8 ms·

No Country for Old Developers

64 points by Centuriprime 6y ago

m_v_p 6y ago
Aren't we all forgetting the elaphant in the room? Older workers usually make more and therefore have higher salary demands when seeking new opportunities. With the advent of each new software language, component library/package and WYSIWYG development environment younger software developers actually require less training & expertise to be productive sooner. Companies know this and would rather hire 2-3 younger engineers for the same price as one senior resource. This looks like ageism on the surface but in reality it's the economics of plain old capitalism at work with Moore's Law accelerated the pace of automation.
amiune 6y ago
I'm 37 I thought I was too old but I decided to start all over again. Took some courses from Coursera about Deep Learning and last month started competing in kaggle and similar competitions sites. I earned 7k dollars but the most important is that I'm learning a lot like if I was in the university again, I think I'm learning even faster.
- swozey 6y ago
  I'm 36 and have not once experienced blatant ageism. I keep my skills current and have pivoted my career many times when things got less interesting or I could tell the market was falling off. I went sysadmin>neteng>syseng>SRE and will have to pivot in 4-5 years again, probably, once some other culture-breaker has hit distributed systems for the 3rd time in my career. Now, I don't have kids so you might go "hey you've got so much free time" - I'm also a 36yo engineer with 10+ years of experience. Most of the positions I take nowadays allow me AMPLE time (as in months) to do research and learn new systems before deploying them to production. I almost never study or work at home these days. A LOT less than in my 20s when I worked in startups. I just went through a few months of interviewing, what did every company want out of me at this "age" (experience)? They wanted a strong desire to mentor and cultivate teams. I've worked with a lot of older engineers who aren't happy to do this, and that's a huge problem and something majorly wrong and undesirable in tech. FWIW I will not ever consider the 30s or 40s old. I am working with a lot more 23-25yo developers now and feel like half of my skillset is bridging communication between zoomers and gen-x bosses. They love learning and its incredibly rewarding helping them grow their careers - something that I never got help with when I started in the toxic tech world of ~2008. I'm a lead/staff IC, not a manager, fwiw.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Had the opposite experience in London and I am not even 36 yet. Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay). Gave up on interviewing for startups and medium companies. Get a job in a top tier company or starve to death. (Top tier is mostly finance in London because FAANG don't have big offices here).
    - swozey 6y ago
      Do you list every single position on your CV, like is it multiple pages with 15+ years on it? I believe CVs are like that whereas my resume is a 1 pager that only has my last decade of SUPER relevant experience listed; my last 3 SR Eng roles. I could submit a 3 page resume with all of my sysadmin, etc jobs on it but then I would definitely be aging myself, even worse because my career actually started when I was 16 (I only mention this in casual interviews). If I started back then it'd probably look like I was 42+ on paper but at that point it's kind of more of a "why is this person listing irrelevant skills from 2005?" Unfortunately I think that's the expectation with CVs? The ones I've seen look like they're describing the persons entire life to me.
      - user5994461 6y ago
        One page both sides. Only list the most relevant positions. I had to cut out positions very early on in my career because there were way too many to fit. I did some short contracting back in the days, imagine 5 jobs over less than 5 years. Also removed all the dates for degrees and all the locations. (London recruiters have a bad habit to ignore experience outside London).
    - pc86 6y ago
      > Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay). This isn't ageism. People do leave jobs they're underqualified for at a much higher rate. And if the salary band for a given job is £50-75k and you require £85k then why would they interview?
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  I don’t want to be a downer but don’t you think it’s just way easier to learn now because we have so many great resources available to us?
  - amiune 6y ago
    Of course and even more for me that I’m in Latin America and now I can easily access to resources from US and Europe
  - vsareto 6y ago
    We do, but there's more surface area to cover because job requirements have also gone up and technology is more complex. Interviewing for tech has also branched off into its own skill with an industry that promotes its own existence.
- m00dy 6y ago
  31 here. I almost did the same. I was working as fullstack developer + infrastructure engineer on AWS and I have recently pivoted to deep learning field and now working for a nlp product at this moment.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Mark Zuckerberg actually said "young people are smarter"? So, he's going to step down now?! Good news.
Orthow2020 6y ago
Test
_qulr 6y ago
"But skills can beat ageism" I dislike this typical response, because it comes close to blaming the victim, and indeed many people do blame the victims of ageism, attributing stereotypical attitudes to them. Imagine claiming "skills can beat racism" or "skills can beat sexism". No, nothing beats discrimination, because it was never based on the existence or absence of skills. Rather, prejudiced people take one look at you, see your gray hair, and make assumptions about you, and you can't beat your hair color any more than you can beat your skin color. Well, you could try to dye your hair and get plastic surgery, but again that has nothing to do with skills.
- harimau777 6y ago
  "Skills can beat ageism" also ignores the fact that many people only have the aptitude for average skills. In a system without discrimination that's not a problem because there are plenty of jobs for average developers.
- unishark 6y ago
  If you just want to rant against SV, I totally agree. It's certainly not fair, because it basically says you have to "work twice as hard" as they say. But the statement is factually correct. While it would certainly be preferable for society to be the one to change and such that your ageism problem goes away. In the meantime, merit matters, and usable advice for an individual to deal with this problem is by building up their skills. Note that the advice came from a recruiter, not a hiring manager justifying themselves.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > It's certainly not fair, because it basically says you have to "work twice as hard" as they say. But the statement is factually correct. It assumes that everyone is lazying around basically. Because of people are not lazying around, no, you can not just work twice as hard. Because you are already working hard, exactly as your competitors do. No people can't double their hard work every time they are treated unfairly. Not if they were actually working in the first place. That goes for ageism, sexism, racism, whatever-ism we talk about.
EdwinLarkin 6y ago
It has been the opposite experience for me in continental Europe.
- bad_alloc 6y ago
  Can you elaborate? Experience is preferred?
  - EdwinLarkin 6y ago
    I could not get a job because I was considered too young.
- thx2099100 6y ago
  In Europe the older you are, the better paid you are. every employer claims to reward skills but does nothing of the sort. the practical way to get paid more is just to be older.
deleted 6y ago
