that will apply for jobs when old, are not representative of older devs, they are representative of older devs without strong networks. > And software is a field moves so fast, talking about relevance of skills in 5 years term doesn't make too much sense. I'm not sure this is necessarily true of all of software. We tend to forget (especially on this site that has an extreme "startup" focus) that most of software dev is still people working with older (5, 10 or 15 years old) tech in a megacorp or public authority somewhere. You don't "see" these people because they don't post to stackoverflow, they don't blog about tech and they don't show up on github. What they do doesn't show up in "language trends" that just look at stackoverflow or github. Because it's just a job, it's not breaking new ground. I work in a 30 man team of 40year olds, where no one really fits the "startup" model. Of course many of these people (I'm one) will have problems finding jobs if they weren't actually "good" devs. If you grow comfortable and don't have a network, you'll have trouble finding a new job after 50 if your tech has gone out of style. But Java, C# etc are going to be in demand for a LONG time yet. Most of software tech isn't about the latest js framework. Also, as long as you stay in the same industry, the main asset of a developer is the domain knowledge from the problem domain, not software development.
• rootlocus 9y ago
  > I am 10 times better than I was when I started. I know, because I still work with some of my code from back then, and I desperately want to rewrite it all. Don't be biased. Your improvement might be heavily influenced by the fact that you work on the same codebase, in the same company, with the same people. If you were to start a new job somewhere else, your productivity would likely drop significantly during the first years.
• Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  The reason is that software - or a lot of work anyway - is throwaway software. Startups want something that just barely works (MVP that just looks good) and then either picks up and takes off, or gets bought for a few billion by investment companies or Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc - their problem then.
• huhtenberg 9y ago
  > Can someone explain it to me? It's very simple - it is harder for younger managers to work with older subordinates. The age-based hierarchies are deeply ingrained into virtually all cultures - "Elders are wise, respect your elders, etc." This makes arguing with (or reprimanding) someone who's older than you a doubly-uncomfortable task for many people. The reverse is also true - that is being bossed around by people significantly younger than yourself. When everyone does a splendid job, the age difference is not a problem. But if someone is not pulling their weight, that when it starts to complicate the situation for everyone involved.
  • moosey 9y ago
    > It's very simple - it is harder for younger managers to work with older subordinates. A good manager would figure out how to make it work. I've worked with younger managers, and I've even had to teach them how to deal with problem workers. I've also had people all the way up to the director level that I've had to manage, as a developer, because they were so terrible. I even had one ask me once 'Why are you managing me?" and had to reply "Why are you making it necessary?". I don't think that we've got the whole management thing down - I think that there are probably the same % of bad managers as their are bad devs. I'd also suggest that there are 10x managers, probably ones that read Peopleware and took it to heart. It is easy to manage most people, all it takes is a bit of diplomacy.
• wellboy 9y ago
  There are also a lot more developers who have ingrained work routines that are just bad. You might be a 10x developer, but there are a lot of 1x developers, 0.3x developers than 10x developers. If they are younger, you can still change their ways a lot better. If you're the hottest startup around, yes, you can only hire 10x developers. However, if you're the average tech company, like most are, you cannot. Those 0.3x developers and 1x developers with bad work routines occupy the most job positions in companies.
• ownagefool 9y ago
  It could be slighly more complex than just be discriminated on based on age. To be perfectly honest, I'd rather work with people who are better than me and who know things that I don't. Sadly, I work in a location and an industry where those people are thin on the ground, and thus I'm usually deciding between people who have less knowledge than I think they really should for the roles we're advertising. I'm not going to lie, when someone has 20 years experience on paper but has a shallow understanding of their trade, I'd rather hire the grad with similar knowledge if all else is equal. With that said, I have hired people who are older than me as junior members of a team before, but that's because they show an interest in learning and improving. Usually this means they've been transitioning into the role from another area. Interviewing is a crap shoot though. I have no idea if I'm good at it or not because I'll never experience the world where I've made different choices. All I know is I expect senior people who know their shit and when they disagree with me, I expect them to be able to argue their point in a friendly and somwhat clear manner. P.S. We're hiring "devops" contractors paying above market rate. It's not a thing about being cheap, it's simply having a quota of allowed hires and trying to get people who can do the job.
• coldtea 9y ago
  >It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? Companies don't care for more experience. The experience the younger programmers have is "good enough" for them, especially weighted with all the other benefits from hiring them (smaller wages, more impressionable, longer hours, less/no family commitments, etc).
• lmm 9y ago
  > Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the company's culture faster, complain less, and in general pick up things sooner. Well, the hardest, meanest coworkers I've ever had were late twenties, early thirties. I've worked with people in their sixties, and they're sweet people. Even the grumpy old sysadmin had only a thin layer of spikes. After just a few days I could see through most of it, and he was 10 times more helpful than my other sysadmins. Not only was he softer (at least deep down) but he was smarter, having done it for decades. Even when he met a new problem, his keenly developed taste made him more likely to choose something that would be more maintainable long term. What if they're right on average, and your experience is the exception rather than the rule?
