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New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

• onebyteman 7y ago
  I’m 100, I started programming using sundials before there were transistors
• nimbius 7y ago
  Is this something exclusive to white collar jobs or is it mostly programming? Asking as my day job is in the skilled trade of engine mechanic. If youre over 45 in a machine shop or in any trade (plumbing, electrical, automotive, HVAC, etc...) your biggest barrier to getting any job is picking up the phone when it rings. Johnson Control, Honeywell, heck even people like Nest and Ford are kicking down your door and offering you any money to join.
  • hourislate 7y ago
    I feel like this applies more to programming. It should act as writing on the wall for anyone who thinks they can make a career out of it. You have 15-20 years and then you're considered old I suppose. I don't find this to be the case with other areas of IT. We have a lot of folks in the late 40's to middle 50's working through out our IT Department and organization.
  • granshaw 7y ago
    From what I can gather it’s way worse in programming than at least in other Engineering fields
  • chadcmulligan 7y ago
    I suspect its west coast USA, particularly start ups. If you're in your 50's then you probably won't put up with the nonsense startups say. As friend of mine says - I wouldn't work for lottery tickets (shares).
• m3kw9 7y ago
  There is also a whiteboard bias
• vinceguidry 7y ago
  The way I look at it, when you work in tech, it doesn't take long for fields to become stratified. I've gotten turned down for a senior job for not having enough "agile experience." Really? Am you looking for an engineer or a project manager? I think every single programmer needs to be looking forward to the day where every single job move is at best a lateral one, so it's going to make more sense to move towards business rather than staying in IC if you want upward mobility as a 'regular' coder. I suspect IC technical jobs are going to be the next professional class, you're either going to be in when that happens or you're going to be out. You won't realize it's happened and you're not in until you get laid off and replaced by a contractor at a fraction of your salary, and you won't be able to find a job except as one of those contractors. The reckoning is coming guys. Get ready for it.
  • pmiller2 7y ago
    I was recently rejected for a job for not having enough “API experience.” I have been a backend engineer for 5 years. Regardless of whatever the hell “API experience” is supposed to be, my entire career has been designing, implementing, and calling APIs.
    • vinceguidry 7y ago
      A recruiter gave me a great piece of advice, to ask the question towards the end of the interview, "is there anything that would cause you to think I'm not quite qualified for the position," this way you can get such concerns out in front and be able to address them while it's still convenient and before they reject you for it.
      • pmiller2 7y ago
        I did ask those things. Don’t underestimate people’s unwillingness to look you in the eye and tell you the truth when they think you might not like it.
• jtr1 7y ago
  A few years ago I worked at a ~50 person startup, where an informal poll revealed everyone on the engineering team to be in an age range of ~24-30. One day we interviewed an insanely qualified dude in his mid-50s. He’d worked with technologicies up and down our stack, their competitors, and their predecessors, and could speak at length to their relative strengths and weaknesses. Tons of open source contributions, mentorship experience galore, super nice - super nice, but also clearly nervous during a few rounds. At the team standup afterward, pretty much everyone was an unreserved yes except the engineering manager who directly said he was concerned about the candidate’s age, and whether he would “fit in.” He wondered out loud whether we could reject the candidate on this basis. The CTO was at the meeting and immediately shut that line of questioning down, although none of us ever heard from that candidate again. Something I’ll never forget as I get older in this field.
  • NeverFade 7y ago
    > The CTO was at the meeting and immediately shut that line of questioning down, although none of us ever heard from that candidate again. Your CTO shut it down because your engineering manager was breaking Federal law in public. However, I don't need to tell you what happens to candidates that the hiring manager doesn't want to hire. Also, I have witnessed similar situations multiple times. Everyone who worked for over 10 years knows ageism is thriving in tech, especially in the Bay.
  • PopeDotNinja 7y ago
    If I were the CTO in that situation, I would seriously have considered firing the engineering manager on the spot. Blatant discrimination is a serious fuck up. Period.
    • paulkon 7y ago
      Yeah at least make it subtle... /s
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• numon 7y ago
  I suspect it is a deep seated human tendency to look up to and defer to the experience of those who are older than you (parents, community elders), so people are naturally uncomfortable with "senior underlings". Junior bosses will inevitably feel their decisions and position threatened by people older than them, especially in more general settings. Throw in the conflation of skill with seniority, leading to an expectation of adjusting wage to age (not skill), our culture's infatuation with youth and the reliance on heuristics to save time and you have a situation highly unsuited to our present job-hopping lifestyles. Finding a job is more about "who you know, not what you know", which just makes things worse since age groups tend to cluster. This then gets explained as "cultural fit". IME HR is all about risk avoidance. HR is not about finding the best candidate, it is concerned about finding the safest. The older folk may be the best, but they are not the safest, because they tend to have empty patches in their resume and the soft skills like wisdom, communication skills, tend not to be expressible in resume form. It's never easy going against ingrained norms, especially when they are held by other people. Until the current millenial tech companies hit middle age, I don't see things changing much. Business opportunity?
• soneca 7y ago
  What about older junior developers? I am 39yo, but I do not relate with these stories from people with 20+ years of experience in tech. I am a frontend developer for two years only, moving to Los Angeles just now and looking for a job. Anyone would like to comment if my age and my lack of experience programming will compound and make extra hard for me to get a job?
• tinalong 7y ago
  Upsetting article.
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• RickSanchez2600 7y ago
  A friend of mine specialized in OSX USB drivers and did contract work for OEMS who make products for the Apple Macintosh. He used to work for Apple in the 1990s and did work on Mac System 7.5.4 with the team. He recently killed himself, because he could not find clients and work due to ageism etc. He got sick as well and for a while was homeless. Once he got grey hair they didn't want to hire him anymore. He was 55.
