21 ms·

How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers

278 points by sbaltes 6y ago

thrownaway954 6y ago
Just remember everyone... a majority of the people who respond to surveys like these are people who are unemployed right or have a gripe with how their life is. very rarely do you get the person who is doing good and happy responding to surveys.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  On the flip side, I've seen really good developers be passed up due to the classic code-word: "too expensive"
  - ChrisRR 6y ago
    But quite often that is valid. Any job can only pay as much as the job is worth. If a more experienced developer who demands a higher salary is taking on work which can be carried out by a less experienced and therefore cheaper developer, it's to be expected that they wouldn't pay for the more expensive developer. Just because someone is a world class michelin star chef, you're still only going to pay them mcdonalds wages for flipping burgers
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      Right, but if you give someone the bracket, they say they're fine with it, they interview well and then HR says "it's too expensive" and you're billing yourself as a youthful fancy startup... then reading between the lines is a skill.
- dpcan 6y ago
  What survey? This is a research paper, and from the research paper: "We start by qualitatively analyzing 24 popular online articles. We contextualize our findings using scientific literature on ageing in software development and a follow-up study investigating discussions about the above-mentioned articles on Hacker News"
joeblau 6y ago
I’m in my late 30’s and almost all of my good friends with a CS/BIT degree has cycled into management. The interesting thing I’m noticing now is that they all have ideas for projects but zero capacity to build anything because they’ve lost their building muscles. They also seem reluctant to really want to learn anything else which is antithetical to software engineering where a new framework is out every day.
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  It's not about losing the building muscle. It's about losing the motivation to do so in tech companies. After many years of being IC, things can get boring. You keep doing the same things, even if you move companies and technologies change. And you always do it in a sub-optimal environment - things like working with tooling you don't like, under managers or with co-workers you don't really like, on projects you're not super excited about, etc. So moving to management is almost inevitable. Not to mention there are other reasons such as better salary and more visibility to change things. Also, people need change in their life. Moving to management is one way to change things. Some people go back to being IC, but most don't.
  - adamc 6y ago
    IMO, management was worse. Talk about things I didn't like. Moved back to engineering and never regretted it.
    - mjayhn 6y ago
      I loathe being in management and am totally aware that I'm probably a bad manager, so I've got a lot of respect for engineers who wind up being put in management roles, but the one thing that keeps pushing me to want to go back into management is getting put into a team with an abysmal or completely missing culture that I feel like mostly stems from terrible leadership. I'm finally to the point where I'm confident enough with my career to actually make noise and complain about things that I'm tired of dealing with which I wasn't in my 20s, but now I'm dealing with my complaints not causing any change in the end.
  - 6y ago
cosmodisk 6y ago
I'm 35, so kind of in the middle. Frankly speaking,I'd hate to work in a company where an average age is 20 as much as where an average age is 60. Sometimes I see job ads with things like ' youthful colleagues',which is crazy. I want to work in an environment,where I can talk to someone in their early 20s and gain from their perspective and understanding and also to someone who's been round the block a few times and can tell off the bat that the shit I came up with minutes ago is neither smart nor useful because X,Y,Z. Putting all this aside, one thing to consider is that there are there are tons of companies out there that do have reasonably easy operational model,which,once streamlined, doesn't require senior people,or only very few. And those companies are very happy to keep thr status quo by only employing from certain demographics.
- moksly 6y ago
  In my country there is an industry in setting up your software company to simulate university life to attract the newly educated developers. You’ll get cheap, extremely motivated employees, who spend almost all their time at your company thanks to boardgame/role play/pizza nights and you get them to keep up-to-date on techs by having them do weekly tech-workshops and presentations. They produce a lot of cheap code, sometimes the quality is decent, other tones it isn’t, and their most talented developers tend to leave for “adult” jobs after a few years, but overall it has been a very successful strategy.
  - ErikAugust 6y ago
    Is your country America?
    - adverbly 6y ago
      It sounds like America, except for the hiring for cheap bit... American companies pay a lot more on avg for their devs than other countries.
      - scruple 6y ago
        But younger engineers can be had more cheaply than experienced engineers. There is also a culture of having to prove yourself which often leads to junior engineers taking positions with companies that are toxic and which dramatically underpay them in order to get some years of experience. I think in our pandemic world, there is also a problem where people who may want to change jobs, due to poor working conditions, will stay put in fear of losing their pay check. These things and more, I'm sure, all compound against all of us, but I think can be felt more strongly at the lower end of the experience range.
digitalsushi 6y ago
This thesis makes a heavy case for plastic surgery to appear younger to keep a tech job - Has anyone reading this ever even considered plastic surgery to get a competitive advantage against ageism?
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I think instead of getting under a scalpel,a better option is to get fit and maintain it long term. People do like good looking people.
- derwiki 6y ago
  My mask would cover it up anyway /shrug
- bongobongo 6y ago
  Usually it’s strippers, models, and porno actors who need to get plastic surgery to keep their jobs. I think I’d rather be unemployed than take a scalpel to my face for six figures and Kombucha on tap
- gen220 6y ago
  For cultural context, in some societies plastic surgery is seen very differently than it is in the United States, as I understand it. So, there's precedent for this internationally. In South Korea, for example [0], there is a long and interesting tradition of cosmetic plastic surgery, such that "standard" procedures (such as the one you suggest) are kind of expected at a certain level, in the same way that relatively standard, elective dental procedures (straightening, whitening, veneering) are expected in the US. To make a crude and probably-flawed analogy, it's seen as an investment in your image; kind of like painting your house, cutting your hair, or purchasing designer clothes. This all being said, I personally don't think this will penetrate the software engineering market too much. IME, if a company is practicing the type of superficially-applied, ageism-based hiring discrimination (the kind that could be gamed with cosmetic surgery), it's a red flag that they're not a serious software shop. I don't know if you want to invest resources in improving your odds at a game that you don't want to be playing. There are much better games at the casino. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face
branweb 6y ago
The article concludes with this: Against this background, we argue that preserving employability cannot and should not solely be the burden of the developers themselves. Companies should take their share of responsibility, encourage practices that welcome developers of any age and curb those negatively affecting older developers. Ok I don't disagree. But how is such a conclusion justified by googling a "age software developer" and seeing what pops up? Paper seems pretty thin.
- toxik 6y ago
  Also it is not a refereed paper, why then write it in a format like this? Make it clear when you publish opinion or position pieces, people.
toonies555 6y ago
I think some older devs would rather leave the corporate world because they can do better work and be happier on their own projects or freelancing.
blickentwapft 6y ago
What will you do for income when you’re too old to get a job in IT?
- matz1 6y ago
  live off investment/retirement account.
- Haul4ss 6y ago
  This is a good question to ask regardless of your career. It's a combination of factors: specialization narrowing the range of possible jobs, experience tending to command a higher salary, and flat-out age discrimination. You will likely have peak earning years, and that means earnings will decline post-peak. For most people this is true, not everybody. If you know this is a likely pattern, you can do something about it. Namely, live below your means, invest, bank raises, keep a lid on lifestyle inflation, and accept that some day you will take a job that pays less than your previous job and that this change should not be ruinous.
- sys_64738 6y ago
  By then it's already too late. You should have an exit strategy when bringing the money in in the early years. Most folk in their twenties don't realize they're forty before they know it.
  - MangoCoffee 6y ago
    agree. max your 401k and buy Index fund if you can. plan your retirement early or save up your money and moved to developing country like Thailand, Taiwan or any safer developing countries with low cost of living and just enjoy your life. my plan is retired at around 50s in Asia and just travel around Asia and do some freelance works.
    - bananaface 6y ago
      I would hate to move halfway around the world for retirement if I had kids.
henrik_w 6y ago
My perspective, as an older developer (I'm 54): - I love coding, and I still code every day. I have no desire to move into other roles (such as management). - As for job security, I think it is harder to find a job as a manager than as a developer, simply because there are many more positions for developers than for managers - Family-wise, it is much easier at my age, because my children are getting into their twenties now. Much more free time for me (including for work if I want), compared to when they were younger and need lots more attention (and being picked up from daycare) - As for learning - that's one of the attractions of being a developer. There are always new things to take in, it never gets boring - On the other hand, even if some things in programming are fleeting (the currently popular frameworks etc), there is a core of fundamental knowledge that you gain over the course of your career that will always apply.
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  No question about the job security angle - a software engineer in tech is the best job security you can get. I also agree it has better work life balance than mangers, as long as you can get yourself motivated to get things done.