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misja111 6y ago
I'm 51 and I don't think I have ever experienced ageism in IT. I just switched to a new area (big data) one year ago for instance and had no problem finding a job. Maybe it's because I live in Europe and in the USA things are different, who knows. But there is one thing though that can make switching jobs more difficult for senior developers, and that is the salary. Chances are that when you're older you are supporting kids, a house, or you just have become used to a higher standard of living. So you will probably look for a higher salary in a new job and yes, that limits your opportunities.
tosser0001 6y ago
I’ve only ever experienced salary-ism which is just a side effect of being in the industry for so long. The issue with getting decent reviews and salary bumps is that eventually you’re making more money than many people are willing to take on. I’m 57 and working with a lot of people my age. We’ve hired a lot of older people.
- lukeramsden 6y ago
  Do you know of anywhere that hires more older people that would also consider hiring some younger, junior candidates as well? I don't know about other younger developers but personally I'd rather work with older, experienced developers, I think that would be of great benefit to my development.
  - tosser0001 6y ago
    My company has a program specifically designed to bring in new blood probably because there are so many older folks. Part of it involves spending time with different teams to get a feel for the various things that are going on. How well it works in practice I can’t say. Like everything else it depends on the quality of the teams you’re on and the nature of the work they’re doing.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  There's definitely a salary ceiling in software. My first few years in the industry, I made double digit percentage increases by changing jobs. The next few years were more like 5-6% to change jobs. Nowadays, I don't expect any increase at all--you max out and every company you look at coincidentally offers about the same amount. Unless you go into management or are lucky enough to get one of those one-in-a-thousand nosebleed FAANG offers, you're plateaued around 10-15 years into your career.
Waterluvian 6y ago
I don't deny ageism existing. It surely does. But I regularly see "I want to reboot my career" mixed into the conversation and I wonder if the industry just doesn't value the decades of generalized experience a veteran brings to a rebooted career. And if they don't value that, why not focus on the hungry 22 year olds who are easier to fool into focusing on work rather than life or family? I think this is truly boneheaded, but that wouldn't surprise me...
bartread 6y ago
"Young people are just smarter." - Mark Zuckerberg Spoken like a naive individual without much in the way of life experience. Keep taking the pills, Mark. Onto more positive points, whilst I have no doubt that ageism exists in our industry, there are also companies with a more enlightened view of age and experience. I tend to prefer hiring people with more experience, in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, when I can. I particularly like those who've worked for a variety of different companies during their careers (avoids institutionalisation). Some of the benefits of more experienced staff: - Tend to take a more rounded view of what they're working on, and find it easier to see different perspectives - Related to this they seem better able to focus on delivering business and customer value - Again, related: less interested in tech for tech's sake, and less prone to chasing fads - Further, related: less idealistic, more pragmatic - Better social skills; easier to get along with - Less emotional: more mature and settled - Better able to manage stress and work/life balance - Lower sense of entitlement - Have often picked up mentoring and coaching skills that can help develop others Of course, there are always exceptions for both experienced and inexperienced staff (and we're very fortunate/have been very careful about our less experienced hires), but these are benefits I've often observed. As I've already implied, we hire people at all levels of experience (with the exception, so far, of fresh grads), but having a good number of experienced staff is I think one of the great strengths of our team, and I view our senior staff as our greatest asset. They're very good, for example, at helping to develop less experienced team members, or wrangling difficult and sensitive issues. (Note that I haven't talked much about technical skills here. Partly this is because we work with a deliberately boring stack - I want us to build great, cutting edge products with solid, reliable, boring tech, not be constantly hindered from building by the problems of the bleeding edge. Mostly it's because, having had to pick up different languages and technologies over the years, and having worked with plenty of developers who've done the same, I don't generally regard specific tech skills as that important. We use SQL Server, for example. But if you've worked with any relational database for any decent length of time during your career you'll get on fine with it, regardless of whether that's Postgres, Oracle, or even MySQL or SQLite. Likewise it's not that hard to learn to query MongoDB or ElasticSearch, although the latter is a bit nuts, even though the syntax is different to SQL. It's not different enough to get in a tizzy about, and I really wish recruiters would wise up to this. Some have, most haven't, in my experience.)
pc86 6y ago
From someone solidly in the age bracket that is supposedly discriminated against, what utter nonsense. This is a bunch of hand-wavey garbage with no actual data backing it up. Some anonymous "surveys" and uncited statements of fact starting with "Chances are" or "in some cases." > Even if you get offered a position you will likely be offered a lower wage if going for a junior job. Yes, that's how it works. You get paid for the position. If you have the experience for a senior role, don't go for a junior job and expect a senior paycheck. If you don't have the experience and can only apply for a junior role, why should you get paid more? Your mortgage and kids' tuition is irrelevant to the value you're providing to the company. > For a 50-year-old it may prove a struggle to make a career change pay off and could take several years to climb the ladder to reach a livable wage. Isn't the common refrain to 20-somethings that they should just eat out less and live with roommates if they're not making enough money? If it's that easy then the 50-year-old should do it, too. I've worked for small mom-and-pop companies and large public corporations. Every supposed example of "ageism" I've seen in real life is much more about attitude than age. > Training and promotion opportunities may not go your way if you’re older. They may be offered to younger staff Again with the hand-wavey "may not go your way...may be offered," but I don't accept the premise anyway. In my experience training is allocated based on how enthusiastically someone wants to get training, and how willing they are to follow-up and ask about funding, getting time on the work schedule, etc. If your attitude is "I know everything I need to know to get my job done," the company is unlikely to go out of their way to spend thousands on training you. I've seen the "f you, I know everything I need to" attitude from 27 year old jerks, and I've seen 60-something programmers tearing through the framework du jour without any trouble. It has nothing to do with stagnation and everything to do with willingness to learn, willingness to listen, willing to do something new, and whether or not you think everyone has something they could teach you.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