  • mikelevins 7y ago
    This is eerily similar to my own story, except that I'm 59 and still alive, so far. I didn't work on drivers; I worked on mostly higher-level stuff (Newton, HyperCard, Quicktime, AppleScript, and several projects that did not ultimately become products). I worked at Apple from 1988 to 1998, and after that moved on to a successful startup. In 2004 for I developed an incurable chronic illness. It was one that is hard to diagnose and hard to treat. I eventually found a doctor who could figure out how to handle it, and became able to work again. Before the illness, I was in that category where I never applied for jobs, because there was always someone bugging me to go to work for them. In fact, my work at Apple was in two chunks because someone bugged me to go to NeXT, then someone bugged me to join a startup, then someone bugged me to go back to Apple. After Apple laid me off in 1998, two startups immediately bugged me to go to work for them and I chose the one that looked better. After the illness, it has never been like that again. Since 2004, I have mostly been self employed, mainly as a contractor writing code and technical documentation. I choose to live in a place with very low cost of living, so that when I'm working I can stack up piles of cash to live on between gigs. I'm using one of those piles now to work on a product of my own design. I've contemplated suicide a few times in what I think is a relatively dispassionate way. It was always during fallow periods when my buffer was getting threadbare, and I was in danger of becoming a financial burden to loved ones. I always decided against it because, first, it's irreversible and other choices aren't; and second, because the harm I would do to my loved ones by making that choice probably outweighed the harm I would do by becoming an expense to them. Although I didn't make your friend's decision, I also don't judge it. I believe I understand in general how it can seem like a reasonable choice in some circumstances. Since we're talking about ageism, I'll mention that I can't prove that the drastic change in my employability is a case of ageism, nor a case of discrimination against people with chronic illnesses. I suspect it of being both, though, partly because age and health are (not necessarily reliable) proxies for other qualities that employers are legitimately interested in, so I can see what the motivation might be, and partly because the differences between before my illness and since are just so stark and sudden.
• ramgorur 7y ago
  I am going to hit 37 this year. I am still a student doing a PhD (an international student). These kind of story scares me.
• aiisjustanif 7y ago
  Sorry, but this comment section is primarily focused Bay Area, LeetCode, California, and Software Devs. Mean while the story doesn't focus on any of those things in particular. How is an old gentleman getting turned away from a job at a restaurant chain, Season 52, for, "Not looking young enough" relate to any of that and the broader issue of Age discrimination across the board. The anecdotal stories are cool and fine obviously. But normally non-tech postings on Hacker-News, especially political news stories/articles, lead to discussion about what was discussed _in_ the article at least somewhat... And I'd like to see that. Just found it odd. Don't mind me if this sentiment isn't shared.
• sn 7y ago
  I would be more than happy to help find work for anyone who is unemployed due to being "overqualified."
• werbles1 7y ago
  Fuck you.
• AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  .... why not contract?
• StaticRedux 7y ago
  As a generalist developer nearing 40, I worry about this all the time. I have extensive and valuable experience in certain areas, including management, but I have started investigating other directions I can take my career and more focused specialities I can pursue to extend my shelf life, because it's seems pretty clear that it's not really viable to continue my current path.
  • tyingq 7y ago
    It is less of a problem if you focus on the IT departments of non-tech companies. Still exists, but nowhere near the same degree.
• Ancalagon 7y ago
  I just don't understand the bias. I'm too young to have experienced age discrimination like this yet, but its obvious at least to me that the best developers and hell, leaders, that I've worked with were all a part of older generations. Is it a shortcoming in pay for all these people? I feel like being out of work for 3 years would definitely lower whatever standard of pay I had prior to becoming unemployed. I just do not get the disconnect
  • drivingmenuts 7y ago
    Older workers = more experience = higher pay. Younger workers = less experience = lower pay. Older workers also cost more in insurance premiums, have more "life events" that pull them away from work and are potentially harder to sell on corporate environment.
    • onion2k 7y ago
      Older workers = more experience = higher pay. You missed a step. Older workers = more experience = more responsibility = higher pay. Without that extra responsibility there's no reason to pay someone more simply because they're older. The pay should be based on what the job is, not the age or 'experience' of the person doing it.
    • fjsolwmv 7y ago
      If you've ever sat in a hiring meeting, you'd know it's straightforward discrimination, but it's positive discrimination in favor of young people . It goes like this: "Old guy here is a low/mid level person after 20 years, so he clearly isn't a superstar. Young guy here is low/mid level person, so he has potential to be a superstar." Hiring committees, smothered by the legal ass covering around race and sex discrimination, never even think twice about making this discriminatory argument. It's even officially enshrined in hiring plans as "expectation of trajectory", a rule that only applies to old people. And before you say "ok but that's a logical argument", it's exactly the same logically correct argument as the (illegal) "bases on my limited knowledge, a white/Chinese/male candidate I just met is more likely to be successful at this job than a black/Hispanic/female candidate".
    • 7y ago
• invalidOrTaken 7y ago
  Seen on Mastodon (not me): >Whenever I hear "We need more programmers! Make more young people interested in programming! Teach programming at kindergarten!" I always get the urge to ask "What did you do with the old ones you had?" >Where are all those programmers you hired 5-20 years ago? Why is no programmer at your company older than 40? Why do you have senior software engineers that are 25 years old? What did you do to all those people? >If you can't take care of your employees, no wonder you never have enough.
  • rolltiide 7y ago
    there are obvious answers, likely interrelated older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory, no matter whether they liked coding or management more. the ones that failed in some way - meaning a disruption in their spending and earning capability - are the only ones on the market trying to get programming jobs, and complaining about it. fixing the earning trajectory in a programming track helps fix this outcome too. FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired.
    • pixelrevision 7y ago
      I wonder how much the transition to management helps nowadays. I have a few friends who did that, lost a lot of technical relevance and have had a terrible time finding new jobs as many places promote from within.
    • RandomOpinion 7y ago
      > older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory ... FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired. The FAANG companies and other technology platform companies have separate technical and management career tracks. Only those who want to be managers become managers.
