8 ms·

When I was 30, people just looked at me and assumed I was a competent software engineer because I looked exactly like a very senior software engineer, and I pre

When I was 30, people just looked at me and assumed I was a competent software engineer because I looked exactly like a very senior software engineer, and I presented myself in that way. But I was very junior, having made a recent career change. Yet they paid me like a prince, and I rose so rapidly through the ranks that I became an executive. Now I'm 50, and my company folded and I went to the curb, and am looking for a new job. Now I don't look like that bright young engineer. I look like an old has-been who is stuck in a rut and stuck in my ways. Except I'm not. I'm highly experienced, an innovator, get along great with many kinds of people and can contribute at all levels of an org, from production support to development to architecture to the boardroom. But the first question I get asked on interviews is "Are you technical?" My over-40 career advice for you is to remember what they do to engineers that are over 40.

jensv 8y ago
That's insanity. What is wrong with this industry????
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Being ageist cost nothing and is hard to prove.
  - noname120 8y ago
    Of course it does cost something. If there is unjustified ageism, then the market value of older people is lower than it should be. In this case, hiring a younger person will cost you more if adjusted for output.
- hinkley 8y ago
  I've been watching Uncle Bob videos lately and he's stated in a number of them that the population of developers has doubled every 5 years basically since the beginning. Which means that half of developers have less than 5 years experience. We are just outnumbered by the new kids. But there also usually aren't enough of them to fill all of the seats.
- vram22 8y ago
  Unless that is a rhetorical question .... plenty.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  I guess it is more a question what is wrong with humanity ... despite all progress, what matters most to most people is, how does someone looks. And it sure does tells a lot, but not at all enough.
madeuptempacct 8y ago
The prospect of being a senior dev and 40 is terrifying to me. The only ones who are treated with any respect are the "real" wizards - i.e. the guys who spent every spare second if their life breathing tech. The guy who decompiles third party code at 4 am to see why their update caused an error in our system (real recent story). The other (very competent) older people get actively harassed. Some little *es from my company tried to get an older guy fired for being "too slow", when he is anything but. And I think the company I work for now is one of the friendlier environments for older devs. Dunno, it's a genuinely scary prospect. Not trying to put anyone down, just what I see around me. I hear its even worse on the coasts. I am in a flyover and have never worked in San Fran.
- twblalock 8y ago
  I'm in Silicon Valley and I work with plenty of well-compensated, valued engineers in their 40s and 50s. They are easier to find at large companies than at startups -- part of that is due to ageism, but another factor is that they are done putting up with the startup bs and want a stable job with good benefits and a high salary and work-life balance. Some of them are senior individual contributors, some of them are in engineering management, and some have transitioned from engineering to project management. Many of them could afford to retire today but want to keep working. And very few of them are still in the building after 5:30pm, because they have lives to go home to and refuse to work crazy startup hours. Ageism is real in the industry. But the outlook for engineers over 40 is not a terrifying or bleak as you make it seem.
- tcbawo 8y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted. Ageism is real and depends on where you are. It can be scary if you live in a smaller market.
- scarface74 8y ago
  The prospect of being a senior dev and 40 is terrifying to me. The only ones who are treated with any respect are the "real" wizards - i.e. the guys who spent every spare second if their life breathing tech. I’m not a wizard, my work/life/exercise balance is pretty good and I’m in my mid 40s. I would hate to be “just a senior developer” competing with younger people who could do just as well for less money. I feel my value add is architecture. I’m a hands on developer by choice, but I can also step in and lead projects, do Devops, speak to CxOs, I know AWS from a development, Devops, and netops perspective pretty well. That does mean that only certain types of companies will pay me for that skillset - mostly smaller companies without dedicated people for all those areas.
itgoon 8y ago
I've had a lot of success with having Github projects to answer that question. "Look for yourself" is a great comeback. It doesn't even have to be original, or particularly useful. Just something that shows that you understand what modern development is about: neat code, good docs, unit tests, regular commits. Use modern libraries and idioms. Heck, I don't think anyplace has even tried the code.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I try to do the same, however it is an up hill battle with HR if the github contents happen to be in distinct domains that what the CV states.
  - vram22 8y ago
    The problem there is not with your Github contents. The problem is with the kind of HR staff who are not technically knowledgeable enough [1] to understand that skills in other domains can translate to skills in the needed domains. Should consider looking for jobs where the technical leadership do the hiring or at least have a large say in it, as in, they are the ones who vet you technically, not the HR. Many HR people just use a buzzword match (Java 5 years exp? no? out!) and reject blindly based on that. (Cue HR jokes like them putting out job descs. for 6 year of Rails exp. when Rails was 2 years old - substitute any other tech too, same story.) HR should only be involved for talks like starting date, perks, joining docs, etc. There are jobs or contracting roles like that, mainly with startups, and I have gotten such gigs. Even in some large enterprise companies where I worked earlier, the technical and managerial parts of the interviews were mostly done by the tech leader or tech managers in the company. I've been interviewed by tech leaders even when I was a junior dev. And that is not uncommon. All depends on the kind of company you apply to. [1] And this is why the "hiring is broken" topic comes up often on HN and other forums, because it is so. Even management, many times, have a shortsighted and wrong view towards what hiring (and related stuff, like what you do after you join) is (or should be) all about. Edited for grammar and to add stuff.