  - SamuelAdams 6y ago
    > a software engineer in tech is the best job security you can get Can you explain this? Anywhere I have ever worked (Fortune 500 orgs) I have always had an "at will" employment contract as a W-2 employee. They can fire me at any time for any reason. Furthermore, when budgets are cut typically the first group to go is the IT department, since they do not bring in any revenue, unless the company is selling IT products and services.
    - henrik_w 6y ago
      I think there is a difference between working at a company where software is the product, vs a company where software only supports the main product (i.e. an IT department). Companies where SW is the product value developers more I think.
citizenpaul 6y ago
My exp. Older programmers need basically no hand-holding/guardrails. That alone can make them much more valuable from a management perspective. Here is the project get it done and its done. Younger programmers sure they might work 16 hr days and weekends. However if I'm having to check that hey are not running wild in left field for 2 hrs everyday its a huge time hit to productivity and just increases the more of them there are. I don't know that I'd want to work someplace that thinks butt in seat is a measure of productivity. To me a job that seems to be appealing to the younger crowd just means the job will be a miserable no life balance grind. There are plenty of jobs out there that just value nothing ever breaking that I'd rather work at then some flavor of the week startup.
- draw_down 6y ago
  > Here is the project get it done and its done. Haha, ohhh boy do I wish that were true. More like here’s the project, oh no wait actually we want to ship it together with 3 other projects, oh no two of them hit a snag, oh but we planned and wrote messaging for them to go out together, so let’s break them apart, ok now some higher-up is asking why we did this in the first place despite how extensively we documented that, uh oh we changed strategies, ok let’s just shove it out because we have other stuff we need to move on to. Thanks for your help with this this quarter. You’re meeting expectations.
- softfalcon 6y ago
  "Here is the project get it done and its done." "...just value nothing every breaking..." This is a huge deal and changes so much about how you work and communicate. Having a no-nonsense view of stability and delivery of the product changes everything. - use stable tools, don't chase the shiny - clearly documented architecture and deployment - frank communication about everything at all times - less ego, more product focus
richieb 6y ago
So, number of software developers doubles roughly about every 5 years. So if you have been in the field for 5 years, half of the developers will be younger than you, if you were in the field for 10 years, 3/4 will be younger than you. You can do the rest of the math. I've been working as a developer for 40+ years, so most other developers are younger than me. Although, on my current team there are two people older than me.
sandoooo 6y ago
So, how does this square with all those ads asking for 5+ years of industry experience in their very specific stack?
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  5 years of X just says that the job market can sustain some number of requests for candidates that don’t require as much ramp-up time once hired. It doesn’t mean the candidates will be old, in fact looking for highly specialized tech stacks rather than experience in the business domain of the product is a sign of someone looking to hire young.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  5 years of experience is basically a 27-28 year old if they started after getting a bachelor's degree. That's not exactly "old".
ArtWomb 6y ago
Real world IT services seem to be dominated by middle aged persons. Accenture, Dell EMC, HPE, RedHat, etc. Particularly integration roles in gov, health, banks. It takes decades to build contacts. And most folks seem to know each other from way back and have similar war stories ;)
cryptica 6y ago
I've come to the conclusion that tech is one of the least meritocratic industries in our economy. As a result of this, many older workers who "didn't make it" are deeply frustrated by the increasing gap between their ever improving skills and their ever decreasing remuneration. This frustration with the system is also what makes them undesirable to hire. They don't believe in the meritocratic fiction so if you hire them, they may cause cultural problems and dissonance inside the company (and they may come across as apathetic). To make matters worse, those who succeeded have an incentive to strongly believe that the tech industry is a perfect meritocracy, so they feel like something must be wrong with these older people and this is why they still have to work as developers and didn't progress in their careers. The affront which reality may pose to their egos, causes employers to hire inexperienced, starry-eyed developers on huge salaries who create chaos and busy-work for themselves whilst yielding diminishing returns and barely getting things done. But the monopolistic, winner-takes-it-all, easy money situation of this industry allows employers in many sub-sectors to make these terrible decisions whilst continuing to thrive and this allows them to maintain and even reinforce their false ideologies about youth and productivity in a vicious cycle of increasing mediocrity.
game_the0ry 6y ago
Question - why is it that experience / age / wisdom is an asset in other professional trades [1], but it is seen s as a liability in tech? I have a couple of theoretical answers. One, perception of tech workers being semi-skilled labor (like low level clerical work) lending it to being managed with "cost center" economics. Middle managers from baby boomer and gen x grew up with idea that tech can easily be "off-shored." The perception is that tech work is a necessary cost, not a strategic element of pretty much all businesses. However, the next generation of middle managers that grew up not knowing what life was like with out the internet will recognize how important tech is to the business and will shift the corporate attitude towards tech work.[2] Two (this one will be a lot more upsetting), tech workers were introverted and passive, which makes them easier to take advantage of by middle managers who are not afraid to bully them around.[3] So when tech workers get laid off after age 40, rather than fight and adapt, they blame ageism and go quietly into the night. However, the next generation of tech workers seems to be a lot more assertive in their comp and career expectations. I know I am. Three, a combination of the above. Fourth, none of the above and I am full of $hit. In which case, I am interested in others' thoughts. [1] Law, medicine, finance, accounting, etc [2] A quick story on how corporate culture can change between generations. When IBM was first trying to sell their PCs to businesses, none of them were buying. So they hired a consulting company to figure out why. The consultants came back and said to IBM that the problem with their PCs not selling was an actuarial problem, not with their strategy - the younger people at those companies were excited about new tech, but the decision makers (many of whom were much older) did not see the value of new tech. Consultants told IBM to wait until the decision makers retired. The rest is history. [3] I have seen this play out, where tech workers are too intimidated to push back against poor business decisions, like over-optimistic delivery deadlines.
- MangoCoffee 6y ago
  >Question - why is it that experience / age / wisdom is an asset in other professional trades [1], but it is seen s as a liability in tech? Silicon Valley (software) Culture. tech (software) company want cheap labors and believed youth can overcome any difficulties. its deep rooted in Silicon Valley culture. From 19 yrs old Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel...etc. While on the hardware side, most of engineers/founders are much older because hardware is more unforgiving than software.
njacobs5074 6y ago
Also an older dev (56) and I agree with other's comments that learning the myriad FE frameworks feels like chasing my tail. I've carved out a role where I work primarily on the back-end of my company's platform, about 50% coding, about 25% mentoring/coaching, and the rest is working with our product managers and business users to develop new functionality. I feel valued and feel like I'm making an important contribution to the company. But I am concerned that one of these days I'll no longer have the cognitive muscle to do all of this.
- dencodev 6y ago
  Young 30s here and I already feel like I don't have the muscle for it.
sys_64738 6y ago
It's easier to lead younger developers as they're raw and don't have experience to call out their management chain. That's something older developers do as they've seen it all before and know how they latest trend ends. Management generally hates that.
- ludamad 6y ago
  On the flip side, more experienced developers (nevermind age) might have used that experience to become set in their ways. Younger developers might be more moldable
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DrBazza 6y ago
Not quite 50. Still coding, still enjoying it. As I've gotten older my time has gone from '20% think about it - 80% code it', to '80% think about it - 20% code it'. I currently work with a surprisingly well balanced spectrum of developers at my current employer. The median age is in the early 30s, with probably a third of us 40 and older out of 150 developers. I'd say with some confidence, that the older developers in my company complete as many "tasks" but write less code when doing it, with a lower defect rate.
- enobrev 6y ago
  That 80/20 split (for younger me) is what taught me enough that I can now think it all out ahead of time. When I just started around 20 years ago, it was all new, it was all confusing, and all the answers were hidden behind obscurity, gatekeeping, and strange social norms (no StackOverflow back then). So I had to learn by brute force, smashing my face into every project for somewhere around 100 hours a week. Now I have some knowledge and perspective, even the ability to pick out the fads and novelties from time to time. I can try new things on small projects and I can go with tried and true for the big things and I tend to understand which projects are better for which approach. I can visualize the data, the models, the inputs and outputs, and think through the logic from beginning to end, all within about 30-50 hours per week. That took lots of late nights and a ton of trial and error. There's a good place for the less experienced and more experienced on any well balanced team, to be certain.
codr7 6y ago
I'm 43, with 20 years of solid experience in most major languages out there, from backend to frontend. I guess the virus is partly to blame, but I'm having a REALLY hard time finding work right now; and I'm applying all over Europe with a focus on Amsterdam & Copenhagen, remote or otherwise.
- MangoCoffee 6y ago
  >I'm applying all over Europe that's might be the problem. Peter Zeihan might be right about Europe. its aging population going to allowed American companies to hire older engineers for cheap.
  - theflyinghorse 6y ago
