6 ms·

> These people are now starting to get old and it’s the first time we’ve had this vast an older software developer workforce. Where are all the older software

> These people are now starting to get old and it’s the first time we’ve had this vast an older software developer workforce. Where are all the older software developers? I've worked at a few FANG and similar-level finance companies, and the vast majority of developers are under 35. Are the older ones clustered in some other corner of the industry?

BurningFrog 7y ago
A lot are rich and retired. A lot are managers. Most never existed. It used to be a much smaller profession. Some burned out and work in real estate.
- stakhanov 7y ago
  I seriously doubt that the "rich and retired" category is quantitatively all that significant. I think they're in sales and middle management.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    Depends on where you are, I guess. Here in Silicon Valley it's pretty significant. Though many of the people I know who could retire keep working. It's truly what they enjoy doing, apparently. One odd thing about this is that you'll rarely meet the rich & retired in your work life, by definition, so it's easy to underestimate how many they are. That said, I have no good way to count them either, and may well be overestimating.
paladinxx 7y ago
There are also many of us who are having trouble finding work. I'm 45, and have a ton of experience. I lost my last job after a few more younger people joined the team (all fresh out of college). They all lived together near the office, went out each night after work -- I'm a single dad with kids so can't do that these days. As much as I liked working with them, there was this growing feeling that they felt that I didn't belong (even though I had been on the team since they were in high school). Code reviews got tougher, I heard complaints from my manager that they thought I took too long on tasks. The final straw was an argument that erupted when I took a day extra than they thought it should take on a particular task. One of them had pulled in OpenSSL a little while back to do some crypto. I needed to make some changes to their code and noticed that the random number generator wasn't being seeded. I wrote some code that I've written before to gather a little entropy from the system and feed it into OpenSSL's PRNG. Even after showing them articles about weak entropy being the cause of security breaches, they collectively felt that I wasn't working in line with the team. At that point I was the only original team member, and I had six team members, all of whom were well below 30 years in age. I've been out of work for 12 months now. Previously I passed every interview I went to (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) and had the luxury of choosing between multiple offers. I haven't got through an onsite loop with any of these recently, nor with a bunch of other companies. The only thing I believe is different is my age. BTW, the me/them thing is reflection after the fact, not how I felt at the time.
- autotune 7y ago
  As a mid 20s guy I have never received an offer from any of the big 4/FAANG companies, though I have from companies that prioritizes work-life balance, and I’m sure that’s come through in interviews. Suppose it’s helped that I was willing to move to major tech hubs but still, could just be a matter of finding the right fit. Everywhere I have worked has had people 40+ years old in technical roles making good money.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  I'd start targeting the legacy industries (insurance, boating, auto). Plenty of large software development houses that would (off the record) hire older people who are more serious.
  - badfrog 7y ago
    What do you mean by off the record?
    - nothrabannosir 7y ago
      You can't explicitly base hiring policy on age. That's illegal.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        No, it’s illegal to discriminate against someone over 40. You can blatantly put on your requirements that you are looking for someone over 40 and can’t be sued - not saying that’s a good idea. If you couldn’t discriminate against someone younger, you couldn’t post that you wanted someone with a master degree and 10 years of experience.
        badfrog 7y ago
        That's accurate for federal law, but I think a log of states are more strict. At least New York is: > The New York State Human Rights Law covers employers with four or more employees. It protects persons 18 and over from age discrimination in employment > An employer may not refuse to hire or promote an employee, and may not terminate an individual because of age, and must provide the same terms and conditions of employment irrespective of age, including salary. https://dhr.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/age-discrimination.pdf https://dhr.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/age-discriminatio...
scarface74 7y ago
A lot of enterprise/“dark matter developers” who are happy going to work everyday doing our job and going home to our nice big houses in the burbs in lower cost cities.....
- stakhanov 7y ago
