4 ms·

Ageism in tech is well-established and widely reported. If you're too old for the game by the time you reach 40, your mid-career does indeed fall somewhere in y

by nikanj 6y ago

Ageism in tech is well-established and widely reported. If you're too old for the game by the time you reach 40, your mid-career does indeed fall somewhere in your late 20s/early 30s.

r0b05 6y ago
Indeed. One needs to have an exit strategy for after 40s. In this case, early 30s would be mid career.
- virgilp 6y ago
  Am a programmer. Mid 40s, switched jobs to a better one not long ago(was headhunted/didn't actively look for it). Still coding, don't really plan to stop soon. I guess it depends for everyone, and yes lots of people prefer to go into management, but it's not compulsory by any means.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    same here. I do feel a little embarrassed sometimes that i am being manager by someone 10 yrs younger than me. I have to remind myself to no think like that. Not sure if its cultural/genetic to feel like that or what.
    - virgilp 6y ago
      You should remind yourself that a good manager is there to support you/ make your job easier and more relevant. A manager is not your master. No manager is embarrassed to have an assistant younger than them, so neither should you be about having a younger manager :) Yes, there's the small "problem" that unlike an assistant, the manager also gets to decide your compensation... but you don't want to be working for managers that look for yes-men. There's no winning in that position, those kind of persons are seldom competent and will only drag you down; better find out sooner than later, and move out.
  - fatnoah 6y ago
    I'm in the mid-40's, though I went the management route because that's what I enjoy. I recently interviewed at MS and a couple FAANGs and was very happy to see that all of them had people older than me as core members of their tech teams. Now, on the startup side of things, I'm pretty sure I had domain names older than nearly all of my interviewers.
- jki275 6y ago
  Nope. 44, write code every day and don't intend to stop any time soon.
b3kart 6y ago
“Well-established and widely reported”: is it actually? Yes, I’ve also seen the anecdotes on HN, but I am conscious of the survivorship bias, never mind HNs overall bias towards the US/Bay Area. You might never hear from developers in their 40s and 50s who have found a job easily and don’t bother participating in such discussions. Any statistics available on age and time in current role for SDEs, preferably spread geographically?
- bob33212 6y ago
  It depends a lot on the company culture. You can find startups where they intentionally look for you people who are excited about joining their first startup. Generally they can pay these people less and give them equity. You can also find older established companies that prefer someone with 10+ years experience in their specific industry. There is also the issue of company hierarchy. After 10 years of experience do you want to be the lowest person within the company hierarchy. Does a company want someone with 15 years experience being told what to do by a manager with 7 years experience?
  - Retric 6y ago
    The CEO is rarely the oldest person in a large company. So some age inversion is going on. A more reasonable comparison is how old the tooling is between industries. The rate of change in the web front end world is vastly faster than C, so having someone with 20 years of experience in each means very different things across industries.
    - pydry 6y ago
      I've noticed that while this is true, age discrimination against older job applicants in a company does correlate to the age of the CEO though. It seems that everybody in management feels more "comfortable" hiring subordinates that are younger than themselves (perhaps because age/experience is a threat to their implied authority), so the younger the CEO is on average, the younger the other C level execs will be, etc. all the way down to the bottom ranks.
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
If you keep your skills sharp, marketable, and maintain a good attitude, you can get a job at any age. I was a tech recruiter for 9 years, and I saw a lot of older candidates get rejected. The reasons they go rejected usually came down to trying to sell themselves on years of experience & coasting on work they had done many years ago. Here are some examples: - if I ask you to tell me a story about cool work you'd done, and the most recent story you can come up with is from 14 years ago, I'm going to ask you come up with a more recent example - if you try to sell me on your 20 years of experience, I'm going to ask you what someone with 20 years of experience can do that someone with 5 years can't do - if you've worked on an older technology for N years and want me to hire you for a modern web development job, trying to selling on how you can learn it is not going to convince me that you want to do it, so when I ask you to show me something you made in something that people actually use these days, I need to see more than a badge you earned on Codecademy - When you try to apply for a development job, I expect you to be a developer now, so if you look like you've been a manager for 10 years, and I ask when the last time you wrote code was, last night is a better answer than last decade - If you want a premium salary, you need premium skills

by nikanj 6y ago

Ageism in tech is well-established and widely reported. If you're too old for the game by the time you reach 40, your mid-career does indeed fall somewhere in your late 20s/early 30s.

