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I'm a 50+ greybeard (literally) and here's my story: I once figured I could improve my chances of getting a job if I shave my beard. I knew I looked much younge

by mojuba 4y ago

I'm a 50+ greybeard (literally) and here's my story: I once figured I could improve my chances of getting a job if I shave my beard. I knew I looked much younger without it, people would get my age wrong by some 10-15 years. And so my 6 months-long search for a job that time ended in success on the first interview after I shaved it. The first one! I remember the faces of the guys who hired me when they saw my personal data on some tax form that I filled later, after the contract was signed. Ageism in this industry is real. I think the root cause of it is investors, it's where the origins of this phenomenon are. They prefer younger entrepreneurs who in turn hire people like themselves, and so it propagates down the hierarchy as the company grows. It's transitive. In fact this is true for all types of discrimination. I switched to entrepreneurship and feel the same effects here. Good luck raising money or even finding a co-founder. It's tough. Not going to shave my beard though. I have no idea what could be done here other than for the aging tech people to unite and form their own companies, investment funds. Just like the other discriminated groups do - women, then racial and other minorities. Edit: I should add, I was talking about a hands-on engineering job, not management. I love coding and not going to quit it because of ageism or pay or other circumstances.

vidanay 4y ago
Another literal 50+ greybeard here. I'll offer a counter example: In the Fortune 500 company I work for, we are absolutely FILLED with greybeards. I's say that the average age is pushing 40 and the average tenure with the company is 10+ with a significant percentage being 20+ y.o.e. (including me).
- mojuba 4y ago
  I see, but it can be explained by the aging management (middle or high or both) at your company. Correct?
  - crustycoder 4y ago
    No.
- quaffapint 4y ago
  I came from a big bank with lots of graybeards to a small startup were I'm 10 years older than the oldest person (who's the cto). It's been fine here though a little awkward at times with contexts I don't know about. Not a big deal though. Now as I continue to get older, I do worry I'll have to go back to those mega companies when it's time to move on and I start to really look the age.
- pizza234 4y ago
  > we are absolutely FILLED with greybeards. I's say that the average age is pushing 40 and the average tenure with the company is 10+ Taking your observation in isolation, there are two implications: 1. that those 40+ years old were, in average, hired when they were in their 30s, when they weren't grey beards; 2. a possible factor that causes their long tenure is that they now struggle to find other jobs.
  - rvba 4y ago
    Also people have to work somewhere.
- abeppu 4y ago
  Do you think different companies at different stages have different biases? mojuba's comment that age discrimination is initially investor driven might no longer apply at a fortune 500 company. Or perhaps other cultural factors (e.g. about the industry/domain) pull in a different direction?
- sidlls 4y ago
  Most Fortune 500 software jobs are poorly compensated line-of-business app building. Decent work for a certain sort (not speaking of intellect or ability, but personality and similar other factors), but hardly challenging or technically sophisticated for the most part
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  "Greybeard" scratches my ear as sexist.
lucasgonze 4y ago
I took the opposite path: after years of concealing my age as much as possible I grew out my beard, which is very much gray. I got positive results pretty quickly, though not how I expected. People were attracted to what they imagined was the depth of my experience. Not that this imagined depth isn't real, but they didn't usually investigate far enough to know whether it was real. The gray beard was all they needed.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  I've had some grey hair since 17 - visibly noticeable by... 19 or 20. My dad was basically gray/white hair by early 40s, and I inherited that trait. It was certainly noticeable by my mid 20s, and probably both helped and hurt along the way in various business/job/work contexts. Never could grow a beard, so 'graybeard' has never been a literal issue for me. :) In my mid 30s, I could, at a distance, pass for late 40s or 50. As I've moved towards that milestone, I don't think there's been much of a change. That's not just me thinking that - I get told that now and then.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    I've always had a baby face and didn't grow out my beard until into my mid 30s. Overnight change. Although not gray, I was no longer treated like a new hire by groups in the large corporation I worked in.
- jmartrican 4y ago
  Are you in the east coast by chance?
bgribble 4y ago
Same story. At about 40 I shaved my epic beard, took graduation dates off my resume and limited it to about the last 10 years of work. Fresh shave and haircut for any f2f interview. So far so good. Now I'm 51 and lucky enough to be able to seriously consider not taking another job after the current one runs its course (which may be a long time, I don't know). But if I do go out after another job I may invest in a few months of facials and spa treatments to get that maximally youthful look :)
- nonzoomer200 4y ago
  Younger than you but already affected by ageism due to long career, and I hate hate hate removing old, relevant experience but it seems necessary. Omitting a decade of serious experience while only in your 30s sucks. On the plus side they perceive you as Talent with Potential, or something. On the downside it means you get treated like a junior by some jackass Uncle Bob fan who has just a handful of years of real experience. It levels the playing field in a crappy way.
  - jones1618 4y ago
    Add an Other Skills & Experience section at the end of your resume with relevant experience minus the dates. It'll be picked up by the keyword bots & maybe trigger curiosity from hiring managers who will bring you in just to ask about it. When asked, say "a few years ago I worked on ..." instead of giving dates. An employer hungry for those skills will likely not care that there isn't a date attached.
  - ufmace 4y ago
    Writing a good resume is very much a skill. You always want to keep the length limited and focus on the most relevant parts of the most relevant experience. Anyone with a decently solid career probably has far too much experience to put it all on a resume that any hiring manager would actually read. I often like to write up for myself a "full" resume with plenty of details about everything, making it way too long, then tailor it as needed for any specific job I want to apply for by cutting out stuff less relevant for that specific position until it's short enough, like 2 pages max.
rbanffy 4y ago
I have more or less the same perception. My beard is grey, I'm getting bald (shaving keeps my hair below 1cm). People are still surprised when I say I'm 54. I wear geeky t-shirts and jeans. Ageism is real and some of the younglings treat me as someone whose knowledge is obsolete, only to be proven wrong. It's true I still remember my way around an Apple II and know what a 3278 was (and how they looked like) and some. One advantage we, The Elders, have is that we know not only how things got (and get, and will get) built, but we also know how they fail. Our current jobs were science fiction when we started, and we know the jobs of the younglings will be science fiction when they grow up. We seldom need more than five minutes to point out organizational issues that can cause a project to fail, and barely five more to list a couple actions to be taken to avert disaster - we don't have to figure it out - we just need to remember what we did. My long and colorful history is a feature, not a bug.