    Why would American companies hire older European developers when we aren't even certain that American companies have any appetite for older American developers?
- user5994461 6y ago
  All these articles about the market forget to mention that tech jobs are hyper concentrated in a handful of city around the world (silicon valley, new york, london). The rest of the world is struggling to get any job. It's not unheard of to have one hundred developers for one role outside of the major capitals.
- ed312 6y ago
  Have you considered working in the US? Seems like we're perpetually in a shortage of good web devs (e.g. can do more than paste together frameworks and Wordpress sites)
- lnsru 6y ago
  Honestly, you are too old in European market. There are no influential technical companies in Europe, no place to accommodate old people like you and me. I am couple years younger than you, but still oldest after my manager in the department. I tried to write few applications before coronavirus, had couple interviews and saw, that many places hire only young guys with couple years experience. Remote work wasn’t even a topic back then.
fecak 6y ago
I'm a former tech recruiter for startups and now a resume writer and career consultant, and I've written for software engineers from 18 through their late 60's. - Older software engineers (40+) won't be discriminated against if they are doing cool stuff and are doing different stuff than they were doing a few years back. I've written this a thousand times before, but we often confuse ageism for stagnation. If you've had the same job for 15 years working on the same system and using the same languages, you aren't a victim of ageism as much as you are being discriminated against because they don't think you'll be able to learn new tricks. - On resumes, don't advertise your age if you're a bit older. We don't need to list that internship, first job out of school, or graduation dates from college. List 15-20 years of your career and leave the rest off. It isn't a biography.
- ido 6y ago
  Wouldn't listing education without a graduation date basically mark a resume as "old"?
  - fecak 6y ago
    Not necessarily. If you list say 15 years of experience and a degree with no date, the reader will assume you are "at least 37". We're just trying to get an interview here - when you show up they'll have a better understanding of your actual age (in most cases), but at that point they're committed to the interview and hopefully the candidate performs well enough where age won't be a factor in any decisions.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      And you can just use a different style of CV that doesn't use the chronological layout.
      - fecak 6y ago
        Something like a functional resume can do a good job in masking age a bit, but typically we still need to list employers, titles, and years.
silentwanderer 6y ago
As an 18 year old, I’ve learned so much in the past few years about developing good software it’s mind-boggling. I can’t imagine what 10, 15, 20 years of experience would look like.
- nhumrich 6y ago
  The returns diminish over time. What you learn over those years is incredibly helpful, as it takes a lot of breadth/depth and time. But the rate at which you learn things goes down. Similar to learning a foreign language. At first you are learning new words everyday. At some point, you know all the common words, so learning new words is impossible at the same rate as before.
- werbel 6y ago
  Congratulations on having already couple of years of experience at your age. I've been on the same boat 10 years ago. As for 10, 15, 20 years of experience: As long as you make sure it's actual 10 years instead of 1 year repeated 10 times you mostly gain awareness and intuition for engineering on a higher level of abstraction as well as the place of technology in a broader business context. Ruby, Django, MVC, Elixir, TS, React, Vue, functional programming, immutability... specific things, tools, technologies, approaches are becoming less important. The experience is getting transferable and you learn when it makes sense to code the Rails way in Django. Slowly "I'm going to learn React/Vue so I can do front-end" will become "I have to do front-end so I'm going to use React/Vue". When choosing technology you'll realize that the "job" in "finding the best for the job" is not just delivering the solution. It's making sure the solution is easily maintainable for years. In that timescale stack homogeneity, hiring strategy etc sometimes become even more important than the tech fit. You might think serverless is the way to go for your new task. But is it really worth to introduce go lambdas to the system when you already have 20 ruby devs? I recommend early switch from "I'm an engineer, let me know what to code" to "I'm here to grow the product/business, let me see what I can do". No one pays for delivering code, companies pay to to solve business problems. The problems you solve don't have to be contained to those that come with your job description and the solutions doesn't have involve technology. No matter the aspect of the inner workings of a company (or life in general), everything can always be improved. Identify the things, suggest/provide solutions and you'll be both satisfied and rewarded. Good luck! :)
woofie11 6y ago
I've worked with two types of older engineers: 1) Ones who keep up their skills 2) Ones who don't The former are a treasure trove of knowledge and skills, and provide substantially more value than anyone junior ever could. Going through so many computing eras gives a higher-level way of thinking about abstraction, or understanding computer architectures. They've hand-tweaked assembly, C, Java, and when they're now doing JavaScript or Python, they understand all the layers of metal underneath. They've gone through flow charts, structured, functional, object oriented, and all the variants there-of. They've written high-speed algorithms to draw lines with pixels, to ray trace, and are now coding GPGPUs. The latter are liabilities, bringing in 1980-era best-practices. They're working on some legacy BASIC or COBAL system from the seventies, and surprised they can't find a new job when that's upgraded and they're downsized. I've rarely seen #1 and #2 mix. They're very different crowds, and in very different types of companies. My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I'm doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years if I do occasional deep dives. Basically, I dive headlong into whatever is the newest, trendiest stack, and get a product out using that, deeply learning all the deep things behind it too. That's what works for me. YMMV.
- codegeek 6y ago
  I agree in general but "skills" are not the only valuable commodity. Real experience matters and I personally feel a lot of so called experienced veterans are more like "1 year of experience 10 times" instead of "10 years worth of experience". So that is another challenge with people who have been in the industry for a while.
- Loughla 6y ago
  I am fascinated when the #2 group pops up to say there is age discrimination in coding - when you dig into it, the problem is about skills and not age (although I cannot really speak to ageism in the tech sector). Every other professional career requires you to stay up-to-date in your professional skills and knowledge to stay relevant in your field. Why would coding/tech in general be any different?
  - smeyer 6y ago
Yizahi 6y ago
I'm working in an outsourcing company on a project which makes use of all kinds of engineers, not the homogeneous programmers working on the same stack in the same language, but actually a lot of diverse tasks - some work on analog hardware, some on digital hardware, some people specialize in controllers A, others in B, some specialists in video, some "regular" application programmers, and the list goes on. And most of engineers are in two offices - one Ukraine, another in Israel. So this very long preface was about age of our employees - despite working on the exact same problems office in Ukraine almost never hires "older" engineers of any specialization. By "older" I mean probably 50+, maybe even 45+. From the same general space where I'm sitting the oldest I know for sure is 40 years old and he is not a recent hire, so he was hired when he just passed 30 years. In the Israel on the other hand there are a lot of "older" engineers by share, and they are getting hired being "older", hired because of their experience in all kinds of domains we are working on. Just wanted to share how this problem looks like in two different countries.
rsynnott 6y ago
I do wonder if there's some conflation of age and institutionalisation; as someone in mid 30s who knows plenty of people in the industry a decade or so older, I'm just not seeing the "life ends at 40" thing that many commenters seem to imply. However, someone who's worked for 20 years at the same place (especially if it's a place where things are done A Certain Way, and anything else is heresy) may well have trouble moving job. And such people will of necessity be older. I suspect that a lot of the perceived problems for older people moving jobs are really more about institutionalised people moving jobs.
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
As an older developer (55), two things: 1) I forget things. If some new piece of information comes in, after a few days, my younger colleagues remember everything, and I don't. 2) I want to sleep after lunch. It's impossible to fight.
robotburrito 6y ago
Also I think that a big problem is our health care system. I may be wrong on this, but I imagine it costs a company more money to employ an older person who may actually use their health insurance or have health problems. Removing the burden of health care from companies would maybe solve a bunch of these problems and allow companies to risk hiring older people.
- pugworthy 6y ago
  I believe it would be completely illegal (in the US) to not hire someone because you perceived them as a health expense risk.
  - randomdude402 6y ago
    That's probably accurate, but if 20 people apply for a position and one gets hired, is it not accurate that nobody is scrutinizing some list of 19 reasons why 19 people didn't get the position? These kinds of things seem like there is no way to enforce them. I don't even know if that's a thing, health insurance being more expensive for companies with older employees or whatever, but just in general. "You can't fail to hire such and such type of person because it's illegal," doesn't seem to actually have much practical ability to influence a hiring process if it wants strongly enough to not be influenced. I haven't done any research on this and could be completely off base. Just have the same thought when I see this mentioned in general and started typing this time.
- LocalPCGuy 6y ago
  I don't disagree with the general sentiment, but I don't believe the reasoning is actually true. Generally companies pool their employees into a risk pool. Smaller ones will find a broker that does it, larger ones probably do it with their company population. But in general, the risk gets spread out enough that a couple individuals do not cause insurance to spike. I could be wrong also, not an expert by any means, but that is basically what our HR rep told me when I inquired (not because of age but because my wife is high-risk/high-cost, depending how you look at it). I was told that was not part of the equation because of how it was setup. It could if it was a small enough business that tried to negotiate something themselves, maybe?