      • cycrutchfield 7y ago
        In theory, yes. In practice, no. At a certain point, a lot of engineers plateau in terms of technical ability and are unable to continue to level up. For many, they feel compelled to switch tracks to management to continue to make progress, regardless of whether they have any innate ability or desire to excel at management.
• scarface74 7y ago
  I’m 45. I didn’t start aggressively job hopping until I was 35, before then I stayed at one job for almost 10 years. I haven’t once had a problem finding a job quickly. I was a generalist when I was 35 and started down the road of specializing in the Microsoft stack in 2008. I start pivoting in 2016 to more architect level roles but still staying hands on but with more cross platform languages (.Net Core, Node, Python), I also spent the last two years getting a lot of experience with AWS from a development/Devops/netops standpoint. I’m slowly getting more into the front end $cool_kids stack with React, etc. But, I don’t do the blind resume submittals to job boards and applicant tracking systems. I keep a very strong network of external recruiters, former managers, and former coworkers. I have never studied leetCode, and won’t go near a job that’s more concerned with how well I’ve read over “Cracking the Code” instead of how well I can architect a system.
  • pmiller2 7y ago
    How many employers do you find yourself needing to exclude because of the “no Leetcode” thing? Do you think you’re sacrificing anything in the way of comp by doing so?
    • Consultant32452 7y ago
      I've got about 20 years of professional coding under my belt including a 5 year stint doing a lot of job hopping/consulting. I'd never even heard of leetcode until this post and won't bother to even visit the website. For most of my career I've been in the group giving interviews. I don't recall having ever seen it mentioned on a resume. It's a complete and total nothing for any employer I've ever worked for/with. Based on the comments in this thread, I'm guessing leetcode has done some successful marketing in the valley. I'm an East coaster.
      • mixmastamyk 7y ago
        Believe they are using it as a generic term for gun-to-head coding challenge fashion.
      • 7y ago
• amk069 7y ago
  In IT, employers find it much easier to scale with junior employees. It is not about their age, but rather the fact that they are cheap and available. Old people tend to be expensive and less likely to change jobs. Job ads address people more likely to be a good fit. That's it.
• zebraflask 7y ago
  I'm in that age bracket myself, and have fortunately avoided most of the abuses described here. Like the other posters are saying, the real problem is that learning how to develop good software (or any other technical product) takes time. This is an experience-based subject - art? craft? - and while I have seen many very talented younger engineers and developers, their lack of experience with a whole list of factors that don't involve slapping some code into an IDE, or what have you, usually means they end up being far less productive than people like to assume. Bay Area culture has produced a lot of great things, but this stereotype has got to go.
• rs23296008n1 7y ago
  Age is just one of the filters that companies use to cull the list of candidates. Buzzword compliance is another set of filters. Even being unemployed is used against you. Gaps between periods of employment are seen by some interviewers as evidence of possible prison time. These same organizations then complain about not being able to find candidates for various positions.
• m0zg 7y ago
  Mid-40s, feel like I have been discriminated against based on age more than once. Not being one to fruitlessly blame my misfortune on things I can't change, I exited the rat race and started consulting. Doubled my already staggering pay working fewer hours, and from home. I realize this is not an easy thing to get up and running, but do at least consider finding your true value on the open market. The results could be surprising. The companies do need people who know what not to do, rather than just young-uns who do stupid things faster, with more energy.
  • mancerayder 7y ago
    I did this for 4 years and went back to full-time management. Even in NYC, I struggled as I (as a DevOps guy) never had the latest tech. If they needed AWS, I got AWS (experience and certs) but then they wanted Docker. Now Kubernetes. Despite years of programming experience in three languages, I still get whiteboarded. The point is, I was being treated like a full-time employee in consultant interviews. A few smaller clients I picked up were miniscule hours, we're talking 8 hours a month at most of work. Here on HN, these startup types wanted me to work for 50 pct less my rate. I'd love to consult one day, but I haven't cracked that code. I have 18 years of systems automation, operations, and now management experience. Something isn't good enough.
    • m0zg 7y ago
      What "interviews" are you talking about? Your track record is supposed to speak for itself. The interview boils down to sitting down with a client and figuring out what they need and whether you can do it. Because you're a contractor you can be fired effortlessly, so there's very little risk for the client. You can also fire the client, so there's little risk for you. I think you either don't have the right track record, or you're selling yourself incorrectly, by which I mean you're charging too little. Whiteboard interviews are out of the question as a contractor: I simply don't have time for this circus. One thing that helps with such things is pricing your services right. And that means charging more than you think is reasonable. The more you can charge, ironically, the easier these discussions get. The effect compounds further if you have several satisfied former clients who can give references. My selling point is really simple, too: you've tried and you've failed, now let me show you what's possible.
• ajcodez 7y ago
  Young people have more variable potential. If you hire a young person they might be 100x or 10x or 1x in a couple years. If you hire an old person you already know they aren’t 100x or 10x otherwise they would be above you in the org chart or retired. There’s nothing wrong with 1x, but preference for young people is common sense all else being equal. And it’s never equal in terms of salary expectations and extra effort.
  • yowlingcat 7y ago
    If your business is a financial equivalent portfolio allocation of too many lottery tickets and not enough stably yielding bonds and securities, you're gonna have a bad time. Predictably, many businesses run with such a naive mentality fold.
  • yowlingcat 7y ago
    Not to double comment, but the other completely fallacious part about this line of reasoning is a conflation of team productivity with individual productivity. Different beasts. A productive team with high cohesion will outproduce a team full of all-stars with low cohesion by at least 10:1, sometimes north of 100:1, but that's mostly because the team full of all-stars with low cohesion works _so_ poorly. One is dysfunctional, the other is not.
  • bojo 7y ago
    Advancement is typically a pyramid, which means not everyone can reach the top. It is impossible for everyone to “be above you in the org chart or retired.”
    • ajcodez 7y ago
      You made my point better than I did. “Not everyone can reach the top.” Young people have had fewer opportunities to reach the top. Not being at the top is a negative signal that gets stronger every year.
      • bojo 7y ago
        Not being at the top is simply a scaling problem, not an opportunity problem.