- jerf 4y ago
  "Ageism is real and some of the younglings treat me as someone whose knowledge is obsolete, only to be proven wrong." This meme is slowly dying, but let me do my part here to kick it along to death faster. Nothing here is intended to offend per se, because I consider everything I say here to be the natural order of things, and there's nothing wrong with it. Still, it's the truth. I'm in my mid-40s now. I've hired a lot of juniors over the years. Never once have I hired someone new and gone "Oh my god, they know so much, my job is at risk and I'm going obsolete!" No, what happen when I hire junior is that I look at where they are now, and where they need to be to be a fully functional member of the team, and kind of sigh and make a plan to try to get them there as quickly as possible, plotting a minimal path through the thicket of things necessary to be a functioning software engineer nowadays. Six months is generally a bare minimum time line for this. Sometimes it's more. And that's just to get to functional. A well-rounded engineer that I can plausibly just pass a project to and see them largely get it done correctly and without blowing their own or my foot off? Years. Years. And I just mean that from a technical perspective... it's yet more before I feel comfortable inserting them into the political layers. Again, not intended to be offensive. Everyone has to pass through this phase. Every mature programmer should expect to be mentoring like this; if you're in your 40s and haven't had to do this at all, take a careful look at your career, something's probably wrong. (I don't mean management; I mean mentorship.) There was one intern a few years ago who turned my head in that he had parity with me on a couple of interesting and unusual skills, but still... it was parity at best, not amazingly better than me. And while he had some amazing building skills for an intern I could see the skillset was still very, very lopsided and he needed a lot of work on the question of what to do, rather than just the doing of things. It's OK. That's normal. I'm not even sure how to hypothesize someone coming out of college with amazing skills in knowing exactly what to do. From what I see even when 20-year-old startup founders get this right it's a combination of mentorship from investors and sheer luck. I despair of even imagining how to teach this skill from anything other than experience, beyond simply sensitizing a student to the fact that it is something they should be looking at as they grow as an engineer. There was a brief window in the 1990s where the industry underwent a technological convulsion and switched away from expensive mainframes to commodity computers and the internet/web. In that brief window, which I was lucky enough to capture and ride, a fresh young whelpling who had spent the last couple of months fiddling with this newfound "web" thing could do some things that the mainframe folks couldn't. There were still plenty of lessons that could have been learned from the mainframe folks, but for whatever reason, be in the internet just not being there yet, an unbridgeable cultural gap between the hacker mindset and the IBM mindset, whatever reason, the communication and wisdom transfer just didn't happen. That hasn't happened since then and I see no prospect of it happening in the next 10 years, not because the next 10 years won't see change but because the people like me of that era have already ridden any number of waves since then and adapted and I don't see that sort of convulsive surprise happening again. The idea that someone in their 50s just has to be old and out of date is not just silly but downright ludicrous. Getting to "well rounded" in 2022 is something that will require you until your mid-30s minimum anymore. I think a lot of the ageism that still lives in the industry are people who are unskilled and unaware. They can't even perceive what it is they are missing, so they are incapable of recognizing the skill gap. Since a lot of the ageism probably resides in people who aren't even engineers, managers, recruiters, people who are for any number of reasons good and bad simply incapable of interacting with engineers and being able to assess their skill levels, it's a plausible guess.
jrochkind1 4y ago
I am approaching that age where I worry people are going to discriminate against me because of age -- I am lucky that I do look younger than I am (even with beard). But I'm wondering if I should edit my resume to make my age less apparent from it -- remove the earliest part of my career from my resume? I have the academic degrees I've earned on my resume -- remove the dates of them too?
- ghaff 4y ago
  There's definitely a school of thought that you should remove dates and trim older jobs. When I last switched jobs a number of years back a good friend of mine strongly advised doing so and I did. Though I ended up getting a job through a personal connection so I doubt anyone did much more than glance at my resume anyway. (And the company had quite a few relatively senior--as in older--people.
rotten 4y ago
I was having trouble finding a job. I dyed my beard back to my original hair color and had 4 offers within 2 weeks. Dyeing your beard feels disingenuous and smells a little funny at first, but it really works. People remarked that I: - Had lost weight - Looked less tired - Must be feeling better - You must be under so much less stress now - You look younger I look forward to retiring and letting it go gray again. For now I think I need to keep it at least partially colored instead of looking like santa claus.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  If you have a particularly stressful time at work you can stop dying it to visibly display your displeasure.
  - kitd 4y ago
    Lol, like a mimic octopus or cuttlefish!
- binkHN 4y ago
  > I dyed my beard back to my original hair color and had 4 offers within 2 weeks. Well done! Good opening for a Tell HN post!
pjmlp 4y ago
Slowly approaching 50, I would say dyeing the hair also helps during the interview process. After the contract is signed, then whatever.
- evilbob93 4y ago
  Approaching 61. Got two offers this year. The current hot market seems to (temporarily) make ageism slightly less of a thing than it used to be. Probably losing the white pony tail a couple years ago helped too. Dying my hair is out of the question, the only thing that isn't gray on my head are my eyebrows. I did take my ID badge for my current job with blue hair, however.
HeckFeck 4y ago
Sorry to hear of these experiences, it should be that you get recognition when you devote a lifetime to a field. But I wonder if this is mostly a US-centric phenomenon. Or maybe it is a tribal mentality, I wonder if web devs of 20 years ago face the same problem with younger web devs today. Or a large amount of web devs considering everything and everyone who doesn't work in the browser to be stoneage. As an anecdote, I once worked with a gentleman twice my age who cut his teeth writing assembly for an obscure HP platform, and I had huge respect for him. And it was obvious that even though we were developing a modern full stack webapp in Python and React, he had an excellent mind for the tough engineering questions.
- mojuba 4y ago
  It was in Europe, and no I'm not a web dev. About 6-7 years ago I switched from systems programming in C/C++ to iOS, Android and some backend, but mostly iOS which is my favorite platform now. I did some web development years ago but never really liked or enjoyed it honestly. Web development is probably more fluid compared to other areas. Browsers evolve like crazy and make frameworks and other tech obsolete pretty fast. So keeping up here might be quite challenging for all ages I imagine.
seti0Cha 4y ago