> "a prejudice that older people simply can’t learn as well as younger people" This prejudice happens to be true. https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-the-age-you-reach-peak-intelligence-according-to-science https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-the-age-you-reach-peak-... I'm an older software developer, and I do not have the same ability to learn new things as I did when I was young. I do have more experience and, with it, a better sense of what matters and what doesn't, so I waste less time on the stuff that doesn't. That is, however, a more subjective attribute and, thus, I don't blame large companies for not being able to evaluate it. They are inherently volume-based and thus focused on more obvious and measurable attributes that directly (though imperfectly) map to developer productivity. As the kids say: it is what it is. If you want to make increasing amounts of money for a long time, become a banker or a doctor. I like writing code.
duxup 6y ago
Bear with me if you've heard me tell this story before on HN: After age 40 I changed careers from a networking career to coding via a bootcamp. I was among a couple folks who were in my age group in the camp. It was a great experience working with folks of all ages in the camp. I think mixing different ages, backgrounds, experience is valuable. While finishing the camp I was working with another person who was my age and he got a call back from a recruiter after a phone interview. He put them on speaker and the recruiter proceeded to note that they didn't think he would be a 'culture fit'. He was braver than I and asked what that meant. "They think you're too old for the group, everyone is young here." We were a bit shocked and just to be sure he heard her right he asked again: "You're too old." For some folks it doesn't even seem to occur to them that such discrimination is wrong. I was a bit floored by the experience. Growing up I remember overhearing some teachers quietly chat to each other and realizing that they could be just as petty as any kids could be. From then on I really never thought much in terms of age. For whatever reason when I go to meetups younger devs don't seem to notice / are a bit surprised when they find out how old I am. When I think back on my career(s) I realize how just one opportunity here or there can make a huge difference and having a place that is obviously closed to me based on age make it known was pretty shocking. Nothing ever came of that event. While trying to just get your foot in the door he didn't want to do anything about it and I could hardly blame him. Both of us were eventually hired elsewhere, and are doing well.
- draw_down 6y ago
  Yes, “culture fit” always and only means this sort of thing. It’s ineffable and not falsifiable, which makes it a great cover for discrimination. Culture should be an emergent property of the group of people who were hired because they were able to do the job.
- jorgeleo 6y ago
  That is ageism and is illegal in the US. The recruiter and the kids need a bit of spanking to learn the lesson https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc
- yodsanklai 6y ago
draw_down 6y ago
Oh, “time will tell”. That’s, um, a relief? I got very lucky and will be exiting this industry soon, in my early forties. And not a moment too soon. I hate it so much, the ageism isn’t even the worst part.
yodsanklai 6y ago
I just got a SWE job offer at a FAANG and I'm in my mid-forties. I took the exact same interviews as anybody else. They've also been contacted me regularly for the last three years. My age isn't written on my resume, but they can easily infer I'm in my forties. My guess is that recruiters don't care as long as they think you have a chance passing the coding interviews. I realize that older developers are slightly uncommon, but maybe it's also because they get bored and think they have better career prospects elsewhere. Personnally, I still love to code and learn new things, as I've always had. I'm used to working with people younger/older than me and it has never been an issue either. That being said, I'm anxious that age becomes an issue along the road. There's also no denying that there is some sort of discrimination against older people. Simply look at the pictures on companies websites and presentation material, they clearly want to show how diverse they are except for older persons... I'm just curious: older people working in big companies, have you ever discussed that with people in charge of promoting/ensuring diversity? I think there's a good point to make.
- duxup 6y ago
  >I realize that older developers are slightly uncommon, I wonder if that is really the case or not.
  - buckminster 6y ago
    This probably is true. The industry has been growing quickly for decades so there will naturally be far more people with ten years' experience than thirty years', say. Most people who enter the industry are young, so you would expect the demographic to skew young.
  - anonuser123456 6y ago
    I think it’s a perception. I’m a youngster in my business unit (500 engineers) at a spry 39.
  - tharne 6y ago
    It is not. I think the idea comes from the fact that people have this idea of "developers" as people who work for startups or FAANG companies. Most developers work in unsexy industries and in boring places. Insurance companies in Indiana, a hospital Utah, an manufacturing plant outside of Houston, etc. There's also the fact that middle-aged developers raising families don't have time to blog and be "influencers" on social media. That being said, ageism is definitely an issue in the industry. A lot of it has to do with so many companies having an "FTE" based approach to viewing things. Some moron with an MBA and no actual real-world skills sees a 55 year-old developer and thinks, "I can replace him with two new grads and still have money left over".
marnett 6y ago
How do they control for the large portion of the older developer demographic who have retired early and/or changed careers?
mojuba 6y ago
The most dreadful thing in this industry to me is this: how many years of experience do you have? 1 2 3 4 5+ That's it. Fin. More than 5 doesn't matter. The truth is that the difference between 30 years and 5 years of experience in a particular field can be as big as between 1 and 5. I just want to ask, does anyone in the industry really care about this fact? Does it matter to any company out there? Have you ever seen a job posting that has say 20+ years of experience as a minimum? As someone with 30+ years in the industry I'm constantly worried that nobody really really needs a coder with so much under their belt anymore. That nobody sees the value in a smaller codebase with fewer bugs and more minimalist and robust architectural solutions. Dear industry (apart from some maybe very specific niches such as OS kernels, compilers and such), do you really care about the old experienced devs?
- trevyn 6y ago
  If you have more than 5 years of experience, you should know the industry and not be paying much attention to formal job postings. Similarly, companies do not typically hire for those positions through public job postings.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    Wow, no bites in 13 hours, so I'll bite: If not job postings, where are these mystical jobs offered? And, don't just say "networking" as if that completely describes the process. I've been in the business for over 20 years and have always gotten my jobs from public postings or recruiters reaching out, who inevitably point me to the public posting as part of the process. I'm unaware of these other Secret Squirrel channels for getting jobs, despite people always telling me they totally definitely exist!