• epc 7y ago
  Am 52. Served as IBM’s “corporate webmaster” in the 1990s (sort of like being CTO but without the cool executive hat). Corporate Webmaster was responsible for all technical operations of IBM’s corporate sites (from systems administration to application development), as well as theoretically responsible for all IBM web sites. As well as serve as the single point of contact inside IBM for anything “internet”. Have been mostly unemployed since leaving IBM in 2001, other than a few short stints with NYC area startups. To F100 corporate organizations I was too “internet” and claimed far too much experience than possible (circa 2002), to startups I was (and apparently am) too conservative, too corporate. And yes, I tried the non–profit track. Every non–profit I interviewed with decided that I was clearly going to drop them as soon as I could reacquire a job in corporate America. I’ve found other ways to make money instead of being employed by others.
  • docker_up 7y ago
    I'm almost 50 myself. I've been coding for 25+ years, and am looking for a new job myself. I have one at a well-known company but I want to make more hay while the sun shines. I currently have a week of onsites booked with the Big N, and I'm in study mode. Because I'm still technical and hands-on and never became a manager, I haven't had any trouble getting contacted constantly for new jobs.
    • markbnj 7y ago
      Same, except add nine years to the age. :). I actually did try management back in the late 90's and early 2000's, first at a startup I cofounded, then at a mid-size public company after the startup was acquired. I basically hated my life from the point where the startup stopped being a bunch of us coding and playing Quake III at night, to the point where I quit the public corp. Went back into engineering, stayed there, work at home and love what I do. Have no lack of opportunities being floated my way.
    • RickJWagner 7y ago
      What's the 'Big N'?
• emit_time 7y ago
  Anecdote: My dad (finance/accounting guy) lost his job in his 40's and was never able to find another one. Thankfully my mom makes enough for things to work out, and they own a piece of rental property, and my dad stashed away a lot of money for retirement while he worked (to the dismay of my mother). Additionally, the company I work at is half (or more) people hired straight out of college which kinda makes me feel weird. It's a small company that has been around ~15 years or so, and I feel like their hiring practices would lead to their ass getting handed to them in court. I like the people I work with, but something definitely feels wrong.
  • andrewprock 7y ago
    Employment is not an efficient market. Transaction costs are very high, bidding is not public, and utility is a non-linear function of more than just compensation.
    • bongobongo 7y ago
      It’s not a market at all, because participation, realistically speaking, is involuntary for most sellers. It’s closer to a feudal contract than an actual market.
      • AtlasBarfed 7y ago
        I love it. Economists are in total denial about such things. EVERYTHING IS A MARKET RUBBER STAMP. Almost all of the US economy is a monopoly or cartel dominated by 1-3 corporations per segment.
        • bongobongo 7y ago
          Yep. Glad that there are at least a few people whose brains haven't been turned to mush by decades of propaganda and inflexible market fundamentalist orthodoxy.
• jedberg 7y ago
  I think part of the problem is "protected classes". I learned the other day that if you're over 40 you're a protected class for engineering in California. If you're a protected class and you have a job, that's great! It will help you a lot. But the unintended consequence is that companies are more reluctant to hire someone in a protected class, because if they are legitimately bad at their job, they are harder to get rid of. I still think we should have protected classes, but the protection needs to reach into hiring too. Maybe make companies have to submit written justification for not hiring someone in a protected class? I don't know I'm just spitballing here.
  • WalterBright 7y ago
    It's well known that the harder the government makes it to fire someone, the equally harder it will be to get hired. It's just that people don't want to believe it.
  • bachmeier 7y ago
    I can't speak to California law, but in general the bar for age discrimination is so high that it doesn't mean much.
    • koolba 7y ago
      The threat of a lawsuit, no matter how frivolous, is enough to dissuade employers.
  • donjigweed 7y ago
    These days, holding all other factors constant, SV companies will generally hire {gay|female|trans|minority} candidates before {male|white|indian|asian}. So companies are apparently not at all concerned about hiring members of protected classes, rather they prefer to hire them. Now, if you want to make the argument that older employees don't boost the companies D&I numbers, while at the same incurring the risk of a protected class, that's a subtly different argument....
    • shearskill 7y ago
• mykowebhn 7y ago
  I'm 48, on the West Coast, and recently finished interviewing, receiving multiple offers. I did 250 Leetcode problems, practiced System Design, and Behavioral. In the end, I found doing 250 Leetcode was probably overkill, but it definitely helped. This will probably get me severely down-voted, and I do understand the antipathy toward having to Leetcode, but the way I see it is that I'm really lucky. I get to sit on my butt, do what I love, and I get paid really well to do it. If interviewing is extremely hard and I have to study, yet again, at 48 so be it. There are plenty of people in the world who are so less fortunate than I am. [Edit] s/250 Leetcode/250 Leetcode problems/
  • b3b0p 7y ago
    I'm not 48, I'm younger, but in my 30's. I only started the LeetCode study grind about a year or so go, but not consistently. I just got back from my onsite at a Big-N and pretty much bombed it. I gut nervous and forgot the easiest of questions. I lost my confidence. My mind went blank, my hands, nerves shaking. Couldn't write complete code or even sentences I think at times. It was bad. I was intimidated for no reason. I am having very difficult time getting the offers (duh, when performing like this). Did you always get to receiving offers? I seem to always get the, we decided to go with another candidate... line after my onsite. I've only had 2 company's fly me out so far and the only companies that I have gotten offers at don't do LeetCode. It's extremely frustrating or maybe I'm just not prepared well enough yet and need to be more consistent with my study and practice (and don't pay as much either) or maybe I'm just not smart enough. I feel stuck. Will it ever end or am I stuck grinding for the rest of my career (life)? Will I ever be able just breathe and relax again? I'm not on the West coast, but interviewing on the West Coast. I'll rent out my condo or keep it around as a home away from home if I ever get an opportunity.
