14 ms·

Older job seekers get fewer offers on LinkedIn but a younger profile photo helps

117 points by Bologo 5y ago

austincheney 5y ago
The most consistent pattern I have observed as an older developer with some years on a resume is absolute utter astonishment when I don't want to waste time on a bunch of confused newb shit like sickly bloated frameworks with a million dependencies. Its weird to hear people acknowledge that I have just so much experience on paper and yet be so amazingly dumbfounded surprised that I would be focused on less junior things. I haven't yet found the proper words to converse through that, but a team of similarly older developers sharing similar concerns adds tremendous value.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dboreham 5y ago
  The lunatics took over the asylum long ago.
  - bnt 5y ago
    I think the sane are locked up in the asylum these days, and the loonies are in the spotlight.
- cageface 5y ago
  Ecosystem matters a lot. For example, React might be overkill for a lot of projects but it’s relatively easy to hire for and there are a lot of drop-in tools and components available.
- tarr11 5y ago
  What frameworks do you like?
  - enriquto 5y ago
    Not the OP, but do you know that you can do most things without (gasp!) using any framework whatsoever?
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      Maybe not your intention, but the way your comment is worded aligns perfectly with the folks I've encountered who think they can't find a job due to ageism. In reality, it's because they can't share even a single sentence without being arrogant and condescending.
- war1025 5y ago
  I'm not even that old, but a pattern I noticed when I've interviewed in the past couple years is that maybe I'm applying for the wrong jobs because my would-be peers ask questions that seem irrelevant and seem confused that I don't have answers ready for "what frameworks do you use? Which languages do you like? etc.", but then I get in an interview with someone who would be above me and we have a great chat about architecture and design and things that are actually relevant. I'm here to build a house, I want to talk about the architecture of structural design of it. I don't care what brand air nailer you guys use.
  - nowherebeen 5y ago
    I have the exact same experience. Many would-be peers simply don't get it when I have very little interest in the type of framework or language they use. They take it as a sign that I cannot contribute to the team readily even though they acknowledge I have more experience.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    My company has a kind of cultural disease where everyone aspires to be an architecture astronaut, people with an ounce of talent or ambition learn to treat code as beneath them, consequently we get beautiful design docs and a garbage codebase. For that reason I would fail any candidate who displayed this attitude. I expect senior candidates to raise the bar on quality and craftsmanship in implementation, and I’ve met plenty who do. YMMV. I don’t think being a framework partisan is a particularly good sign, but at least it shows you have some experience and reflection and taste with regard to the tensions involved in making things that run.
    - war1025 5y ago
      I'm one of four engineers at my company. I don't have the luxury of offloading my job to someone else. Also I really feel like you're projecting attitudes that I (at least didn't mean to) portray. I design the dog food, and then I make the dog food.
    - cbm-vic-20 5y ago
      I'm also an old fogey. When anyone says claims they or their title is "software architect", it usually means they're full of shit. The best "software architects" I've ever known typically call themselves programmers.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  omg yes. i've taken way to many jobs where, after alot of very considered discussion about the kind of work i do, and how I dont consider generic devops worth the time. happy to debug our code in production, but i'm not first line support or software install/configure. yes, they assure me, they really want a software developer in the classic sense. this is an absolutely perfect fit. and when I show up? welcome to the team, why dont you shadow joe who is going to be upgrading Kafka kafka this week.. at Google they actually pointed me at the nightly error queue for some AI pipeline and told me my job for the next 6 months was going to be pulling out the errors and manually fixing the input until it passes. the real issue is that they just dont really do software development. so much so they dont even know what it looks like.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    "the real issue is that they just dont really do software development. " No offense, that kind of seems to be your issue, not theirs. In large orgs if there are 10 'technical but not really dev roles' for ever 2 devs ... that's the reality of the world we live in. It's maybe 'sad' that we call can't write code, but that's maybe not quite an 'industry' problem. On the other hand, using giant fragile stacks with a million dependencies and systems that are an 'inherent mess' ... well that's maybe a little bit different and motivation is different because you might be actually wasting your time. But in reality there is a ton of work to be done and most of it is not glamorous.
    - convolvatron 5y ago
      sounds like you would be wise not to hire me. if only more people understood that software development isn't operations.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  As an engineer with more than 15 years professional experience, my definition of "junior shit" would be thinking you can hand-roll a foundation or framework better than something that already exists.
  - Tade0 5y ago
    It's number 39. in Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design. https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html I have this on my list of questions I ask interviewers. I should follow-up with "how much of your budget is dedicated to this?" Major red flag if they don't even know how much catering to their NIH syndrome currently costs them.
    - cableshaft 5y ago
      Really great list, thanks for sharing that!
    - cbm-vic-20 5y ago
      Number 4 hits too close to home. Great list.
    - LAC-Tech 5y ago
      Do you also ask the opposite? How much of your budget is dedicated to working round, debugging, and wrestling with tools developed for the framework?
  - austincheney 5y ago
    That reminds me of people comparing writing in JavaScript (without their pet abstraction library) to writing in assembly. What a bunch of horse shit. It’s a red flag to self-identify configuration monkeys (people limited to following instructions) apart from those that can actually write and test applications. This rule about absolute failure in rolling your own realistically only applies to cryptography, because the bar there is set extremely high and there is a rigorous vetting process.
    - 5y ago
- tuesdayrain 5y ago