• jules 9y ago
  Perhaps the extra experience is not worth 50% more? I'd be wary about calling an entire industry irrational when they're spending their own money.
• scarface74 9y ago
  I'm in my mid 40s and active professional developer who goes back and forth between being a team lead, an architect, and a developer depending on what interest me at the moment. I've found with older developers they fall in two camps - old set in their ways, didn't keep up with technology and its harder to teach them modern best practices. The other type are the ones who have learned a lot from their experience and are aggressive learners. I don't think older developers are ever "malleable" we are always stuck in our ways. Our ways just may be "this is the way I've always done it" or "I love technology and learn for the sake of learning" or "I learn aggressively to stay competitive". As far as being 10x better, the other side of the coin is that it doesn't matter if you're 10x better if your skill set is more than the company needs. If all your company needs is another CRUD app and you've gained expertise in AI, they aren't going to pay you more based on you being better.
• Spooky23 9y ago
  They don’t want people with health issues, kids and spouses. Whatever advantages you have, the common sense thinking is that more commitment and more control has high value.
• Daycrawler 9y ago
  Software isn't like architecture or carpentry. First, software engineering and programming are fields with way more skill diversity, which is a nice way of saying that there are a lot of relatively incompetent people in the industry. The assumption that people with experience are more skilled isn't generally true. I've seen people hired for the role of CTO in small startups who were explicitly chosen for their age because it somehow meant that they got more experience, except that they weren't as good as the graduate. Second, software isn't as critical as other fields because users don't care (or are trained not to care). Your iPhone calculator not working isn't the same as your room's window not closing. Most companies don't really search talent. They just want to hire cheap "talented enough". In the specific case of Facebook, Amazon, etc, the hiring process is focused on algorithmic and stuff like that a recent grade is simply more likely to get since it's still fresh.
  • pc86 9y ago
    The CTO role is about 40-49% technical at the absolute most. The primary point of the CTO is to build the team below them. This requires a lot of "soft skills" that 99% of graduates don't have. My point is that it's likely the CTO is not the most technically adept person in the company, and that's to be expected.
• koliber 9y ago
  It's about costs. If you are a large company and have robust processes in place, you don't need smart people with tons of experience. Such people are expensive. You need average people who don't need to think too much for themselves and can follow directions and work hard. The process is designed to compensate for mistakes and guide inexperienced workers. Thinking in computer terms, the analogy goes like this. A long time ago, servers had to be very powerful and very reliable. Then came cloud computing and redundant architectures. Now, you plug in relatively cheap components into an architecture that can tolerate failure. You no longer buy high-availability components as the system can function around issues seamlessly.
  • phkahler 9y ago
    >> If you are a large company and have robust processes in place, you don't need smart people with tons of experience. Such people are expensive. That was the fallacy put forth in the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) right on page 1 or 2. The notion that process could eliminate the need to rely on experts. There are a couple problems with that. Number one is that there is no process that can solve all problems or write all code. Number two is that those processes are probably not lower cost - they rely on a larger group of people. All you really get from such things is better consistency, and that is often what large companies are looking for. I would argue that having some experts in such places is extremely beneficial at times. I've benefited from them and I've been one in my niche. Without pockets of expertise, a vast group of mediocre people will drift at times.
    • koliber 9y ago
      >> Without pockets of expertise, a vast group of mediocre people will drift at times. I completely agree with each thing you said. I should have been more clear and said "a large company does not need to fill their entire workforce with smart people with tons of experience. Just a few is enough once a good process is in place." A small company needs very smart people when starting up. They don't have any processes in place and each problem is new. As companies grow, these experts develop and polish processes. As time goes on, more and more can be done with less capable people. Not all experts can be eliminated as a company grows. There will always be problems that don't fit the process. An expert is needed for those. A process also needs to adapt with the times. Experts are needed for that. However, for any class of problem, the pareto principle is in play. An army of mediocre people with an excellent process can handle 80%* of the issues. The remained will need to be handled by experts. If you have a small company you may need 10 experts to handle X load. You don't need 1000 experts to handle 100x load. You need 20 experts, a good process, and 980 hard working people. * - numbers depend on actual cases. These values are for illustrative purposes only.
• lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  What I think you're missing is how easy it is to coast in this field. It certianly sounds like you're a smart capable person with the good fortune to largely work with other smart capable people. That's great; it's not normal. At least coming from the financial sector (which employees huge numbers of people with the title "software developer") there's a pularity of people who stop improving somewhere around year one then coast on office politics and inter-firm job hopping. These are the people I think the new wave of companies/teams are looking to avoid. After 10+ years, your jobs, if you're good, ought to be coming from network references rather than facebook adds anyway. Experience is necessary but not sufficient for a top quality dev and top quality is neither necessary nor sufficient to make successful software. The cult of experience in other engineering disciplines is the reason those salaries are so low compared to ours (despite the fact that the work, schooling, and certification are orders of magnitude more involved). Let's not bring that to software please.
