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I am pretty sure "ageism" is just an inadvertent consequence of the wrong belief that years of experience must linearly translate to ability. Not because anyone

I am pretty sure "ageism" is just an inadvertent consequence of the wrong belief that years of experience must linearly translate to ability. Not because anyone dislikes older folk per se. If someone has got 30 years of experience, employers/recruiters think it requires at least senior or manager position, while entry/mid level position appears "unsuitable". They don't understand that after 3-5 years the diminishing returns flatten the output almost completely and the only thing that years of experience can tell is the arithmetic difference between current year and the year of graduation. The matters are surely made worse by the current FAANG tendency to ignore whether the experience is relevant. If someone has never wrote a line of Java before, a junior position with quick promotion is the most fair and logical choice. But if their resume shows 7+ years of any coding experience at all it wouldn't even pop up in recruiter's search because of how they set up their filters for junior positions.

lambdasquirrel 7y ago
Experience in what? Programming ability? Then yes. I don’t think you really start becoming an engineer until you’ve already got coding down, and then you start having to go onto other things...
world32 7y ago
I think this is a very good point and is definitely part of the reason why we have apparent ageism. This aspect is also compounded by the fact that technologies and paradigms are changing so fast - yes I know software re-invents the wheel a lot, but the fact that you were coding GUIs in the 90s, before some of today's 20-something developers were even born, really doesn't make you that much better of a React.js developer. I'm not saying the kind of ageism thats being discussed here doesn't exist - the "brogrammer", "culture fit" kind of discrimination. But I think its probably blown out of proportion. Especially for non-bay area companies, it seems like whenever somebody talks about "tech companies" they are referring to a very specific kind of tech company that is really only a relatively small portion of the industry.
ska 7y ago
They don't understand that after 3-5 years the diminishing returns flatten This sounds about correct for a single role. A good senior person will have at least a few different roles under their belt too, each one of those takes another 3-5 years to flatten out, and usually at least a couple tech stacks they've been deeply in. Having multiple repeats of the same year's experience never helps anyone, whether it's 2 years or 20. But 10-15 years of good experience puts you far ahead of 5. The old joke about this had to do with learning to differentiate between 10 years experience, and the same year of experience, 10 times.
pacomerh 7y ago
well you'd be surprised, I have seen younger people have much less tolerance for older folks because they're not in their cultural circle (in bigger companies). Basically they look for more excuses to get rid of them when in reality these same mistakes were being made by other younger people. In some cases yes it's straight up like that.

lambdasquirrel 7y ago

Experience in what? Programming ability? Then yes. I don’t think you really start becoming an engineer until you’ve already got coding down, and then you start having to go onto other things...

world32 7y ago

I think this is a very good point and is definitely part of the reason why we have apparent ageism. This aspect is also compounded by the fact that technologies and paradigms are changing so fast - yes I know software re-invents the wheel a lot, but the fact that you were coding GUIs in the 90s, before some of today's 20-something developers were even born, really doesn't make you that much better of a React.js developer. I'm not saying the kind of ageism thats being discussed here doesn't exist - the "brogrammer", "culture fit" kind of discrimination. But I think its probably blown out of proportion. Especially for non-bay area companies, it seems like whenever somebody talks about "tech companies" they are referring to a very specific kind of tech company that is really only a relatively small portion of the industry.

ska 7y ago

They don't understand that after 3-5 years the diminishing returns flatten This sounds about correct for a single role. A good senior person will have at least a few different roles under their belt too, each one of those takes another 3-5 years to flatten out, and usually at least a couple tech stacks they've been deeply in. Having multiple repeats of the same year's experience never helps anyone, whether it's 2 years or 20. But 10-15 years of good experience puts you far ahead of 5. The old joke about this had to do with learning to differentiate between 10 years experience, and the same year of experience, 10 times.

pacomerh 7y ago

well you'd be surprised, I have seen younger people have much less tolerance for older folks because they're not in their cultural circle (in bigger companies). Basically they look for more excuses to get rid of them when in reality these same mistakes were being made by other younger people. In some cases yes it's straight up like that.