  Not sure what kind of work you do but whenever I hear frontend devs don't use a framework/view library I have a difficult time taking them seriously. More often than not that means they're using some mess of a pseudo-framework that they created themselves.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    When you now have things like TypeScript that allow you to define interfaces completely external from your logic you have already addressed half of what frameworks solve for without writing a single line of code. After that the only things left that frameworks provide are APIs and composition. If you know what you are doing you define your APIs first in consideration for the business logic and save composition for the final step after all other logic is written. Then you can make any adjustments to your internal APIs as necessary to glue things together. No framework is needed, minimal refactoring, and a smaller code base with less complexity because a generic framework doesn’t know your business requirements in advance.
- nkingsy 5y ago
  The most senior engineer I’ve met had a refreshing attitude that clicked with me. “It’s just typing. Typey typey type.” I take that to mean, no matter the code base, no matter the questionable choices made historically and that will be made in the future, the job doesn’t change. Figure out the requirements, grind until they’re met. Who cares what the stack is and how many layers of libraries there are? If that becomes a problem we will fix it.
  - abeppu 5y ago
    But how much typing, how much staring at screens, how many meetings are needed to reach your actual goals? I care about the choices bc the wrong ones create problems which require more typing, or typing at night. "The job doesn't change" except the amount of time and effort required to do something useful can change.
    - nkingsy 5y ago
      Sure, but that’s not my problem as a new hire. I just assume any new codebase will be horribly sticky and hope I can smooth it out a little. Humans calibrate so quickly. With my latest job, I spent the first month thinking I was coding my way through a nostril-deep vat of honey and getting nothing done, but my boss was impressed with my productivity. Now it’s just normal and I feel productive again though the pace hasn’t changed. Startups go faster, big companies go slower. I’d much rather get paid well and navigate intractable tech debt with zero pressure to work extra hours than move quickly and get side eyes for stopping at 5.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > how many meetings are needed to reach your actual goals? Basically zero, other than requirements gathering meetings with customers, the number of which are required is independent of tech stack. Other meetings will probably happen due to process choices made by your org, but they mostly don’t (1) depend on tech stack, or (2) contribute to reaching the actual goals, except insofar as they are necessary to clear arbitrary impediments also created by organizational process decisions. > I care about the choices bc the wrong ones create problems which require more typing, or typing at night. Unreasonable working hour demands are not a product of tech stack choices, they are a product of management disrespect for staff. You cannot avoid them by choosing the right tech stack.
privateSFacct 5y ago
For front-end dev - some older developers are really tired of the constant churn. This can be a good thing if you can / already are off the endless new frontend bandwagon. But since a lot of junior folks are into the "latest and greatest" it can be very hard internally (and cement a perhaps resistance to change stereotype). I'm a bit tired of folks saying older devs are not resistant to change. Reality - with experience some stuff just seems faddy at times over the course of longer career arcs. So yes, older devs can be bit resistant to jumping onto the latest bandwagon.
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  That seems like something that would already be reflected on people's resumes, so it seems odd that a different photo would make a difference if that's the concern.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- abnry 5y ago
  Do you think the fads will come and go with lower frequency as more time passes? Software engineering is a young field. I don't hear a lot about, for instance, fads in aerospace engineering but that could be because I hear little about it in general. Perhaps software engineering is always going to be "faddy" because of how flexible and reconfigurable software is in general.
  - hajile 5y ago
    I think it’s the latter. Aerospace engineers do have fads like the aerospike rocket engine. Nobody’s launched one (that I know of) because it simply doesn’t work yet. The cost of failure is just too catastrophic. Instead, there’s a focus on the tradeoffs and lots of experimentation to get it right. In software, if the prototype didn’t work, you tweak it and try again or even deploy with known issues and fix in prod later (looking at you game companies). If you had to throw away all your code and start over completely with each iteration like you do with rockets, you’d see more discussion and testing out earlier (in fact, you tend to see this more in critical software —- eg, the software that controls those rockets). Finally, very few companies throw as much money behind business software as they do at rockets. I’d bet heavily that v8, .net, hotspot, or even gcc (metaphorical engines for your code) have only a fraction of the resources spent on a new rocket design.
softwaredoug 5y ago
I am much more aware of appearing attractive, fitter, and younger to other tech peers as I age. I’m curious if anyone else feels this pressure?
- siva7 5y ago
  i noticed it absolutely helps. i get flooded with recruiter messages. it's a bit like on dating apps - the first appearance matters.
  - softwaredoug 5y ago
    Also I am conscious of not using my not very dank “can has cheezburger” memes
facorreia 5y ago
I don't know how many offers other people are getting, but I'm 52 and I get on average about 8 messages from recruiters every day. Maybe that's because I look younger in my profile picture... :D
- karaterobot 5y ago
  Agreed. I just went through finding a new job, and I was a little worried about it, given everything I've heard about ageism in this industry. Far from that, I had loads of recruiters contacting me, and on the whole this job search was the easiest and fastest I've ever had. One interviewer commented on my age, which felt a little odd since it was something he brought up, and not part of the conversation. But, I don't feel like it hurt me, even in that situation. People were generally very cool. At my old job, a YC startup, I was the oldest person on staff. Older than the founders, the VPs, or any of the developers by at least a few years. But, I can also remember being the youngest person at my first job, and on balance, I think my age was more of a professional liability for me back then than it is now. It wasn't a huge issue in either scenario.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    This might be somewhat of an aberration (I hope it isn't, as I'm in the same boat, but it might be). A bunch of people got laid off during the pandemic and now everything is opening up and everyone is hiring and they've become more desperate for talent. At least in theory. I have noticed a hesitance on some employers to actually bump their ranges for wages, and have had several recruiters tell me their client's budget for the role is criminally low, no wonder they're having trouble hiring people.
- ithurtswhenip 5y ago
