12 ms·

I’m 61 and have been working in high tech since 1983 or so, writing embedded software, doing system administration, and managing people. The article strikes me

by jes 5y ago

I’m 61 and have been working in high tech since 1983 or so, writing embedded software, doing system administration, and managing people. The article strikes me as good advice. I didn’t find anything to disagree with in it. Ageism is a thing. People have all kinds of biases of which they may or may not be aware. You have them too, and so do I. A line from another source that I keep in mind is this: “If you’re always getting angry, you’ll turn your nature against the Way.” [1] It doesn’t pay to be the angry, unapproachable person in life. [1] https://www.dailyzen.com/journal/bloodstream-sermon https://www.dailyzen.com/journal/bloodstream-sermon

tharne 5y ago
In addition to ageism, I think the proliferation of the MBA/McKinsey school of thought really works against older programmers. You have an increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge around 1) Programming, and 2) whatever industry they happen to be working in. What's worse, is that they see no problem with this because they think they "understand business". What this leads to is a lot of dumb decisions. One example in this case is that, to someone who's never written a line of code, a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of. You need to have a decent understanding of the work developers do, in order to understand the value the 50 year-old developer brings and why paying him or her 2 or 3x the 25 year-old is actually a bargain.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide and while I agree the senior developers are on a curve shifted to the right, there’s a massive amount of overlap. Most company’s best 5% 25 year-old developers are probably creating more value than their median 50 year-old developer, even though that median senior dev is creating more value than the median 25 year-old.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    > One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide I kind of disagree with this, although I don't think it's age that separates developers. But developers who can work independently are a lot more valuable than those that require close supervision, and those developers are considerably more value than those who are actively destroying value.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      If I understand your comment correctly, I think we're agreeing (that there is a wide range [high variance] of value delivered across the population: think of a bell curve that's "smooshed" down to be short and wide).
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        Quite possibly. I realised after I posted that I wasn't quite sure what the axis of your plot were (I'm still not).
        sokoloff 5y ago
        X axis is value delivered per engineer, increasing with X. Y axis is a histogram of “number of engineers producing that value”, increasing with Y. This, but for value instead of IQ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Yes, when you look at those differences any performance drop due to age is going to look tiny in comparison. What I have found though is a lack of willingness to put up with bullshit. Stuff I accepted as normal in my twenties I'd just walk away from now. This is probably good for the employer but maybe not for your immediate manager.
    - spaetzleesser 5y ago
- jnwatson 5y ago
  These days, there is no excuse to have a non-technical manager (unless you are a technical manager yourself). Software is eating the world; it is professional negligence to put someone in charge that doesn't have a detailed understanding of the technology that impacts everything about the modern workplace. It isn't like there is a shortage of technical managers right now. I've never had a non-technical manager, even when I worked in sales, and I've been doing this for over 20 years.
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
    This must be industry variant then. 3 of my 4 jobs in the last 30 years have involved non-technical leadership. The exception was working for a "tools" company where software was the product. But the other 3 are at the "edge" where software enables real devices to be more modern/gadgety. In that context, software programmers are a necessary evil to en-smart-ify gadgets that have traditionally been "dumb." And letting software people be part of the direction is too much of a loss of traditional power.
    - spaetzleesser 5y ago
      That’s why I recommend that young people should try to work for a company where the CEO comes from a tech background and understands your work. It’s just natural that someone has more respect for a role they have performed themselves.
      - travisgriggs 5y ago
        Why do you recommend this to young people specifically? Wouldn't it be sound advice regardless of the age of the recipient of this advice? Just curious why you've added that qualifier.
        spaetzleesser 5y ago
        I guess i don’t give advice to people my age ;). getting into tech companies also seems easier when you are young and don’t have much of a resume. Having a resume with years in not interesting companies and uncool tech also seems to make you toxic.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  > without the hassles of things like kids to take care of That's not accurate. At 35 there are young kids, maybe even 45. At 50 they're pretty much independent, at least aged 10-12. So actually, if you hire a 32 year old dev you should be more concerned about kids than if you hire a 50 year old. So if that's the concern, only hire 18 year olds I guess, or maybe even 15.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    Actually if you hire 25-year-olds, they're probably going to start having kids right around the time you need them the most.
    - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
      yeah, but the plan is: lay them off once they start having kids, and hire new 25-year olds. source: 25+ years experience in this industry.
      - Aperocky 5y ago
        Consulting industry?
      - smsm42 5y ago
        Can believe it. But: you don't need the whole industry. You need to find one good place to work in. Those exist. May it pay a bit less than soulless corp? Sure, maybe - or maybe not. But my 25+ yr experience shows they do exist.
  - Ma8ee 5y ago
    The spread is quite wide. I got my first kid at 45 and now almost 50 working 75% to take care of two kids the rest of the time. The flip side is that I have never been so focused during working hours as now. I’m getting quite much more done in six hours than I used to get done in eight or nine.
    - 5y ago
- wmeredith 5y ago