    • mykowebhn 7y ago
      I feel for you. If you'd like we can chat offline. You can reach me at mycoweb2000-comm at yahoo dot com.
    • aiisjustanif 7y ago
      > I gut nervous and forgot the easiest of questions. I lost my confidence. My mind went blank, my hands, nerves shaking. Couldn't write complete code or even sentences I think at times. It was bad. I was intimidated for no reason. This happens to me too. > Will it ever end or am I stuck grinding for the rest of my career (life)? Will I ever be able just breathe and relax again? I'm not on the West coast, but interviewing on the West Coast. I'll rent out my condo or keep it around as a home away from home if I ever get an opportunity. Dude just try for companies on the west coast. Why is this the end all be all? Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Charlotte, Raleigh, Colorado Springs. . . So many cities with low CoL and six figure salaries for Developers, Security Engineers, Linux Admins, Infrastructure Engineers. You even have Denver, DC, NYC, Charlotte, Arlington, Seattle, Tampa, Minneapolis, so many options. Stop limiting yourself San Francisco when there are so many great cities, with awesome opportunities.
• pleasecalllater 7y ago
  I still require to work in a company where my manager/boss/CTO know much more than me. I'm almost 40. It's really hard to work for a 20-something guy who has almost no experience and is happily making all the mistakes he could read in books about. Still, finding a job where my boss would know more is more and more problematic. When I was 33 I was rejected by a recruiter with "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing teams. There must be something wrong with you, so I cannot pass your papers to the client." Still, looking for a job is a very traumatic experience. The companies are looking for unicorns: young, cheap, without family (aka drinking in evenings, working on weekends), with lots of experience, and academic knowledge (which will never be used). A couple of times I heard from guys, who would be my managers "oh, I'd love to have your experience"... the rest of the interviews went smoothly. In all the places I even didn't get to the step where they asked for the money requirements. They just didn't answer. I'm looking for a remote job now. I even made a nicely stripped resume on one page. My normal has 3 pages. It's a very traumatic experience, especially that most of the remote companies require knowing almost only some new stuff, totally ignoring my 18 years of experience in everything else. Btw... a surgeon of my age is usually not experienced enough to make surgeries on his/her own. A programmer of my age is usually a useless resource, which is happily replaced with someone just after the college. All this makes me sad. The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
  • aryehof 7y ago
    > The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience? Experience in software development is sadly irrelevant for much of the software development industry. Instead what is today valued is knowledge of some new framework, the ability to describe data structures and algorithms (for interviews only), and the ability to pick-up (hack) at things quickly and without complaint. All of these things are equally well done by a newcomer, of which there are ever increasing numbers. What future does someone increasingly older have over time, in an industry where the only qualifications (really) sought are "smart, eager, compliant, cheerful, and quick to learn"?
  • scarface74 7y ago
    My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I don’t care what you did in the 90s. No one cares that I wrote C for DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the late 90s or the systems I wrote with a combination of C++/COM and Vb6 in the early 2000s. I only go back 10 years. In fact, I negotiated not to be a team lead at my current job.
• rdiddly 7y ago
  The ironic thing of course is that it's hard to imagine what actual advantage a practice of age discrimination might provide. All real and true criteria for a job can be tested for directly; there's no need to make age a dubiously-accurate proxy for any of those. It literally makes no sense. From the COMPANY'S point of view.
  • tyingq 7y ago
    The perceived benefit is avoiding someone with reasonable salary and work hour expectations.
    • rdiddly 7y ago
      Yeah but you can do that by means of "salary and work hour discrimination," see what I'm saying? Those are things you can state outright, legally. Just make it clear that those are parameters of the job, and if they accept the job, they accept the job. I dunno maybe I've gone completely batshit crazy up in here.
      • tyingq 7y ago
        No, you're right, they are just doing it the quick/lazy way. Older workers are also less liable to drink all the other corporate koolaid that might be harder to test for.
  • heisenbit 7y ago
    > All real and true criteria for a job can be tested for directly; Analytical skills can be tested. It gets much harder on the creative skill and interaction skill side. Software is mostly about people communicating and making decisions. These standardized tests are only good to get accurate results in an area not so relevant later.
    • rdiddly 7y ago
      Sorry, I didn't mean to focus too literally on the idea of "testing." I'm using the term broadly to include things like pair-programming or job interviews (and other things, obviously), which are examples of "tests" that try to tease out some of the things you're talking about.
• Bukhmanizer 7y ago
  Is it just me or is there a way lower bar for evidence when it comes to age discrimination in tech on Hackernews compared to gender or race discrimination. I’m not saying that it’s not a real phenomenon, but pretty much all the evidence I’ve seen is anecdotal or fairly weak. While it’s true that a lot of older people are great programmers, I also think programming ability is only about 50% of what most people are looking for. The other 50% is about how well you work with others, and I have to say, when I read a lot of these anecdotes I can’t help but feel like some of people these people aren’t getting hired because they come off as stubborn assholes.
  • supertrope 7y ago
    Everyone gets older, race is static.
  • rs23296008n1 7y ago
    You're going to get anecdotes on HN because this is a discussion website. Also, studies on this issue tend to not be well known without effort looking them up. The asshole factor is relevant but not as much as you would expect. The actual perception that older workers haven't kept their edge is actually a common bias I've seen while gathering people for hiring. This bias is probably common amongst younger looking at older workers (eg 25 year old not hiring 35 year old) but also amongst older looking at less older. Eg a 50 year old won't hire a 40 year old because they wonder why the 40 year old even wants the position. Those two viewpoints seem to be recurring patterns at least in my experience. You probably want hard data. I'm sure it is out here, Department of labor?
    • aiisjustanif 7y ago
      I'll go broad and say unemployment is below 4.0%, Fortune 500 have less age discrimination probably, and this particular comment section on Hacker News seems to be a lot of Bay Area/ San Fransisco perspective. And the article isn't even about Software Devs.