  I think last I got any message from a recruiter was more than 6 months ago. Granted I have nothing in my profile besides photo and a listing of the companies I worked for and position. Plus some endorsements and recommendations. But I would have expected that any recruiter could infer from the companies I worked for and endorsements enough. Maybe just an European thing. I'm mid 30s and have always been a top performer. All jobs I had so far were me applying on the company website. I don't understand where's that shortage I keep hearing about.
imbnwa 5y ago
I'm just now coming out of my not-junior-but-not-senior period of overengineering and wish there were more older devs in my shop to consort with instead of a bunch of other not-junior-but-not-quite-senior devs (if we're being serious and not using senior to mean "I've just been doing this a long time" instead of "I've been doing thing a long time and I've learned from my experiences and here's what specifically").
MattGaiser 5y ago
> Those stereotypes include being seen as less competent and less adaptable, particularly when it comes to using new technologies. Anecdotally, I have encountered the latter a few times. I've known older developers (> 40) who didn't want to move to Angular/React and would rather have stayed on jQuery (for complicated brand new web apps) or didn't want to learn beyond Java 8.
- rendall 5y ago
  I've known developers like that in their 20s. They get comfortable in their niche and have been doing it that way for so long they resist anything different. Be wary. This can happen to us all.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  My experience as well. On top of that, those types of engineers usually have a terrible and arrogant attitude and often attribute any disagreement as "ageism."
- nowherebeen 5y ago
  Counterpoint is if there was any reason to? I find both jQuery and React solve very different problems. Simply moving to React because it’s what’s everyone is doing would be just as wrong as sticking to jQuery because they refuse to learn new things.
  - jgerrish 5y ago
    You're right, jQuery alone, even when it was all the rage, wasn't enough for a frontend application. Backbone, Marionette, eventually Angular and all the rest were huge improvements. You needed a message passing / routing framework, and the new frameworks have consolidated that and improved on it. Older developers are sometimes more conservative. Sorry. And age leads to cognitive decline. Reality is reality. I'm an older engineer, and even if things are stacked against me, I'm ok with that. It's a consequence of the brutal shift in cultural education around the craft. I hope more creative individuals flourish.
- indymike 5y ago
surfingdino 5y ago
I have been following a simple pattern of learning a new tech stack every five years. It's not easy, but that's what pays the bills and keeps me in the game.
ElViajero 5y ago
> “A younger-looking face creates impressions of higher physical and mental fitness,” the authors write. “Our results suggest that these impressions may indeed be a powerful driver of favorable employment outcomes.” It is possible that there are other explanations. Older developers may want better salaries, better working conditions, be harder to manipulate, etc. Good leadership is going to hire people that fits in the culture of the company and have the needed skills. Whenever the candidate is younger or older does not matter. Bad leadership wants cheap employees that obey orders and don't challenge authority. Younger, more inexperienced developers will fit this category, even if they are technically skilled. This is as good a theory that any other one to explain the fact that recruiters want younger developers.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  Nothing else in the resume changed, though. Just the picture. The age was still listed truthfully, demands didn't change, and the experience was the same. If bad leadership wanted cheap employees, that is easily filtered by hiring folks with less experience (for example) because those folks tend to be younger.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  > better salaries, better working conditions, be harder to manipulate That's me. I only 36 and I absolutely do not buy the corporate bullshit that someone's product is going to "change the world" through some incremental improvement of some software as a service. I am strongly against exploitative business models. And I know how much I am worth. When interviewing I like to give the CEO a little push back and see how they respond. I'm not going to work for someone who gets flustered when I question their thinking. I will however provide a lot of value for a team I am comfortable with.
- blagie 5y ago
  I'm kinda with you there. There are more jobs for junior developers, and higher salaries for senior ones. That kinda correlates with age too. If I see someone 60 in tech, I assume they're either: - A wizard, who spent 40 years knee-deep in technology. - Someone with management experience. - A flake-out who never did either. I'm also less likely to cold-call someone more intimidating for random job screening, but more likely to reach out for something aligned to their skill set.
pm90 5y ago
Why is this controversial? Such a bias will almost always exist. There is an anecdote from Hamming's famous "You and your research" [0] talk which I'll reproduce in full: > Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, ``Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't mistreated them.'' Answer, I wasn't dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people. Anecdotally, I've been on the job search train recently. Even though recruiters say that dress code is "casual", what I've found is that if I take some time to wear fitting clothes and make sure that my video background is either blurred out or nicer looking, the results are very different. [0]: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
vergessenmir 5y ago
Or none at all.
joegahona 5y ago
> In terms of practical implications, the authors say these results reconfirm why photographs are usually absent from traditional resumes or CVs. As such, they suggest that removing photos from LinkedIn might make job-seeking fairer. The lack of photos might cause recruiters to focus more on information that is more relevant to the job. I would be curious if Linkedin penalizes profiles missing a photo in their algorithm or whatever. I.e. I seem to recall getting badgered to add a photo when I didn't have one, and the implication that my profile was "incomplete." I suppose a way around this would be a completely unrelated photo, or a drawing of yourself, etc. I'd love to see the same type of experiment with the person's race and gender, but that's probably too inflammatory of an experiment.
- lhorie 5y ago
  I recall reading that the effect on gender has been documented in classical musician auditions (women were selected more frequently with the introduction of blind auditions)
  - treis 5y ago
    Frequently cited but a fatally flawed study: > The first thing they noticed is that the raw tabulations showed women doing worse behind the screens. But perhaps, Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse explained, blind auditions “lowered the average quality of female auditionees.” To control for ability, they analyzed a small subset of candidates who took part in both blind and nonblind auditions in three of the eight orchestras. >The result was a tangle of ambiguous, contradictory trends. The screens seemed to help women in preliminary audition rounds but men in semifinal rounds. None of the findings were strong enough to draw broad conclusions one way or the other. >So where did Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse get their totemic conclusion that blind auditions dramatically improved the success of women candidates? After warning that their findings were not statistically significant, they declared them to be “economically significant.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-audition-study-11571599303 https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-auditi...