jcroll 8y ago
> remember what they do to engineers that are over 40. May I ask what do you mean by this? I'm an engineer entering my late 30's, what is it exactly that I have to prepare for by the time I enter my 40s?
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  They eventually get fired because too old/too expensive. Get into management/team leadership in a way or another asap. You're probably not feeling this right now because the economy is overheated. But be wary of the next recession if you're still doing the same job - however much better - than a junior for several times their salary. (If you've specialized and valuable skills that are extremely hard to replace you should be fine. But if you're doing generic stuff it's time to take a cold hard look at what your career will be in the next 25 years.) And just to be clear in case one might think this is ageism at work: having seen the difference in productivity, I'd hire a 40+ senior over 3 juniors in a heartbeat most of the time, but budget doesn't always allow one to do so.
  - zmmmmm 8y ago
    > having seen the difference in productivity, I'd hire a 40+ senior over 3 juniors in a heartbeat most of the time Honestly I think it's not directly ageism, but indirectly, many people are afraid of managing people with significantly more experience or just plain older than them. So if the team lead is 35 with 10 years eng experience, they will probably be worried about a 45 y/o with 25 years eng experience who will challenge their authority and possibly prevent them from leading the whole team the way they want. Developing the maturity to not just cope with but thrive on managing people with much more experience / knowledge than yourself takes time, especially for engineers who tend to derive their authority primarily from their technical knowledge / experience. Eventually it will happen, but only after those managers replace technical experience with actual management experience as the basis of their self-worth / ego / authority.
    - JohnBooty 8y ago
      > So if the team lead is 35 with 10 years eng > experience, they will probably be worried about > a 45 y/o with 25 years eng experience who will > challenge their authority and possibly prevent > them from leading the whole team the way they want. This was a huge factor at my last job, with myself and other engineers who were much more experienced than the people who were (inexplicably) placed in charge. We had a VP who was so green that he didn't know what he didn't know. He was still in that phase of life where he knew 10% of everything, and since he didn't know the other 90% even existed... he thought his knowledge was 100%. Very difficult to work with, much less for. (And that's even without a "power struggle" happening. Us 40-ish types were explicitly disinterested in becoming management. Nobody wanted to undermine him; we literally just wanted to do our jobs without his incompetent micromanagement)
khazhoux 8y ago
> My over-40 career advice for you is to remember what they do to engineers that are over 40. No offense personally intended, but as a mid-40s engineer/manager who knows many 40s/50s engineers, I can't relate to this sentiment. We have a couple of older engineers who are kinda useless, but we also have some useless young engineers too. Some of the older engineers dominate the engineering org, leading large architectures and more-often-than-not seeing technical issues very clearly and making good calls. Their defining characteristic is that they're good, not that they have gray hair. My over-40 career advice for everyone is to stay sharp.
- rasjani 8y ago
  Totally agree. Been in it professionally since ‘97. I’m not a superstar or anything but people who have hired me have always done it because of this. As a self educated, i still keep myself updated as that’s always been the passion that drove me here. And observation about flip side: When Nokia came crashing down, lot of engineers where (and still are) struggling to get a new job. They had been working on same area for decades, with tools that are limited to their old work - and no desire to take chances and trying out something different. Yeah, age can be limiting factor, sometimes, but don’t let it be because of your own fault.
scarface74 8y ago
I completely disagree with this sentiment. I have a group of six friends from a former company that I still keep in touch with and we meet for lunch at least once a month , the youngest is 42 and the oldest is in his late 50s. The guy in his late 50s, hired all of us at our former company. He “self demoted” to a developer after his kids graduated. None of us have any desire for management. We all keep up with the latest technology and any of us regularly get jobs within a month or two depending on how picky we are being. I am in my mid 40s, been developing professionally for over 20 years and it’s never taken me more than a month to get a job from the time I start looking. I am nowhere near the west coast but I do live in s major metropolitan area.
paulgrant999 8y ago
40+ and I can tell you, this is the case. basically industry just wants to suck the life out of you from 20-40, then dump your ass hard. just the way it is. last week I was talking to an Indian working two jobs, because his take home pay was < 20k, billable at 60k, for a job that market pay is 120k at entry-level. So when somebody tells me to "take a paycut", I tell them to go fuck themselves. Particularly if they are the CEO banking millions of dollars, and block-busting labor with H1B's under slave conditions. The crazy thing? I asked the Indian guy, do you even want to live in the states and he doesn't care. He actually prefers India. So they're coming over here, ruining the job market, and they don't give a shit if they're even here. Mentally I'm going "then why the fuck are you here?" If they totally repealed the H1B, I would be a happy camper. They already transferred the tech to India and China; but do they have to kill/give away the next generations of tech?

jensv 8y ago

That's insanity. What is wrong with this industry????