  Big houses in the burbs is not what life is like for everyone getting worried about age discrimination now. Imagine this: You took your university education a bit too seriously, entering the workforce after completing a PhD at age, say, 25, immediately after the 2008-crash. That means you're too young to have been around in the 80s, inventing the world's first online banking or whatever. You were never part of the dot-com bonanza of the 90s. Your parents are probably still alive and you never got any inheritance. You command a medium-level income with your mediocre career, but having had to move to a tech hub (or a major city at least) has meant that you never got much of a chance for your income to turn into savings, due to not having had a chance to get on the real estate ladder and your income going to the landlord and taxman. You're now 36 and starting to get worried if you'll be able to find another job in this industry if you should lose the one you have now. Lucky you.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    What would have happened had they spent some time researching and knowing that from a financial standpoint that a PhD does not statistically give you a great ROI? - most major cities not on the west coast you would be fine with a “medium level” by HN standards salary of low six figures. - In most major cities not on the west coast or NYC, you can still buy a decent home making low six figures. By the time I was 36, I had stayed at one job way too long, I was the stereotypical “expert beginner” and was just starting to job hop and my career trajectory from the time I was 35 until now 10 years later looks like that of someone just starting out and moving up for the last ten years. No hint of age discrimination - only a couple of rejections in the course of five job changes - and since I always use recruiters, my resume has never gone down a black hole. The last ten years I’ve been a regular old journeyman enterprise software/SAAS developer -> team lead -> architect/principal developer.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
Not in the bay area or other tech centers, I would guess.
cbsks 7y ago
I’ve been in the robotics/embedded software industry for the last 15 years, and I have never experienced a vast majority of coworkers under 35. Either I’ve just been lucky, or this is one of the corners!
- dmcdm 7y ago
  Ha, so I work in embedded too, and I was definitely one of the oddballs when I explicitly set-out to land a job in systems out of college. Now I'm a bit older, but I still remember my hiring manager's glum face light up when he asked me what I was "into" at a career fair and I replied with "C and Linux, FPGAs, etc." Now I go to career fairs, and I can certainly empathize - there really aren't a lot of new college grads who have any interest in systems work. In fact, 9 months ago we hired a new college grad and they left after about 6 months to go do some data science thing for an insurance company (sounds boring to me). Something I've heard discussed in CS education, and experienced myself to an extent (I'm a part-time adjunct faculty teaching Operating Systems), is how the more recent generations of students are, in-spite of the ubiquity of computing in their daily lives, purportedly entering programs "less computer literate" than previous generations. I don't believe "computer literacy" accurately captures the nature of the nascent deficiency - it's really about "_systems_ literacy". I imagine what's happening to "systems" ownership is a lot like what happened to car ownership between the 1950s and the 1970s - people forgot how to fix them because they got more complex and needed less maintenance. I think for some of us older folks who experienced early home-computing, this isn't all that counter-intuitive of an analogy. In the old days, to play a computer game, it usually necessitated some amount of "tinkering around" under the hood of the "system" - possibly changing settings, maybe you needed to install more HW, maybe you had to manually fix some corner case overlooked by the errant programmer. I've heard that people who were young adults in the early-80s to late-90's were in a "sweet spot" for systems - people had easy access to them, but they also had to "repair" (modify, configure, augment, etc) them a lot. Today, we're trying to fill-in the sweet spot with things like the RaspberryPi and the myriad of similar educationally-oriented embedded systems / home computers, but somehow I don't feel like most of those capture the "frustration" factor - they're well documented, and pretty regular. So, while it may be hard to find people in their 50's who can create a multi-platform responsive app using whatever "cutting-edge stack" Medium is swooning over, it's been my experience that it's even harder to find someone in their 20's who can write a device driver, or even a halfway-decent C program.
user5994461 7y ago
First, there are few developers with multiple decades of experience (almost none outside of the tech hubs), while there is a bazillion people entering the market every year. Don't expect to find a lot because they are simply few and outnumbered. You can usually find more in big corporations (cushy work life balance, healthcare and pension), in more traditional industries (defense, finance) and working as contractors or consultants (less corporate bullshit and HR barriers). Last but not least. A non negligible amount of older workers are semi-retired. If you've worked 1980-2010 in NYC/LDN/SF you could have been doing quite well and acquired 2 homes at a fraction of what they are worth now.
Nasrudith 7y ago
The usual answer is consulting companies. There the apperance is the opposite - you won't get hired as a consultant unless you have at least a little gray or white hair.