kwthrows 5y ago
So basically we're back to the Aryan Race thing.
CarelessExpert 5y ago
You know, for the longest time, the fact that I look quite young for my age bothered me (I'm in my early 40s and recently someone I'd just met exclaimed they thought I was 25). But ageism in the industry is starting to make me grateful for my luck in the genetic lottery...
- treeman79 5y ago
  At 20,I grew a beard so would be taken seriously. Now I shave to be taken seriously.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    I'm 26 and I still can't grow a beard. I still have some patches that hair doesn't even grow in. But at least I'll have a full head of hair by 55 so that's cool.
rmason 5y ago
You can have a younger picture, you can remove older jobs on your resume to appear younger. It gets you the interview, you can pass the coding test but then get told that they don't think you're a 'cultural fit'. I think the underlying reason is when you have far more experience than your future boss they are intimidated by you.
- trhway 5y ago
  > It gets you the interview, you can pass the coding test but then get told that they don't think you're a 'cultural fit'. a recent AMZN innovation to optimize that process out - an explicitly stated max years of experience cap that thus effectively bars you even from applying (previous post with some replies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786601 ) You may be willing and qualified, yet because of age you can't even apply. Feels just nice.
  - Tade0 5y ago
    How old is "old"? I'm 32, is my Lifeclock already red/black?
    - trhway 5y ago
      may be. What i saw was a 10 years cap, and otherwise the next level on the menu was SDE 5 (i.e. principal, expected to have publications, etc., and only rare individuals can make SDE5 coming from outside as i gathered from googling) which i can only wish you great luck passing the interview for. Note: it was a real unambiguous cap, explicitly stressed as the strict cap 2 times, not that typical "we're looking for 5-10 years experience", and it was made clear that for exceeding the cap - either apply for SDE5 or don't bother to apply at all.
      - hinoki 5y ago
        Maybe they were talking about an experience cap for hiring at a given (low) level? Which is also stupid, but since many companies (I have no experience with Amazon, but I do know Microsoft and Facebook will) “manage you out” if you don’t get promotions at a minimum rate, makes some kind of sense. BTW, SDE 5 isn’t an Amazon level. There is L5, which corresponds to SDE II, which is only one promotion from college hire. And there is Principal, which is L7. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google&track=Software...
CheezeIt 5y ago
Unsurprising. Older job seekers switch jobs less often, so recruiters target young ones to maximize ROI.
walshemj 5y ago
Which is why I don't have a photo on Linked in. IMHO the EU should ban the practice unless is for models / Actors.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I never make a secret of my age, but I am also not looking for a job. Corporations are obviously terrified of us oldsters. Not 100% sure I know all the reasons. I was just reading another HN front page story, about this poor woman that was fired for not writing an app that really required an experienced engineer. Lot of that, going around. Wonder why?
- giantandroids 5y ago
  On the whole we are less likely to advantage taken of from a less need to prove yourself.
machinehermiter 5y ago
IMO so much of age bias is because so many people are in terrible physical shape as they age. If you are visibly in really good shape, I think you get a bias in your favor as an older person. Not really an age bias but a perfectly rational probability of a lack of energy bias.
- dave333 5y ago
  For a sedentary job there's no need to be fit. Some people are the weight equivalent of racists - maybe fat fascists? fat nazis?
LAC-Tech 5y ago
Reading about all the ageism anecdotes on HN over the years really pushed me towards self employment. I'm still in my 30s, but my 40s will hit sooner than I think and I don't want to be caught with my pants down.
kmbfjr 5y ago
55 year old software engineer , with extensive RF/analog background with dual EE/CE degrees. I can’t begin to count the number of interviews gleaned from LinkedIn where the first 45 minutes of the interview was a late 20’s early 30’s person telling me all about their wonderful work and how great they are. Not a word about the job, nothing about the company, all about them and the places they’ve worked, what they have done. Just who the hell is being interviewed? When this happens, it is all I can do not to walk out of the interview or kill the call/Zoom session. The moment some places figure out you’re over 45, it is over. Except for very forward looking start-ups who want to grow very quickly. That is where I have been working for the past 10 years..best time of my life. But I also know, this is my last employer.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  This. I had an interview for a "digital interactive agency" where a 24-year-old lectured me this and that and how great she was. She was flabbergasted to find out I had more people working under me than were in her entire company. At the end of all this she says--"Do you think you are ready to step up to X quality?" I had just finished my yearly reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), and I was pretty annoyed with her, so I asked, "How do you define quality?" ZAMM is about a philosophy called the metaphysics of quality-- I knew that no matter what she said, I would have an advanced argument from ZAMM to belittle her with (the interview was just a formality at this point). She replied, "Hmmm, I'll have to think about that." And I never heard from this individual or agency again. I would like to think that day she learned not to say stupid things. Not to insult people over when you really don't even know what you're saying. But I doubt it.
  - oceanghost 5y ago
    I realize replying to yourself demonstrates poor taste... But I'd like to add that at the time of the interview I had software I had personally designed at companies like DirecTV, Samsung, LG, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Google and Applied Materials. I literally had products at Crestron, Denon and Monster, and one product that could be purchased nationally at Best Buy.
dave333 5y ago
Older devs should just work on their own ecommerce stuff and squeeze expenses to maximize their runway until they takeoff. Interviewing is a waste of time past a certain age - I was 53 the last time I got hired.
dave333 5y ago
Eventually job interviews will be done by AI bots that are programmed not to have any gender/race/age/appearance/sexual orientation/weight/attractiveness bias.
- blooalien 5y ago
  And not too long after that, the jobs will be done by AI bots as well…

