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Allow me to provide a contrarian view. I'm not disagreeing that age-discrimination does not exist, however I must say it's not always the case. I'm 35, so I wo

Allow me to provide a contrarian view. I'm not disagreeing that age-discrimination does not exist, however I must say it's not always the case. I'm 35, so I wouldn't qualify as young but neither old. Businesses tend to recruit younger devs for few reasons: - They can be easily convinced to work longer hours - They are typically paid much less However there is one trait in older devs that make them undesirable: - They tend to carry baggage from the past. This comes in various flavors, such as biases one has regarding the path of their careers, their interpersonal relationships (social and official), technology choices etc. The thing about biases are that the mind that nurtures them can easily justify them, thus making the very biases appear rational and logical. Furthermore not all biases are negative. They are a useful piece of memory that comes with experience. The question is: Can you consciously choose when to apply the bias -or- Is your mind driven compulsively to apply them indiscriminately? I would argue that victimhood about agism does not help anybody. If you are in a craft, where the barrier to entry is low, be prepared to compete with the fresh crop of talent coming in. There's a lot more I could write about this. But I leave it for another time.

bachmeier 7y ago
"Businesses tend to recruit younger devs for few reasons: - They can be easily convinced to work longer hours - They are typically paid much less" Older workers and younger workers are paid the same way - they agree on a salary when they start working and that's what they're paid. It's so common on HN to see age discrimination dismissed as not real because of pay. That argument doesn't make any sense. The same goes for working conditions. If you're hiring someone for a position that requires you to work certain hours, that doesn't really have anything to do with the age of the applicant. And anyway, this article wasn't about software development, which has unique characteristics.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  > Older workers and younger workers are paid the same way - they agree on a salary when they start working and that's what they're paid. When I was freshly out of university, it was easy to play various tricks on me, such as agreeing on a salary for 40 hours a week, and then convincing me to do a lot of unpaid overtime. (I am not even talking about using various dirty tricks; just asking me nicely would do, because I had no idea of value of my time and zero negotiation skills.) If you tried to do the same thing to me now, I would be much better at keeping my boundaries.
rzzzt 7y ago
> The thing about biases are that the mind that nurtures them can easily justify them, thus making the very biases appear rational and logical. https://scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-bad-ideas/ https://scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-ba...
- factorialboy 7y ago
  Love it. Here I'm getting voted for saying people with experience tend to gather biases. Of course I never denied that younger people don't have biases. And I conceded that not all biases are bad. :whatever:
Kudos 7y ago
> be prepared to compete with the fresh crop of talent coming in The whole point is that you're not given a fair chance to compete, with your resume being discarded simply because you are older.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  Should that happen, you're better off not working for that company anyway. Nobody wants to seldom hire young-er people for the good reasons. Meanwhile, I find that there are increasingly more opportunities for experienced devs in their 30's and 40's. I suspect boomers were under the impression that 40 was already 'not so young' or 'too old' in terms of performance/productivity, but that's a vision from 1960, not 2019. People are slow to adapt to demographic realities, it's a generation's game.
- gbacon 7y ago
  Merely placing resumes onto lots of piles of other resumes is a losing strategy for job seekers because the cost of doing the same thing for competitors is so low, and as you noted, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. As a hiring manager, I’d much rather hire someone whose work I already know or based on a personal recommendation from someone whose opinion I value. Combing through resumes is risky and time consuming. Please (!) help me help you by dragging yourself out of the pool of resumes and into one of the top two categories.
noir_lord 7y ago
> I would argue that victimhood about agism does not help anybody. If you are in a craft, where the barrier to entry is low, be prepared to compete with the fresh crop of talent coming in. Not a fair competition if the people hiring are biased by a false notion of "younger === better", when I was young I noticed that the older devs had their shit together in ways I didn't and I made an effort to learn from them (things like thorough documentation, keeping a log of things that broke for next time, writing the code, then rewriting it to it's simplest form, the avoidance of 'clever' code and clarity over clever that kind of thing). As for biases, yeah it is easy to get jaded and see "Super shiny Foo" as another Bar that you dealt with a decade ago with the same mistakes (and to an extent that can be true) but the world turns. I've joked for decades that if you want to know what next years hotness will be look at what the academics in the field where doing 20-25 years ago. After all, experience is learning from your mistakes, wisdom is learning from other peoples.