  • WilliamEdward 7y ago
    Attitude is the core of the problem. Another comment mentioned that if age discrimination happens, it happens primarily in VC culture areas like SV. I have a sneaking suspicion that high-tech workers don't really know what real unemployment looks like and are complaining about not getting to pick specifically where they want to work based on their tailor-made ideal environment that SV has spoonfed them about what a job should look like. Having the ability to even live in high profile areas and apply for high-tech jobs puts you several cuts above the rest of the non-tech working world and you will never truly be jobless. I would be grateful for that, personally. EDIT: evidence of this in this thread said by others: "Also, the SV is really the bastion of anti discrimination. Which is great. But they replaced it with something else, ageism." "I have been unable to rejoin the supposedly "hot" SF Bay Area tech industry. I can get interviews if I whack 15 years off my web development career on my resume. I don't pass the in-person or video interview stage, because then the employer sees that I'm older than 35."
• forinti 7y ago
  Head of HR once asked me what type of people we needed. I said we desperately needed older people. 20-year-old project managers don't have a clue. Company went under, he sells air-conditioning now.
  • JudgeWapner 7y ago
    > 20-year-old project managers don't have a clue maybe the company should have had policies that gave their managers more clues? > he sells air-conditioning now. probably makes more (and accomplishes more) than many engineers, especially ones at vapor-ware startups.
    • WilliamEdward 7y ago
      > maybe the company should have had policies that gave their managers more clues? Nah, I think management is just a job that requires experience and certification like any other job to be truly good at. People have this idea that "it's management, how hard can it be"... Turns out, really hard. Only the qualified should be managers, not some 20 year old whose only qualification is being 'good with people'.
• drchewbacca 7y ago
  One thing I'm a bit confused about is why doesn't salary bidding fix this? For example if a 25 yr old coder is $X per year surely, even if you have terrible age discrimination, there must be some salary level, say $0.75*X where having the older worker is preferable? Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market? Is it that people value youth so much they will pay a 3x markup for it or something? If there's a large pool of super skilled people begging for work I don't quite understand why someone wouldn't want to leverage that. I get why maybe you pay older workers less if you discriminate, but to not hire them at all seems strange.
  • jswizzy 7y ago
    I know this is just personnel experience so don't take it for much but I had to share an office with a 70 year old "programmer" who made three times my salary. I know this because my supervisor got drunk on a business trip and told me the day after he fired the guy. He was constantly asking everyone how to do the simplest of tasks and complaining about being under payed and discriminated against because of his age and was extremely condescending to anyone who tried to help him. He never finished any assignment even after a year and a half. The led developer who has been coding for 15 years took over his last project and had to throw out all the code because it was basically just copied and pasted from stackover flow. I don't think this guy ever really knew how to code well and had got into the industry in a time where programmers where rare. Honestly, for what I've seen all the over 40 crowd in the industry moves into management positions.
    • mixmastamyk 7y ago
      I’ve seen many younger folks who couldn’t code their way out of a paper bag. Both anecdotes useless.
  • mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Once you’re old, you typically don’t get to the negotiating salary stage.
  • adventured 7y ago
• allenu 7y ago
  I'm 41 and still have recruiters contacting me and generally do well in interviews. I'm lucky in that the skills I have are harder to find (8 or so years doing iOS development). I also have to admit that one thing that helps me tremendously is that I look young. Just about everyone I work with assumes I am still in my 20s based on my appearance. They all act shocked once they do find out that I'm older. Looking young helps a lot with rapport in interviews since the interviewers feel more at ease that I'm "one of them" rather than some old guy.
  • rootusrootus 7y ago
    In my experience attitude and connections count for the most. I'm 45 and I don't have any problems finding new opportunities. But I never go through the front door, it's always a referral. I can't imagine having a real problem until I'm in my 60s. At least around here, there just aren't so many programmers that we can afford to turn away qualified people just because they are in their 40s or 50s. If they know their shit, they're welcome to work for us. We've got developers ranging from 20-65, pretty evenly distributed.
    • paulkon 7y ago
      What geographical area do you work in? Any skill in particular that you find helps you stand out?
  • mjkunc 7y ago
    Same age here. Mid-thirties career switch into tech. Landed my first tech job at 37 (consulting), first startup at 40 (data engineering) and just started a new startup at 41 (data engineering/devops). I'm probably the oldest at my company by a decade. I don't think I look particularly young, but maybe? I'm not saying age discrimination doesn't exist, just that I've been lucky / fortunate enough not to have experienced it.
• thih9 7y ago
  > You’re in private mode. Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode. This is the first time I'm seeing this message and I hope this doesn't become a trend.
  • quotemstr 7y ago
    It's already a trend. The fault, IMHO, lies with browser vendors making it possible for sites to detect private browsing mode in the first place. That should be a privacy but and prioritized accordingly.
  • scarejunba 7y ago
    I hope it does. It helps ensure that content creators are rewarded for creation.
    • rootusrootus 7y ago
      The PiHole I use at home renders a lot of media sites unavailable to me. I'm not going to subscribe to all of them, so it will effectively reduce my bubble to whatever I'm willing to pay for (and I'll tell you know, that will basically be whatever I can get from a single all-you-can-eat provider, like Apple News).
      • scarejunba 7y ago
        I'm sure the actions of a person who would buy and set up a specialized device to block ads are not representative of the general population so I (and probably any other content producer) are not going to optimize for that use-case, though I do appreciate your sharing.
        • rootusrootus 7y ago
          It may be that "regular" people are more willing to have a dozen different media subscriptions for various sites, but I don't think that's a safe assumption.
• freyr 7y ago
  Can someone tell me where the older software engineers in the Bay Area have gone? I recently moved into the software industry (after years in the telecom industry), and the lack of older software engineers is disconcerting in a Soylent Green type of way. I guess some have moved into management, and others have made enough money to retire, or they've moved somewhere with better value than the Bay Area. They're likely to avoid companies where everyone's in their twenties and the offices looks like frat houses. But even so, I'd expect to see many more gray-haired engineers around here than I do.
  • sjg007 7y ago
    We work remotely.