BurningFrog 7y ago

A lot are rich and retired. A lot are managers. Most never existed. It used to be a much smaller profession. Some burned out and work in real estate.

stakhanov 7y ago
I seriously doubt that the "rich and retired" category is quantitatively all that significant. I think they're in sales and middle management.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Depends on where you are, I guess. Here in Silicon Valley it's pretty significant. Though many of the people I know who could retire keep working. It's truly what they enjoy doing, apparently. One odd thing about this is that you'll rarely meet the rich & retired in your work life, by definition, so it's easy to underestimate how many they are. That said, I have no good way to count them either, and may well be overestimating.

paladinxx 7y ago

There are also many of us who are having trouble finding work. I'm 45, and have a ton of experience. I lost my last job after a few more younger people joined the team (all fresh out of college). They all lived together near the office, went out each night after work -- I'm a single dad with kids so can't do that these days. As much as I liked working with them, there was this growing feeling that they felt that I didn't belong (even though I had been on the team since they were in high school). Code reviews got tougher, I heard complaints from my manager that they thought I took too long on tasks. The final straw was an argument that erupted when I took a day extra than they thought it should take on a particular task. One of them had pulled in OpenSSL a little while back to do some crypto. I needed to make some changes to their code and noticed that the random number generator wasn't being seeded. I wrote some code that I've written before to gather a little entropy from the system and feed it into OpenSSL's PRNG. Even after showing them articles about weak entropy being the cause of security breaches, they collectively felt that I wasn't working in line with the team. At that point I was the only original team member, and I had six team members, all of whom were well below 30 years in age. I've been out of work for 12 months now. Previously I passed every interview I went to (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) and had the luxury of choosing between multiple offers. I haven't got through an onsite loop with any of these recently, nor with a bunch of other companies. The only thing I believe is different is my age. BTW, the me/them thing is reflection after the fact, not how I felt at the time.

autotune 7y ago
As a mid 20s guy I have never received an offer from any of the big 4/FAANG companies, though I have from companies that prioritizes work-life balance, and I’m sure that’s come through in interviews. Suppose it’s helped that I was willing to move to major tech hubs but still, could just be a matter of finding the right fit. Everywhere I have worked has had people 40+ years old in technical roles making good money.
WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
I'd start targeting the legacy industries (insurance, boating, auto). Plenty of large software development houses that would (off the record) hire older people who are more serious.
- badfrog 7y ago
  What do you mean by off the record?
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    You can't explicitly base hiring policy on age. That's illegal.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      No, it’s illegal to discriminate against someone over 40. You can blatantly put on your requirements that you are looking for someone over 40 and can’t be sued - not saying that’s a good idea. If you couldn’t discriminate against someone younger, you couldn’t post that you wanted someone with a master degree and 10 years of experience.
      - badfrog 7y ago
        That's accurate for federal law, but I think a log of states are more strict. At least New York is: > The New York State Human Rights Law covers employers with four or more employees. It protects persons 18 and over from age discrimination in employment > An employer may not refuse to hire or promote an employee, and may not terminate an individual because of age, and must provide the same terms and conditions of employment irrespective of age, including salary. https://dhr.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/age-discrimination.pdf https://dhr.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/age-discriminatio...

scarface74 7y ago

A lot of enterprise/“dark matter developers” who are happy going to work everyday doing our job and going home to our nice big houses in the burbs in lower cost cities.....