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Nobody really needs someone with 30 years of general experience because each such person is unique, impossible to completely replace. If you have the level of expertise that comes from real understanding of six different fields attained from five years of good work in them you might literally be the only person with that combination of skills. There are definitely under a 1,000 of you. If you have 30 years of experience but maybe five of real learning then you’re presumably competent but you’re not super special, just competent and known to be competent. After 30 years in the same field you could be one of those people with serious deep expertise. Those people are valuable but the market is thin. You need to make your skills known so work finds you through your network, or you need to become a consultant in spirit if not fact and sell. Loudly trumpet your expertise.
rossdavidh 6y ago
I started coding professionally in my mid-30's. I am in my early 50's. If I have ever been discriminated against because of my age, I am not aware of it, and don't care because I've always found work. Now, I should mention that I did switch a few years back to doing consulting/temporary positions, although sometimes these "temporary" positions last over a year. This means two things: 1) I buy my own healthcare insurance (I recommend using healthsherpa.com to help do that), so it could be that employers don't worry about my age because they don't have to pay for my insurance 2) I am forced into a position of having to learn new things every year, whether it's a new industry or a new library/framework or a new language or whatever. This means I cannot become unwilling to try new things. I do think it's true that you need to not activate the "he's too old to do new things" alarm bells, by being very circumspect about criticizing new trends. But this is probably a healthy habit to cultivate anyway; give the new trend a chance, at least. Also, there is a difference in the respect given to older programmers relative to other industries. In most fields (e.g. doctor, lawyer, banker, even engineer) as you get older, you become higher status and your opinions are given greater respect. In programming, your opinion is worth about what anyone else's is. So, if you think that after programming for decades your opinion ought to be given more weight than the 23 year old's, you're in the wrong industry. But, I think the best teams have both young and old programmers, and it's healthy to be in a team where young people are willing to speak up and disagree with you.
- marstall 6y ago
  yes, same here. my first SWE job was at 26, now 52 and my career has never felt more stable in terms of my ability to get another good job if my current one fell through. i love what i do and have a strong motivation to earn, so I have always made an effort to stay current, and that's translated to continually being in demand. I feel confident I'll be be able ride it out as long as I need to, if my health and the economy hold up!
mori876 6y ago
anecdote: after 10y as a software engineer I came back to the academy to accomplish a PhD. Recently, I applied to a research intern position at Facebook and got the response: "we only get people with less than 6 years experience for this position" (My inside referrer got the response, as a job applicant I got not reponse)
orange_tee 6y ago
Is ageism a thing or is it just the fact that in every industry there is a push to move up the ladder? You are just not supposed to be doing grunt work at 50. This is true of all professions. People below you don't want you to be occupying their spot, and people above you have a hard time with a guy who is senior to them in age and experience.
sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
Young people are mainly more easily influenced. It's far easier to convince a young person without a family nor passion in life to work for 12 hours a day for little money rather than experienced people. It's also far easier to sell hyped, useless technological solutions to young, non-experienced people who don't understand the problem to solve. I say this as a young developer who took too much time to recover from the marketing hype maintained by money seeking vendors.
notacoward 6y ago
Like other "isms" ageism rarely announces itself as such. Instead it cloaks itself in other forms of bias that "just happen" to be correlated with age. For example, oncall requirements and late meetings/offsites are primarily burdensome to those with families, but that's disproportionately older workers. Open offices are less endurable for older workers because of otherwise-neutral changes in hearing and concentration. And so on. An even more subtle form of ageism is discrimination against certain technical/process habits that are correlated with when one entered the industry and therefore with age. For example, older engineers are more likely to believe in thinking through problems before starting to code, but in a "move fast" culture that's considered outdated. Older developers are likely to be more conservative when estimating technical difficulty or time to completion, which gets interpreted as unwillingness to commit (especially compared to younger developers who often wildly overcommit and suffer no consequence). Older workers are more likely to push back against corporate happy-talk because they've heard it all before and it never amounted to anything, but that can be interpreted as disloyalty or a "culture fit" problem. Ageism is not one big obvious thing; it's a collection of small subtle things. Bit by bit by bit, these things nibble away at older workers' individual productivity and collaborative opportunities. Many overcome it. I did OK for myself in three years when I was 20+ years older than the median for the two groups I was in at a FAANG. But just because a problem is overcome doesn't mean it's not a problem.
deleted 6y ago
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johnwheeler 6y ago
Ageism is the only prejudice I can think of that no one is immune to. Are there others you can think of?
- derbOac 6y ago
  Sexism. Maybe even racism at some level. Really I think prejudices operate all the time in all sorts of ways. I say that not to be dismissive — I think all forms of them are a problem — but I think some of them rise to a certain level of societal awareness because of the numbers of people affected.
tomcooks 6y ago
> Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from. Yeah
sys_64738 6y ago
One strategy is to find a company filled with older workers so you're younger. They're out there but usually not web type companies in my experience.
Overtimegoal 6y ago
I'm 61. Been paid to write software for 42 years. I make it a point to add a new technology with every project. Currently that's Vuejs. Next one will be Blazor based, I think. It's the way I keep my skills up to date and myself hireable. I'll never retire cause even if I stopped working for others, I'd still be writing code for myself.
Ods25 6y ago
Where the hell are all of these magical companies that hire only young people? I'm 23 with an extensive project list & written tutorials,a completed CompSci degree, and a half completed dual degree in electrical engineering & compEng, yet I can't get hired even when I pass an algorithm test with 30 minutes remaining. However a mid 30s dev friend of mine this year juggled 3 companies into getting him a nice salary and told me "Yeah, nobody takes you seriously until you're 30".
flatus 6y ago
FTFA: I love this: "Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying: “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” " b/c it crystallizes, for all time and for all to see, how wrong Mark Zuckerberg can be.
Centuriprime 6y ago
Thanks everyone for a good open discussion on this subject. Much appreciated, and I hope you don't suffer ageism. There should be enough opportunities for all of us.