117 points by Bologo 5y ago

The most consistent pattern I have observed as an older developer with some years on a resume is absolute utter astonishment when I don't want to waste time on a bunch of confused newb shit like sickly bloated frameworks with a million dependencies. Its weird to hear people acknowledge that I have just so much experience on paper and yet be so amazingly dumbfounded surprised that I would be focused on less junior things. I haven't yet found the proper words to converse through that, but a team of similarly older developers sharing similar concerns adds tremendous value.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dboreham 5y ago
The lunatics took over the asylum long ago.
- bnt 5y ago
  I think the sane are locked up in the asylum these days, and the loonies are in the spotlight.
cageface 5y ago
Ecosystem matters a lot. For example, React might be overkill for a lot of projects but it’s relatively easy to hire for and there are a lot of drop-in tools and components available.
tarr11 5y ago
What frameworks do you like?
- enriquto 5y ago
  Not the OP, but do you know that you can do most things without (gasp!) using any framework whatsoever?
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    Maybe not your intention, but the way your comment is worded aligns perfectly with the folks I've encountered who think they can't find a job due to ageism. In reality, it's because they can't share even a single sentence without being arrogant and condescending.
war1025 5y ago
I'm not even that old, but a pattern I noticed when I've interviewed in the past couple years is that maybe I'm applying for the wrong jobs because my would-be peers ask questions that seem irrelevant and seem confused that I don't have answers ready for "what frameworks do you use? Which languages do you like? etc.", but then I get in an interview with someone who would be above me and we have a great chat about architecture and design and things that are actually relevant. I'm here to build a house, I want to talk about the architecture of structural design of it. I don't care what brand air nailer you guys use.
- nowherebeen 5y ago
  I have the exact same experience. Many would-be peers simply don't get it when I have very little interest in the type of framework or language they use. They take it as a sign that I cannot contribute to the team readily even though they acknowledge I have more experience.
- closeparen 5y ago
  My company has a kind of cultural disease where everyone aspires to be an architecture astronaut, people with an ounce of talent or ambition learn to treat code as beneath them, consequently we get beautiful design docs and a garbage codebase. For that reason I would fail any candidate who displayed this attitude. I expect senior candidates to raise the bar on quality and craftsmanship in implementation, and I’ve met plenty who do. YMMV. I don’t think being a framework partisan is a particularly good sign, but at least it shows you have some experience and reflection and taste with regard to the tensions involved in making things that run.
  - war1025 5y ago
    I'm one of four engineers at my company. I don't have the luxury of offloading my job to someone else. Also I really feel like you're projecting attitudes that I (at least didn't mean to) portray. I design the dog food, and then I make the dog food.
  - cbm-vic-20 5y ago
    I'm also an old fogey. When anyone says claims they or their title is "software architect", it usually means they're full of shit. The best "software architects" I've ever known typically call themselves programmers.
convolvatron 5y ago
omg yes. i've taken way to many jobs where, after alot of very considered discussion about the kind of work i do, and how I dont consider generic devops worth the time. happy to debug our code in production, but i'm not first line support or software install/configure. yes, they assure me, they really want a software developer in the classic sense. this is an absolutely perfect fit. and when I show up? welcome to the team, why dont you shadow joe who is going to be upgrading Kafka kafka this week.. at Google they actually pointed me at the nightly error queue for some AI pipeline and told me my job for the next 6 months was going to be pulling out the errors and manually fixing the input until it passes. the real issue is that they just dont really do software development. so much so they dont even know what it looks like.
- jollybean 5y ago
  "the real issue is that they just dont really do software development. " No offense, that kind of seems to be your issue, not theirs. In large orgs if there are 10 'technical but not really dev roles' for ever 2 devs ... that's the reality of the world we live in. It's maybe 'sad' that we call can't write code, but that's maybe not quite an 'industry' problem. On the other hand, using giant fragile stacks with a million dependencies and systems that are an 'inherent mess' ... well that's maybe a little bit different and motivation is different because you might be actually wasting your time. But in reality there is a ton of work to be done and most of it is not glamorous.
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    sounds like you would be wise not to hire me. if only more people understood that software development isn't operations.
seattle_spring 5y ago
As an engineer with more than 15 years professional experience, my definition of "junior shit" would be thinking you can hand-roll a foundation or framework better than something that already exists.
- Tade0 5y ago
  It's number 39. in Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design. https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html I have this on my list of questions I ask interviewers. I should follow-up with "how much of your budget is dedicated to this?" Major red flag if they don't even know how much catering to their NIH syndrome currently costs them.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    Really great list, thanks for sharing that!
  - cbm-vic-20 5y ago
    Number 4 hits too close to home. Great list.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    Do you also ask the opposite? How much of your budget is dedicated to working round, debugging, and wrestling with tools developed for the framework?
- austincheney 5y ago
  That reminds me of people comparing writing in JavaScript (without their pet abstraction library) to writing in assembly. What a bunch of horse shit. It’s a red flag to self-identify configuration monkeys (people limited to following instructions) apart from those that can actually write and test applications. This rule about absolute failure in rolling your own realistically only applies to cryptography, because the bar there is set extremely high and there is a rigorous vetting process.
  - 5y ago
tuesdayrain 5y ago
Not sure what kind of work you do but whenever I hear frontend devs don't use a framework/view library I have a difficult time taking them seriously. More often than not that means they're using some mess of a pseudo-framework that they created themselves.
- austincheney 5y ago
  When you now have things like TypeScript that allow you to define interfaces completely external from your logic you have already addressed half of what frameworks solve for without writing a single line of code. After that the only things left that frameworks provide are APIs and composition. If you know what you are doing you define your APIs first in consideration for the business logic and save composition for the final step after all other logic is written. Then you can make any adjustments to your internal APIs as necessary to glue things together. No framework is needed, minimal refactoring, and a smaller code base with less complexity because a generic framework doesn’t know your business requirements in advance.
nkingsy 5y ago
The most senior engineer I’ve met had a refreshing attitude that clicked with me. “It’s just typing. Typey typey type.” I take that to mean, no matter the code base, no matter the questionable choices made historically and that will be made in the future, the job doesn’t change. Figure out the requirements, grind until they’re met. Who cares what the stack is and how many layers of libraries there are? If that becomes a problem we will fix it.
- abeppu 5y ago
  But how much typing, how much staring at screens, how many meetings are needed to reach your actual goals? I care about the choices bc the wrong ones create problems which require more typing, or typing at night. "The job doesn't change" except the amount of time and effort required to do something useful can change.
  - nkingsy 5y ago
    Sure, but that’s not my problem as a new hire. I just assume any new codebase will be horribly sticky and hope I can smooth it out a little. Humans calibrate so quickly. With my latest job, I spent the first month thinking I was coding my way through a nostril-deep vat of honey and getting nothing done, but my boss was impressed with my productivity. Now it’s just normal and I feel productive again though the pace hasn’t changed. Startups go faster, big companies go slower. I’d much rather get paid well and navigate intractable tech debt with zero pressure to work extra hours than move quickly and get side eyes for stopping at 5.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > how many meetings are needed to reach your actual goals? Basically zero, other than requirements gathering meetings with customers, the number of which are required is independent of tech stack. Other meetings will probably happen due to process choices made by your org, but they mostly don’t (1) depend on tech stack, or (2) contribute to reaching the actual goals, except insofar as they are necessary to clear arbitrary impediments also created by organizational process decisions. > I care about the choices bc the wrong ones create problems which require more typing, or typing at night. Unreasonable working hour demands are not a product of tech stack choices, they are a product of management disrespect for staff. You cannot avoid them by choosing the right tech stack.