  > You have an increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge After seeing this time and time again, and because I was getting older, I made a conscious decision to move into management. Be the change you want to see in the world, right? Now my output is mostly spreadsheets and powerpoint, but I enable my team to do good work as I insulate them from the bullshit. I can always get down into the trenches or work on a side project if I need to scratch that creative itch.
  - apples_oranges 5y ago
    Yes! It's probably just a demographics thing that will even itself out in the future. I mean: People like you will become managers and there are many programmers in the younger generations to draw candidates from.
    - winphone1974 5y ago
      Haha! Cause nobody every changes, loses their edge or falls out of touch with their tech roots, right? We just need to get these clueless dinosaurs out of power before the current woke kids take over!
  - logshipper 5y ago
    I really respect that attitude. I happen to be doing a security assessment on some products (PuTTY etc) at the firm (Fortune Global 100) where I am interning. It baffled me to read a directive from management that said that we should shy away from open-source projects - I must confess that I was somewhat frustrated at the sheer ignorance in the memo but your comment allows me to see a silver-lining. I hope that one day I can rise up to management and make decisions based on greater nuance than simply saying "OSS bad and insecure".
    - TimPC 5y ago
      I think the general aversion to OSS is more that there is no responsible actor. In many cases, if you integrate a third party paid solution you can file a bug on that solution with reasonable confidence it can be a priority. If you use code from another team at the company you know you can file bugs on them. If you write code yourself you have confidence in fixing it. There is a danger with integrating OSS that you have code in your stack that no one knows well enough to fix and no one is responsible for. If something breaks you might have to learn a sizeable amount of code and domain knowledge to make a fix. Filing bugs on OSS is not viewed in the same way as filing bugs on paid third party solutions as whether the bugs are a priority to an OSS solution seems more risky. Note that large amounts of OSS is used in companies, but it's generally code that developers are expected to know well enough to dive into if need be. And code that is popular enough to be well tested for bugs and known that breaking errors in the framework will get fixes. Examples would be things like Python or Node.js. As a manager a potential problem you can have is a major bug your team is responsible for that no one is qualified to fix and thus your only reasonable time estimate is unknown. Avoiding certain parts of OSS is often a precaution against this situation.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 5y ago
  The young MBA people are intimidated by people who can reject their schoolbook ideas coherently. Most of those people are older, but not all of them. I started noticing this before I was thirty, either reacting to me or to someone I agreed with who happened to be older. It only gets worse.
- rmason 5y ago
  Recently Ford was in the news here in Michigan regarding layoffs. They found emails saying if an employee is over 55, have a career of large success and as a result are paid above average then lay them off. Ford is facing huge challenges as the entire industry has to pivot to battery powered vehicles and they want to get rid of their best and most experienced people? This will not end well for them. I'd be just the opposite and try to convince these folks to work until 75!
  - kjksf 5y ago
    That sure sucked but this was not about the age but about the cost. They wanted to fire the most expensive people. In union shops seniority tends to go in hand with higher pay. And I'm guessing their thinking was that the closer someone is to retirement, the more likely they are to accept a payout offer.
  - Retric 5y ago
    This is likely a direct result of the EV transition. They now have a lot of people with 30 years experience that’s seemingly irrelevant.
- omgwtfbbq 5y ago
  >a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of Bunt functionally this is correct. If they are both "Senior Devs" they're going to be roughly equivalent. If you are 50 and haven't gotten architect/tech-lead/principal roles etc. you're probably at your ceiling and you aren't really going to be much more valuable than that 25 year old.
- dr-detroit 5y ago
  Women cant have kids when theyre 50. have kids when youre 20. Stab anyone who tells you not to.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of. I was a fairly good programmer when I was 25. I'm a MASSIVELY better programmer at 57 than I was back then. My memory is a bit worse, and for certain kinds of problems, I may be a bit slower than I was at peak (maybe around 42-47). But hire me now, and you'll get a better programmer than you would ever have gotten from this body in the past. And, guess what: no kids to take care of because they've already grown into fully fledged adults and lead their own lives.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  > increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge I think it's on the downward trend though. Where I work, more managers than not used to be an engineer, and the younger they are, the more likely they're going to used to be engineers (or straight up converted).
- urthor 5y ago
  Isn't the trend against this approach? It seems at least in tech, the view is that this is not so good.
eplanit 5y ago
For those who haven't yet experienced ageism, it often starts for you when the hiring manager/director is younger than you are. Beware of the age of the bosses when surveilling a potential new gig.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  And you don't have to be 50+ to experience it. My former 30 year old self with a brand new baby had a 25 year old manager, and experienced it constantly. He just couldn't fathom why I wouldn't answer his random slacks at night, or why I thought beer taps, ping pong, and happy hours weren't suitable replacements for good benefits and incentive packages.
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    Although this isn't the usual use of the term, your comment is a great example of the importance of a manager that values diversity. You can overlook, and drive away, really good employees for really bad reasons. It's not likely that a response to a random slack in the middle of the night had any value to the company's bottom line. Managers that can't accept that not everyone should be like them are bad for the company.