Also a literal greybeard (mid 50s) and I haven't seen ageism. Not sure if it's because I'm on the east coast and it's different here or I'm just not aware of it. I've sort of been expecting to hit it, but instead I feel as though I get a lot of respect from younger developers and they often seek out my opinion on things. Maybe it's just luck, but there are a couple of things I try to do that may play a role. One is that I never try to pull rank on anyone or dismiss anyone's ideas or concerns. Respecting others' abilities and experiences makes it easy for them to return that respect as they are not feeling defensive. Another is I try not to be dismissive of whatever new tech or fads they may be invested in, but rather acknowledge that they are attempts to solve real problems and I can understand what they are trying to do, even if I think there are better solutions. I take a sort of exaggeratedly open-minded attitude in order to head off any assumption that I don't like their ideas because they are new. Finally, I'm quick to share my experience. Everybody likes war stories and if you always have a war story for every situation people will start to understand the value of experience. Of course humility is important in that. I share my mistakes more than my successes so as to avoid coming across as a pompous windbag. That's my experience anyway. Who knows, may just be that I've gotten lucky.
- jones1618 4y ago
  100% this. Ageism manifests as dismissiveness or intimidation. Keeping skills current & showing accomplishments negates the first and humility and being personable helps mitigate the second. Sometimes in an interview when I suspect the interviewer is uncomfortable with assessing "their Dad", I throw a lot of curiosity at them about their skills & career & ask their advice about the company or tech stack they use. That helps breakdown the "too old to learn & won't listen to me" stereotypes.
- pjsg 4y ago
  I'm also a literal greybeard (early 60s) on the east coast, and I haven't found this ageism to be a problem. Young companies are about "what can you do for me" and 40 years of experience gives me the intuition about architecture and implementation that you don't get without having lived through lots of failed projects! Also, with a long career, you probably have a number of significant successes under your belt, and, while past success does not guarantee future success, it appears that past failure is a strong indicator of future failure. New teams want people with a track record of success.
dominotw 4y ago
> I think the root cause of it is investors I am not sure if its just investors though. If you are hiring someone to do run of the mill crud/etl type jobs then a younger person is a better hire. I've noticed a marked drop in my energy levels as I've gotten older into my 40s. Weather is unethical or not is prbly an different issue but reasoning behind it makes perfect sense to me.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I believe ageism is real. But I would blunt it a bit: I think engineers hire people "like them". That explains the ageism, sexism, racism.... I say that blunts it a bit because I think I don't blame engineers to look for someone like them — it comes easy, it is probably easier to judge someone who you feel shares your own life experiences. But yeah, some years back we interviewed a guy for the team who was about my age (early 50's at that time). I thought he was top notch. But a younger engineer on the team pushed hard to reject him for the role. Why? "I think he's a bad fit for the team." That was the only reason we could get for his rejection. Sure, just an anecdote. I see red flags now though when someone says "not a good fit" (whatever that means).
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I usually find when people discuss fit, it's helpful to ask specifically what behaviors indicated which personality traits that the co-worker is trying to filter out. Asking for precision also shifts the discussion from something general like fit to specific things like which traits is this company trying to select for, and whether or not the other interviewers agree that a behavior indicated a specific personality trait. I don't have studies to back this up, but I find personally it helps give an avenue for co-workers to argue against bigotry without accusing anyone of behaving in a bigoted away.
- sodapopcan 4y ago
  "Not a good fit" is a perfectly good reason not to hire someone, but not if you can't, or are unwilling, to define what you mean by it.
  - jones1618 4y ago
    Exactly. Managers should insist that peer-reviewers give specific attributes or behaviors. Also, "cultural fit" questions can be casually ageist as hell. I was asked once (at 40 or so), "We like to skateboard around the office for fun. What do you like to do?" I sincerely believe it was (for the 20-something interviewer) an innocent, almost routine interview question. I diffused the question by saying that sounded like a blast but I prefer Nerf Blaster wars or pranking people by hijacking their wireless mouse or whatever. I got the job offer but I've been on other interviews where I aced the manager's and technical interviews but got shut down by a barely college graduate who clearly didn't think they'd have to work with "their Dad." Not much you can do about that.
willio58 4y ago
That’s funny, I believe I experienced ageism but on the other end of the age spectrum. I couldn’t figure out why I was making it so far in interviews but not getting the job. This happened for months. Then one day I decided to grow out my beard to look older. I’m 25. With my beard I rarely get carded, without it I always get carded. Same story as you, the first round of interviews came and my beard saved the day. Now once I reach a year 6 months at this company I’ll shave it ;)
- smadsen 4y ago
  Glad to meet someone else with this problem. People would talk to me as if I was not old enough to be taken seriously, even though I had been working professionally in the field since my 18th birthday. One time, I was told that I should be at the company for at least 6 months before offering an opinion. It's understandable when someone is just inexperienced, but by rendering a judgment on someone's expertise based on perceived age, I can't help but call it reverse ageism. Now closing in on 50 with my share of life experience (good and bad) and some gray hairs setting in, it has gotten better, although people often mistake me for being 10-15 years younger than I actually am.
neves 4y ago
After this post I think I'll paint my hair next time I search for a job.
Test0129 4y ago
> they prefer young entrepreneurs I am not a grey beard yet but I am getting there quickly. My time in the industry is they value youth because it is exploitable not because they're like-minded. A young person with few responsibilities, no kids, no house, perhaps not even a significant other is easier to get to stick to exploitative pager duty schedules, long nights, etc for little pay and a party once in a while. Older people tend to be more concerned with raw numbers such as salary and total comp which presents a problem for this kind of grifter. That being said despite having literal grey in my beard I have never had an issue getting a job. I keep my skills loosely up to date (I still don't follow the latest language trends) and know which industries I can move in. Most people age out into management and older ICs are hard to find beyond late 30s and early 40s.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Underrated analysis.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
Ageism in tech is like throwing a kick blind and seeing someone getting kicked and figuring that's the guy you kicked. Then 20 years later you get a kick in the butt and realise that was who you kicked.
codefreeordie 4y ago
