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I prefer hiring people in their 30ies. It’s the perfect mix of being old enough to be practical and patient and young enough to still be cheap. The cheap bit co
by eksemplar 8y ago
I prefer hiring people in their 30ies. It’s the perfect mix of being old enough to be practical and patient and young enough to still be cheap. The cheap bit comes from being in the Danish public sector where seniority gives automatic pay increases that you can’t legally turn down, so there is that.
I do wonder why people wouldn’t hire older programmers or engineers though. A lot of them are still extremely nerdy about their hobby, they have profound amounts of experience and they’ll typically both be able to follow orders and voice their opinions. Often they’ll have a good grip on work life balancing as well, making them less prone to stress.
I’m not sure ageism is really a big problem though. I haven’t seen any unemployment numbers on old programmers being huge, though I will admit that fear of abuse was one of the reasons I went into management.
That being said, I do think people should plan their staff to be without huge age gaps. It’s one of the few things that has an empirical proven negative effect on teams. But that goes both ways.
- taurath 8y agoCouple points I’ve seen that can knock older (and not wiser) devs - * fixing the problems they had at their last company, inappropriately so to the point of over-engineering. Sometimes it’s not elegant, but hardened against the wrong things * insistence on older technologies and patternss that they’re familiar with even if not concise
- cmcginty 8y ago>I prefer hiring people in their 30ies. >I’m not sure ageism is really a big problem though. I'm not sure you can put both those statements together without sounding uninformed.
- chii 8y agoIts only ageism when other people do it.
- wyclif 8y agoI do wonder why people wouldn’t hire older programmers or engineers though The same reason the military prefers younger over older. Younger developers are easier to manipulate, overwork, and underpay. They are easier to mould and shape in conformance with corporate "culture fit", and they're less likely to question authority. They also don't have the wisdom yet to know when they are being asked to drink the startup Kool-Aid.
- taurath 8y agoWhich in a way kind of brings up a point - sometimes you need idealists to see things through, to have a chance. A crusty pessimistic person isn’t necessarily battle-hardened, they may be battle-broken. Of course, that doesn’t have much to do with age - one can be closed to new ideas at any age.
- wonton2 8y agoI think in Scandinavia it is different because we actually have laws saying you cannot force people to work the extreme amounts of overtime that they do in USA or in China. So older devs could be using the time they have more efficiently. My experience is also that older devs are very sought after. It could also have something to do with the shortage of developers here though.