64 points by Centuriprime 6y ago

Aren't we all forgetting the elaphant in the room? Older workers usually make more and therefore have higher salary demands when seeking new opportunities. With the advent of each new software language, component library/package and WYSIWYG development environment younger software developers actually require less training & expertise to be productive sooner. Companies know this and would rather hire 2-3 younger engineers for the same price as one senior resource. This looks like ageism on the surface but in reality it's the economics of plain old capitalism at work with Moore's Law accelerated the pace of automation.

amiune 6y ago

I'm 37 I thought I was too old but I decided to start all over again. Took some courses from Coursera about Deep Learning and last month started competing in kaggle and similar competitions sites. I earned 7k dollars but the most important is that I'm learning a lot like if I was in the university again, I think I'm learning even faster.

swozey 6y ago
I'm 36 and have not once experienced blatant ageism. I keep my skills current and have pivoted my career many times when things got less interesting or I could tell the market was falling off. I went sysadmin>neteng>syseng>SRE and will have to pivot in 4-5 years again, probably, once some other culture-breaker has hit distributed systems for the 3rd time in my career. Now, I don't have kids so you might go "hey you've got so much free time" - I'm also a 36yo engineer with 10+ years of experience. Most of the positions I take nowadays allow me AMPLE time (as in months) to do research and learn new systems before deploying them to production. I almost never study or work at home these days. A LOT less than in my 20s when I worked in startups. I just went through a few months of interviewing, what did every company want out of me at this "age" (experience)? They wanted a strong desire to mentor and cultivate teams. I've worked with a lot of older engineers who aren't happy to do this, and that's a huge problem and something majorly wrong and undesirable in tech. FWIW I will not ever consider the 30s or 40s old. I am working with a lot more 23-25yo developers now and feel like half of my skillset is bridging communication between zoomers and gen-x bosses. They love learning and its incredibly rewarding helping them grow their careers - something that I never got help with when I started in the toxic tech world of ~2008. I'm a lead/staff IC, not a manager, fwiw.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Had the opposite experience in London and I am not even 36 yet. Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay). Gave up on interviewing for startups and medium companies. Get a job in a top tier company or starve to death. (Top tier is mostly finance in London because FAANG don't have big offices here).
  - swozey 6y ago
    Do you list every single position on your CV, like is it multiple pages with 15+ years on it? I believe CVs are like that whereas my resume is a 1 pager that only has my last decade of SUPER relevant experience listed; my last 3 SR Eng roles. I could submit a 3 page resume with all of my sysadmin, etc jobs on it but then I would definitely be aging myself, even worse because my career actually started when I was 16 (I only mention this in casual interviews). If I started back then it'd probably look like I was 42+ on paper but at that point it's kind of more of a "why is this person listing irrelevant skills from 2005?" Unfortunately I think that's the expectation with CVs? The ones I've seen look like they're describing the persons entire life to me.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      One page both sides. Only list the most relevant positions. I had to cut out positions very early on in my career because there were way too many to fit. I did some short contracting back in the days, imagine 5 jobs over less than 5 years. Also removed all the dates for degrees and all the locations. (London recruiters have a bad habit to ignore experience outside London).
  - pc86 6y ago
    > Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay). This isn't ageism. People do leave jobs they're underqualified for at a much higher rate. And if the salary band for a given job is £50-75k and you require £85k then why would they interview?
danielscrubs 6y ago
I don’t want to be a downer but don’t you think it’s just way easier to learn now because we have so many great resources available to us?
- amiune 6y ago
  Of course and even more for me that I’m in Latin America and now I can easily access to resources from US and Europe
- vsareto 6y ago
  We do, but there's more surface area to cover because job requirements have also gone up and technology is more complex. Interviewing for tech has also branched off into its own skill with an industry that promotes its own existence.
m00dy 6y ago
31 here. I almost did the same. I was working as fullstack developer + infrastructure engineer on AWS and I have recently pivoted to deep learning field and now working for a nlp product at this moment.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Mark Zuckerberg actually said "young people are smarter"? So, he's going to step down now?! Good news.

Orthow2020 6y ago

Test

_qulr 6y ago

"But skills can beat ageism" I dislike this typical response, because it comes close to blaming the victim, and indeed many people do blame the victims of ageism, attributing stereotypical attitudes to them. Imagine claiming "skills can beat racism" or "skills can beat sexism". No, nothing beats discrimination, because it was never based on the existence or absence of skills. Rather, prejudiced people take one look at you, see your gray hair, and make assumptions about you, and you can't beat your hair color any more than you can beat your skin color. Well, you could try to dye your hair and get plastic surgery, but again that has nothing to do with skills.

harimau777 6y ago
"Skills can beat ageism" also ignores the fact that many people only have the aptitude for average skills. In a system without discrimination that's not a problem because there are plenty of jobs for average developers.
unishark 6y ago
If you just want to rant against SV, I totally agree. It's certainly not fair, because it basically says you have to "work twice as hard" as they say. But the statement is factually correct. While it would certainly be preferable for society to be the one to change and such that your ageism problem goes away. In the meantime, merit matters, and usable advice for an individual to deal with this problem is by building up their skills. Note that the advice came from a recruiter, not a hiring manager justifying themselves.
- watwut 6y ago
  > It's certainly not fair, because it basically says you have to "work twice as hard" as they say. But the statement is factually correct. It assumes that everyone is lazying around basically. Because of people are not lazying around, no, you can not just work twice as hard. Because you are already working hard, exactly as your competitors do. No people can't double their hard work every time they are treated unfairly. Not if they were actually working in the first place. That goes for ageism, sexism, racism, whatever-ism we talk about.