Ageism in tech is super real. I was sitting at lunch the other day at my large tech company office when I overheard a wonderful conversation from the table behind me about the "kinds" of managers a team might have that included this snippet: "I mean, you could get someone midcareer, say age 25 or so, and they'll be really fiery and excited, but they won't know everything yet. But it means that you can figure it out. Or, I mean you could get someone super senior like 35, and then they'll be the expert but they'll be old and slow" Not only did this go entirely unchallenged, but everyone seemed fully in agreement. This is one example, but conversations like this that assume that by 35 or at most 40 you're all worn out and washed up are fairly common. Having started this job during COVID, I didn't realize how young everyone in my company is, but after this conversation, I realized that I only know one engineer over 40 here. (I know some managers that are over 40, but none that I know are yet 50.)
b20000 4y ago
what is the next thing to do? wear fluo color clothing and have some piercings and wear bracelets with lucky charms, and end every sentence with “far out bro”? like you say, we need to come together as a community and industry and oppose these and other forms of stealth discrimination. i’m wondering if the coding interviews are organized to facilitate discrimination by age.
kforo9n 4y ago
intrasight 4y ago
57M here and still love coding. Ageism is very real - but so is the tech shortage. So it's a good time to be a greybeard. I was at a Google event a few years back. A colleague (53M) expressed to a Google PM his interest in coming to work for Google. The PM said bluntly "Google doesn't hire people over 50". The employee average cost-benefit curve inverts at 40. At least that's what the beancounters will say.
- wrs 4y ago
  Considering that Google has lost (OK, settled) some high-profile age discrimination lawsuits over the years, that may not be an inaccurate statement, but it’s a pretty stupid move to say that to a prospective employee.
- sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
  Google is also the corporate manifestation of peterpan syndrome so i'm not surprised
wvh 4y ago
I'm not quite a graybeard yet – even though the first shades are starting to appear – but I have been working for about 24 years now. Frankly, lots of my middle-aged colleagues have been sitting on a chair doing the same thing for 20 years and have not kept up to date. Experience is important, as is being able to predict what approaches will get a project in the weeds. It's not necessary to chase the latest shiny thing, but some serious effort is required to stay up to date instead of immediately assuming ageism. Experience would be so much more valuable if you have something worthwhile to add to discussions about the merits and challenges of newer technologies of the last 5-10 years like for example Javascript frameworks or Kubernetes and other cloud and hybrid strategies.
xwowsersx 4y ago
Is there data to support the claim that more ageism occurs in this industry than others? I think it is probably true, but I'm wondering if there's any hard evidence. I suppose it's going to be pretty hard to get reliable data on this. We can get statistics on mean age vs other industries, but those numbers alone don't prove age discrimination.
biztos 4y ago
I’m also 50+ and I wonder how reliable it is to just “present younger” (which I do) because the hiring manager may be the gatekeeper of prejudice, and s/he knows your age. Is it really the “culture fit” i.e. do people feel like you’re their dad, or will it be a factor when they review your CV and see you are not only overqualified, but don’t know React? I agree with your suggestion and it’s one reason why I’m starting a consulting company. I figure when the chips are down, the bosses need the work done, and the Olds get that. We’ll see, I’m just starting, but I’d love to end up with a stable of 65-year-olds helping startups actually ship.
gonehome 4y ago
One thing I’ve always thought would be interesting is that age discrimination laws only protect people older than 40. That means you can legally discriminate against young people. If ageism is truly a thing it means that there exist old people that are undervalued by the market. Starting a company or having roles that are specifically 40+ only could be an interesting hiring advantage if that’s true. Especially if mentorship is part of the role. Also - from friends that teach at university, lots of young people don’t know what a file system is and can’t navigate basic files/folders or hierarchies. They’re confused by files opening in applications (these are CS freshman). A bit unrelated but a lot of the “old” knowledge remains extremely relevant especially when kids exposure to only ios abstracts relevant bits away.
robotnikman 4y ago
Where I work plenty of the developers here are what you would call 'greybeards'. I've always enjoyed talking to them and they have interesting stories to tell. It seems you run into ageism less when you look outside of VC ran companies, but that's based on anecdotes I've heard from others and just my observation.
mynameisash 4y ago
> I once figured I could improve my chances of getting a job if I shave my beard. When I was an SDE 2, I kept contributing (what I felt were) consistent, marked improvements to my team and our products, but I didn't get a promo. Then I let my beard grow out and I appeared a good deal older. Shortly thereafter, I got my senior promotion. Of course, there's no counterfactual. Maybe I just needed more time under my belt for my promo, or maybe other people were getting their well-deserved promotions before I got mine. But it felt like shedding that babyface helped me out back then. Maybe in a few years (I'm in my 40s now), I'll want to shave again to stay in the sweet spot appearance-wise.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>Ageism in this industry is real. I think the root cause of it is investors, it's where the origins of this phenomenon are. It's a simple but profound statement. Ageism (and many other 'isms') would not exist if older people did not discriminate against other older people. Investors would typically be older people.
babycake 4y ago
What about your college degree on your resume? Don't you have to list the year you graduated? Even job portals that make everyone fill the damn web forms manually, it generally always asks when one graduated. From that they can deduce your age?
jmspring 4y ago
There is ageism for sure. That said, I've probably isolated myself from a lot of it because if a company boasts (as often happens at "work at a startup", etc type events) "we work hard, we play hard", "we are a family" - no. Tell me about what you are building, what you intend to deliver and how you are doing it. What one does in their private life is up to them and should not be tied to corporate culture. If the team isn't experienced and has to work more to achieve commitments - that is a management / hiring issue. I will certainly expand contributions as needed to help make things successful, but I will not give up my own life to backfill for poor management or hires - did that multiple times and doesn't gain you anything. That said, making sure junior members are set up for success and get help and mentoring and guidance needed is part of being a senior member. For me, that is part of my calculation when determining timelines and deliverables.
orwin 4y ago
This is really dumb, the best engineer i ever worked with were at least 40, and the best was 55+. I think software is a place where a selection occur whit ageing: if you're not that good and can't improve, you will get increasingly frustrated and either leave or get to a management post. If you are "good", you will at least stay at your level, but mostl likely improve with age. Average people like me stagnate and i can see myself decline if i don't do anything to retain my skills.
butterNaN 4y ago
Look into worker co-ops.