scott31 6y ago
The "paper" seems to be of low quality for arxiv, not even has two column layout.
- dickiedyce 6y ago
  ... and the methodology seems poor too. I had a sideline in magazine journalism for a while... I'd be interested in the correlation between article bias (pro / anti) versus age of writer (or target readership)
- James_Henry 6y ago
  I can only stand three-column layouts myself, much better quality!
0xfffafaCrash 6y ago
While it's certainly not the case everywhere, the truth is that a lot of software development needs out there aren't terribly challenging to get to a "good enough" state from a business value perspective. This is exacerbated by the hyper-specialization of shallow roles where companies are basically looking for technologists. Once upon a time people used to hire software developers expecting them to figure out how to solve problems across almost all software layers and to take their time doing it. Now many positions are for churning out work with a specific library or framework in a specific language. It doesn't take a long time for there to be diminishing returns in terms of the worth of each extra year of experience when someone's role is to work as a "React developer" or something like that especially if someone else is responsible for making the designs and another person for setting up the backend or if the bulk of the software can effectively be outsourced by leaning on open source tech. Factors like flexibility in work hour expectations and compensation favor younger developers who tend to have fewer responsibilities outside of work but have enough specialized skills to get the grunt work done and are able to put in the hours to make up for their lack of experience. Generally younger developers are not as well suited for making lots of bigger architectural decisions since they don't have the experience to really grasp longterm consequences of different approaches, but in terms of numbers, you need fewer people making those decisions than those doing the grunt work and young people with just a few years of experience often seem to do the grunt work about as well as anyone. This wouldn't be such a big problem for older software developers if there wasn't a pay expectation gap or if they were as likely to be flexible about hours. Rightly or wrongly, however, people expect higher compensation for their experience, even if much of that experience isn't actually producing that much more business value given the sort of work that they are actually stuck doing. The world definitely has a place for the John Carmacks, but it's really not that large a percentage of jobs where they can make the most of the value they have to offer.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I'm older. I'm no slouch. I can prove it, with a huge portfolio of stuff I was working on fifteen minutes ago. I stopped looking for work some time ago. Let's just say that I have the skillset and chops that many startups would kill for, but I don't have a...how do they say it, these days...gosh darn it...I just can't keep up with the stuff they say...oh yeah.."cultural fit." Yeah, that's it.
jolmg 6y ago
It's a shame that this paper uses a URL shortening service intermediary for its links. Eventually, those links will become useless at discretion of that service and you can't even use them in the WaybackMachine either when that happens. Not only because those URLs are unremarkable on their own (I doubt the bitly links are present elsewhere on the web so the WaybackMachine would be triggered into archiving them), but also because I doubt the WaybackMachine would scan PDFs for links. I leave record of the URL redirections here: https://bit.ly/2RKJW6S https://bit.ly/2RKJW6S -> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/22/google-pays-11m-to-jobseekers-who-alleged-age-discrimination https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/22/google-pa... https://bit.ly/2RIit5L https://bit.ly/2RIit5L -> https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/boomers-30/201710/young-people-are-just-smarter https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/boomers-30/201710/yo... https://bit.ly/2yfZGYN https://bit.ly/2yfZGYN -> https://www.quora.com/Is-30-years-old-too-old-to-learn-computer-programming https://www.quora.com/Is-30-years-old-too-old-to-learn-compu... https://bit.ly/2K7tolx https://bit.ly/2K7tolx -> https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ageing/ https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ageing/ https://bit.ly/2z19eXW https://bit.ly/2z19eXW -> https://empirical-software.engineering/assets/data/google-search-results_us-en_2019-08-02_annotated.csv https://empirical-software.engineering/assets/data/google-se... https://bit.ly/2XEuWez https://bit.ly/2XEuWez -> https://github.com/sbaltes/api-retriever https://github.com/sbaltes/api-retriever https://bit.ly/3agASwY https://bit.ly/3agASwY -> https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm -> https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm -> http://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination http://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination -> https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination https://bit.ly/2Bcuc7y https://bit.ly/2Bcuc7y -> https://www.zhihu.com/question/55618811 https://www.zhihu.com/question/55618811
- waynesoftware 6y ago
  Thank you for posting these. Some other links of potential interest: https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-world/ https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-... https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-leaders-greyglers-navigating-our-way-bigger-better-tracy-wilk/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-leaders-greyglers-navi... https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Work-Making-Modern-Elder/dp/0525572902 https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Work-Making-Modern-Elder/dp/05... These are from https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/tmrg-gitlab-generational-understanding/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/tmrg-gitl...
_qulr 6y ago
The cognitive dissonance of the tech industry is that many companies do in fact value their longtime employees, but they won't hire any new employees of the same age. You can be old in tech, as long as you were hired when you were young.
- _qulr 6y ago
  The main problem that "older" workers have is just getting in the door. Once they get in the door, they can often prove themselves, but they just aren't given the same chances as younger workers.
tabtab 6y ago
I have to say a lot of technology "change" is fads. The New Thing takes over before anybody seriously vets the new idea. Once something looks like "legacy-ware", everyone gets scared of being obsolete and abandons it for the new kidware on the block. Experiments are nice, but making everyone in IT be a guinea pig is not productive. Rapid change for the sake of change alone will probably "benefit" younger workers on average. Fashion driven IT is probably not good for organizations in general, not for just older workers, because they are paying to throw out software and start over too often; but it seems nobody can stop this Sisyphusian dance.
cwbrandsma 6y ago
They list documents stating 30 year old developers as old ... are you kidding me? At 30, developers are just starting to understand the job (like all of the non-coding skills).
wonderwonder 6y ago
One thing that older engineers often have that younger don't is family commitments. I am in my 40's with all the things that come along with that, wife, kids, expectation of personal time, etc. With Covid hitting, my productivity has plunged. I have young kids at home that I have to tutor, my wife is working from home as well so constantly getting distracted by her work calls. Kids stress both of us out, dogs barking etc. Its almost impossible to get any deep work done. I work with a bunch of either younger people without families or people my age that are childless. They have not been affected at all. Employers very often want someone that will live to work for the company, many of the middle aged engineers cannot / will not do that.
agentultra 6y ago
I've worked with two types of engineers: 1) Those who believe in age stereotypes 2) Those who don't There isn't some cliff you fall off of and become, "too old." That is one of the central lies of ageism. You're suddenly too old to be cool, you're too old to learn new things, you're too old to start something new, you're too old, too old, too old. So get it in now, while you're young! Work hard, put your head down because once you're over that cliff it's done! You'll be too old to be a programmer anymore! You'll be stuck in your ways, a crufty old fossil, someone who only shows up and doesn't learn anything new. I'm getting older. I'm picking up skateboarding. In recent years I've learned how to formally verify systems using model checkers and theorem provers. I've picked up on category theory and abstract algebra. I started streaming my side project to learn how to implement a database from scratch in Haskell. You'd think that I should either go into management or find another career. This is a young person's game! You have to keep up with all the new technology! Old people can't keep up! The lambda calculus turned 84 this year. Binary trees have not changed much. There was a paper released eight years ago that showed us how to implement co-ordination free operations on B+-Trees. Hooray. The real innovation still happens in small steps at the periphery. Ageism makes us believe that our best years are short and fleeting. That all of our work will be behind us for the majority of our lives. To talk about expertise as a deficiency and experience as useless. Your best years may yet be ahead of you.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
57 year old software dev here. It does definitely get tougher to find and keep work as you get into your 50s. What I've found is that it's a lot easier to get a job at a company that's run by people my age or older. I've been at a few startups over the last several years where the CEOs or managers were around 60. The interviews are a lot easier - kind of like interviews were back in the 80s & 90s probably because those are the types of interviews they remember as well. Being of a similar age they also tend to figure that if you made it this far you're probably going to be a good worker. I've had way more autonomy in those situations than I've had at other companies where I had 30-something-year-old managers. Maybe I'm falling into some reverse-ageism here, but in my experience I'd rather work for someone closer to my own age or even older. Problem is that there are getting to be fewer and fewer of these options as people tend to retire in their 60s.
godelmachine 6y ago
My father is 58. He works as an independent ERP Consultant. Last week, he enrolled for a 6 month boot camp on web technologies with an elite engineering school near his home. He’s my inspiration to keep learning to remain relevant in Industry 4.0