EdwinLarkin 6y ago

It has been the opposite experience for me in continental Europe.

bad_alloc 6y ago
Can you elaborate? Experience is preferred?
- EdwinLarkin 6y ago
  I could not get a job because I was considered too young.
thx2099100 6y ago
In Europe the older you are, the better paid you are. every employer claims to reward skills but does nothing of the sort. the practical way to get paid more is just to be older.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

misja111 6y ago

I'm 51 and I don't think I have ever experienced ageism in IT. I just switched to a new area (big data) one year ago for instance and had no problem finding a job. Maybe it's because I live in Europe and in the USA things are different, who knows. But there is one thing though that can make switching jobs more difficult for senior developers, and that is the salary. Chances are that when you're older you are supporting kids, a house, or you just have become used to a higher standard of living. So you will probably look for a higher salary in a new job and yes, that limits your opportunities.

tosser0001 6y ago

I’ve only ever experienced salary-ism which is just a side effect of being in the industry for so long. The issue with getting decent reviews and salary bumps is that eventually you’re making more money than many people are willing to take on. I’m 57 and working with a lot of people my age. We’ve hired a lot of older people.

lukeramsden 6y ago
Do you know of anywhere that hires more older people that would also consider hiring some younger, junior candidates as well? I don't know about other younger developers but personally I'd rather work with older, experienced developers, I think that would be of great benefit to my development.
- tosser0001 6y ago
  My company has a program specifically designed to bring in new blood probably because there are so many older folks. Part of it involves spending time with different teams to get a feel for the various things that are going on. How well it works in practice I can’t say. Like everything else it depends on the quality of the teams you’re on and the nature of the work they’re doing.
ryandrake 6y ago
There's definitely a salary ceiling in software. My first few years in the industry, I made double digit percentage increases by changing jobs. The next few years were more like 5-6% to change jobs. Nowadays, I don't expect any increase at all--you max out and every company you look at coincidentally offers about the same amount. Unless you go into management or are lucky enough to get one of those one-in-a-thousand nosebleed FAANG offers, you're plateaued around 10-15 years into your career.

Waterluvian 6y ago

I don't deny ageism existing. It surely does. But I regularly see "I want to reboot my career" mixed into the conversation and I wonder if the industry just doesn't value the decades of generalized experience a veteran brings to a rebooted career. And if they don't value that, why not focus on the hungry 22 year olds who are easier to fool into focusing on work rather than life or family? I think this is truly boneheaded, but that wouldn't surprise me...

bartread 6y ago

"Young people are just smarter." - Mark Zuckerberg Spoken like a naive individual without much in the way of life experience. Keep taking the pills, Mark. Onto more positive points, whilst I have no doubt that ageism exists in our industry, there are also companies with a more enlightened view of age and experience. I tend to prefer hiring people with more experience, in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, when I can. I particularly like those who've worked for a variety of different companies during their careers (avoids institutionalisation). Some of the benefits of more experienced staff: - Tend to take a more rounded view of what they're working on, and find it easier to see different perspectives - Related to this they seem better able to focus on delivering business and customer value - Again, related: less interested in tech for tech's sake, and less prone to chasing fads - Further, related: less idealistic, more pragmatic - Better social skills; easier to get along with - Less emotional: more mature and settled - Better able to manage stress and work/life balance - Lower sense of entitlement - Have often picked up mentoring and coaching skills that can help develop others Of course, there are always exceptions for both experienced and inexperienced staff (and we're very fortunate/have been very careful about our less experienced hires), but these are benefits I've often observed. As I've already implied, we hire people at all levels of experience (with the exception, so far, of fresh grads), but having a good number of experienced staff is I think one of the great strengths of our team, and I view our senior staff as our greatest asset. They're very good, for example, at helping to develop less experienced team members, or wrangling difficult and sensitive issues. (Note that I haven't talked much about technical skills here. Partly this is because we work with a deliberately boring stack - I want us to build great, cutting edge products with solid, reliable, boring tech, not be constantly hindered from building by the problems of the bleeding edge. Mostly it's because, having had to pick up different languages and technologies over the years, and having worked with plenty of developers who've done the same, I don't generally regard specific tech skills as that important. We use SQL Server, for example. But if you've worked with any relational database for any decent length of time during your career you'll get on fine with it, regardless of whether that's Postgres, Oracle, or even MySQL or SQLite. Likewise it's not that hard to learn to query MongoDB or ElasticSearch, although the latter is a bit nuts, even though the syntax is different to SQL. It's not different enough to get in a tizzy about, and I really wish recruiters would wise up to this. Some have, most haven't, in my experience.)

pc86 6y ago

From someone solidly in the age bracket that is supposedly discriminated against, what utter nonsense. This is a bunch of hand-wavey garbage with no actual data backing it up. Some anonymous "surveys" and uncited statements of fact starting with "Chances are" or "in some cases." > Even if you get offered a position you will likely be offered a lower wage if going for a junior job. Yes, that's how it works. You get paid for the position. If you have the experience for a senior role, don't go for a junior job and expect a senior paycheck. If you don't have the experience and can only apply for a junior role, why should you get paid more? Your mortgage and kids' tuition is irrelevant to the value you're providing to the company. > For a 50-year-old it may prove a struggle to make a career change pay off and could take several years to climb the ladder to reach a livable wage. Isn't the common refrain to 20-somethings that they should just eat out less and live with roommates if they're not making enough money? If it's that easy then the 50-year-old should do it, too. I've worked for small mom-and-pop companies and large public corporations. Every supposed example of "ageism" I've seen in real life is much more about attitude than age. > Training and promotion opportunities may not go your way if you’re older. They may be offered to younger staff Again with the hand-wavey "may not go your way...may be offered," but I don't accept the premise anyway. In my experience training is allocated based on how enthusiastically someone wants to get training, and how willing they are to follow-up and ask about funding, getting time on the work schedule, etc. If your attitude is "I know everything I need to know to get my job done," the company is unlikely to go out of their way to spend thousands on training you. I've seen the "f you, I know everything I need to" attitude from 27 year old jerks, and I've seen 60-something programmers tearing through the framework du jour without any trouble. It has nothing to do with stagnation and everything to do with willingness to learn, willingness to listen, willing to do something new, and whether or not you think everyone has something they could teach you.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