by mojuba 4y ago

vidanay 4y ago

Another literal 50+ greybeard here. I'll offer a counter example: In the Fortune 500 company I work for, we are absolutely FILLED with greybeards. I's say that the average age is pushing 40 and the average tenure with the company is 10+ with a significant percentage being 20+ y.o.e. (including me).

mojuba 4y ago
I see, but it can be explained by the aging management (middle or high or both) at your company. Correct?
- crustycoder 4y ago
  No.
quaffapint 4y ago
I came from a big bank with lots of graybeards to a small startup were I'm 10 years older than the oldest person (who's the cto). It's been fine here though a little awkward at times with contexts I don't know about. Not a big deal though. Now as I continue to get older, I do worry I'll have to go back to those mega companies when it's time to move on and I start to really look the age.
pizza234 4y ago
> we are absolutely FILLED with greybeards. I's say that the average age is pushing 40 and the average tenure with the company is 10+ Taking your observation in isolation, there are two implications: 1. that those 40+ years old were, in average, hired when they were in their 30s, when they weren't grey beards; 2. a possible factor that causes their long tenure is that they now struggle to find other jobs.
- rvba 4y ago
  Also people have to work somewhere.
abeppu 4y ago
Do you think different companies at different stages have different biases? mojuba's comment that age discrimination is initially investor driven might no longer apply at a fortune 500 company. Or perhaps other cultural factors (e.g. about the industry/domain) pull in a different direction?
sidlls 4y ago
Most Fortune 500 software jobs are poorly compensated line-of-business app building. Decent work for a certain sort (not speaking of intellect or ability, but personality and similar other factors), but hardly challenging or technically sophisticated for the most part
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
"Greybeard" scratches my ear as sexist.

lucasgonze 4y ago

I took the opposite path: after years of concealing my age as much as possible I grew out my beard, which is very much gray. I got positive results pretty quickly, though not how I expected. People were attracted to what they imagined was the depth of my experience. Not that this imagined depth isn't real, but they didn't usually investigate far enough to know whether it was real. The gray beard was all they needed.

mgkimsal 4y ago
I've had some grey hair since 17 - visibly noticeable by... 19 or 20. My dad was basically gray/white hair by early 40s, and I inherited that trait. It was certainly noticeable by my mid 20s, and probably both helped and hurt along the way in various business/job/work contexts. Never could grow a beard, so 'graybeard' has never been a literal issue for me. :) In my mid 30s, I could, at a distance, pass for late 40s or 50. As I've moved towards that milestone, I don't think there's been much of a change. That's not just me thinking that - I get told that now and then.
- tomrod 4y ago
  I've always had a baby face and didn't grow out my beard until into my mid 30s. Overnight change. Although not gray, I was no longer treated like a new hire by groups in the large corporation I worked in.
jmartrican 4y ago
Are you in the east coast by chance?

bgribble 4y ago

Same story. At about 40 I shaved my epic beard, took graduation dates off my resume and limited it to about the last 10 years of work. Fresh shave and haircut for any f2f interview. So far so good. Now I'm 51 and lucky enough to be able to seriously consider not taking another job after the current one runs its course (which may be a long time, I don't know). But if I do go out after another job I may invest in a few months of facials and spa treatments to get that maximally youthful look :)

nonzoomer200 4y ago
Younger than you but already affected by ageism due to long career, and I hate hate hate removing old, relevant experience but it seems necessary. Omitting a decade of serious experience while only in your 30s sucks. On the plus side they perceive you as Talent with Potential, or something. On the downside it means you get treated like a junior by some jackass Uncle Bob fan who has just a handful of years of real experience. It levels the playing field in a crappy way.
- jones1618 4y ago
  Add an Other Skills & Experience section at the end of your resume with relevant experience minus the dates. It'll be picked up by the keyword bots & maybe trigger curiosity from hiring managers who will bring you in just to ask about it. When asked, say "a few years ago I worked on ..." instead of giving dates. An employer hungry for those skills will likely not care that there isn't a date attached.
- ufmace 4y ago
  Writing a good resume is very much a skill. You always want to keep the length limited and focus on the most relevant parts of the most relevant experience. Anyone with a decently solid career probably has far too much experience to put it all on a resume that any hiring manager would actually read. I often like to write up for myself a "full" resume with plenty of details about everything, making it way too long, then tailor it as needed for any specific job I want to apply for by cutting out stuff less relevant for that specific position until it's short enough, like 2 pages max.

rbanffy 4y ago

I have more or less the same perception. My beard is grey, I'm getting bald (shaving keeps my hair below 1cm). People are still surprised when I say I'm 54. I wear geeky t-shirts and jeans. Ageism is real and some of the younglings treat me as someone whose knowledge is obsolete, only to be proven wrong. It's true I still remember my way around an Apple II and know what a 3278 was (and how they looked like) and some. One advantage we, The Elders, have is that we know not only how things got (and get, and will get) built, but we also know how they fail. Our current jobs were science fiction when we started, and we know the jobs of the younglings will be science fiction when they grow up. We seldom need more than five minutes to point out organizational issues that can cause a project to fail, and barely five more to list a couple actions to be taken to avert disaster - we don't have to figure it out - we just need to remember what we did. My long and colorful history is a feature, not a bug.