    - dimitrios1 5y ago
      You highlight another good point, in that ageism is just a symptom of a broader psychological phenomena of "othering" others. I suspect that even if I was indeed younger than my manager, simply having a child and entering a new life stage with newer, more important priorities caused me to be treated differently. In a way I think the manager just wanted people who are just like them because they were a lazy manager, and wanted an easy way to relate to others rather than the hard work of understanding other perspectives and experiences. A ton of companies I have worked for preached diversity of thought, opinion, and background, to the wazoo and very rarely have they practiced what they preached.
    - slumdev 5y ago
      This is real diversity--some single, some married, some with kids, some without, some older, some younger, coming from all different educational backgrounds, and living in different communities. If everybody went to the same handful of colleges, is roughly the same age, and lives in the same trendy suburb, it doesn't matter what color they are. That "diversity" is literally skin-deep.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Ageism is a thing. Indeed. I’ve been in the too while executives at a large, publicly-traded company denied specific hiring requests because their LinkedIn profile pictures “looked too old”. On the other hand, that company was terrible to work for many reasons. They weren’t excluding older developers because they thought they were less knowledgeable. They were excluding older workers because the company knew they couldn’t trick them into working 12-hour days and putting up with abusive management practices. Young people could be convinced the bad things were normal. Older devs knew better and wouldn’t stick around anyway.
- iratewizard 5y ago
  I've hired a few 50+ devs and every time I regret it. Those specific devs learn much slower. They had a complex about their age that made them difficult to work with and connect with. Their work product was bad and no amount of intervention corrected course. Being only in a senior role that late in life itself is a red flag.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    What's above senior? Senior++?
    - ivalm 5y ago
      Staff, principle, fellow? More seriously I think something that can happen with older folks is they might fall into working in a single place with a single set of tools for a very long time so when they transition to something different it may be hard to adjust. Not necessarily because “they are old” but because if they did one thing and only that thing for 15 years it’s hard to change.
      - busterarm 5y ago
        They could have had those roles already. Once you're in those advanced IC type of roles, there aren't really a lot of places that you can go. A lot of the time that role depends on your domain experience within the company -- Usually to "move up", you have to go down a role to a bigger/more-challenging company. Thus at BigCo, hiring senior devs of advanced age should make sense to do. s/a staff engineer/architect.
cbushko 5y ago
Ageism is a thing but I don't think it is always due to the fact that you are "old". Companies turn old people away because they do not want to pay for "experience". Why pay twice as much for an experienced developer when you can get a fresh new grad that is "just as productive"? Companies often ignore the fact that there is an experienced Senior Developer sitting in the corner telling that productive Junior Developer what pitfalls to avoid and how to get things done.
- spfzero 5y ago
  And then there's the whole thing about measuring productivity. It's very hard for many managers to understand the qualitative status of a codebase, and to connect future task effectiveness with past decisions that affected that quality. So the average manager doesn't actually know how to judge productivity. I don't think they think they know, and just are mistaken. I think they know they don't know. So what do they have to go on? Pay, and conformity with their own set of best-loved personality traits (called "cultural fit").
ithinkso 5y ago
> It doesn’t pay to be the angry, unapproachable person in life. Besides the ageism thing (because I'm still relatively young so it doesn't, admittedly, affect me) I've noticed the same exact thing about cynicism. If you're always angry you will eventually only see reasons to be angry because no one else will keep interacting with you. Similarly, if you're a cynic about everything you will soon find yourself in an environment that only reinforces your believes because everyone else gets tired of it
01100011 5y ago
You mentioned anger. I've found one of the hardest things to do as a male in his mid 40s is resist the anger that arises in response to nearly everything unexpected, unintended or challenging to my thinking. I never was an angry person, but somewhere around 43 I noticed my first reaction to many things was anger. It is a very blinding, unproductive emotion.
- Asooka 5y ago
  I have noticed something similar and I'm "just" 35. I think the best way to explain it is that I don't usually get angry, so when I do, I don't have much practice and the emotion tends to linger. The problem is not with anger per se, but with violence and loss of thinking. You should practice being angry and expressing it, I think. State your anger, explain what's wrong and tell people you don't want to stand for it. There is a difference between being an angry asshole and just being angry.
- jes 5y ago
  I had an anger problem as well. It did great damage in my life and to the lives of people I loved and still love. For me it was helpful to get therapy for a few years from a “No More Mr. Nice Guy” therapist. You can search for information on Nice Guy syndrome & Dr. Robert Glover. I’m definitely not saying that this is your issue. I’m only saying you might want to check it out. Joining men’s groups helped me, too.
- leviathant 5y ago
  I'm going to say something not to be flippant, but in the spirit of being helpful, and I'm being genuine in my question: Have you considered seeing a therapist?
cogman10 5y ago
It's something that frankly scares me about the career. I'm still young enough with lucky genetics that still get me carded at the liquor store. Yet, I really fear that in the future I'll get rejected from a company because "We are worried you won't be able to learn the new tech". I've been saving aggressively for retirement for just that reason.
- smsm42 5y ago
  You're doing the right thing saving aggressively, but if some idiots would reject you because, say, you're 54 years old (the age at which Beethoven finished his 9th) - then I'm sure there would be less idiotic people you could work with.