  • pmorici 7y ago
    Someone who is over 40 today would have gotten their start in the late 90's around the time of the first Internet boom. The number of software engineering positions since then has exploded. Based on numbers on the Bureau of Labor and Statistics website it seems like they are roughly doubling each decade. The main source of new engineers is new graduates. That, coupled with the fact that people move into management, and leave the field, retire early is going to skew the workforce to the younger side regardless of any age discrimination.
  • novok 7y ago
    Go look at larger, older companies. Many guys in microsoft and apple who have worked there for 20 years.
  • aiisjustanif 7y ago
    The answer is Texas.
  • trashface 7y ago
    I'm 44 and worked at various bay area startups you never heard of from 1998 to 2005, at which time I moved out of that area. I don't have precise numbers, but based on a cursory scan of my linked-in connections, some of my cohort has followed that path and moved out. Another big subgroup is the people who went to google or some other Big N. In particular a lot of the high performance people did this. Another person who replied to you suggested that CS/programming is just a lot more popular now and I think that is big part of the reason why it skews young. When I graduated (in 1997), CS was not a popular study. As a consequence, startups back then had a wide age range (20-60+), but still were quite youthful overall.
• Cannibusted 7y ago
  Yeah, I am in my mid 40s, and it was wild to interview for a new job after 5 years. Things have really changed in that short time. I posted a portfolio that showed, if you want this, hire me! My resume was standard, listing out my projects and summarizing my experience. I had good references that I rarely shared unless it was the last stages, so they wouldn't get bombarded. I applied weekly to new opps, keeping track for the inevitable unemployment record as well. Results: My huge project list showed my age. Some companies clearly weren't interested... they wanted new programmers, younger, not stuck in the past, etc. I couldn't understand some companies purpose, so new agey with today's internet and reddit culture. Still, I got 20–30 emails a day! Constant phone calls, messages, occasional scams. Did 2 in-person interviews. I found a great new job, remote programming, in 3-4 months! It was a blur! The secret is respect, communication, wisdom and quick reflexes, in my case.
  • cableshaft 7y ago
    Where did you post these things for other people to discover?
• davewhite123 7y ago
  Or how about this. What software projects do you like to work on in your spare time? aah I don't.... Do you ask a postman if he likes to go on a long walk in his spare time? when we has walks all the day long. I recently applied for a job at digital ocean, and on the form they asked me how I like to be identified . You know, he , she, it, thing, alien, rubber ducky. I saw so no option for julius caesar.
• quotemstr 7y ago
  It's interesting that corporate diversity reports provide population breakdowns for demographic categories involved in heated political debates but seldom (never, in my experience) provide breakdowns according to other categories that might be just as important for diversity of thought, e.g. age and political affiliation.
  • pmiller2 7y ago
    Political affiliation? What would that have to do with working as a software engineer (for instance) at most companies?
• alkonaut 7y ago
  Age is not a problem, just avoid companies younger than yourself and I think you’ll do just fine.
• outlace 7y ago
  If 70 year olds really are less productive software engineers than single Red Bull-fueled 22 year olds (on average), and you thus end up hiring less 70 year olds, is that really discrimination? I get the article has stories from older people that seem to suggest they are well-qualified for the job and literally just their age number seems to lose them the job, which of course would be discriminatory. But the law suits of companies based on statistical analyses of the number of older people in the company made it seem like a company can be sued for not having an expected distribution of ages but it’s not clear what assumptions are baked into these analyses (ie is it assumed a priori that all ages are equally productive). Certainly older people are more productive in certain contexts than others (eg I’ll take an older more experienced surgeon over the new junior attending any day, but I’ll bet on the young person in a football match or tasks that require a lot of cognitive flexibility).
  • bsder 7y ago
    > If 70 year olds really are less productive software engineers than single Red Bull-fueled 22 year olds (on average) That's a really big "if", and seems to have no supporting evidence. Let me turn this around into an only slightly less unsupported statement: Youngsters in programming are desirable because most programming has become a shitty job where you need obedient people just slightly smarter than average but no smarter. Genuinely smart people are actually unwelcome in most programming jobs. Programming now is mostly plumbing garbage data between crappy APIs that change every 6 months according to whim and fashion and you don't need smart people for that. In that environment, any knowledge you learn has a half-life of 3 months and you are solving the same problems over and over in different languages and APIs. Or, alternatively, most VC money is chasing scalable "fad" social businesses, and having youngsters is useful because they are willing to expend enormous amount of money following fads while attempting to get laid. Again, knowledge half-life is under 3 months. People making actual money and solving business problems seem to have no problems with hiring older people.
  • hsudheh 7y ago
    “...less productive software engineers than single Red Bull-fueled 22 year olds (on average)...” If you think a bunch of 22 yo people running around in circles creating technical debt and missing the point of features to get an over engineered pos out the door that you’ll spend way more on to ripout the 20,000 npm librarians and crashing severs because “how does memory work” and “I wrote sooooo many lines of code” - yeah, you’re part of the problem.
• dba7dba 7y ago
  You know what I find really ironic? The successes of startups in Silicon Valley really drove up the compensation of programmers. But these same startups have founders/managers who openly state they prefer younger programmers, and direct their HR/recruiters to act accordingly. And now, we have whole classes of programmers who can't get a job at all. It's pretty obvious no recruiter lost his/her job for passing on resumes of younger programmers. Also, the SV is really the bastion of anti discrimination. Which is great. But they replaced it with something else, ageism. Just my 2 cents.
• chiph 7y ago
  At a previous job an older coworker dyed his hair dark to get the job. He let it go back to gray afterwards.
  • ok_coo 7y ago
    Don’t hate the player, hate the game. :) I would do the same if I felt I had to.
  • dba7dba 7y ago
    Did he dye his hair blue/purple? Cause that seems to be a popular in-demand hair style preferred by the cool startups.
  • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I wonder what they thought of that.