> "a prejudice that older people simply can’t learn as well as younger people" This prejudice happens to be true. https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-the-age-you-reach-peak-intelligence-according-to-science https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-the-age-you-reach-peak-... I'm an older software developer, and I do not have the same ability to learn new things as I did when I was young. I do have more experience and, with it, a better sense of what matters and what doesn't, so I waste less time on the stuff that doesn't. That is, however, a more subjective attribute and, thus, I don't blame large companies for not being able to evaluate it. They are inherently volume-based and thus focused on more obvious and measurable attributes that directly (though imperfectly) map to developer productivity. As the kids say: it is what it is. If you want to make increasing amounts of money for a long time, become a banker or a doctor. I like writing code.

duxup 6y ago

Bear with me if you've heard me tell this story before on HN: After age 40 I changed careers from a networking career to coding via a bootcamp. I was among a couple folks who were in my age group in the camp. It was a great experience working with folks of all ages in the camp. I think mixing different ages, backgrounds, experience is valuable. While finishing the camp I was working with another person who was my age and he got a call back from a recruiter after a phone interview. He put them on speaker and the recruiter proceeded to note that they didn't think he would be a 'culture fit'. He was braver than I and asked what that meant. "They think you're too old for the group, everyone is young here." We were a bit shocked and just to be sure he heard her right he asked again: "You're too old." For some folks it doesn't even seem to occur to them that such discrimination is wrong. I was a bit floored by the experience. Growing up I remember overhearing some teachers quietly chat to each other and realizing that they could be just as petty as any kids could be. From then on I really never thought much in terms of age. For whatever reason when I go to meetups younger devs don't seem to notice / are a bit surprised when they find out how old I am. When I think back on my career(s) I realize how just one opportunity here or there can make a huge difference and having a place that is obviously closed to me based on age make it known was pretty shocking. Nothing ever came of that event. While trying to just get your foot in the door he didn't want to do anything about it and I could hardly blame him. Both of us were eventually hired elsewhere, and are doing well.

draw_down 6y ago
Yes, “culture fit” always and only means this sort of thing. It’s ineffable and not falsifiable, which makes it a great cover for discrimination. Culture should be an emergent property of the group of people who were hired because they were able to do the job.
jorgeleo 6y ago
That is ageism and is illegal in the US. The recruiter and the kids need a bit of spanking to learn the lesson https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc
yodsanklai 6y ago

draw_down 6y ago

Oh, “time will tell”. That’s, um, a relief? I got very lucky and will be exiting this industry soon, in my early forties. And not a moment too soon. I hate it so much, the ageism isn’t even the worst part.

yodsanklai 6y ago

I just got a SWE job offer at a FAANG and I'm in my mid-forties. I took the exact same interviews as anybody else. They've also been contacted me regularly for the last three years. My age isn't written on my resume, but they can easily infer I'm in my forties. My guess is that recruiters don't care as long as they think you have a chance passing the coding interviews. I realize that older developers are slightly uncommon, but maybe it's also because they get bored and think they have better career prospects elsewhere. Personnally, I still love to code and learn new things, as I've always had. I'm used to working with people younger/older than me and it has never been an issue either. That being said, I'm anxious that age becomes an issue along the road. There's also no denying that there is some sort of discrimination against older people. Simply look at the pictures on companies websites and presentation material, they clearly want to show how diverse they are except for older persons... I'm just curious: older people working in big companies, have you ever discussed that with people in charge of promoting/ensuring diversity? I think there's a good point to make.

duxup 6y ago
>I realize that older developers are slightly uncommon, I wonder if that is really the case or not.
- buckminster 6y ago
  This probably is true. The industry has been growing quickly for decades so there will naturally be far more people with ten years' experience than thirty years', say. Most people who enter the industry are young, so you would expect the demographic to skew young.
- anonuser123456 6y ago
  I think it’s a perception. I’m a youngster in my business unit (500 engineers) at a spry 39.
- tharne 6y ago
  It is not. I think the idea comes from the fact that people have this idea of "developers" as people who work for startups or FAANG companies. Most developers work in unsexy industries and in boring places. Insurance companies in Indiana, a hospital Utah, an manufacturing plant outside of Houston, etc. There's also the fact that middle-aged developers raising families don't have time to blog and be "influencers" on social media. That being said, ageism is definitely an issue in the industry. A lot of it has to do with so many companies having an "FTE" based approach to viewing things. Some moron with an MBA and no actual real-world skills sees a 55 year-old developer and thinks, "I can replace him with two new grads and still have money left over".

marnett 6y ago

How do they control for the large portion of the older developer demographic who have retired early and/or changed careers?

mojuba 6y ago

The most dreadful thing in this industry to me is this: how many years of experience do you have? 1 2 3 4 5+ That's it. Fin. More than 5 doesn't matter. The truth is that the difference between 30 years and 5 years of experience in a particular field can be as big as between 1 and 5. I just want to ask, does anyone in the industry really care about this fact? Does it matter to any company out there? Have you ever seen a job posting that has say 20+ years of experience as a minimum? As someone with 30+ years in the industry I'm constantly worried that nobody really really needs a coder with so much under their belt anymore. That nobody sees the value in a smaller codebase with fewer bugs and more minimalist and robust architectural solutions. Dear industry (apart from some maybe very specific niches such as OS kernels, compilers and such), do you really care about the old experienced devs?

trevyn 6y ago
If you have more than 5 years of experience, you should know the industry and not be paying much attention to formal job postings. Similarly, companies do not typically hire for those positions through public job postings.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Wow, no bites in 13 hours, so I'll bite: If not job postings, where are these mystical jobs offered? And, don't just say "networking" as if that completely describes the process. I've been in the business for over 20 years and have always gotten my jobs from public postings or recruiters reaching out, who inevitably point me to the public posting as part of the process. I'm unaware of these other Secret Squirrel channels for getting jobs, despite people always telling me they totally definitely exist!
barry-cotter 6y ago
Nobody really needs someone with 30 years of general experience because each such person is unique, impossible to completely replace. If you have the level of expertise that comes from real understanding of six different fields attained from five years of good work in them you might literally be the only person with that combination of skills. There are definitely under a 1,000 of you. If you have 30 years of experience but maybe five of real learning then you’re presumably competent but you’re not super special, just competent and known to be competent. After 30 years in the same field you could be one of those people with serious deep expertise. Those people are valuable but the market is thin. You need to make your skills known so work finds you through your network, or you need to become a consultant in spirit if not fact and sell. Loudly trumpet your expertise.