278 points by sbaltes 6y ago

Just remember everyone... a majority of the people who respond to surveys like these are people who are unemployed right or have a gripe with how their life is. very rarely do you get the person who is doing good and happy responding to surveys.

deleted 6y ago
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WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
On the flip side, I've seen really good developers be passed up due to the classic code-word: "too expensive"
- ChrisRR 6y ago
  But quite often that is valid. Any job can only pay as much as the job is worth. If a more experienced developer who demands a higher salary is taking on work which can be carried out by a less experienced and therefore cheaper developer, it's to be expected that they wouldn't pay for the more expensive developer. Just because someone is a world class michelin star chef, you're still only going to pay them mcdonalds wages for flipping burgers
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    Right, but if you give someone the bracket, they say they're fine with it, they interview well and then HR says "it's too expensive" and you're billing yourself as a youthful fancy startup... then reading between the lines is a skill.
dpcan 6y ago
What survey? This is a research paper, and from the research paper: "We start by qualitatively analyzing 24 popular online articles. We contextualize our findings using scientific literature on ageing in software development and a follow-up study investigating discussions about the above-mentioned articles on Hacker News"

joeblau 6y ago

I’m in my late 30’s and almost all of my good friends with a CS/BIT degree has cycled into management. The interesting thing I’m noticing now is that they all have ideas for projects but zero capacity to build anything because they’ve lost their building muscles. They also seem reluctant to really want to learn anything else which is antithetical to software engineering where a new framework is out every day.

tinyhouse 6y ago
It's not about losing the building muscle. It's about losing the motivation to do so in tech companies. After many years of being IC, things can get boring. You keep doing the same things, even if you move companies and technologies change. And you always do it in a sub-optimal environment - things like working with tooling you don't like, under managers or with co-workers you don't really like, on projects you're not super excited about, etc. So moving to management is almost inevitable. Not to mention there are other reasons such as better salary and more visibility to change things. Also, people need change in their life. Moving to management is one way to change things. Some people go back to being IC, but most don't.
- adamc 6y ago
  IMO, management was worse. Talk about things I didn't like. Moved back to engineering and never regretted it.
  - mjayhn 6y ago
    I loathe being in management and am totally aware that I'm probably a bad manager, so I've got a lot of respect for engineers who wind up being put in management roles, but the one thing that keeps pushing me to want to go back into management is getting put into a team with an abysmal or completely missing culture that I feel like mostly stems from terrible leadership. I'm finally to the point where I'm confident enough with my career to actually make noise and complain about things that I'm tired of dealing with which I wasn't in my 20s, but now I'm dealing with my complaints not causing any change in the end.
- 6y ago

cosmodisk 6y ago

I'm 35, so kind of in the middle. Frankly speaking,I'd hate to work in a company where an average age is 20 as much as where an average age is 60. Sometimes I see job ads with things like ' youthful colleagues',which is crazy. I want to work in an environment,where I can talk to someone in their early 20s and gain from their perspective and understanding and also to someone who's been round the block a few times and can tell off the bat that the shit I came up with minutes ago is neither smart nor useful because X,Y,Z. Putting all this aside, one thing to consider is that there are there are tons of companies out there that do have reasonably easy operational model,which,once streamlined, doesn't require senior people,or only very few. And those companies are very happy to keep thr status quo by only employing from certain demographics.

moksly 6y ago
In my country there is an industry in setting up your software company to simulate university life to attract the newly educated developers. You’ll get cheap, extremely motivated employees, who spend almost all their time at your company thanks to boardgame/role play/pizza nights and you get them to keep up-to-date on techs by having them do weekly tech-workshops and presentations. They produce a lot of cheap code, sometimes the quality is decent, other tones it isn’t, and their most talented developers tend to leave for “adult” jobs after a few years, but overall it has been a very successful strategy.
- ErikAugust 6y ago
  Is your country America?
  - adverbly 6y ago
    It sounds like America, except for the hiring for cheap bit... American companies pay a lot more on avg for their devs than other countries.
    - scruple 6y ago
      But younger engineers can be had more cheaply than experienced engineers. There is also a culture of having to prove yourself which often leads to junior engineers taking positions with companies that are toxic and which dramatically underpay them in order to get some years of experience. I think in our pandemic world, there is also a problem where people who may want to change jobs, due to poor working conditions, will stay put in fear of losing their pay check. These things and more, I'm sure, all compound against all of us, but I think can be felt more strongly at the lower end of the experience range.

digitalsushi 6y ago

This thesis makes a heavy case for plastic surgery to appear younger to keep a tech job - Has anyone reading this ever even considered plastic surgery to get a competitive advantage against ageism?

cosmodisk 6y ago
I think instead of getting under a scalpel,a better option is to get fit and maintain it long term. People do like good looking people.
derwiki 6y ago
My mask would cover it up anyway /shrug
bongobongo 6y ago
Usually it’s strippers, models, and porno actors who need to get plastic surgery to keep their jobs. I think I’d rather be unemployed than take a scalpel to my face for six figures and Kombucha on tap
gen220 6y ago
For cultural context, in some societies plastic surgery is seen very differently than it is in the United States, as I understand it. So, there's precedent for this internationally. In South Korea, for example [0], there is a long and interesting tradition of cosmetic plastic surgery, such that "standard" procedures (such as the one you suggest) are kind of expected at a certain level, in the same way that relatively standard, elective dental procedures (straightening, whitening, veneering) are expected in the US. To make a crude and probably-flawed analogy, it's seen as an investment in your image; kind of like painting your house, cutting your hair, or purchasing designer clothes. This all being said, I personally don't think this will penetrate the software engineering market too much. IME, if a company is practicing the type of superficially-applied, ageism-based hiring discrimination (the kind that could be gamed with cosmetic surgery), it's a red flag that they're not a serious software shop. I don't know if you want to invest resources in improving your odds at a game that you don't want to be playing. There are much better games at the casino. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face

branweb 6y ago

The article concludes with this: Against this background, we argue that preserving employability cannot and should not solely be the burden of the developers themselves. Companies should take their share of responsibility, encourage practices that welcome developers of any age and curb those negatively affecting older developers. Ok I don't disagree. But how is such a conclusion justified by googling a "age software developer" and seeing what pops up? Paper seems pretty thin.

toxik 6y ago
Also it is not a refereed paper, why then write it in a format like this? Make it clear when you publish opinion or position pieces, people.

toonies555 6y ago

I think some older devs would rather leave the corporate world because they can do better work and be happier on their own projects or freelancing.

blickentwapft 6y ago

What will you do for income when you’re too old to get a job in IT?

matz1 6y ago
live off investment/retirement account.
Haul4ss 6y ago
This is a good question to ask regardless of your career. It's a combination of factors: specialization narrowing the range of possible jobs, experience tending to command a higher salary, and flat-out age discrimination. You will likely have peak earning years, and that means earnings will decline post-peak. For most people this is true, not everybody. If you know this is a likely pattern, you can do something about it. Namely, live below your means, invest, bank raises, keep a lid on lifestyle inflation, and accept that some day you will take a job that pays less than your previous job and that this change should not be ruinous.
sys_64738 6y ago
By then it's already too late. You should have an exit strategy when bringing the money in in the early years. Most folk in their twenties don't realize they're forty before they know it.
- MangoCoffee 6y ago
  agree. max your 401k and buy Index fund if you can. plan your retirement early or save up your money and moved to developing country like Thailand, Taiwan or any safer developing countries with low cost of living and just enjoy your life. my plan is retired at around 50s in Asia and just travel around Asia and do some freelance works.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    I would hate to move halfway around the world for retirement if I had kids.

henrik_w 6y ago

My perspective, as an older developer (I'm 54): - I love coding, and I still code every day. I have no desire to move into other roles (such as management). - As for job security, I think it is harder to find a job as a manager than as a developer, simply because there are many more positions for developers than for managers - Family-wise, it is much easier at my age, because my children are getting into their twenties now. Much more free time for me (including for work if I want), compared to when they were younger and need lots more attention (and being picked up from daycare) - As for learning - that's one of the attractions of being a developer. There are always new things to take in, it never gets boring - On the other hand, even if some things in programming are fleeting (the currently popular frameworks etc), there is a core of fundamental knowledge that you gain over the course of your career that will always apply.

