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Not surprising. Years ago one of my (gray haired) mentors opened my eyes to ageism in this industry by asking me to pay attention to how many programmers in th

Not surprising. Years ago one of my (gray haired) mentors opened my eyes to ageism in this industry by asking me to pay attention to how many programmers in the office have gray hair. Once you start looking for it, it becomes obvious that age discrimination is rampant. Some blame the young workforce on the industry being young, but the industry is decades old at this point so I don't think that excuse holds water.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Older workers have experience. Experience is expensive. You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. Age discrimination is rarely punished, and when it is, the penalties are minimal. Incentives matter.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Older workers have expectations of employers. Expectations are even more expensive than experience!
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Who knew it's outrageous to expect work life balance and reasonable compensation for experience.
    - mikelyons 6y ago
      The incentive structure of unregulated capitalism is "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs." The things to extract value from: employees, environment, government policy, tax code, if I was smarter I'd think of a few others.
      - mylons 6y ago
        you have my name, and my views. I don't know how to feel about this. there's some solace in knowing Mike Lyons is an extraordinarily popular name though.
        mikelyons 6y ago
        What's in a name?
      - ChrisLomont 6y ago
        "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs" is also the incentive structure of workers.
        mitjak 6y ago
        in the context of capitalism, sure.
        ChrisLomont 6y ago
        In the context of humanity. People do this even in non-capitalist countries. Or do you think that when a country is not capitalist the people suddenly stop doing things to benefit themselves?
        mikelyons 6y ago
        Worker's incentives seem more along the "do whatever those with resources say to trade your mind and body and time for survival"
        ChrisLomont 6y ago
        Companies compete for workers. Don’t like your current situation, leave. Companies know this, so cannot simply do whatever they want. Both sides have power, and the same incentives.
        mikelyons 6y ago
        I would argue that this is a perspective of someone with power in the job market, and perhaps that perspective is limited to a small portion of workers' experiences. I also find "don't like it, leave" to be a very unaware oversimplification of the situation many American workers are in.
- ska 6y ago
  > You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. It's not at all clear that there a net gain here, so the situation is at best complex.
  - mikelyons 6y ago
    In what way is the net gain not clear here? It seems clear to me that "even factoring in" means that there is a net gain for the employer, at a net loss to employees.
    - randcraw 6y ago
      "A net gain" implies that savings in a youngster's salary exceeds the losses due to their inexperience. You're saying you know how all these add up in the neterprise? I sure don't. I doubt most employers do either, since IT productivity is notoriously hard to quantify. Generally, it's more important to know what not to do. And that's something that only comes with time -- making mistakes and learning from them.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      The companies I've worked at have been very bad at measuring things like "this is how much that bug cost us in terms of people who tried the app once and then never came back." They're so focused on the data sources that are easy to collect that things like this are basically invisible. They know churn rate is an important thing to track, but look at it much more from a "what about this new feature, or changing the color of the icons" perspective, than from a "what if our software was less of a dumpster fire?" perspective. If you want to build quickly AND have flexibility AND have some reliability, you're gonna need some experienced employees, but if that's not a thing you've ever seen cause you've only ever worked with people fresh out of school... you're not gonna know what you're missing.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      Timescale. An older employee with experience can often see and avoid problems before they occur. A younger, inexperienced employee will not and will have to find the problem and attempt to fix it, usually three or four times before the problem is actually solved. So, for six or twelve months, the employer can sail along gloriously, enjoying the benefits of cheaper employees. Until the bill comes due. And at that time no one can really help them except their current employees, who are the only ones who understand the history-dependent system they've built. Fortunately, the time scales that most employers operate at rarely exceeds six to twelve months.
- x87678r 6y ago
  > Older workers have experience. Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack. > Experience is expensive. Fang Graduate roles pay > $200k. Lots of experienced people would love that but would never get hired.
  - nucleardog 6y ago
    > Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack. Or the old "ten years of experience" versus "one year of experience ten times".
mywittyname 6y ago