privateSFacct 5y ago

For front-end dev - some older developers are really tired of the constant churn. This can be a good thing if you can / already are off the endless new frontend bandwagon. But since a lot of junior folks are into the "latest and greatest" it can be very hard internally (and cement a perhaps resistance to change stereotype). I'm a bit tired of folks saying older devs are not resistant to change. Reality - with experience some stuff just seems faddy at times over the course of longer career arcs. So yes, older devs can be bit resistant to jumping onto the latest bandwagon.

resoluteteeth 5y ago
That seems like something that would already be reflected on people's resumes, so it seems odd that a different photo would make a difference if that's the concern.
deleted 5y ago
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abnry 5y ago
Do you think the fads will come and go with lower frequency as more time passes? Software engineering is a young field. I don't hear a lot about, for instance, fads in aerospace engineering but that could be because I hear little about it in general. Perhaps software engineering is always going to be "faddy" because of how flexible and reconfigurable software is in general.
- hajile 5y ago
  I think it’s the latter. Aerospace engineers do have fads like the aerospike rocket engine. Nobody’s launched one (that I know of) because it simply doesn’t work yet. The cost of failure is just too catastrophic. Instead, there’s a focus on the tradeoffs and lots of experimentation to get it right. In software, if the prototype didn’t work, you tweak it and try again or even deploy with known issues and fix in prod later (looking at you game companies). If you had to throw away all your code and start over completely with each iteration like you do with rockets, you’d see more discussion and testing out earlier (in fact, you tend to see this more in critical software —- eg, the software that controls those rockets). Finally, very few companies throw as much money behind business software as they do at rockets. I’d bet heavily that v8, .net, hotspot, or even gcc (metaphorical engines for your code) have only a fraction of the resources spent on a new rocket design.

softwaredoug 5y ago

I am much more aware of appearing attractive, fitter, and younger to other tech peers as I age. I’m curious if anyone else feels this pressure?

siva7 5y ago
i noticed it absolutely helps. i get flooded with recruiter messages. it's a bit like on dating apps - the first appearance matters.
- softwaredoug 5y ago
  Also I am conscious of not using my not very dank “can has cheezburger” memes

facorreia 5y ago

I don't know how many offers other people are getting, but I'm 52 and I get on average about 8 messages from recruiters every day. Maybe that's because I look younger in my profile picture... :D

karaterobot 5y ago
Agreed. I just went through finding a new job, and I was a little worried about it, given everything I've heard about ageism in this industry. Far from that, I had loads of recruiters contacting me, and on the whole this job search was the easiest and fastest I've ever had. One interviewer commented on my age, which felt a little odd since it was something he brought up, and not part of the conversation. But, I don't feel like it hurt me, even in that situation. People were generally very cool. At my old job, a YC startup, I was the oldest person on staff. Older than the founders, the VPs, or any of the developers by at least a few years. But, I can also remember being the youngest person at my first job, and on balance, I think my age was more of a professional liability for me back then than it is now. It wasn't a huge issue in either scenario.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  This might be somewhat of an aberration (I hope it isn't, as I'm in the same boat, but it might be). A bunch of people got laid off during the pandemic and now everything is opening up and everyone is hiring and they've become more desperate for talent. At least in theory. I have noticed a hesitance on some employers to actually bump their ranges for wages, and have had several recruiters tell me their client's budget for the role is criminally low, no wonder they're having trouble hiring people.
ithurtswhenip 5y ago
I think last I got any message from a recruiter was more than 6 months ago. Granted I have nothing in my profile besides photo and a listing of the companies I worked for and position. Plus some endorsements and recommendations. But I would have expected that any recruiter could infer from the companies I worked for and endorsements enough. Maybe just an European thing. I'm mid 30s and have always been a top performer. All jobs I had so far were me applying on the company website. I don't understand where's that shortage I keep hearing about.

imbnwa 5y ago

I'm just now coming out of my not-junior-but-not-senior period of overengineering and wish there were more older devs in my shop to consort with instead of a bunch of other not-junior-but-not-quite-senior devs (if we're being serious and not using senior to mean "I've just been doing this a long time" instead of "I've been doing thing a long time and I've learned from my experiences and here's what specifically").