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Being ageist cost nothing and is hard to prove.
- noname120 8y ago
  Of course it does cost something. If there is unjustified ageism, then the market value of older people is lower than it should be. In this case, hiring a younger person will cost you more if adjusted for output.
hinkley 8y ago
I've been watching Uncle Bob videos lately and he's stated in a number of them that the population of developers has doubled every 5 years basically since the beginning. Which means that half of developers have less than 5 years experience. We are just outnumbered by the new kids. But there also usually aren't enough of them to fill all of the seats.
vram22 8y ago
Unless that is a rhetorical question .... plenty.
hutzlibu 8y ago
I guess it is more a question what is wrong with humanity ... despite all progress, what matters most to most people is, how does someone looks. And it sure does tells a lot, but not at all enough.

madeuptempacct 8y ago

The prospect of being a senior dev and 40 is terrifying to me. The only ones who are treated with any respect are the "real" wizards - i.e. the guys who spent every spare second if their life breathing tech. The guy who decompiles third party code at 4 am to see why their update caused an error in our system (real recent story). The other (very competent) older people get actively harassed. Some little *es from my company tried to get an older guy fired for being "too slow", when he is anything but. And I think the company I work for now is one of the friendlier environments for older devs. Dunno, it's a genuinely scary prospect. Not trying to put anyone down, just what I see around me. I hear its even worse on the coasts. I am in a flyover and have never worked in San Fran.

twblalock 8y ago
I'm in Silicon Valley and I work with plenty of well-compensated, valued engineers in their 40s and 50s. They are easier to find at large companies than at startups -- part of that is due to ageism, but another factor is that they are done putting up with the startup bs and want a stable job with good benefits and a high salary and work-life balance. Some of them are senior individual contributors, some of them are in engineering management, and some have transitioned from engineering to project management. Many of them could afford to retire today but want to keep working. And very few of them are still in the building after 5:30pm, because they have lives to go home to and refuse to work crazy startup hours. Ageism is real in the industry. But the outlook for engineers over 40 is not a terrifying or bleak as you make it seem.
tcbawo 8y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Ageism is real and depends on where you are. It can be scary if you live in a smaller market.
scarface74 8y ago
The prospect of being a senior dev and 40 is terrifying to me. The only ones who are treated with any respect are the "real" wizards - i.e. the guys who spent every spare second if their life breathing tech. I’m not a wizard, my work/life/exercise balance is pretty good and I’m in my mid 40s. I would hate to be “just a senior developer” competing with younger people who could do just as well for less money. I feel my value add is architecture. I’m a hands on developer by choice, but I can also step in and lead projects, do Devops, speak to CxOs, I know AWS from a development, Devops, and netops perspective pretty well. That does mean that only certain types of companies will pay me for that skillset - mostly smaller companies without dedicated people for all those areas.

itgoon 8y ago

I've had a lot of success with having Github projects to answer that question. "Look for yourself" is a great comeback. It doesn't even have to be original, or particularly useful. Just something that shows that you understand what modern development is about: neat code, good docs, unit tests, regular commits. Use modern libraries and idioms. Heck, I don't think anyplace has even tried the code.

pjmlp 8y ago
I try to do the same, however it is an up hill battle with HR if the github contents happen to be in distinct domains that what the CV states.
- vram22 8y ago
  The problem there is not with your Github contents. The problem is with the kind of HR staff who are not technically knowledgeable enough [1] to understand that skills in other domains can translate to skills in the needed domains. Should consider looking for jobs where the technical leadership do the hiring or at least have a large say in it, as in, they are the ones who vet you technically, not the HR. Many HR people just use a buzzword match (Java 5 years exp? no? out!) and reject blindly based on that. (Cue HR jokes like them putting out job descs. for 6 year of Rails exp. when Rails was 2 years old - substitute any other tech too, same story.) HR should only be involved for talks like starting date, perks, joining docs, etc. There are jobs or contracting roles like that, mainly with startups, and I have gotten such gigs. Even in some large enterprise companies where I worked earlier, the technical and managerial parts of the interviews were mostly done by the tech leader or tech managers in the company. I've been interviewed by tech leaders even when I was a junior dev. And that is not uncommon. All depends on the kind of company you apply to. [1] And this is why the "hiring is broken" topic comes up often on HN and other forums, because it is so. Even management, many times, have a shortsighted and wrong view towards what hiring (and related stuff, like what you do after you join) is (or should be) all about. Edited for grammar and to add stuff.