Some of the best people I've worked with are those who've been with the company for a long time. IME, the dead weight tends to be phased out over the years, so there's a bit of survivorship bias with the remaining ones. However, the road certainly isn't easy for them. Despite the utility of these people being totally obvious to anyone whose ever worked with them, with each change of leadership comes another fight to keep their jobs. The one that stuck with me was when I worked for one of the biggest companies in the world, and they laid off the man who had more patents than anyone else in the company, by a good margin. He was in his late 50s, and he came onboard after getting his Ph.D, leaving once to found a startup, which was acquired by the company after a few years. He was brilliant, humble and could have absolutely been a professor at MIT or a principal at Google. But he loved working for our company. I got the hell out of Dodge after that.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  That's not ageism though. Getting pushed out because they lost the shelter of their patron(s) or because they were on the losing side of a political battle, which is a common cause of the departure of people like that, is a different thing entirely.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I've worked at companies where older people are rarely seen, but I've also worked at companies where older developers are the norm. In fact, I started my career at a company where I was one of the few people under the age of 40. I don't have any statistics to support this, but I've wondered if workers tend to congregate by age groups at different companies. That is, if employees prefer to work with coworkers around their same age, they'll tend to move to companies that match their own demographic. If you're not in that demographic, you'll see fewer of those people around you. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a factor at some level. Geography plays a big role, too. If you consider "the industry" to be high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley then people will naturally self-select out of the area as they start raising families and growing older. Move to a more family-friendly city and suddenly it's more common to see diverse age ranges working at companies.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Consulting is infamous for being a "greybeard accumulator" where the stereotypical career path is that they either to to management or consulting. Client expectations seem to play a part in it that they at times seem to feel dissatisfied at a younger consultant who don't prove themself to be an all solving savant while tolerating a broader range of outcomes from an elder one. I know one attempt to have a sub visibly middle aged programmer local talent maximia who know the local language didn't work out as well compared to a former technician consultant who operated a bit more rote standards familarity. There may have been conflating other skillsets including social. To put it crudely the programmer was slightly jerkish, the former technician apparently always wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Regardless the bias seemed to reinforce itself from clients.
tylerFowler 6y ago
It's also regional, I started my career at a startup in Kansas City, where the situation is completely the opposite. The average age of the company was 40 or so, particularly in engineering.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago
  Also industry specific as well. I'm in the transportation technology industry and age isn't really an issue.
jnwatson 6y ago
Still, one needs to consider the demographics of programmers in general. Even ignoring issues like moving to management, health, etc, there simply weren't many programmers that started in the 1980's.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
triceratops 6y ago
I'm not denying that ageism exists, but this proves nothing. There are many reasons why young people outnumber over-40s in programming roles: 1. The size of the field has increased exponentially over time. Far fewer programmers started their careers in the 80s or 90s vs the past 10 years. 2. Many older programmers have transitioned into upper management or other roles - for example, product/project/people management, sales engineering, customer success, technical writing and so on. 3. People leave the industry due to family or health reasons, windfalls/inheritances leading to early retirement, burnout, or career changes. The longer someone has been working, the likelier it is that people from their cohort have left for one of these reasons.
kls 6y ago
While I don't disagree with you, there are other nuanced facets to this as well. I am 45 soon to be 46, and I have watched this industry chew up and spit out many of my friends and colleagues along the way. Burnout is a real thing. I have a friend who one day said F'it and bought a worm farm, he is literally a worm farmer now. Others took the elevator to management, one became a DJ, one opened a party store etc. etc. We loose a lot of the old timers to attrition, not many people can do the software grind for 20-30 years straight. The second nuance is that I and the rest of Gen-X sit one the cusp of the desktop revolution and its transition to the internet revolution. Most of the desktop programmers 30+ year at that time, did not make the transition, they stuck with desktop and rode it into the twilight of their career and that is a big reason you just don't seem to see too many people over their mid 40's in the industry. None of that negates the fact that ageism does exist in this industry, but there are other contributing factors as to why we don't see many programmers past the 40's cut off.
- RickJWagner 6y ago
  I'm in my middle 50s myself, been programming for 30 years. I like the story about the worm farming. It'd be appealing, except there's a slightly creepy feel to it when you're this close to senior citizenship. :)