tinyhouse 6y ago
No question about the job security angle - a software engineer in tech is the best job security you can get. I also agree it has better work life balance than mangers, as long as you can get yourself motivated to get things done.
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  > a software engineer in tech is the best job security you can get Can you explain this? Anywhere I have ever worked (Fortune 500 orgs) I have always had an "at will" employment contract as a W-2 employee. They can fire me at any time for any reason. Furthermore, when budgets are cut typically the first group to go is the IT department, since they do not bring in any revenue, unless the company is selling IT products and services.
  - henrik_w 6y ago
    I think there is a difference between working at a company where software is the product, vs a company where software only supports the main product (i.e. an IT department). Companies where SW is the product value developers more I think.

citizenpaul 6y ago

My exp. Older programmers need basically no hand-holding/guardrails. That alone can make them much more valuable from a management perspective. Here is the project get it done and its done. Younger programmers sure they might work 16 hr days and weekends. However if I'm having to check that hey are not running wild in left field for 2 hrs everyday its a huge time hit to productivity and just increases the more of them there are. I don't know that I'd want to work someplace that thinks butt in seat is a measure of productivity. To me a job that seems to be appealing to the younger crowd just means the job will be a miserable no life balance grind. There are plenty of jobs out there that just value nothing ever breaking that I'd rather work at then some flavor of the week startup.

draw_down 6y ago
> Here is the project get it done and its done. Haha, ohhh boy do I wish that were true. More like here’s the project, oh no wait actually we want to ship it together with 3 other projects, oh no two of them hit a snag, oh but we planned and wrote messaging for them to go out together, so let’s break them apart, ok now some higher-up is asking why we did this in the first place despite how extensively we documented that, uh oh we changed strategies, ok let’s just shove it out because we have other stuff we need to move on to. Thanks for your help with this this quarter. You’re meeting expectations.
softfalcon 6y ago
"Here is the project get it done and its done." "...just value nothing every breaking..." This is a huge deal and changes so much about how you work and communicate. Having a no-nonsense view of stability and delivery of the product changes everything. - use stable tools, don't chase the shiny - clearly documented architecture and deployment - frank communication about everything at all times - less ego, more product focus

richieb 6y ago

So, number of software developers doubles roughly about every 5 years. So if you have been in the field for 5 years, half of the developers will be younger than you, if you were in the field for 10 years, 3/4 will be younger than you. You can do the rest of the math. I've been working as a developer for 40+ years, so most other developers are younger than me. Although, on my current team there are two people older than me.

sandoooo 6y ago

So, how does this square with all those ads asking for 5+ years of industry experience in their very specific stack?

finnthehuman 6y ago
5 years of X just says that the job market can sustain some number of requests for candidates that don’t require as much ramp-up time once hired. It doesn’t mean the candidates will be old, in fact looking for highly specialized tech stacks rather than experience in the business domain of the product is a sign of someone looking to hire young.
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
5 years of experience is basically a 27-28 year old if they started after getting a bachelor's degree. That's not exactly "old".

ArtWomb 6y ago

Real world IT services seem to be dominated by middle aged persons. Accenture, Dell EMC, HPE, RedHat, etc. Particularly integration roles in gov, health, banks. It takes decades to build contacts. And most folks seem to know each other from way back and have similar war stories ;)

cryptica 6y ago

I've come to the conclusion that tech is one of the least meritocratic industries in our economy. As a result of this, many older workers who "didn't make it" are deeply frustrated by the increasing gap between their ever improving skills and their ever decreasing remuneration. This frustration with the system is also what makes them undesirable to hire. They don't believe in the meritocratic fiction so if you hire them, they may cause cultural problems and dissonance inside the company (and they may come across as apathetic). To make matters worse, those who succeeded have an incentive to strongly believe that the tech industry is a perfect meritocracy, so they feel like something must be wrong with these older people and this is why they still have to work as developers and didn't progress in their careers. The affront which reality may pose to their egos, causes employers to hire inexperienced, starry-eyed developers on huge salaries who create chaos and busy-work for themselves whilst yielding diminishing returns and barely getting things done. But the monopolistic, winner-takes-it-all, easy money situation of this industry allows employers in many sub-sectors to make these terrible decisions whilst continuing to thrive and this allows them to maintain and even reinforce their false ideologies about youth and productivity in a vicious cycle of increasing mediocrity.

game_the0ry 6y ago

Question - why is it that experience / age / wisdom is an asset in other professional trades [1], but it is seen s as a liability in tech? I have a couple of theoretical answers. One, perception of tech workers being semi-skilled labor (like low level clerical work) lending it to being managed with "cost center" economics. Middle managers from baby boomer and gen x grew up with idea that tech can easily be "off-shored." The perception is that tech work is a necessary cost, not a strategic element of pretty much all businesses. However, the next generation of middle managers that grew up not knowing what life was like with out the internet will recognize how important tech is to the business and will shift the corporate attitude towards tech work.[2] Two (this one will be a lot more upsetting), tech workers were introverted and passive, which makes them easier to take advantage of by middle managers who are not afraid to bully them around.[3] So when tech workers get laid off after age 40, rather than fight and adapt, they blame ageism and go quietly into the night. However, the next generation of tech workers seems to be a lot more assertive in their comp and career expectations. I know I am. Three, a combination of the above. Fourth, none of the above and I am full of $hit. In which case, I am interested in others' thoughts. [1] Law, medicine, finance, accounting, etc [2] A quick story on how corporate culture can change between generations. When IBM was first trying to sell their PCs to businesses, none of them were buying. So they hired a consulting company to figure out why. The consultants came back and said to IBM that the problem with their PCs not selling was an actuarial problem, not with their strategy - the younger people at those companies were excited about new tech, but the decision makers (many of whom were much older) did not see the value of new tech. Consultants told IBM to wait until the decision makers retired. The rest is history. [3] I have seen this play out, where tech workers are too intimidated to push back against poor business decisions, like over-optimistic delivery deadlines.

MangoCoffee 6y ago
>Question - why is it that experience / age / wisdom is an asset in other professional trades [1], but it is seen s as a liability in tech? Silicon Valley (software) Culture. tech (software) company want cheap labors and believed youth can overcome any difficulties. its deep rooted in Silicon Valley culture. From 19 yrs old Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel...etc. While on the hardware side, most of engineers/founders are much older because hardware is more unforgiving than software.

njacobs5074 6y ago

Also an older dev (56) and I agree with other's comments that learning the myriad FE frameworks feels like chasing my tail. I've carved out a role where I work primarily on the back-end of my company's platform, about 50% coding, about 25% mentoring/coaching, and the rest is working with our product managers and business users to develop new functionality. I feel valued and feel like I'm making an important contribution to the company. But I am concerned that one of these days I'll no longer have the cognitive muscle to do all of this.

dencodev 6y ago
Young 30s here and I already feel like I don't have the muscle for it.

sys_64738 6y ago

It's easier to lead younger developers as they're raw and don't have experience to call out their management chain. That's something older developers do as they've seen it all before and know how they latest trend ends. Management generally hates that.

ludamad 6y ago
On the flip side, more experienced developers (nevermind age) might have used that experience to become set in their ways. Younger developers might be more moldable

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

DrBazza 6y ago

Not quite 50. Still coding, still enjoying it. As I've gotten older my time has gone from '20% think about it - 80% code it', to '80% think about it - 20% code it'. I currently work with a surprisingly well balanced spectrum of developers at my current employer. The median age is in the early 30s, with probably a third of us 40 and older out of 150 developers. I'd say with some confidence, that the older developers in my company complete as many "tasks" but write less code when doing it, with a lower defect rate.

enobrev 6y ago
That 80/20 split (for younger me) is what taught me enough that I can now think it all out ahead of time. When I just started around 20 years ago, it was all new, it was all confusing, and all the answers were hidden behind obscurity, gatekeeping, and strange social norms (no StackOverflow back then). So I had to learn by brute force, smashing my face into every project for somewhere around 100 hours a week. Now I have some knowledge and perspective, even the ability to pick out the fads and novelties from time to time. I can try new things on small projects and I can go with tried and true for the big things and I tend to understand which projects are better for which approach. I can visualize the data, the models, the inputs and outputs, and think through the logic from beginning to end, all within about 30-50 hours per week. That took lots of late nights and a ton of trial and error. There's a good place for the less experienced and more experienced on any well balanced team, to be certain.

codr7 6y ago

I'm 43, with 20 years of solid experience in most major languages out there, from backend to frontend. I guess the virus is partly to blame, but I'm having a REALLY hard time finding work right now; and I'm applying all over Europe with a focus on Amsterdam & Copenhagen, remote or otherwise.