by jes 5y ago

tharne 5y ago

In addition to ageism, I think the proliferation of the MBA/McKinsey school of thought really works against older programmers. You have an increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge around 1) Programming, and 2) whatever industry they happen to be working in. What's worse, is that they see no problem with this because they think they "understand business". What this leads to is a lot of dumb decisions. One example in this case is that, to someone who's never written a line of code, a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of. You need to have a decent understanding of the work developers do, in order to understand the value the 50 year-old developer brings and why paying him or her 2 or 3x the 25 year-old is actually a bargain.

sokoloff 5y ago
One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide and while I agree the senior developers are on a curve shifted to the right, there’s a massive amount of overlap. Most company’s best 5% 25 year-old developers are probably creating more value than their median 50 year-old developer, even though that median senior dev is creating more value than the median 25 year-old.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide I kind of disagree with this, although I don't think it's age that separates developers. But developers who can work independently are a lot more valuable than those that require close supervision, and those developers are considerably more value than those who are actively destroying value.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    If I understand your comment correctly, I think we're agreeing (that there is a wide range [high variance] of value delivered across the population: think of a bell curve that's "smooshed" down to be short and wide).
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      Quite possibly. I realised after I posted that I wasn't quite sure what the axis of your plot were (I'm still not).
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        X axis is value delivered per engineer, increasing with X. Y axis is a histogram of “number of engineers producing that value”, increasing with Y. This, but for value instead of IQ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Yes, when you look at those differences any performance drop due to age is going to look tiny in comparison. What I have found though is a lack of willingness to put up with bullshit. Stuff I accepted as normal in my twenties I'd just walk away from now. This is probably good for the employer but maybe not for your immediate manager.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
jnwatson 5y ago
These days, there is no excuse to have a non-technical manager (unless you are a technical manager yourself). Software is eating the world; it is professional negligence to put someone in charge that doesn't have a detailed understanding of the technology that impacts everything about the modern workplace. It isn't like there is a shortage of technical managers right now. I've never had a non-technical manager, even when I worked in sales, and I've been doing this for over 20 years.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  This must be industry variant then. 3 of my 4 jobs in the last 30 years have involved non-technical leadership. The exception was working for a "tools" company where software was the product. But the other 3 are at the "edge" where software enables real devices to be more modern/gadgety. In that context, software programmers are a necessary evil to en-smart-ify gadgets that have traditionally been "dumb." And letting software people be part of the direction is too much of a loss of traditional power.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    That’s why I recommend that young people should try to work for a company where the CEO comes from a tech background and understands your work. It’s just natural that someone has more respect for a role they have performed themselves.
    - travisgriggs 5y ago
      Why do you recommend this to young people specifically? Wouldn't it be sound advice regardless of the age of the recipient of this advice? Just curious why you've added that qualifier.
      - spaetzleesser 5y ago
        I guess i don’t give advice to people my age ;). getting into tech companies also seems easier when you are young and don’t have much of a resume. Having a resume with years in not interesting companies and uncool tech also seems to make you toxic.
joelbluminator 5y ago
> without the hassles of things like kids to take care of That's not accurate. At 35 there are young kids, maybe even 45. At 50 they're pretty much independent, at least aged 10-12. So actually, if you hire a 32 year old dev you should be more concerned about kids than if you hire a 50 year old. So if that's the concern, only hire 18 year olds I guess, or maybe even 15.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Actually if you hire 25-year-olds, they're probably going to start having kids right around the time you need them the most.
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    yeah, but the plan is: lay them off once they start having kids, and hire new 25-year olds. source: 25+ years experience in this industry.
    - Aperocky 5y ago
      Consulting industry?
    - smsm42 5y ago
      Can believe it. But: you don't need the whole industry. You need to find one good place to work in. Those exist. May it pay a bit less than soulless corp? Sure, maybe - or maybe not. But my 25+ yr experience shows they do exist.
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  The spread is quite wide. I got my first kid at 45 and now almost 50 working 75% to take care of two kids the rest of the time. The flip side is that I have never been so focused during working hours as now. I’m getting quite much more done in six hours than I used to get done in eight or nine.