durnygbur 7y ago
> - They tend to carry baggage from the past. This comes in various flavors, such as biases one has regarding the path of their careers, their interpersonal relationships (social and official), technology choices etc. When one begins the career, one keeps hearing in the interviews "we want more experience". Ok then, 10 years down the road and they say "it's not experience what you've acquired, but bias". Just whatever it takes to lowball you, playing the nasty "you're not worthy" interview game. The "bias" is the same bollocks as an "inexperience" (from the perspective of the interview negotiations).
- agumonkey 7y ago
  > Just whatever it takes to lowball you, playing the nasty "you're not worthy" interview game. I find this ultra terrifying. This is an advanced technical field yet the same old "we're the gateway we'll use it against you -- future colleague -- without hesitating". Some things never change
- em-bee 7y ago
  i hire junior devs directly out of school, because that's the only place where i get unbiased and trainable people. that said, i think bias peaks after a few years, after that, people get more and more experience that helps them keep their bias in check. i was like that. i had a strong bias against programming languages that i didn't know anything about. it was prejudice, pure and simple. but as i learned more and more, i realized the errors of my ways, and bias was replaced by experience.
yabadabadoes 7y ago
While I agree, I think a bigger problem is that the fresh crop of talent has mechanisms to compete that achieve both ageism and a reduction in efficiency on par with full blown institutional dementia. Eternal September in design and frameworks is so popular largely since it eliminates the problem of HR looking for the most years of experience. HR's terrible innefficiency is going to hurt someone, but the actual results are very interesting. In multiple framework cycles in industry one can see many a problem just below the threshhold of importance to a todo app might have initial structure to be solved by a first designer, then that structure is written over in a redesign, then a new cycle fixes another problem that had a clear fix in the old design, now it will be hard and therefore done incorrectly in a way that ensures it will never get solved given the frameworks cycles of starting over with new developers. The end result is a dead pile of mush that can't compete with a new framework with fresh style for todo apps. Naturally these behaviors are not some problem with employees, the overall restructuring of industry has made it important to get repaid for redoing things over and over the wrong way such that there is always something important to get credit for. There is no longer an industry that keeps workers for life because it is profiting and accepts that their later work has diminishing returns because all the low hanging fruit was fixed long ago.
tarr11 7y ago
> They tend to carry baggage from the past. This comes in various flavors, such as biases one has regarding the path of their careers, their interpersonal relationships (social and official), technology choices etc. this happens as soon as you switch positions or companies - even as early as your twenties. For example, think of all the people who share their learnings (at work, on Medium, etc) about “this is how we did X at [unicorn company].” It may be that we are more biased to opinions of people who are similar to us, and dismiss the opinions of those who don’t fit our demographic.
- em-bee 7y ago
  yup, bias is acquired as soon as you start working. against everything you don't know. then, as you learn different ways in your next job your bias will (hopefully) be challenged and you'll slowly get rid of it.
onion2k 7y ago
Just in case it's not obvious, your assertion about what older people are like is absolutely textbook ageism.
- xtiansimon 7y ago
  That may be true. I don’t have enough in this game to follow the literature. I’m responding to the above post and here with anecdotal experience. What it suggestsed to me is we need to talk about social skills necessary to navigate roles and relationships between young managers and older workers. When dealing with junior and inexperienced colleagues, the power relationship seems more ‘natural’. People can reference many years of clear social hierarchies—parent-child, teacher-student, adult-child. Where is the template for the reverse relationship? Younger, and socially/life inexperienced managers, with ‘junior’ workers who are older by years, and maybe socially very experienced. Let’s face it, no manager wants to hire someone who threatens their position. And I’ve see the workers who feel a new older worker also threatens their growth trajectory in the company—as if you’re jumping the line. In my experience some of these problems change dynamic when you work for small businesses, and flatter organizations.
hobabaObama 7y ago
> - They tend to carry baggage from the past. I work in a team which is oldboy's club. I tried various new ways and technologies to make everyone's life easier. But they always shoot down saying "it is running fine". The software is so old and tweaked number of times. I am surprised we have a functional software despite having so many obvious flaws.
acdha 7y ago
That stereotyping is textbook ageism. It’s also incorrectly assuming that younger developers don’t have biases — we should rewrite everything in …! is a joke for a reason — all people do and a key life skill is learning to recognize and correct for them.