MangoCoffee 6y ago
>I'm applying all over Europe that's might be the problem. Peter Zeihan might be right about Europe. its aging population going to allowed American companies to hire older engineers for cheap.
- theflyinghorse 6y ago
  Why would American companies hire older European developers when we aren't even certain that American companies have any appetite for older American developers?
user5994461 6y ago
All these articles about the market forget to mention that tech jobs are hyper concentrated in a handful of city around the world (silicon valley, new york, london). The rest of the world is struggling to get any job. It's not unheard of to have one hundred developers for one role outside of the major capitals.
ed312 6y ago
Have you considered working in the US? Seems like we're perpetually in a shortage of good web devs (e.g. can do more than paste together frameworks and Wordpress sites)
lnsru 6y ago
Honestly, you are too old in European market. There are no influential technical companies in Europe, no place to accommodate old people like you and me. I am couple years younger than you, but still oldest after my manager in the department. I tried to write few applications before coronavirus, had couple interviews and saw, that many places hire only young guys with couple years experience. Remote work wasn’t even a topic back then.

fecak 6y ago

I'm a former tech recruiter for startups and now a resume writer and career consultant, and I've written for software engineers from 18 through their late 60's. - Older software engineers (40+) won't be discriminated against if they are doing cool stuff and are doing different stuff than they were doing a few years back. I've written this a thousand times before, but we often confuse ageism for stagnation. If you've had the same job for 15 years working on the same system and using the same languages, you aren't a victim of ageism as much as you are being discriminated against because they don't think you'll be able to learn new tricks. - On resumes, don't advertise your age if you're a bit older. We don't need to list that internship, first job out of school, or graduation dates from college. List 15-20 years of your career and leave the rest off. It isn't a biography.

ido 6y ago
Wouldn't listing education without a graduation date basically mark a resume as "old"?
- fecak 6y ago
  Not necessarily. If you list say 15 years of experience and a degree with no date, the reader will assume you are "at least 37". We're just trying to get an interview here - when you show up they'll have a better understanding of your actual age (in most cases), but at that point they're committed to the interview and hopefully the candidate performs well enough where age won't be a factor in any decisions.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    And you can just use a different style of CV that doesn't use the chronological layout.
    - fecak 6y ago
      Something like a functional resume can do a good job in masking age a bit, but typically we still need to list employers, titles, and years.

silentwanderer 6y ago

As an 18 year old, I’ve learned so much in the past few years about developing good software it’s mind-boggling. I can’t imagine what 10, 15, 20 years of experience would look like.

nhumrich 6y ago
The returns diminish over time. What you learn over those years is incredibly helpful, as it takes a lot of breadth/depth and time. But the rate at which you learn things goes down. Similar to learning a foreign language. At first you are learning new words everyday. At some point, you know all the common words, so learning new words is impossible at the same rate as before.
werbel 6y ago
Congratulations on having already couple of years of experience at your age. I've been on the same boat 10 years ago. As for 10, 15, 20 years of experience: As long as you make sure it's actual 10 years instead of 1 year repeated 10 times you mostly gain awareness and intuition for engineering on a higher level of abstraction as well as the place of technology in a broader business context. Ruby, Django, MVC, Elixir, TS, React, Vue, functional programming, immutability... specific things, tools, technologies, approaches are becoming less important. The experience is getting transferable and you learn when it makes sense to code the Rails way in Django. Slowly "I'm going to learn React/Vue so I can do front-end" will become "I have to do front-end so I'm going to use React/Vue". When choosing technology you'll realize that the "job" in "finding the best for the job" is not just delivering the solution. It's making sure the solution is easily maintainable for years. In that timescale stack homogeneity, hiring strategy etc sometimes become even more important than the tech fit. You might think serverless is the way to go for your new task. But is it really worth to introduce go lambdas to the system when you already have 20 ruby devs? I recommend early switch from "I'm an engineer, let me know what to code" to "I'm here to grow the product/business, let me see what I can do". No one pays for delivering code, companies pay to to solve business problems. The problems you solve don't have to be contained to those that come with your job description and the solutions doesn't have involve technology. No matter the aspect of the inner workings of a company (or life in general), everything can always be improved. Identify the things, suggest/provide solutions and you'll be both satisfied and rewarded. Good luck! :)

woofie11 6y ago

I've worked with two types of older engineers: 1) Ones who keep up their skills 2) Ones who don't The former are a treasure trove of knowledge and skills, and provide substantially more value than anyone junior ever could. Going through so many computing eras gives a higher-level way of thinking about abstraction, or understanding computer architectures. They've hand-tweaked assembly, C, Java, and when they're now doing JavaScript or Python, they understand all the layers of metal underneath. They've gone through flow charts, structured, functional, object oriented, and all the variants there-of. They've written high-speed algorithms to draw lines with pixels, to ray trace, and are now coding GPGPUs. The latter are liabilities, bringing in 1980-era best-practices. They're working on some legacy BASIC or COBAL system from the seventies, and surprised they can't find a new job when that's upgraded and they're downsized. I've rarely seen #1 and #2 mix. They're very different crowds, and in very different types of companies. My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I'm doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years if I do occasional deep dives. Basically, I dive headlong into whatever is the newest, trendiest stack, and get a product out using that, deeply learning all the deep things behind it too. That's what works for me. YMMV.

codegeek 6y ago
I agree in general but "skills" are not the only valuable commodity. Real experience matters and I personally feel a lot of so called experienced veterans are more like "1 year of experience 10 times" instead of "10 years worth of experience". So that is another challenge with people who have been in the industry for a while.
Loughla 6y ago
I am fascinated when the #2 group pops up to say there is age discrimination in coding - when you dig into it, the problem is about skills and not age (although I cannot really speak to ageism in the tech sector). Every other professional career requires you to stay up-to-date in your professional skills and knowledge to stay relevant in your field. Why would coding/tech in general be any different?
- smeyer 6y ago

Yizahi 6y ago

I'm working in an outsourcing company on a project which makes use of all kinds of engineers, not the homogeneous programmers working on the same stack in the same language, but actually a lot of diverse tasks - some work on analog hardware, some on digital hardware, some people specialize in controllers A, others in B, some specialists in video, some "regular" application programmers, and the list goes on. And most of engineers are in two offices - one Ukraine, another in Israel. So this very long preface was about age of our employees - despite working on the exact same problems office in Ukraine almost never hires "older" engineers of any specialization. By "older" I mean probably 50+, maybe even 45+. From the same general space where I'm sitting the oldest I know for sure is 40 years old and he is not a recent hire, so he was hired when he just passed 30 years. In the Israel on the other hand there are a lot of "older" engineers by share, and they are getting hired being "older", hired because of their experience in all kinds of domains we are working on. Just wanted to share how this problem looks like in two different countries.

rsynnott 6y ago

I do wonder if there's some conflation of age and institutionalisation; as someone in mid 30s who knows plenty of people in the industry a decade or so older, I'm just not seeing the "life ends at 40" thing that many commenters seem to imply. However, someone who's worked for 20 years at the same place (especially if it's a place where things are done A Certain Way, and anything else is heresy) may well have trouble moving job. And such people will of necessity be older. I suspect that a lot of the perceived problems for older people moving jobs are really more about institutionalised people moving jobs.

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago

As an older developer (55), two things: 1) I forget things. If some new piece of information comes in, after a few days, my younger colleagues remember everything, and I don't. 2) I want to sleep after lunch. It's impossible to fight.

robotburrito 6y ago

Also I think that a big problem is our health care system. I may be wrong on this, but I imagine it costs a company more money to employ an older person who may actually use their health insurance or have health problems. Removing the burden of health care from companies would maybe solve a bunch of these problems and allow companies to risk hiring older people.

pugworthy 6y ago
I believe it would be completely illegal (in the US) to not hire someone because you perceived them as a health expense risk.
- randomdude402 6y ago
  That's probably accurate, but if 20 people apply for a position and one gets hired, is it not accurate that nobody is scrutinizing some list of 19 reasons why 19 people didn't get the position? These kinds of things seem like there is no way to enforce them. I don't even know if that's a thing, health insurance being more expensive for companies with older employees or whatever, but just in general. "You can't fail to hire such and such type of person because it's illegal," doesn't seem to actually have much practical ability to influence a hiring process if it wants strongly enough to not be influenced. I haven't done any research on this and could be completely off base. Just have the same thought when I see this mentioned in general and started typing this time.
LocalPCGuy 6y ago
I don't disagree with the general sentiment, but I don't believe the reasoning is actually true. Generally companies pool their employees into a risk pool. Smaller ones will find a broker that does it, larger ones probably do it with their company population. But in general, the risk gets spread out enough that a couple individuals do not cause insurance to spike. I could be wrong also, not an expert by any means, but that is basically what our HR rep told me when I inquired (not because of age but because my wife is high-risk/high-cost, depending how you look at it). I was told that was not part of the equation because of how it was setup. It could if it was a small enough business that tried to negotiate something themselves, maybe?

scott31 6y ago

The "paper" seems to be of low quality for arxiv, not even has two column layout.

dickiedyce 6y ago
... and the methodology seems poor too. I had a sideline in magazine journalism for a while... I'd be interested in the correlation between article bias (pro / anti) versus age of writer (or target readership)
James_Henry 6y ago
I can only stand three-column layouts myself, much better quality!