rossdavidh 6y ago

I started coding professionally in my mid-30's. I am in my early 50's. If I have ever been discriminated against because of my age, I am not aware of it, and don't care because I've always found work. Now, I should mention that I did switch a few years back to doing consulting/temporary positions, although sometimes these "temporary" positions last over a year. This means two things: 1) I buy my own healthcare insurance (I recommend using healthsherpa.com to help do that), so it could be that employers don't worry about my age because they don't have to pay for my insurance 2) I am forced into a position of having to learn new things every year, whether it's a new industry or a new library/framework or a new language or whatever. This means I cannot become unwilling to try new things. I do think it's true that you need to not activate the "he's too old to do new things" alarm bells, by being very circumspect about criticizing new trends. But this is probably a healthy habit to cultivate anyway; give the new trend a chance, at least. Also, there is a difference in the respect given to older programmers relative to other industries. In most fields (e.g. doctor, lawyer, banker, even engineer) as you get older, you become higher status and your opinions are given greater respect. In programming, your opinion is worth about what anyone else's is. So, if you think that after programming for decades your opinion ought to be given more weight than the 23 year old's, you're in the wrong industry. But, I think the best teams have both young and old programmers, and it's healthy to be in a team where young people are willing to speak up and disagree with you.

marstall 6y ago
yes, same here. my first SWE job was at 26, now 52 and my career has never felt more stable in terms of my ability to get another good job if my current one fell through. i love what i do and have a strong motivation to earn, so I have always made an effort to stay current, and that's translated to continually being in demand. I feel confident I'll be be able ride it out as long as I need to, if my health and the economy hold up!

mori876 6y ago

anecdote: after 10y as a software engineer I came back to the academy to accomplish a PhD. Recently, I applied to a research intern position at Facebook and got the response: "we only get people with less than 6 years experience for this position" (My inside referrer got the response, as a job applicant I got not reponse)

orange_tee 6y ago

Is ageism a thing or is it just the fact that in every industry there is a push to move up the ladder? You are just not supposed to be doing grunt work at 50. This is true of all professions. People below you don't want you to be occupying their spot, and people above you have a hard time with a guy who is senior to them in age and experience.

sylvain_kerkour 6y ago

Young people are mainly more easily influenced. It's far easier to convince a young person without a family nor passion in life to work for 12 hours a day for little money rather than experienced people. It's also far easier to sell hyped, useless technological solutions to young, non-experienced people who don't understand the problem to solve. I say this as a young developer who took too much time to recover from the marketing hype maintained by money seeking vendors.

notacoward 6y ago

Like other "isms" ageism rarely announces itself as such. Instead it cloaks itself in other forms of bias that "just happen" to be correlated with age. For example, oncall requirements and late meetings/offsites are primarily burdensome to those with families, but that's disproportionately older workers. Open offices are less endurable for older workers because of otherwise-neutral changes in hearing and concentration. And so on. An even more subtle form of ageism is discrimination against certain technical/process habits that are correlated with when one entered the industry and therefore with age. For example, older engineers are more likely to believe in thinking through problems before starting to code, but in a "move fast" culture that's considered outdated. Older developers are likely to be more conservative when estimating technical difficulty or time to completion, which gets interpreted as unwillingness to commit (especially compared to younger developers who often wildly overcommit and suffer no consequence). Older workers are more likely to push back against corporate happy-talk because they've heard it all before and it never amounted to anything, but that can be interpreted as disloyalty or a "culture fit" problem. Ageism is not one big obvious thing; it's a collection of small subtle things. Bit by bit by bit, these things nibble away at older workers' individual productivity and collaborative opportunities. Many overcome it. I did OK for myself in three years when I was 20+ years older than the median for the two groups I was in at a FAANG. But just because a problem is overcome doesn't mean it's not a problem.

deleted 6y ago

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johnwheeler 6y ago

Ageism is the only prejudice I can think of that no one is immune to. Are there others you can think of?

derbOac 6y ago
Sexism. Maybe even racism at some level. Really I think prejudices operate all the time in all sorts of ways. I say that not to be dismissive — I think all forms of them are a problem — but I think some of them rise to a certain level of societal awareness because of the numbers of people affected.

tomcooks 6y ago

> Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from. Yeah

sys_64738 6y ago

One strategy is to find a company filled with older workers so you're younger. They're out there but usually not web type companies in my experience.

Overtimegoal 6y ago

I'm 61. Been paid to write software for 42 years. I make it a point to add a new technology with every project. Currently that's Vuejs. Next one will be Blazor based, I think. It's the way I keep my skills up to date and myself hireable. I'll never retire cause even if I stopped working for others, I'd still be writing code for myself.

Ods25 6y ago

Where the hell are all of these magical companies that hire only young people? I'm 23 with an extensive project list & written tutorials,a completed CompSci degree, and a half completed dual degree in electrical engineering & compEng, yet I can't get hired even when I pass an algorithm test with 30 minutes remaining. However a mid 30s dev friend of mine this year juggled 3 companies into getting him a nice salary and told me "Yeah, nobody takes you seriously until you're 30".

flatus 6y ago

FTFA: I love this: "Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying: “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” " b/c it crystallizes, for all time and for all to see, how wrong Mark Zuckerberg can be.

Centuriprime 6y ago

Thanks everyone for a good open discussion on this subject. Much appreciated, and I hope you don't suffer ageism. There should be enough opportunities for all of us.