bachmeier 7y ago

"Businesses tend to recruit younger devs for few reasons: - They can be easily convinced to work longer hours - They are typically paid much less" Older workers and younger workers are paid the same way - they agree on a salary when they start working and that's what they're paid. It's so common on HN to see age discrimination dismissed as not real because of pay. That argument doesn't make any sense. The same goes for working conditions. If you're hiring someone for a position that requires you to work certain hours, that doesn't really have anything to do with the age of the applicant. And anyway, this article wasn't about software development, which has unique characteristics.

Viliam1234 7y ago
> Older workers and younger workers are paid the same way - they agree on a salary when they start working and that's what they're paid. When I was freshly out of university, it was easy to play various tricks on me, such as agreeing on a salary for 40 hours a week, and then convincing me to do a lot of unpaid overtime. (I am not even talking about using various dirty tricks; just asking me nicely would do, because I had no idea of value of my time and zero negotiation skills.) If you tried to do the same thing to me now, I would be much better at keeping my boundaries.

rzzzt 7y ago

> The thing about biases are that the mind that nurtures them can easily justify them, thus making the very biases appear rational and logical. https://scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-bad-ideas/ https://scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-ba...

factorialboy 7y ago
Love it. Here I'm getting voted for saying people with experience tend to gather biases. Of course I never denied that younger people don't have biases. And I conceded that not all biases are bad. :whatever:

Kudos 7y ago

> be prepared to compete with the fresh crop of talent coming in The whole point is that you're not given a fair chance to compete, with your resume being discarded simply because you are older.

K0SM0S 7y ago
Should that happen, you're better off not working for that company anyway. Nobody wants to seldom hire young-er people for the good reasons. Meanwhile, I find that there are increasingly more opportunities for experienced devs in their 30's and 40's. I suspect boomers were under the impression that 40 was already 'not so young' or 'too old' in terms of performance/productivity, but that's a vision from 1960, not 2019. People are slow to adapt to demographic realities, it's a generation's game.
gbacon 7y ago
Merely placing resumes onto lots of piles of other resumes is a losing strategy for job seekers because the cost of doing the same thing for competitors is so low, and as you noted, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. As a hiring manager, I’d much rather hire someone whose work I already know or based on a personal recommendation from someone whose opinion I value. Combing through resumes is risky and time consuming. Please (!) help me help you by dragging yourself out of the pool of resumes and into one of the top two categories.

noir_lord 7y ago

> I would argue that victimhood about agism does not help anybody. If you are in a craft, where the barrier to entry is low, be prepared to compete with the fresh crop of talent coming in. Not a fair competition if the people hiring are biased by a false notion of "younger === better", when I was young I noticed that the older devs had their shit together in ways I didn't and I made an effort to learn from them (things like thorough documentation, keeping a log of things that broke for next time, writing the code, then rewriting it to it's simplest form, the avoidance of 'clever' code and clarity over clever that kind of thing). As for biases, yeah it is easy to get jaded and see "Super shiny Foo" as another Bar that you dealt with a decade ago with the same mistakes (and to an extent that can be true) but the world turns. I've joked for decades that if you want to know what next years hotness will be look at what the academics in the field where doing 20-25 years ago. After all, experience is learning from your mistakes, wisdom is learning from other peoples.