r0b05 6y ago

Indeed. One needs to have an exit strategy for after 40s. In this case, early 30s would be mid career.

virgilp 6y ago
Am a programmer. Mid 40s, switched jobs to a better one not long ago(was headhunted/didn't actively look for it). Still coding, don't really plan to stop soon. I guess it depends for everyone, and yes lots of people prefer to go into management, but it's not compulsory by any means.
- dominotw 6y ago
  same here. I do feel a little embarrassed sometimes that i am being manager by someone 10 yrs younger than me. I have to remind myself to no think like that. Not sure if its cultural/genetic to feel like that or what.
  - virgilp 6y ago
    You should remind yourself that a good manager is there to support you/ make your job easier and more relevant. A manager is not your master. No manager is embarrassed to have an assistant younger than them, so neither should you be about having a younger manager :) Yes, there's the small "problem" that unlike an assistant, the manager also gets to decide your compensation... but you don't want to be working for managers that look for yes-men. There's no winning in that position, those kind of persons are seldom competent and will only drag you down; better find out sooner than later, and move out.
- fatnoah 6y ago
  I'm in the mid-40's, though I went the management route because that's what I enjoy. I recently interviewed at MS and a couple FAANGs and was very happy to see that all of them had people older than me as core members of their tech teams. Now, on the startup side of things, I'm pretty sure I had domain names older than nearly all of my interviewers.
jki275 6y ago
Nope. 44, write code every day and don't intend to stop any time soon.

b3kart 6y ago

“Well-established and widely reported”: is it actually? Yes, I’ve also seen the anecdotes on HN, but I am conscious of the survivorship bias, never mind HNs overall bias towards the US/Bay Area. You might never hear from developers in their 40s and 50s who have found a job easily and don’t bother participating in such discussions. Any statistics available on age and time in current role for SDEs, preferably spread geographically?

bob33212 6y ago
It depends a lot on the company culture. You can find startups where they intentionally look for you people who are excited about joining their first startup. Generally they can pay these people less and give them equity. You can also find older established companies that prefer someone with 10+ years experience in their specific industry. There is also the issue of company hierarchy. After 10 years of experience do you want to be the lowest person within the company hierarchy. Does a company want someone with 15 years experience being told what to do by a manager with 7 years experience?
- Retric 6y ago
  The CEO is rarely the oldest person in a large company. So some age inversion is going on. A more reasonable comparison is how old the tooling is between industries. The rate of change in the web front end world is vastly faster than C, so having someone with 20 years of experience in each means very different things across industries.
  - pydry 6y ago
    I've noticed that while this is true, age discrimination against older job applicants in a company does correlate to the age of the CEO though. It seems that everybody in management feels more "comfortable" hiring subordinates that are younger than themselves (perhaps because age/experience is a threat to their implied authority), so the younger the CEO is on average, the younger the other C level execs will be, etc. all the way down to the bottom ranks.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

If you keep your skills sharp, marketable, and maintain a good attitude, you can get a job at any age. I was a tech recruiter for 9 years, and I saw a lot of older candidates get rejected. The reasons they go rejected usually came down to trying to sell themselves on years of experience & coasting on work they had done many years ago. Here are some examples: - if I ask you to tell me a story about cool work you'd done, and the most recent story you can come up with is from 14 years ago, I'm going to ask you come up with a more recent example - if you try to sell me on your 20 years of experience, I'm going to ask you what someone with 20 years of experience can do that someone with 5 years can't do - if you've worked on an older technology for N years and want me to hire you for a modern web development job, trying to selling on how you can learn it is not going to convince me that you want to do it, so when I ask you to show me something you made in something that people actually use these days, I need to see more than a badge you earned on Codecademy - When you try to apply for a development job, I expect you to be a developer now, so if you look like you've been a manager for 10 years, and I ask when the last time you wrote code was, last night is a better answer than last decade - If you want a premium salary, you need premium skills