0xfffafaCrash 6y ago

While it's certainly not the case everywhere, the truth is that a lot of software development needs out there aren't terribly challenging to get to a "good enough" state from a business value perspective. This is exacerbated by the hyper-specialization of shallow roles where companies are basically looking for technologists. Once upon a time people used to hire software developers expecting them to figure out how to solve problems across almost all software layers and to take their time doing it. Now many positions are for churning out work with a specific library or framework in a specific language. It doesn't take a long time for there to be diminishing returns in terms of the worth of each extra year of experience when someone's role is to work as a "React developer" or something like that especially if someone else is responsible for making the designs and another person for setting up the backend or if the bulk of the software can effectively be outsourced by leaning on open source tech. Factors like flexibility in work hour expectations and compensation favor younger developers who tend to have fewer responsibilities outside of work but have enough specialized skills to get the grunt work done and are able to put in the hours to make up for their lack of experience. Generally younger developers are not as well suited for making lots of bigger architectural decisions since they don't have the experience to really grasp longterm consequences of different approaches, but in terms of numbers, you need fewer people making those decisions than those doing the grunt work and young people with just a few years of experience often seem to do the grunt work about as well as anyone. This wouldn't be such a big problem for older software developers if there wasn't a pay expectation gap or if they were as likely to be flexible about hours. Rightly or wrongly, however, people expect higher compensation for their experience, even if much of that experience isn't actually producing that much more business value given the sort of work that they are actually stuck doing. The world definitely has a place for the John Carmacks, but it's really not that large a percentage of jobs where they can make the most of the value they have to offer.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I'm older. I'm no slouch. I can prove it, with a huge portfolio of stuff I was working on fifteen minutes ago. I stopped looking for work some time ago. Let's just say that I have the skillset and chops that many startups would kill for, but I don't have a...how do they say it, these days...gosh darn it...I just can't keep up with the stuff they say...oh yeah.."cultural fit." Yeah, that's it.

jolmg 6y ago

It's a shame that this paper uses a URL shortening service intermediary for its links. Eventually, those links will become useless at discretion of that service and you can't even use them in the WaybackMachine either when that happens. Not only because those URLs are unremarkable on their own (I doubt the bitly links are present elsewhere on the web so the WaybackMachine would be triggered into archiving them), but also because I doubt the WaybackMachine would scan PDFs for links. I leave record of the URL redirections here: https://bit.ly/2RKJW6S https://bit.ly/2RKJW6S -> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/22/google-pays-11m-to-jobseekers-who-alleged-age-discrimination https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/22/google-pa... https://bit.ly/2RIit5L https://bit.ly/2RIit5L -> https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/boomers-30/201710/young-people-are-just-smarter https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/boomers-30/201710/yo... https://bit.ly/2yfZGYN https://bit.ly/2yfZGYN -> https://www.quora.com/Is-30-years-old-too-old-to-learn-computer-programming https://www.quora.com/Is-30-years-old-too-old-to-learn-compu... https://bit.ly/2K7tolx https://bit.ly/2K7tolx -> https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ageing/ https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ageing/ https://bit.ly/2z19eXW https://bit.ly/2z19eXW -> https://empirical-software.engineering/assets/data/google-search-results_us-en_2019-08-02_annotated.csv https://empirical-software.engineering/assets/data/google-se... https://bit.ly/2XEuWez https://bit.ly/2XEuWez -> https://github.com/sbaltes/api-retriever https://github.com/sbaltes/api-retriever https://bit.ly/3agASwY https://bit.ly/3agASwY -> https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm -> https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm -> http://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination http://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination -> https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination https://bit.ly/2Bcuc7y https://bit.ly/2Bcuc7y -> https://www.zhihu.com/question/55618811 https://www.zhihu.com/question/55618811

waynesoftware 6y ago
Thank you for posting these. Some other links of potential interest: https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-world/ https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-... https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-leaders-greyglers-navigating-our-way-bigger-better-tracy-wilk/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-leaders-greyglers-navi... https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Work-Making-Modern-Elder/dp/0525572902 https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Work-Making-Modern-Elder/dp/05... These are from https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/tmrg-gitlab-generational-understanding/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/tmrg-gitl...

_qulr 6y ago

The cognitive dissonance of the tech industry is that many companies do in fact value their longtime employees, but they won't hire any new employees of the same age. You can be old in tech, as long as you were hired when you were young.

_qulr 6y ago
The main problem that "older" workers have is just getting in the door. Once they get in the door, they can often prove themselves, but they just aren't given the same chances as younger workers.

tabtab 6y ago

I have to say a lot of technology "change" is fads. The New Thing takes over before anybody seriously vets the new idea. Once something looks like "legacy-ware", everyone gets scared of being obsolete and abandons it for the new kidware on the block. Experiments are nice, but making everyone in IT be a guinea pig is not productive. Rapid change for the sake of change alone will probably "benefit" younger workers on average. Fashion driven IT is probably not good for organizations in general, not for just older workers, because they are paying to throw out software and start over too often; but it seems nobody can stop this Sisyphusian dance.

cwbrandsma 6y ago

They list documents stating 30 year old developers as old ... are you kidding me? At 30, developers are just starting to understand the job (like all of the non-coding skills).

wonderwonder 6y ago

One thing that older engineers often have that younger don't is family commitments. I am in my 40's with all the things that come along with that, wife, kids, expectation of personal time, etc. With Covid hitting, my productivity has plunged. I have young kids at home that I have to tutor, my wife is working from home as well so constantly getting distracted by her work calls. Kids stress both of us out, dogs barking etc. Its almost impossible to get any deep work done. I work with a bunch of either younger people without families or people my age that are childless. They have not been affected at all. Employers very often want someone that will live to work for the company, many of the middle aged engineers cannot / will not do that.

agentultra 6y ago

I've worked with two types of engineers: 1) Those who believe in age stereotypes 2) Those who don't There isn't some cliff you fall off of and become, "too old." That is one of the central lies of ageism. You're suddenly too old to be cool, you're too old to learn new things, you're too old to start something new, you're too old, too old, too old. So get it in now, while you're young! Work hard, put your head down because once you're over that cliff it's done! You'll be too old to be a programmer anymore! You'll be stuck in your ways, a crufty old fossil, someone who only shows up and doesn't learn anything new. I'm getting older. I'm picking up skateboarding. In recent years I've learned how to formally verify systems using model checkers and theorem provers. I've picked up on category theory and abstract algebra. I started streaming my side project to learn how to implement a database from scratch in Haskell. You'd think that I should either go into management or find another career. This is a young person's game! You have to keep up with all the new technology! Old people can't keep up! The lambda calculus turned 84 this year. Binary trees have not changed much. There was a paper released eight years ago that showed us how to implement co-ordination free operations on B+-Trees. Hooray. The real innovation still happens in small steps at the periphery. Ageism makes us believe that our best years are short and fleeting. That all of our work will be behind us for the majority of our lives. To talk about expertise as a deficiency and experience as useless. Your best years may yet be ahead of you.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

57 year old software dev here. It does definitely get tougher to find and keep work as you get into your 50s. What I've found is that it's a lot easier to get a job at a company that's run by people my age or older. I've been at a few startups over the last several years where the CEOs or managers were around 60. The interviews are a lot easier - kind of like interviews were back in the 80s & 90s probably because those are the types of interviews they remember as well. Being of a similar age they also tend to figure that if you made it this far you're probably going to be a good worker. I've had way more autonomy in those situations than I've had at other companies where I had 30-something-year-old managers. Maybe I'm falling into some reverse-ageism here, but in my experience I'd rather work for someone closer to my own age or even older. Problem is that there are getting to be fewer and fewer of these options as people tend to retire in their 60s.

godelmachine 6y ago

My father is 58. He works as an independent ERP Consultant. Last week, he enrolled for a 6 month boot camp on web technologies with an elite engineering school near his home. He’s my inspiration to keep learning to remain relevant in Industry 4.0