MattGaiser 5y ago

> Those stereotypes include being seen as less competent and less adaptable, particularly when it comes to using new technologies. Anecdotally, I have encountered the latter a few times. I've known older developers (> 40) who didn't want to move to Angular/React and would rather have stayed on jQuery (for complicated brand new web apps) or didn't want to learn beyond Java 8.

rendall 5y ago
I've known developers like that in their 20s. They get comfortable in their niche and have been doing it that way for so long they resist anything different. Be wary. This can happen to us all.
seattle_spring 5y ago
My experience as well. On top of that, those types of engineers usually have a terrible and arrogant attitude and often attribute any disagreement as "ageism."
nowherebeen 5y ago
Counterpoint is if there was any reason to? I find both jQuery and React solve very different problems. Simply moving to React because it’s what’s everyone is doing would be just as wrong as sticking to jQuery because they refuse to learn new things.
- jgerrish 5y ago
  You're right, jQuery alone, even when it was all the rage, wasn't enough for a frontend application. Backbone, Marionette, eventually Angular and all the rest were huge improvements. You needed a message passing / routing framework, and the new frameworks have consolidated that and improved on it. Older developers are sometimes more conservative. Sorry. And age leads to cognitive decline. Reality is reality. I'm an older engineer, and even if things are stacked against me, I'm ok with that. It's a consequence of the brutal shift in cultural education around the craft. I hope more creative individuals flourish.
indymike 5y ago

surfingdino 5y ago

I have been following a simple pattern of learning a new tech stack every five years. It's not easy, but that's what pays the bills and keeps me in the game.

ElViajero 5y ago

> “A younger-looking face creates impressions of higher physical and mental fitness,” the authors write. “Our results suggest that these impressions may indeed be a powerful driver of favorable employment outcomes.” It is possible that there are other explanations. Older developers may want better salaries, better working conditions, be harder to manipulate, etc. Good leadership is going to hire people that fits in the culture of the company and have the needed skills. Whenever the candidate is younger or older does not matter. Bad leadership wants cheap employees that obey orders and don't challenge authority. Younger, more inexperienced developers will fit this category, even if they are technically skilled. This is as good a theory that any other one to explain the fact that recruiters want younger developers.

Broken_Hippo 5y ago
Nothing else in the resume changed, though. Just the picture. The age was still listed truthfully, demands didn't change, and the experience was the same. If bad leadership wanted cheap employees, that is easily filtered by hiring folks with less experience (for example) because those folks tend to be younger.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
> better salaries, better working conditions, be harder to manipulate That's me. I only 36 and I absolutely do not buy the corporate bullshit that someone's product is going to "change the world" through some incremental improvement of some software as a service. I am strongly against exploitative business models. And I know how much I am worth. When interviewing I like to give the CEO a little push back and see how they respond. I'm not going to work for someone who gets flustered when I question their thinking. I will however provide a lot of value for a team I am comfortable with.
blagie 5y ago
I'm kinda with you there. There are more jobs for junior developers, and higher salaries for senior ones. That kinda correlates with age too. If I see someone 60 in tech, I assume they're either: - A wizard, who spent 40 years knee-deep in technology. - Someone with management experience. - A flake-out who never did either. I'm also less likely to cold-call someone more intimidating for random job screening, but more likely to reach out for something aligned to their skill set.

pm90 5y ago

Why is this controversial? Such a bias will almost always exist. There is an anecdote from Hamming's famous "You and your research" [0] talk which I'll reproduce in full: > Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, ``Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't mistreated them.'' Answer, I wasn't dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people. Anecdotally, I've been on the job search train recently. Even though recruiters say that dress code is "casual", what I've found is that if I take some time to wear fitting clothes and make sure that my video background is either blurred out or nicer looking, the results are very different. [0]: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

vergessenmir 5y ago

Or none at all.

joegahona 5y ago

> In terms of practical implications, the authors say these results reconfirm why photographs are usually absent from traditional resumes or CVs. As such, they suggest that removing photos from LinkedIn might make job-seeking fairer. The lack of photos might cause recruiters to focus more on information that is more relevant to the job. I would be curious if Linkedin penalizes profiles missing a photo in their algorithm or whatever. I.e. I seem to recall getting badgered to add a photo when I didn't have one, and the implication that my profile was "incomplete." I suppose a way around this would be a completely unrelated photo, or a drawing of yourself, etc. I'd love to see the same type of experiment with the person's race and gender, but that's probably too inflammatory of an experiment.

lhorie 5y ago
I recall reading that the effect on gender has been documented in classical musician auditions (women were selected more frequently with the introduction of blind auditions)
- treis 5y ago
  Frequently cited but a fatally flawed study: > The first thing they noticed is that the raw tabulations showed women doing worse behind the screens. But perhaps, Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse explained, blind auditions “lowered the average quality of female auditionees.” To control for ability, they analyzed a small subset of candidates who took part in both blind and nonblind auditions in three of the eight orchestras. >The result was a tangle of ambiguous, contradictory trends. The screens seemed to help women in preliminary audition rounds but men in semifinal rounds. None of the findings were strong enough to draw broad conclusions one way or the other. >So where did Ms. Goldin and Ms. Rouse get their totemic conclusion that blind auditions dramatically improved the success of women candidates? After warning that their findings were not statistically significant, they declared them to be “economically significant.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-audition-study-11571599303 https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-auditi...

kwthrows 5y ago

So basically we're back to the Aryan Race thing.