jcroll 8y ago

> remember what they do to engineers that are over 40. May I ask what do you mean by this? I'm an engineer entering my late 30's, what is it exactly that I have to prepare for by the time I enter my 40s?

ddebernardy 8y ago
They eventually get fired because too old/too expensive. Get into management/team leadership in a way or another asap. You're probably not feeling this right now because the economy is overheated. But be wary of the next recession if you're still doing the same job - however much better - than a junior for several times their salary. (If you've specialized and valuable skills that are extremely hard to replace you should be fine. But if you're doing generic stuff it's time to take a cold hard look at what your career will be in the next 25 years.) And just to be clear in case one might think this is ageism at work: having seen the difference in productivity, I'd hire a 40+ senior over 3 juniors in a heartbeat most of the time, but budget doesn't always allow one to do so.
- zmmmmm 8y ago
  > having seen the difference in productivity, I'd hire a 40+ senior over 3 juniors in a heartbeat most of the time Honestly I think it's not directly ageism, but indirectly, many people are afraid of managing people with significantly more experience or just plain older than them. So if the team lead is 35 with 10 years eng experience, they will probably be worried about a 45 y/o with 25 years eng experience who will challenge their authority and possibly prevent them from leading the whole team the way they want. Developing the maturity to not just cope with but thrive on managing people with much more experience / knowledge than yourself takes time, especially for engineers who tend to derive their authority primarily from their technical knowledge / experience. Eventually it will happen, but only after those managers replace technical experience with actual management experience as the basis of their self-worth / ego / authority.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    > So if the team lead is 35 with 10 years eng > experience, they will probably be worried about > a 45 y/o with 25 years eng experience who will > challenge their authority and possibly prevent > them from leading the whole team the way they want. This was a huge factor at my last job, with myself and other engineers who were much more experienced than the people who were (inexplicably) placed in charge. We had a VP who was so green that he didn't know what he didn't know. He was still in that phase of life where he knew 10% of everything, and since he didn't know the other 90% even existed... he thought his knowledge was 100%. Very difficult to work with, much less for. (And that's even without a "power struggle" happening. Us 40-ish types were explicitly disinterested in becoming management. Nobody wanted to undermine him; we literally just wanted to do our jobs without his incompetent micromanagement)

khazhoux 8y ago

> My over-40 career advice for you is to remember what they do to engineers that are over 40. No offense personally intended, but as a mid-40s engineer/manager who knows many 40s/50s engineers, I can't relate to this sentiment. We have a couple of older engineers who are kinda useless, but we also have some useless young engineers too. Some of the older engineers dominate the engineering org, leading large architectures and more-often-than-not seeing technical issues very clearly and making good calls. Their defining characteristic is that they're good, not that they have gray hair. My over-40 career advice for everyone is to stay sharp.

rasjani 8y ago
Totally agree. Been in it professionally since ‘97. I’m not a superstar or anything but people who have hired me have always done it because of this. As a self educated, i still keep myself updated as that’s always been the passion that drove me here. And observation about flip side: When Nokia came crashing down, lot of engineers where (and still are) struggling to get a new job. They had been working on same area for decades, with tools that are limited to their old work - and no desire to take chances and trying out something different. Yeah, age can be limiting factor, sometimes, but don’t let it be because of your own fault.

scarface74 8y ago

I completely disagree with this sentiment. I have a group of six friends from a former company that I still keep in touch with and we meet for lunch at least once a month , the youngest is 42 and the oldest is in his late 50s. The guy in his late 50s, hired all of us at our former company. He “self demoted” to a developer after his kids graduated. None of us have any desire for management. We all keep up with the latest technology and any of us regularly get jobs within a month or two depending on how picky we are being. I am in my mid 40s, been developing professionally for over 20 years and it’s never taken me more than a month to get a job from the time I start looking. I am nowhere near the west coast but I do live in s major metropolitan area.

paulgrant999 8y ago

40+ and I can tell you, this is the case. basically industry just wants to suck the life out of you from 20-40, then dump your ass hard. just the way it is. last week I was talking to an Indian working two jobs, because his take home pay was < 20k, billable at 60k, for a job that market pay is 120k at entry-level. So when somebody tells me to "take a paycut", I tell them to go fuck themselves. Particularly if they are the CEO banking millions of dollars, and block-busting labor with H1B's under slave conditions. The crazy thing? I asked the Indian guy, do you even want to live in the states and he doesn't care. He actually prefers India. So they're coming over here, ruining the job market, and they don't give a shit if they're even here. Mentally I'm going "then why the fuck are you here?" If they totally repealed the H1B, I would be a happy camper. They already transferred the tech to India and China; but do they have to kill/give away the next generations of tech?