jerf 4y ago
"Ageism is real and some of the younglings treat me as someone whose knowledge is obsolete, only to be proven wrong." This meme is slowly dying, but let me do my part here to kick it along to death faster. Nothing here is intended to offend per se, because I consider everything I say here to be the natural order of things, and there's nothing wrong with it. Still, it's the truth. I'm in my mid-40s now. I've hired a lot of juniors over the years. Never once have I hired someone new and gone "Oh my god, they know so much, my job is at risk and I'm going obsolete!" No, what happen when I hire junior is that I look at where they are now, and where they need to be to be a fully functional member of the team, and kind of sigh and make a plan to try to get them there as quickly as possible, plotting a minimal path through the thicket of things necessary to be a functioning software engineer nowadays. Six months is generally a bare minimum time line for this. Sometimes it's more. And that's just to get to functional. A well-rounded engineer that I can plausibly just pass a project to and see them largely get it done correctly and without blowing their own or my foot off? Years. Years. And I just mean that from a technical perspective... it's yet more before I feel comfortable inserting them into the political layers. Again, not intended to be offensive. Everyone has to pass through this phase. Every mature programmer should expect to be mentoring like this; if you're in your 40s and haven't had to do this at all, take a careful look at your career, something's probably wrong. (I don't mean management; I mean mentorship.) There was one intern a few years ago who turned my head in that he had parity with me on a couple of interesting and unusual skills, but still... it was parity at best, not amazingly better than me. And while he had some amazing building skills for an intern I could see the skillset was still very, very lopsided and he needed a lot of work on the question of what to do, rather than just the doing of things. It's OK. That's normal. I'm not even sure how to hypothesize someone coming out of college with amazing skills in knowing exactly what to do. From what I see even when 20-year-old startup founders get this right it's a combination of mentorship from investors and sheer luck. I despair of even imagining how to teach this skill from anything other than experience, beyond simply sensitizing a student to the fact that it is something they should be looking at as they grow as an engineer. There was a brief window in the 1990s where the industry underwent a technological convulsion and switched away from expensive mainframes to commodity computers and the internet/web. In that brief window, which I was lucky enough to capture and ride, a fresh young whelpling who had spent the last couple of months fiddling with this newfound "web" thing could do some things that the mainframe folks couldn't. There were still plenty of lessons that could have been learned from the mainframe folks, but for whatever reason, be in the internet just not being there yet, an unbridgeable cultural gap between the hacker mindset and the IBM mindset, whatever reason, the communication and wisdom transfer just didn't happen. That hasn't happened since then and I see no prospect of it happening in the next 10 years, not because the next 10 years won't see change but because the people like me of that era have already ridden any number of waves since then and adapted and I don't see that sort of convulsive surprise happening again. The idea that someone in their 50s just has to be old and out of date is not just silly but downright ludicrous. Getting to "well rounded" in 2022 is something that will require you until your mid-30s minimum anymore. I think a lot of the ageism that still lives in the industry are people who are unskilled and unaware. They can't even perceive what it is they are missing, so they are incapable of recognizing the skill gap. Since a lot of the ageism probably resides in people who aren't even engineers, managers, recruiters, people who are for any number of reasons good and bad simply incapable of interacting with engineers and being able to assess their skill levels, it's a plausible guess.

jrochkind1 4y ago

I am approaching that age where I worry people are going to discriminate against me because of age -- I am lucky that I do look younger than I am (even with beard). But I'm wondering if I should edit my resume to make my age less apparent from it -- remove the earliest part of my career from my resume? I have the academic degrees I've earned on my resume -- remove the dates of them too?

ghaff 4y ago
There's definitely a school of thought that you should remove dates and trim older jobs. When I last switched jobs a number of years back a good friend of mine strongly advised doing so and I did. Though I ended up getting a job through a personal connection so I doubt anyone did much more than glance at my resume anyway. (And the company had quite a few relatively senior--as in older--people.

rotten 4y ago

I was having trouble finding a job. I dyed my beard back to my original hair color and had 4 offers within 2 weeks. Dyeing your beard feels disingenuous and smells a little funny at first, but it really works. People remarked that I: - Had lost weight - Looked less tired - Must be feeling better - You must be under so much less stress now - You look younger I look forward to retiring and letting it go gray again. For now I think I need to keep it at least partially colored instead of looking like santa claus.

willcipriano 4y ago
If you have a particularly stressful time at work you can stop dying it to visibly display your displeasure.
- kitd 4y ago
  Lol, like a mimic octopus or cuttlefish!
binkHN 4y ago
> I dyed my beard back to my original hair color and had 4 offers within 2 weeks. Well done! Good opening for a Tell HN post!

pjmlp 4y ago

Slowly approaching 50, I would say dyeing the hair also helps during the interview process. After the contract is signed, then whatever.

evilbob93 4y ago
Approaching 61. Got two offers this year. The current hot market seems to (temporarily) make ageism slightly less of a thing than it used to be. Probably losing the white pony tail a couple years ago helped too. Dying my hair is out of the question, the only thing that isn't gray on my head are my eyebrows. I did take my ID badge for my current job with blue hair, however.

HeckFeck 4y ago

Sorry to hear of these experiences, it should be that you get recognition when you devote a lifetime to a field. But I wonder if this is mostly a US-centric phenomenon. Or maybe it is a tribal mentality, I wonder if web devs of 20 years ago face the same problem with younger web devs today. Or a large amount of web devs considering everything and everyone who doesn't work in the browser to be stoneage. As an anecdote, I once worked with a gentleman twice my age who cut his teeth writing assembly for an obscure HP platform, and I had huge respect for him. And it was obvious that even though we were developing a modern full stack webapp in Python and React, he had an excellent mind for the tough engineering questions.

mojuba 4y ago
It was in Europe, and no I'm not a web dev. About 6-7 years ago I switched from systems programming in C/C++ to iOS, Android and some backend, but mostly iOS which is my favorite platform now. I did some web development years ago but never really liked or enjoyed it honestly. Web development is probably more fluid compared to other areas. Browsers evolve like crazy and make frameworks and other tech obsolete pretty fast. So keeping up here might be quite challenging for all ages I imagine.