• povertyworld 7y ago
  This is why I gave up on ever having a "real job". This thread inspired me to take a look at a job board and the first thing I saw was a mobile developer job listed as "entry level". Scrolling down, the requirements are 5 years minimum mobile development experience. This is entry level now? Five years experience? By the time I have five years experience working at some kind of theoretical pre-entry level job and finally qualify for "entry level", I'll be old enough to be age discriminated against for being too old. If I could afford it, I'd go back to school to be an accountant or something, but since programming as all I know how to do and can afford to do, it's monetize "side projects" or die poor. And yes I know, working for someone else would make way more money, but that's like saying to an Uber driver "Hey bro, you'd make way more money with an NYC cab medallion". Like they don't know that? Of course, but that is not an option.
  • devonkim 7y ago
    There’s some cruel irony of you bringing up accounting for more stability when another poster in these comments said his father was laid off from an accounting job in his 40s and never found another job again. Modern work is brutal in the developed world and our institutions both government and market are failing at utilizing the wealth of human experience and knowledge available primarily for the sake of institutions built upon generations of burn-out, complacency, and cronyism as the dark sides of the virtues of diligence, solidarity, and trust relationships.
    • intended 7y ago
      Not accounting, he said finance. Usually accountants get hired, while finance types are the ones capable of making retirement savings.
    • pmiller2 7y ago
      Not to mention PWC was one of the companies named in the article as a potential perpetrator of age discrimination.
    • madengr 7y ago
      Had lunch with a friend yesterday, who told me his daughter and her her husband, both under 40, are now partners at their accounting firm. Household income of $480k in flyover country. Maybe accounting is like bimodal legal salaries, you either make it to the top, or you are out.
• 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  Odd that in an article about age based discrimination, they don't mention that there is also age based discrimination against young people, for example, getting into C level positions in the non-tech world. When I used to be employed by other people, I specifically remember being told "we can't really promote you to director, you are too young". I wasn't inexperienced (I started working full time at 16). It wasn't that I hadn't earned it. It was because the old farts on the board wouldn't take me seriously. Discrimination sucks.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • blub 7y ago
    Age discrimination against young people is temporary and is not causing any major (or even minor) social problems. One literally just has to wait a bit longer while being gainfully employed. On the other hand, older people can't get jobs and their livelihood + potentially the livelihood of their families is at risk.
  • JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > I wasn't inexperienced (I started working full time at 16). It wasn't that I hadn't earned it. Above middle management, political calculus dominates meritocratic concerns (in the short term). This is true in any organisation because we’re primates. You won’t “earn” your way into senior management and you won’t help your case by informally complaining. If you want a promotion you need leverage. Relationships with (potential) shareholders and creditors, a credible threat to decamp (and cause damage), et cetera. If you can’t threaten to leave you have no leverage. If your leaving wouldn’t cause the Board and senior management pain, you have no leverage. (If you have no leverage, that’s fine—get it.) Speaking as someone who spent a lot of their career being young (and impatient).
    • 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
      I was specifically told by the CEO I would be considered for the position if not for my age. I earned my place by proving my value and reliability for years. Explaining why we discriminate is not helping those who want to see this stopped. It's like explaining why old people get discriminated upon. Yes, there is a logic to it. No, it is not acceptable. Yes, that is how it works now. No, that is not how it will always work, humans are constantly evolving. The way you talk sounds defeatist. It sounds a lot like the old 'thats just the way it is' when people talk about change. BTW, I totally agree with you as to the fact that the logic you are talking about is correct in that is how things work NOW. Though we have been overcoming this. Or else there wouldn't be black or women in any boardroom. Change is happening. I don't believe those who say it will always be the same. P.S. this happened to me more than 10 years ago. I ended up quitting and since spent the majority of my life working for myself.
• throwayscid3 7y ago
  I'm 47 and have run my own companies, exited some of them with handsome returns, enjoyed many cool start-up projects, worked for some fortune-50 companies, have an IQ that is through the roof, but despite everything, since around 7 years am unable to get a job. Mostly I'm "overqualified" or "just too old" ... never mind I am still hands-on and happy to just get paid whatever the Junior gets, but nobody is interested. Since I've hit the end of 30ies I've become invisible. This has costed me my marriage, the relationship with my kids who don't talk to me. That lead to a decline in my mental health and physical health. Lack of connections costed me a lot of friends too. I quit all social media because that too radicalized me a lot (nothing else to do when you're sitting on your arse). For some parts of 2018 and most of 2019 I was homeless. In the past 6 months tried to kill myself twice. Once with heroin (never took it before), second time with Fentanyl. Making sure nobody would find me I went into the woods on a several day hike and shot enough to kill a horse, but both times I woke up with a massive hangover 2 days later. I can assure you it wasn't a cry for fucking help. Everything was done right and I am not supposed to be here, yet for some reason I still fucking am. When I still had the energy to open up to people after they asked why I'm falling apart nobody listened. Everyone focused on me losing my family so they told me I should get "help", others told me I should just lower my expectation when it comes to jobs. How much lower can you go? Junior jobs are pointless because they don't want to talk to people my age but people who they can "shape" to their ideology. But seriously fuck them, and fuck their ignorance. They dare to ask "what is the problem" yet when they hear they are so incapable of helping that their best and only suggestion is to "seek professional help". Yes why not outsource the problem to a professional because sure as fuck I have no time to bother with your problems (which compared to my non-problems sound pretty fucking real). Nobody even considers that my problem isn't drugs, or being suicidal, or becoming estranged, and that my problem is simply that I don't get a job. I never thought I would end up at this point because everything went well for me. Well at least until I got "old". Guess we all gotta go at some stage. I had a great time so maybe I shouldn't complain. It's probably better to leave when you're still ahead (I made the mistake of still being here). throwaway for obvious reasons.
  • h0p3 7y ago
    Fuck dude. That is awful. =( If you ever want to talk, hit me up.
• threwawasy1228 7y ago
  Can anyone tell me if this is felt all over specifically in areas like the midwest or the south? Or does this problem happen mainly in the weird zones of silicon valley and NYC?