CarelessExpert 5y ago

You know, for the longest time, the fact that I look quite young for my age bothered me (I'm in my early 40s and recently someone I'd just met exclaimed they thought I was 25). But ageism in the industry is starting to make me grateful for my luck in the genetic lottery...

treeman79 5y ago
At 20,I grew a beard so would be taken seriously. Now I shave to be taken seriously.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I'm 26 and I still can't grow a beard. I still have some patches that hair doesn't even grow in. But at least I'll have a full head of hair by 55 so that's cool.

rmason 5y ago

You can have a younger picture, you can remove older jobs on your resume to appear younger. It gets you the interview, you can pass the coding test but then get told that they don't think you're a 'cultural fit'. I think the underlying reason is when you have far more experience than your future boss they are intimidated by you.

trhway 5y ago
> It gets you the interview, you can pass the coding test but then get told that they don't think you're a 'cultural fit'. a recent AMZN innovation to optimize that process out - an explicitly stated max years of experience cap that thus effectively bars you even from applying (previous post with some replies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786601 ) You may be willing and qualified, yet because of age you can't even apply. Feels just nice.
- Tade0 5y ago
  How old is "old"? I'm 32, is my Lifeclock already red/black?
  - trhway 5y ago
    may be. What i saw was a 10 years cap, and otherwise the next level on the menu was SDE 5 (i.e. principal, expected to have publications, etc., and only rare individuals can make SDE5 coming from outside as i gathered from googling) which i can only wish you great luck passing the interview for. Note: it was a real unambiguous cap, explicitly stressed as the strict cap 2 times, not that typical "we're looking for 5-10 years experience", and it was made clear that for exceeding the cap - either apply for SDE5 or don't bother to apply at all.
    - hinoki 5y ago
      Maybe they were talking about an experience cap for hiring at a given (low) level? Which is also stupid, but since many companies (I have no experience with Amazon, but I do know Microsoft and Facebook will) “manage you out” if you don’t get promotions at a minimum rate, makes some kind of sense. BTW, SDE 5 isn’t an Amazon level. There is L5, which corresponds to SDE II, which is only one promotion from college hire. And there is Principal, which is L7. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google&track=Software...

CheezeIt 5y ago

Unsurprising. Older job seekers switch jobs less often, so recruiters target young ones to maximize ROI.

walshemj 5y ago

Which is why I don't have a photo on Linked in. IMHO the EU should ban the practice unless is for models / Actors.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I never make a secret of my age, but I am also not looking for a job. Corporations are obviously terrified of us oldsters. Not 100% sure I know all the reasons. I was just reading another HN front page story, about this poor woman that was fired for not writing an app that really required an experienced engineer. Lot of that, going around. Wonder why?

giantandroids 5y ago
On the whole we are less likely to advantage taken of from a less need to prove yourself.

machinehermiter 5y ago

IMO so much of age bias is because so many people are in terrible physical shape as they age. If you are visibly in really good shape, I think you get a bias in your favor as an older person. Not really an age bias but a perfectly rational probability of a lack of energy bias.

dave333 5y ago
For a sedentary job there's no need to be fit. Some people are the weight equivalent of racists - maybe fat fascists? fat nazis?

LAC-Tech 5y ago

Reading about all the ageism anecdotes on HN over the years really pushed me towards self employment. I'm still in my 30s, but my 40s will hit sooner than I think and I don't want to be caught with my pants down.

kmbfjr 5y ago

55 year old software engineer , with extensive RF/analog background with dual EE/CE degrees. I can’t begin to count the number of interviews gleaned from LinkedIn where the first 45 minutes of the interview was a late 20’s early 30’s person telling me all about their wonderful work and how great they are. Not a word about the job, nothing about the company, all about them and the places they’ve worked, what they have done. Just who the hell is being interviewed? When this happens, it is all I can do not to walk out of the interview or kill the call/Zoom session. The moment some places figure out you’re over 45, it is over. Except for very forward looking start-ups who want to grow very quickly. That is where I have been working for the past 10 years..best time of my life. But I also know, this is my last employer.

oceanghost 5y ago
This. I had an interview for a "digital interactive agency" where a 24-year-old lectured me this and that and how great she was. She was flabbergasted to find out I had more people working under me than were in her entire company. At the end of all this she says--"Do you think you are ready to step up to X quality?" I had just finished my yearly reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), and I was pretty annoyed with her, so I asked, "How do you define quality?" ZAMM is about a philosophy called the metaphysics of quality-- I knew that no matter what she said, I would have an advanced argument from ZAMM to belittle her with (the interview was just a formality at this point). She replied, "Hmmm, I'll have to think about that." And I never heard from this individual or agency again. I would like to think that day she learned not to say stupid things. Not to insult people over when you really don't even know what you're saying. But I doubt it.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  I realize replying to yourself demonstrates poor taste... But I'd like to add that at the time of the interview I had software I had personally designed at companies like DirecTV, Samsung, LG, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Google and Applied Materials. I literally had products at Crestron, Denon and Monster, and one product that could be purchased nationally at Best Buy.

dave333 5y ago

Older devs should just work on their own ecommerce stuff and squeeze expenses to maximize their runway until they takeoff. Interviewing is a waste of time past a certain age - I was 53 the last time I got hired.

dave333 5y ago

Eventually job interviews will be done by AI bots that are programmed not to have any gender/race/age/appearance/sexual orientation/weight/attractiveness bias.

blooalien 5y ago
And not too long after that, the jobs will be done by AI bots as well…