seti0Cha 4y ago

Also a literal greybeard (mid 50s) and I haven't seen ageism. Not sure if it's because I'm on the east coast and it's different here or I'm just not aware of it. I've sort of been expecting to hit it, but instead I feel as though I get a lot of respect from younger developers and they often seek out my opinion on things. Maybe it's just luck, but there are a couple of things I try to do that may play a role. One is that I never try to pull rank on anyone or dismiss anyone's ideas or concerns. Respecting others' abilities and experiences makes it easy for them to return that respect as they are not feeling defensive. Another is I try not to be dismissive of whatever new tech or fads they may be invested in, but rather acknowledge that they are attempts to solve real problems and I can understand what they are trying to do, even if I think there are better solutions. I take a sort of exaggeratedly open-minded attitude in order to head off any assumption that I don't like their ideas because they are new. Finally, I'm quick to share my experience. Everybody likes war stories and if you always have a war story for every situation people will start to understand the value of experience. Of course humility is important in that. I share my mistakes more than my successes so as to avoid coming across as a pompous windbag. That's my experience anyway. Who knows, may just be that I've gotten lucky.

jones1618 4y ago
100% this. Ageism manifests as dismissiveness or intimidation. Keeping skills current & showing accomplishments negates the first and humility and being personable helps mitigate the second. Sometimes in an interview when I suspect the interviewer is uncomfortable with assessing "their Dad", I throw a lot of curiosity at them about their skills & career & ask their advice about the company or tech stack they use. That helps breakdown the "too old to learn & won't listen to me" stereotypes.
pjsg 4y ago
I'm also a literal greybeard (early 60s) on the east coast, and I haven't found this ageism to be a problem. Young companies are about "what can you do for me" and 40 years of experience gives me the intuition about architecture and implementation that you don't get without having lived through lots of failed projects! Also, with a long career, you probably have a number of significant successes under your belt, and, while past success does not guarantee future success, it appears that past failure is a strong indicator of future failure. New teams want people with a track record of success.

dominotw 4y ago

> I think the root cause of it is investors I am not sure if its just investors though. If you are hiring someone to do run of the mill crud/etl type jobs then a younger person is a better hire. I've noticed a marked drop in my energy levels as I've gotten older into my 40s. Weather is unethical or not is prbly an different issue but reasoning behind it makes perfect sense to me.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

I believe ageism is real. But I would blunt it a bit: I think engineers hire people "like them". That explains the ageism, sexism, racism.... I say that blunts it a bit because I think I don't blame engineers to look for someone like them — it comes easy, it is probably easier to judge someone who you feel shares your own life experiences. But yeah, some years back we interviewed a guy for the team who was about my age (early 50's at that time). I thought he was top notch. But a younger engineer on the team pushed hard to reject him for the role. Why? "I think he's a bad fit for the team." That was the only reason we could get for his rejection. Sure, just an anecdote. I see red flags now though when someone says "not a good fit" (whatever that means).

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I usually find when people discuss fit, it's helpful to ask specifically what behaviors indicated which personality traits that the co-worker is trying to filter out. Asking for precision also shifts the discussion from something general like fit to specific things like which traits is this company trying to select for, and whether or not the other interviewers agree that a behavior indicated a specific personality trait. I don't have studies to back this up, but I find personally it helps give an avenue for co-workers to argue against bigotry without accusing anyone of behaving in a bigoted away.
sodapopcan 4y ago
"Not a good fit" is a perfectly good reason not to hire someone, but not if you can't, or are unwilling, to define what you mean by it.
- jones1618 4y ago
  Exactly. Managers should insist that peer-reviewers give specific attributes or behaviors. Also, "cultural fit" questions can be casually ageist as hell. I was asked once (at 40 or so), "We like to skateboard around the office for fun. What do you like to do?" I sincerely believe it was (for the 20-something interviewer) an innocent, almost routine interview question. I diffused the question by saying that sounded like a blast but I prefer Nerf Blaster wars or pranking people by hijacking their wireless mouse or whatever. I got the job offer but I've been on other interviews where I aced the manager's and technical interviews but got shut down by a barely college graduate who clearly didn't think they'd have to work with "their Dad." Not much you can do about that.

willio58 4y ago

That’s funny, I believe I experienced ageism but on the other end of the age spectrum. I couldn’t figure out why I was making it so far in interviews but not getting the job. This happened for months. Then one day I decided to grow out my beard to look older. I’m 25. With my beard I rarely get carded, without it I always get carded. Same story as you, the first round of interviews came and my beard saved the day. Now once I reach a year 6 months at this company I’ll shave it ;)

smadsen 4y ago
Glad to meet someone else with this problem. People would talk to me as if I was not old enough to be taken seriously, even though I had been working professionally in the field since my 18th birthday. One time, I was told that I should be at the company for at least 6 months before offering an opinion. It's understandable when someone is just inexperienced, but by rendering a judgment on someone's expertise based on perceived age, I can't help but call it reverse ageism. Now closing in on 50 with my share of life experience (good and bad) and some gray hairs setting in, it has gotten better, although people often mistake me for being 10-15 years younger than I actually am.

neves 4y ago

After this post I think I'll paint my hair next time I search for a job.

Test0129 4y ago

> they prefer young entrepreneurs I am not a grey beard yet but I am getting there quickly. My time in the industry is they value youth because it is exploitable not because they're like-minded. A young person with few responsibilities, no kids, no house, perhaps not even a significant other is easier to get to stick to exploitative pager duty schedules, long nights, etc for little pay and a party once in a while. Older people tend to be more concerned with raw numbers such as salary and total comp which presents a problem for this kind of grifter. That being said despite having literal grey in my beard I have never had an issue getting a job. I keep my skills loosely up to date (I still don't follow the latest language trends) and know which industries I can move in. Most people age out into management and older ICs are hard to find beyond late 30s and early 40s.

anigbrowl 4y ago
Underrated analysis.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

Ageism in tech is like throwing a kick blind and seeing someone getting kicked and figuring that's the guy you kicked. Then 20 years later you get a kick in the butt and realise that was who you kicked.