durnygbur 7y ago

> - They tend to carry baggage from the past. This comes in various flavors, such as biases one has regarding the path of their careers, their interpersonal relationships (social and official), technology choices etc. When one begins the career, one keeps hearing in the interviews "we want more experience". Ok then, 10 years down the road and they say "it's not experience what you've acquired, but bias". Just whatever it takes to lowball you, playing the nasty "you're not worthy" interview game. The "bias" is the same bollocks as an "inexperience" (from the perspective of the interview negotiations).

agumonkey 7y ago
> Just whatever it takes to lowball you, playing the nasty "you're not worthy" interview game. I find this ultra terrifying. This is an advanced technical field yet the same old "we're the gateway we'll use it against you -- future colleague -- without hesitating". Some things never change
em-bee 7y ago
i hire junior devs directly out of school, because that's the only place where i get unbiased and trainable people. that said, i think bias peaks after a few years, after that, people get more and more experience that helps them keep their bias in check. i was like that. i had a strong bias against programming languages that i didn't know anything about. it was prejudice, pure and simple. but as i learned more and more, i realized the errors of my ways, and bias was replaced by experience.

yabadabadoes 7y ago

While I agree, I think a bigger problem is that the fresh crop of talent has mechanisms to compete that achieve both ageism and a reduction in efficiency on par with full blown institutional dementia. Eternal September in design and frameworks is so popular largely since it eliminates the problem of HR looking for the most years of experience. HR's terrible innefficiency is going to hurt someone, but the actual results are very interesting. In multiple framework cycles in industry one can see many a problem just below the threshhold of importance to a todo app might have initial structure to be solved by a first designer, then that structure is written over in a redesign, then a new cycle fixes another problem that had a clear fix in the old design, now it will be hard and therefore done incorrectly in a way that ensures it will never get solved given the frameworks cycles of starting over with new developers. The end result is a dead pile of mush that can't compete with a new framework with fresh style for todo apps. Naturally these behaviors are not some problem with employees, the overall restructuring of industry has made it important to get repaid for redoing things over and over the wrong way such that there is always something important to get credit for. There is no longer an industry that keeps workers for life because it is profiting and accepts that their later work has diminishing returns because all the low hanging fruit was fixed long ago.

tarr11 7y ago

> They tend to carry baggage from the past. This comes in various flavors, such as biases one has regarding the path of their careers, their interpersonal relationships (social and official), technology choices etc. this happens as soon as you switch positions or companies - even as early as your twenties. For example, think of all the people who share their learnings (at work, on Medium, etc) about “this is how we did X at [unicorn company].” It may be that we are more biased to opinions of people who are similar to us, and dismiss the opinions of those who don’t fit our demographic.

em-bee 7y ago
yup, bias is acquired as soon as you start working. against everything you don't know. then, as you learn different ways in your next job your bias will (hopefully) be challenged and you'll slowly get rid of it.

onion2k 7y ago

Just in case it's not obvious, your assertion about what older people are like is absolutely textbook ageism.

xtiansimon 7y ago
That may be true. I don’t have enough in this game to follow the literature. I’m responding to the above post and here with anecdotal experience. What it suggestsed to me is we need to talk about social skills necessary to navigate roles and relationships between young managers and older workers. When dealing with junior and inexperienced colleagues, the power relationship seems more ‘natural’. People can reference many years of clear social hierarchies—parent-child, teacher-student, adult-child. Where is the template for the reverse relationship? Younger, and socially/life inexperienced managers, with ‘junior’ workers who are older by years, and maybe socially very experienced. Let’s face it, no manager wants to hire someone who threatens their position. And I’ve see the workers who feel a new older worker also threatens their growth trajectory in the company—as if you’re jumping the line. In my experience some of these problems change dynamic when you work for small businesses, and flatter organizations.

hobabaObama 7y ago

> - They tend to carry baggage from the past. I work in a team which is oldboy's club. I tried various new ways and technologies to make everyone's life easier. But they always shoot down saying "it is running fine". The software is so old and tweaked number of times. I am surprised we have a functional software despite having so many obvious flaws.

acdha 7y ago

That stereotyping is textbook ageism. It’s also incorrectly assuming that younger developers don’t have biases — we should rewrite everything in …! is a joke for a reason — all people do and a key life skill is learning to recognize and correct for them.