• lostcolony 9y ago
  Honestly, just evaluating a person's relevant experience vs salary requirements would end up looking like age discrimination. If all I care about is degree + ~7 years experience in relevant technologies + generally solid head on the person's shoulders, and I have one person with those, asking X, and another person with those, as well as another 13 years unrelated experience asking tens of thousands more, why would I pick the latter? If I don't think the benefit of that extra unrelated experience (we do cloud based distributed systems, that experience is in windows desktop apps and drivers, say) offsets that cost, why would I hire him at his expected salary? Note that I'm not saying there isn't a bias in this industry, just that it may appear magnified due to such considerations. I know where I work we ignore age, but we often dismiss resumes with "that person is far too expensive for what this position entails" when it comes to junior - senior devs. Leads, architects, technical managers, it's all considered worthwhile, but below that you're an individual contributor in a very particular niche (albeit one that allows you to learn the other parts of the system, and other projects).
  • kenjackson 9y ago
    Ignoring age is the right thing. The title of the job will do the filtering for you. I'm not going to apply to a Jr Dev position. The pay and position handle all this for you. And if someone with extra experience wants the role, what's wrong with that?
• ptero 9y ago
  > It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? It may or may not from the business point. But the point of the article I think is to debate whether this is legal or not, which is orthogonal to a purely business decision.
• dspillett 9y ago
  > his keenly developed taste made him more likely to choose something that would be more maintainable long term. But the same taste, and knowledge born of experience that there is little as long-lived as a temporary solution, might make him put his foot down and try to prevent management enforcing a short-cut that will generate technical debt. This can make older, more experienced, people seem more difficult to work with. They may also be more likely to have family commitments or have developed hobbies that require commitment (when I was marathon training last year, sticking to my plan meant arranging extra work around that rather then the other way around) so are less inclined to do overtime because bad planning elsewhere has caused a "crunch". This isn't a case of expecting more money for doing it, it is simply not wanting to do it no matter the incentive because we don't want to compromise on the things that make life feel worthwhile (younger people are easier to convince that they'll have time for that later!). None of this is fair to judge on, of course. It does not impact their ability to do the job well in the contracted time unless things are badly managed around them. But they are still considerations some people make when hiring.
• tomjen3 9y ago
  There is the perception that as you get older you don't keep up with new tech and that you work less hard. So if you are an older person, make a side project with some cutting edge stuff and prove them wrong.
• watwut 9y ago
  It is about fitting stereotype. Stereotype of good programmer is young man in formal clothing. Hence companies look for that.
• intended 9y ago
  Your suffering from survivorship bias, and you also seem to be talking from the perspective of a colleauge at the same level or near enough as the new employee. Managers and above want people who dont really know their rights, have the energy and willingness to just do the job. They also assume that younger people have better skill sets. All things equal, younger people cost less.
• purple-again 9y ago
  Another very strong factor is health insurance. A single employee with serious cancer can cause the premiums for the entire company to go up 20%. That’s not a made up scenario or a made up number. United Healthcare is not a small provider either.
• kindatrue 9y ago
  Guy Kawasaki once had a post that states the reason why, but in a different angle - it's a post basically on why Silicon Valley is successful: >>https://guykawasaki.com/how_to_kick_sil/ https://guykawasaki.com/how_to_kick_sil/ High housing prices. If houses are cheap, it means that young people can buy housing sooner and have kids. When they have kids, they can’t take as much risk and don’t have as much energy to start companies. (I have four kids—I barely have the time and energy to blog, much less start a company.) Also, if houses are cheap, it’s easier to “make it big,” and you want it to be hard to make it big.<<
  • linkregister 9y ago
    Wasn’t most of SV’s most important growth during a time when housing, talent, and funding were plentiful? Each generation of companies has come from dream teams from the previous. Space race R&D contracts and AT&T engineers begat HP, which begat Apple, Oracle, and Intel, then Sun Microsystems and the dot-coms, then Google and Apple 2.0, now the current crop of companies. SV housing being expensive has only been true for the last 20 years, and has only been utterly unaffordable for the last three. Guy knows his probate housing, self-help writing, and public speaking, but I don’t take him as an authority for computer company insights.
• loa_in_ 9y ago
  I genuinely wonder if people in charge of companies read up on the tech news and wonder "I sure would love to have a person, akin to a mathematician, that could do good work and operated in those abstract truths we see are interwoven in all things and reliably improve my business" and then proceed to hire cheapest mental workforce that gets the job barely done .