codefreeordie 4y ago

Ageism in tech is super real. I was sitting at lunch the other day at my large tech company office when I overheard a wonderful conversation from the table behind me about the "kinds" of managers a team might have that included this snippet: "I mean, you could get someone midcareer, say age 25 or so, and they'll be really fiery and excited, but they won't know everything yet. But it means that you can figure it out. Or, I mean you could get someone super senior like 35, and then they'll be the expert but they'll be old and slow" Not only did this go entirely unchallenged, but everyone seemed fully in agreement. This is one example, but conversations like this that assume that by 35 or at most 40 you're all worn out and washed up are fairly common. Having started this job during COVID, I didn't realize how young everyone in my company is, but after this conversation, I realized that I only know one engineer over 40 here. (I know some managers that are over 40, but none that I know are yet 50.)

b20000 4y ago

what is the next thing to do? wear fluo color clothing and have some piercings and wear bracelets with lucky charms, and end every sentence with “far out bro”? like you say, we need to come together as a community and industry and oppose these and other forms of stealth discrimination. i’m wondering if the coding interviews are organized to facilitate discrimination by age.

kforo9n 4y ago

intrasight 4y ago

57M here and still love coding. Ageism is very real - but so is the tech shortage. So it's a good time to be a greybeard. I was at a Google event a few years back. A colleague (53M) expressed to a Google PM his interest in coming to work for Google. The PM said bluntly "Google doesn't hire people over 50". The employee average cost-benefit curve inverts at 40. At least that's what the beancounters will say.

wrs 4y ago
Considering that Google has lost (OK, settled) some high-profile age discrimination lawsuits over the years, that may not be an inaccurate statement, but it’s a pretty stupid move to say that to a prospective employee.
sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
Google is also the corporate manifestation of peterpan syndrome so i'm not surprised

wvh 4y ago

I'm not quite a graybeard yet – even though the first shades are starting to appear – but I have been working for about 24 years now. Frankly, lots of my middle-aged colleagues have been sitting on a chair doing the same thing for 20 years and have not kept up to date. Experience is important, as is being able to predict what approaches will get a project in the weeds. It's not necessary to chase the latest shiny thing, but some serious effort is required to stay up to date instead of immediately assuming ageism. Experience would be so much more valuable if you have something worthwhile to add to discussions about the merits and challenges of newer technologies of the last 5-10 years like for example Javascript frameworks or Kubernetes and other cloud and hybrid strategies.

xwowsersx 4y ago

Is there data to support the claim that more ageism occurs in this industry than others? I think it is probably true, but I'm wondering if there's any hard evidence. I suppose it's going to be pretty hard to get reliable data on this. We can get statistics on mean age vs other industries, but those numbers alone don't prove age discrimination.

biztos 4y ago

I’m also 50+ and I wonder how reliable it is to just “present younger” (which I do) because the hiring manager may be the gatekeeper of prejudice, and s/he knows your age. Is it really the “culture fit” i.e. do people feel like you’re their dad, or will it be a factor when they review your CV and see you are not only overqualified, but don’t know React? I agree with your suggestion and it’s one reason why I’m starting a consulting company. I figure when the chips are down, the bosses need the work done, and the Olds get that. We’ll see, I’m just starting, but I’d love to end up with a stable of 65-year-olds helping startups actually ship.

gonehome 4y ago

One thing I’ve always thought would be interesting is that age discrimination laws only protect people older than 40. That means you can legally discriminate against young people. If ageism is truly a thing it means that there exist old people that are undervalued by the market. Starting a company or having roles that are specifically 40+ only could be an interesting hiring advantage if that’s true. Especially if mentorship is part of the role. Also - from friends that teach at university, lots of young people don’t know what a file system is and can’t navigate basic files/folders or hierarchies. They’re confused by files opening in applications (these are CS freshman). A bit unrelated but a lot of the “old” knowledge remains extremely relevant especially when kids exposure to only ios abstracts relevant bits away.

robotnikman 4y ago

Where I work plenty of the developers here are what you would call 'greybeards'. I've always enjoyed talking to them and they have interesting stories to tell. It seems you run into ageism less when you look outside of VC ran companies, but that's based on anecdotes I've heard from others and just my observation.

mynameisash 4y ago

> I once figured I could improve my chances of getting a job if I shave my beard. When I was an SDE 2, I kept contributing (what I felt were) consistent, marked improvements to my team and our products, but I didn't get a promo. Then I let my beard grow out and I appeared a good deal older. Shortly thereafter, I got my senior promotion. Of course, there's no counterfactual. Maybe I just needed more time under my belt for my promo, or maybe other people were getting their well-deserved promotions before I got mine. But it felt like shedding that babyface helped me out back then. Maybe in a few years (I'm in my 40s now), I'll want to shave again to stay in the sweet spot appearance-wise.

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago

>Ageism in this industry is real. I think the root cause of it is investors, it's where the origins of this phenomenon are. It's a simple but profound statement. Ageism (and many other 'isms') would not exist if older people did not discriminate against other older people. Investors would typically be older people.

babycake 4y ago

What about your college degree on your resume? Don't you have to list the year you graduated? Even job portals that make everyone fill the damn web forms manually, it generally always asks when one graduated. From that they can deduce your age?

jmspring 4y ago

There is ageism for sure. That said, I've probably isolated myself from a lot of it because if a company boasts (as often happens at "work at a startup", etc type events) "we work hard, we play hard", "we are a family" - no. Tell me about what you are building, what you intend to deliver and how you are doing it. What one does in their private life is up to them and should not be tied to corporate culture. If the team isn't experienced and has to work more to achieve commitments - that is a management / hiring issue. I will certainly expand contributions as needed to help make things successful, but I will not give up my own life to backfill for poor management or hires - did that multiple times and doesn't gain you anything. That said, making sure junior members are set up for success and get help and mentoring and guidance needed is part of being a senior member. For me, that is part of my calculation when determining timelines and deliverables.

orwin 4y ago

This is really dumb, the best engineer i ever worked with were at least 40, and the best was 55+. I think software is a place where a selection occur whit ageing: if you're not that good and can't improve, you will get increasingly frustrated and either leave or get to a management post. If you are "good", you will at least stay at your level, but mostl likely improve with age. Average people like me stagnate and i can see myself decline if i don't do anything to retain my skills.

butterNaN 4y ago

Look into worker co-ops.