  - 5y ago
wmeredith 5y ago
> You have an increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge After seeing this time and time again, and because I was getting older, I made a conscious decision to move into management. Be the change you want to see in the world, right? Now my output is mostly spreadsheets and powerpoint, but I enable my team to do good work as I insulate them from the bullshit. I can always get down into the trenches or work on a side project if I need to scratch that creative itch.
- apples_oranges 5y ago
  Yes! It's probably just a demographics thing that will even itself out in the future. I mean: People like you will become managers and there are many programmers in the younger generations to draw candidates from.
  - winphone1974 5y ago
    Haha! Cause nobody every changes, loses their edge or falls out of touch with their tech roots, right? We just need to get these clueless dinosaurs out of power before the current woke kids take over!
- logshipper 5y ago
  I really respect that attitude. I happen to be doing a security assessment on some products (PuTTY etc) at the firm (Fortune Global 100) where I am interning. It baffled me to read a directive from management that said that we should shy away from open-source projects - I must confess that I was somewhat frustrated at the sheer ignorance in the memo but your comment allows me to see a silver-lining. I hope that one day I can rise up to management and make decisions based on greater nuance than simply saying "OSS bad and insecure".
  - TimPC 5y ago
    I think the general aversion to OSS is more that there is no responsible actor. In many cases, if you integrate a third party paid solution you can file a bug on that solution with reasonable confidence it can be a priority. If you use code from another team at the company you know you can file bugs on them. If you write code yourself you have confidence in fixing it. There is a danger with integrating OSS that you have code in your stack that no one knows well enough to fix and no one is responsible for. If something breaks you might have to learn a sizeable amount of code and domain knowledge to make a fix. Filing bugs on OSS is not viewed in the same way as filing bugs on paid third party solutions as whether the bugs are a priority to an OSS solution seems more risky. Note that large amounts of OSS is used in companies, but it's generally code that developers are expected to know well enough to dive into if need be. And code that is popular enough to be well tested for bugs and known that breaking errors in the framework will get fixes. Examples would be things like Python or Node.js. As a manager a potential problem you can have is a major bug your team is responsible for that no one is qualified to fix and thus your only reasonable time estimate is unknown. Avoiding certain parts of OSS is often a precaution against this situation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hinkley 5y ago
The young MBA people are intimidated by people who can reject their schoolbook ideas coherently. Most of those people are older, but not all of them. I started noticing this before I was thirty, either reacting to me or to someone I agreed with who happened to be older. It only gets worse.
rmason 5y ago
Recently Ford was in the news here in Michigan regarding layoffs. They found emails saying if an employee is over 55, have a career of large success and as a result are paid above average then lay them off. Ford is facing huge challenges as the entire industry has to pivot to battery powered vehicles and they want to get rid of their best and most experienced people? This will not end well for them. I'd be just the opposite and try to convince these folks to work until 75!
- kjksf 5y ago
  That sure sucked but this was not about the age but about the cost. They wanted to fire the most expensive people. In union shops seniority tends to go in hand with higher pay. And I'm guessing their thinking was that the closer someone is to retirement, the more likely they are to accept a payout offer.
- Retric 5y ago
  This is likely a direct result of the EV transition. They now have a lot of people with 30 years experience that’s seemingly irrelevant.
omgwtfbbq 5y ago
>a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of Bunt functionally this is correct. If they are both "Senior Devs" they're going to be roughly equivalent. If you are 50 and haven't gotten architect/tech-lead/principal roles etc. you're probably at your ceiling and you aren't really going to be much more valuable than that 25 year old.
dr-detroit 5y ago
Women cant have kids when theyre 50. have kids when youre 20. Stab anyone who tells you not to.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of. I was a fairly good programmer when I was 25. I'm a MASSIVELY better programmer at 57 than I was back then. My memory is a bit worse, and for certain kinds of problems, I may be a bit slower than I was at peak (maybe around 42-47). But hire me now, and you'll get a better programmer than you would ever have gotten from this body in the past. And, guess what: no kids to take care of because they've already grown into fully fledged adults and lead their own lives.
Aperocky 5y ago
> increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge I think it's on the downward trend though. Where I work, more managers than not used to be an engineer, and the younger they are, the more likely they're going to used to be engineers (or straight up converted).
urthor 5y ago
Isn't the trend against this approach? It seems at least in tech, the view is that this is not so good.

