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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

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.

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.