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Only because as people get experience they end up in the “Engineering Manager” role & such. Plus there’s a GLUT of fresh grads joining each year.

taneq 8y ago
Yeah, I think part of the issue is the horribly broken career progression model that most companies seem to use. Graduate -> Software Engineer -> Senior Software Engineer -> Team Lead -> Non-Technical Manager (???) Then again, unless a company is scaling at the same speed as your career, you're eventually (probably before 40) going to hit a wall where there's no higher level for a tech person to go, because there are no bigger problems to solve. If you want to earn more money or get more recognition, you're going to need to move to another company which can offer harder challenges.
intended 8y ago
Your last line is the single point of failure for this whole issue. The various systems, incentives, lies - ALL, arise from the growth paradigm. That paradigm depends on more cheap, energetic fresh meat arriving out of college/recruiters every year. Fresh grads cost less, have relatively more energy, fewer ties, and probably better cognition responses. They lack experience, but that's a solvable problem. The question to ask is this: Why WONT there be work place discrimination, when younger, cheaper candidates show up every day? System incentives are not in favor of growing old in tech. And whats laughably worse about this is that humans are TERRIBLE at making out correlation from causation: people will eventually associate youth with tech work, so an OLD person doing tech - will be tagged as an outlier and assessed on that. (And Firms would NEVER admit that its just easier for them to ignore work place equality issues in favor of "fit" and "cultural match")
- kokey 8y ago
  This is also more of a US centric phenomenon, not only because of the investment culture but because it's about the only developed country with a strong young population. That said, as those of us with the experience has witnessed before, these periods of growth focus comes in cycles and when the phase ends the experience of being boring and risk-averse can actually be an advantage for survival if it's combined with skill and experience.
jonhendry18 8y ago
"Only because as people get experience they end up in the “Engineering Manager” role & such." There's a limited number of those positions, inherently. So most of the people in an age group are probably leaving the profession altogether, not moving to management.

taneq 8y ago

Yeah, I think part of the issue is the horribly broken career progression model that most companies seem to use. Graduate -> Software Engineer -> Senior Software Engineer -> Team Lead -> Non-Technical Manager (???) Then again, unless a company is scaling at the same speed as your career, you're eventually (probably before 40) going to hit a wall where there's no higher level for a tech person to go, because there are no bigger problems to solve. If you want to earn more money or get more recognition, you're going to need to move to another company which can offer harder challenges.

intended 8y ago

Your last line is the single point of failure for this whole issue. The various systems, incentives, lies - ALL, arise from the growth paradigm. That paradigm depends on more cheap, energetic fresh meat arriving out of college/recruiters every year. Fresh grads cost less, have relatively more energy, fewer ties, and probably better cognition responses. They lack experience, but that's a solvable problem. The question to ask is this: Why WONT there be work place discrimination, when younger, cheaper candidates show up every day? System incentives are not in favor of growing old in tech. And whats laughably worse about this is that humans are TERRIBLE at making out correlation from causation: people will eventually associate youth with tech work, so an OLD person doing tech - will be tagged as an outlier and assessed on that. (And Firms would NEVER admit that its just easier for them to ignore work place equality issues in favor of "fit" and "cultural match")

kokey 8y ago
This is also more of a US centric phenomenon, not only because of the investment culture but because it's about the only developed country with a strong young population. That said, as those of us with the experience has witnessed before, these periods of growth focus comes in cycles and when the phase ends the experience of being boring and risk-averse can actually be an advantage for survival if it's combined with skill and experience.

jonhendry18 8y ago

"Only because as people get experience they end up in the “Engineering Manager” role & such." There's a limited number of those positions, inherently. So most of the people in an age group are probably leaving the profession altogether, not moving to management.