eplanit 5y ago

For those who haven't yet experienced ageism, it often starts for you when the hiring manager/director is younger than you are. Beware of the age of the bosses when surveilling a potential new gig.

dimitrios1 5y ago
And you don't have to be 50+ to experience it. My former 30 year old self with a brand new baby had a 25 year old manager, and experienced it constantly. He just couldn't fathom why I wouldn't answer his random slacks at night, or why I thought beer taps, ping pong, and happy hours weren't suitable replacements for good benefits and incentive packages.
- bachmeier 5y ago
  Although this isn't the usual use of the term, your comment is a great example of the importance of a manager that values diversity. You can overlook, and drive away, really good employees for really bad reasons. It's not likely that a response to a random slack in the middle of the night had any value to the company's bottom line. Managers that can't accept that not everyone should be like them are bad for the company.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    You highlight another good point, in that ageism is just a symptom of a broader psychological phenomena of "othering" others. I suspect that even if I was indeed younger than my manager, simply having a child and entering a new life stage with newer, more important priorities caused me to be treated differently. In a way I think the manager just wanted people who are just like them because they were a lazy manager, and wanted an easy way to relate to others rather than the hard work of understanding other perspectives and experiences. A ton of companies I have worked for preached diversity of thought, opinion, and background, to the wazoo and very rarely have they practiced what they preached.
  - slumdev 5y ago
    This is real diversity--some single, some married, some with kids, some without, some older, some younger, coming from all different educational backgrounds, and living in different communities. If everybody went to the same handful of colleges, is roughly the same age, and lives in the same trendy suburb, it doesn't matter what color they are. That "diversity" is literally skin-deep.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Ageism is a thing. Indeed. I’ve been in the too while executives at a large, publicly-traded company denied specific hiring requests because their LinkedIn profile pictures “looked too old”. On the other hand, that company was terrible to work for many reasons. They weren’t excluding older developers because they thought they were less knowledgeable. They were excluding older workers because the company knew they couldn’t trick them into working 12-hour days and putting up with abusive management practices. Young people could be convinced the bad things were normal. Older devs knew better and wouldn’t stick around anyway.