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Older workers have experience. Experience is expensive. You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. Age discrimination is rarely punished, and when it is, the penalties are minimal. Incentives matter.

ethbr0 6y ago
Older workers have expectations of employers. Expectations are even more expensive than experience!
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Who knew it's outrageous to expect work life balance and reasonable compensation for experience.
  - mikelyons 6y ago
    The incentive structure of unregulated capitalism is "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs." The things to extract value from: employees, environment, government policy, tax code, if I was smarter I'd think of a few others.
    - mylons 6y ago
      you have my name, and my views. I don't know how to feel about this. there's some solace in knowing Mike Lyons is an extraordinarily popular name though.
      - mikelyons 6y ago
        What's in a name?
    - ChrisLomont 6y ago
      "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs" is also the incentive structure of workers.
      - mitjak 6y ago
        in the context of capitalism, sure.
        ChrisLomont 6y ago
        In the context of humanity. People do this even in non-capitalist countries. Or do you think that when a country is not capitalist the people suddenly stop doing things to benefit themselves?
        mikelyons 6y ago
        Worker's incentives seem more along the "do whatever those with resources say to trade your mind and body and time for survival"
        ChrisLomont 6y ago
        Companies compete for workers. Don’t like your current situation, leave. Companies know this, so cannot simply do whatever they want. Both sides have power, and the same incentives.
        mikelyons 6y ago
        I would argue that this is a perspective of someone with power in the job market, and perhaps that perspective is limited to a small portion of workers' experiences. I also find "don't like it, leave" to be a very unaware oversimplification of the situation many American workers are in.
ska 6y ago
> You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. It's not at all clear that there a net gain here, so the situation is at best complex.
- mikelyons 6y ago
  In what way is the net gain not clear here? It seems clear to me that "even factoring in" means that there is a net gain for the employer, at a net loss to employees.
  - randcraw 6y ago
    "A net gain" implies that savings in a youngster's salary exceeds the losses due to their inexperience. You're saying you know how all these add up in the neterprise? I sure don't. I doubt most employers do either, since IT productivity is notoriously hard to quantify. Generally, it's more important to know what not to do. And that's something that only comes with time -- making mistakes and learning from them.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    The companies I've worked at have been very bad at measuring things like "this is how much that bug cost us in terms of people who tried the app once and then never came back." They're so focused on the data sources that are easy to collect that things like this are basically invisible. They know churn rate is an important thing to track, but look at it much more from a "what about this new feature, or changing the color of the icons" perspective, than from a "what if our software was less of a dumpster fire?" perspective. If you want to build quickly AND have flexibility AND have some reliability, you're gonna need some experienced employees, but if that's not a thing you've ever seen cause you've only ever worked with people fresh out of school... you're not gonna know what you're missing.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Timescale. An older employee with experience can often see and avoid problems before they occur. A younger, inexperienced employee will not and will have to find the problem and attempt to fix it, usually three or four times before the problem is actually solved. So, for six or twelve months, the employer can sail along gloriously, enjoying the benefits of cheaper employees. Until the bill comes due. And at that time no one can really help them except their current employees, who are the only ones who understand the history-dependent system they've built. Fortunately, the time scales that most employers operate at rarely exceeds six to twelve months.
x87678r 6y ago
> Older workers have experience. Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack. > Experience is expensive. Fang Graduate roles pay > $200k. Lots of experienced people would love that but would never get hired.
- nucleardog 6y ago
  > Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack. Or the old "ten years of experience" versus "one year of experience ten times".