stakhanov 7y ago
Big houses in the burbs is not what life is like for everyone getting worried about age discrimination now. Imagine this: You took your university education a bit too seriously, entering the workforce after completing a PhD at age, say, 25, immediately after the 2008-crash. That means you're too young to have been around in the 80s, inventing the world's first online banking or whatever. You were never part of the dot-com bonanza of the 90s. Your parents are probably still alive and you never got any inheritance. You command a medium-level income with your mediocre career, but having had to move to a tech hub (or a major city at least) has meant that you never got much of a chance for your income to turn into savings, due to not having had a chance to get on the real estate ladder and your income going to the landlord and taxman. You're now 36 and starting to get worried if you'll be able to find another job in this industry if you should lose the one you have now. Lucky you.
- scarface74 7y ago
  What would have happened had they spent some time researching and knowing that from a financial standpoint that a PhD does not statistically give you a great ROI? - most major cities not on the west coast you would be fine with a “medium level” by HN standards salary of low six figures. - In most major cities not on the west coast or NYC, you can still buy a decent home making low six figures. By the time I was 36, I had stayed at one job way too long, I was the stereotypical “expert beginner” and was just starting to job hop and my career trajectory from the time I was 35 until now 10 years later looks like that of someone just starting out and moving up for the last ten years. No hint of age discrimination - only a couple of rejections in the course of five job changes - and since I always use recruiters, my resume has never gone down a black hole. The last ten years I’ve been a regular old journeyman enterprise software/SAAS developer -> team lead -> architect/principal developer.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

Not in the bay area or other tech centers, I would guess.

cbsks 7y ago

I’ve been in the robotics/embedded software industry for the last 15 years, and I have never experienced a vast majority of coworkers under 35. Either I’ve just been lucky, or this is one of the corners!

dmcdm 7y ago
Ha, so I work in embedded too, and I was definitely one of the oddballs when I explicitly set-out to land a job in systems out of college. Now I'm a bit older, but I still remember my hiring manager's glum face light up when he asked me what I was "into" at a career fair and I replied with "C and Linux, FPGAs, etc." Now I go to career fairs, and I can certainly empathize - there really aren't a lot of new college grads who have any interest in systems work. In fact, 9 months ago we hired a new college grad and they left after about 6 months to go do some data science thing for an insurance company (sounds boring to me). Something I've heard discussed in CS education, and experienced myself to an extent (I'm a part-time adjunct faculty teaching Operating Systems), is how the more recent generations of students are, in-spite of the ubiquity of computing in their daily lives, purportedly entering programs "less computer literate" than previous generations. I don't believe "computer literacy" accurately captures the nature of the nascent deficiency - it's really about "_systems_ literacy". I imagine what's happening to "systems" ownership is a lot like what happened to car ownership between the 1950s and the 1970s - people forgot how to fix them because they got more complex and needed less maintenance. I think for some of us older folks who experienced early home-computing, this isn't all that counter-intuitive of an analogy. In the old days, to play a computer game, it usually necessitated some amount of "tinkering around" under the hood of the "system" - possibly changing settings, maybe you needed to install more HW, maybe you had to manually fix some corner case overlooked by the errant programmer. I've heard that people who were young adults in the early-80s to late-90's were in a "sweet spot" for systems - people had easy access to them, but they also had to "repair" (modify, configure, augment, etc) them a lot. Today, we're trying to fill-in the sweet spot with things like the RaspberryPi and the myriad of similar educationally-oriented embedded systems / home computers, but somehow I don't feel like most of those capture the "frustration" factor - they're well documented, and pretty regular. So, while it may be hard to find people in their 50's who can create a multi-platform responsive app using whatever "cutting-edge stack" Medium is swooning over, it's been my experience that it's even harder to find someone in their 20's who can write a device driver, or even a halfway-decent C program.

user5994461 7y ago

First, there are few developers with multiple decades of experience (almost none outside of the tech hubs), while there is a bazillion people entering the market every year. Don't expect to find a lot because they are simply few and outnumbered. You can usually find more in big corporations (cushy work life balance, healthcare and pension), in more traditional industries (defense, finance) and working as contractors or consultants (less corporate bullshit and HR barriers). Last but not least. A non negligible amount of older workers are semi-retired. If you've worked 1980-2010 in NYC/LDN/SF you could have been doing quite well and acquired 2 homes at a fraction of what they are worth now.

Nasrudith 7y ago

The usual answer is consulting companies. There the apperance is the opposite - you won't get hired as a consultant unless you have at least a little gray or white hair.