iratewizard 5y ago
I've hired a few 50+ devs and every time I regret it. Those specific devs learn much slower. They had a complex about their age that made them difficult to work with and connect with. Their work product was bad and no amount of intervention corrected course. Being only in a senior role that late in life itself is a red flag.
- Clubber 5y ago
  What's above senior? Senior++?
  - ivalm 5y ago
    Staff, principle, fellow? More seriously I think something that can happen with older folks is they might fall into working in a single place with a single set of tools for a very long time so when they transition to something different it may be hard to adjust. Not necessarily because “they are old” but because if they did one thing and only that thing for 15 years it’s hard to change.
    - busterarm 5y ago
      They could have had those roles already. Once you're in those advanced IC type of roles, there aren't really a lot of places that you can go. A lot of the time that role depends on your domain experience within the company -- Usually to "move up", you have to go down a role to a bigger/more-challenging company. Thus at BigCo, hiring senior devs of advanced age should make sense to do. s/a staff engineer/architect.

cbushko 5y ago

Ageism is a thing but I don't think it is always due to the fact that you are "old". Companies turn old people away because they do not want to pay for "experience". Why pay twice as much for an experienced developer when you can get a fresh new grad that is "just as productive"? Companies often ignore the fact that there is an experienced Senior Developer sitting in the corner telling that productive Junior Developer what pitfalls to avoid and how to get things done.

spfzero 5y ago
And then there's the whole thing about measuring productivity. It's very hard for many managers to understand the qualitative status of a codebase, and to connect future task effectiveness with past decisions that affected that quality. So the average manager doesn't actually know how to judge productivity. I don't think they think they know, and just are mistaken. I think they know they don't know. So what do they have to go on? Pay, and conformity with their own set of best-loved personality traits (called "cultural fit").

ithinkso 5y ago

> It doesn’t pay to be the angry, unapproachable person in life. Besides the ageism thing (because I'm still relatively young so it doesn't, admittedly, affect me) I've noticed the same exact thing about cynicism. If you're always angry you will eventually only see reasons to be angry because no one else will keep interacting with you. Similarly, if you're a cynic about everything you will soon find yourself in an environment that only reinforces your believes because everyone else gets tired of it

01100011 5y ago

You mentioned anger. I've found one of the hardest things to do as a male in his mid 40s is resist the anger that arises in response to nearly everything unexpected, unintended or challenging to my thinking. I never was an angry person, but somewhere around 43 I noticed my first reaction to many things was anger. It is a very blinding, unproductive emotion.

Asooka 5y ago
I have noticed something similar and I'm "just" 35. I think the best way to explain it is that I don't usually get angry, so when I do, I don't have much practice and the emotion tends to linger. The problem is not with anger per se, but with violence and loss of thinking. You should practice being angry and expressing it, I think. State your anger, explain what's wrong and tell people you don't want to stand for it. There is a difference between being an angry asshole and just being angry.
jes 5y ago
I had an anger problem as well. It did great damage in my life and to the lives of people I loved and still love. For me it was helpful to get therapy for a few years from a “No More Mr. Nice Guy” therapist. You can search for information on Nice Guy syndrome & Dr. Robert Glover. I’m definitely not saying that this is your issue. I’m only saying you might want to check it out. Joining men’s groups helped me, too.
leviathant 5y ago
I'm going to say something not to be flippant, but in the spirit of being helpful, and I'm being genuine in my question: Have you considered seeing a therapist?

cogman10 5y ago

It's something that frankly scares me about the career. I'm still young enough with lucky genetics that still get me carded at the liquor store. Yet, I really fear that in the future I'll get rejected from a company because "We are worried you won't be able to learn the new tech". I've been saving aggressively for retirement for just that reason.

smsm42 5y ago
You're doing the right thing saving aggressively, but if some idiots would reject you because, say, you're 54 years old (the age at which Beethoven finished his 9th) - then I'm sure there would be less idiotic people you could work with.