mywittyname 6y ago

Some of the best people I've worked with are those who've been with the company for a long time. IME, the dead weight tends to be phased out over the years, so there's a bit of survivorship bias with the remaining ones. However, the road certainly isn't easy for them. Despite the utility of these people being totally obvious to anyone whose ever worked with them, with each change of leadership comes another fight to keep their jobs. The one that stuck with me was when I worked for one of the biggest companies in the world, and they laid off the man who had more patents than anyone else in the company, by a good margin. He was in his late 50s, and he came onboard after getting his Ph.D, leaving once to found a startup, which was acquired by the company after a few years. He was brilliant, humble and could have absolutely been a professor at MIT or a principal at Google. But he loved working for our company. I got the hell out of Dodge after that.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
That's not ageism though. Getting pushed out because they lost the shelter of their patron(s) or because they were on the losing side of a political battle, which is a common cause of the departure of people like that, is a different thing entirely.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

I've worked at companies where older people are rarely seen, but I've also worked at companies where older developers are the norm. In fact, I started my career at a company where I was one of the few people under the age of 40. I don't have any statistics to support this, but I've wondered if workers tend to congregate by age groups at different companies. That is, if employees prefer to work with coworkers around their same age, they'll tend to move to companies that match their own demographic. If you're not in that demographic, you'll see fewer of those people around you. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a factor at some level. Geography plays a big role, too. If you consider "the industry" to be high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley then people will naturally self-select out of the area as they start raising families and growing older. Move to a more family-friendly city and suddenly it's more common to see diverse age ranges working at companies.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Consulting is infamous for being a "greybeard accumulator" where the stereotypical career path is that they either to to management or consulting. Client expectations seem to play a part in it that they at times seem to feel dissatisfied at a younger consultant who don't prove themself to be an all solving savant while tolerating a broader range of outcomes from an elder one. I know one attempt to have a sub visibly middle aged programmer local talent maximia who know the local language didn't work out as well compared to a former technician consultant who operated a bit more rote standards familarity. There may have been conflating other skillsets including social. To put it crudely the programmer was slightly jerkish, the former technician apparently always wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Regardless the bias seemed to reinforce itself from clients.

tylerFowler 6y ago

It's also regional, I started my career at a startup in Kansas City, where the situation is completely the opposite. The average age of the company was 40 or so, particularly in engineering.

HumblyTossed 6y ago
Also industry specific as well. I'm in the transportation technology industry and age isn't really an issue.

jnwatson 6y ago

Still, one needs to consider the demographics of programmers in general. Even ignoring issues like moving to management, health, etc, there simply weren't many programmers that started in the 1980's.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

triceratops 6y ago

I'm not denying that ageism exists, but this proves nothing. There are many reasons why young people outnumber over-40s in programming roles: 1. The size of the field has increased exponentially over time. Far fewer programmers started their careers in the 80s or 90s vs the past 10 years. 2. Many older programmers have transitioned into upper management or other roles - for example, product/project/people management, sales engineering, customer success, technical writing and so on. 3. People leave the industry due to family or health reasons, windfalls/inheritances leading to early retirement, burnout, or career changes. The longer someone has been working, the likelier it is that people from their cohort have left for one of these reasons.

kls 6y ago

While I don't disagree with you, there are other nuanced facets to this as well. I am 45 soon to be 46, and I have watched this industry chew up and spit out many of my friends and colleagues along the way. Burnout is a real thing. I have a friend who one day said F'it and bought a worm farm, he is literally a worm farmer now. Others took the elevator to management, one became a DJ, one opened a party store etc. etc. We loose a lot of the old timers to attrition, not many people can do the software grind for 20-30 years straight. The second nuance is that I and the rest of Gen-X sit one the cusp of the desktop revolution and its transition to the internet revolution. Most of the desktop programmers 30+ year at that time, did not make the transition, they stuck with desktop and rode it into the twilight of their career and that is a big reason you just don't seem to see too many people over their mid 40's in the industry. None of that negates the fact that ageism does exist in this industry, but there are other contributing factors as to why we don't see many programmers past the 40's cut off.

RickJWagner 6y ago
I'm in my middle 50s myself, been programming for 30 years. I like the story about the worm farming. It'd be appealing, except there's a slightly creepy feel to it when you're this close to senior citizenship. :)