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Ask HN: Do startups hire 50+ year old programmers?(US)

49 points by FredBrach 15y ago

kls 15y ago
Yes they do, as long as you keep up with the trends, one of the things that tends to happen is at a certain age, usually in the 30's many developers will decide to sunset. e.g they just stick with COBOL, Java, etc. It can be a good career choice, usually there is an apex where wages decline or stagnate for a 5-10 years and then they see their effective wage start to rise given that new personnel entering the field opt for other technologies and older peers leave the industry. Given that reality a good deal of older programmer choose to take that course. I don't think that age discrimination is as bad in the industry as people think it is. I think rather sun-setting at some point becomes too much of a draw for most and you also have those that defect to management. I know in my start-up experiences when I was young we used to look up to the older developers that took the effort to stay relevant. Personally, I would hire someone of any age if they are proficient and have passion to build something. I think there may be some organizations that may look at older developers and think well we can't get 80 hrs a week out of them, but I think they are the minority and I personally would not want to work for an organization that would expect 80hrs a week a standard course.
- hack_edu 15y ago
  I always frown a little when my older (by a dozen years or so) co-workers get frustrated when moving to new tech, like git. :( Too often they'll bristle at the mere suggestion that they should keep the dedicating an hour or two of their spare time each week/month to reading and learning new things. Its not hard, regardless of obligations outside of the office. You can't just sit back and rest on the stuff you learned 10 years ago...
  - hsuresh 15y ago
    Why should they do this in their spare time? If it is important to the business, shouldn't the employers provide time for their employees to learn new technologies?
    - jfoutz 15y ago
      There's nothing wrong with requireing your employer to do that. To me, it seems like a transition away from being an engineer to an employee. Keeping up with the latest and greatest, learning new stuff keeps you active in your profession. When you're passive about about that stuff, your job hunting prospects decline. In the worst case, you're literally totally dependent on that single employer, because there's nothing else you can do.
    - rgrieselhuber 15y ago
      Because the business will be able to find someone who is willing to learn in their spare time. Besides, the great thing about being a programmer is not that you have to learn new things but that you get to.
      - timr 15y ago
        "the business will be able to find someone who is willing to learn in their spare time. Besides, the great thing about being a programmer is not that you have to learn new things but that you get to." Huh. I love to learn new things, but I hate learning boring technologies that re-solve solved problems. Especially when the old, boring technologies are serving me well. If I could reclaim the hours I spent learning git (which is only a marginal net improvement over svn), I have a long backlog of CS papers about everything from image classification to distributed systems design. Those problems are interesting. Learning another version-control system is not interesting (and the same goes for: editors, make systems, debuggers, and to some extent, programming languages. I don't want to spend hundreds of hours learning another syntactic variant of Algol or Lisp unless I need it for something.) But now that I'm proficient with git, I can guarantee that some obnoxious fanboy is going to come along and force me to switch to some whizzy new version control system that promises to solve all my problems and give me a pony. It's the way of the world, but I'm still waiting for my pony. When I was younger, I'd get distracted by any flash in the pan. Now I'm more conservative about what I'll pick up. Maybe that kind of conservatism is part of what you're paying for when you hire an experienced employee. After all, someone who won't waste hundreds of developer hours switching your whole company to the newest flavor of version control (without sufficient justification for the cost) is a benefit to the bottom line.
  - crag 15y ago
    I'm 49 years old. Currently I write python, php, (and all the usual web scripting like js, html, css etc, etc) and c. I've always written c. But spanning my carrer (life) I've written Assembler, BASIC, Xbase, Pascal, COBOL, & Ada. I've worked on various database systems including DB2, Oracle, Sybase and straight betrieve. I've worked on various systems including (my very first HeathKit and TRS 80), Wang, Dec VAX, Netware, BeOS, IBM 360 and AS400's, most of the various UNIX's and of course all the popular OS's of today. I use Git. I also use SVN. And I even use CVS (if I must). This idea that us "older" programmers are resistant to change is ridiculous. If you want to get the "older guys" using Git explain why. I can't tell you how many times I hear younger programmers bashing other languages and tools. And rarely do they know what they are talking about. PS: Let me add; I'm in management now - translation- programmers work for me. But I still write code. With them. On the same projects. For several reasons: (1) I enjoy it. (2) I better understand what they are writing. (3) I like to say to clients "I wrote that". That feels good.
    - jelavich 15y ago
      I'm 49 also, and I still write C and Python. I also have a lot of experience of scaling things operationally, so we have many things to provide. I love learning the new things, if they help me do my job better - like git (HATE svn. HATE). I quickly can spot the fads and will look at them and wait (scala, erlang) for the right place to use them.
      - jnorthrop 15y ago
        > I quickly can spot the fads I'm 44 and this is a very under-rated skill that older developers bring to the table. And one that only experience can teach. The grand-parent posted mentioned it as well when he talks about younger programmers bashing other tools and languages but rarely know what they are talking about. I love hiring older developers for this reason. The problem is finding an older developer who 1) wants to continue to write code, 2) has kept up-to-date with their skills and 3) is looking for a job. That is a rarity indeed. Having just gone through the search for a new hire I can tell you there were plenty of older developers who applied that didn't have proper skills and none who kept up with technologies.
playhard 15y ago
Age does not matter. Skills matter. This is interesting. Have to lookup whether startups have already hired 50 plus year old guys? Maybe phd professors!
- seanmccann 15y ago
  Age would matter for a startup beyond just skills. Older hackers might not be able to "keep up" and "fit in" with many startups. Culture fit is really important, but being old doesn't automatically mean no fit. One interesting thing about a hacker being 50 is that they potentially have an empty nest (no kids), much like their 20s. In some cases they might be able to work "startup hours".
- pgbovine 15y ago
  i think if you're a 50+ year old tenured professor, your skills are probably not in line with what a start-up needs; you've spent 25+ years of your life optimizing for doing academic research and teaching, not sweating out the details of making product X work seamlessly on platform Y with quirk Z. some 50+ year old tenured professors co-found companies and serve in advisory roles, but i highly doubt that they're staying up late setting watchpoints in gdb and punching their monitors.
splitrocket 15y ago
Yes. I hire excellent people who are interested and interesting that fit into the culture of our company. Age/sex/race/gender/etc. are irrelevant.
MaggieL 15y ago
kls doesn't think age discrimination is as bad as it is. I'll wager he doesn't think gender discrimination is as bad as it is either. He's more likely to age than he is to change gender, so we'll check back with him in 30 years. It's kind of amusing to hear him think of COBOL and Java in the same breath; I've worked extensively with both. Not at the same time, though. :-) He is on target in saying keeping your skillset fresh is key. Like the Red Queen, it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.
- kls 15y ago
  I'm old. I have almost 20 years in the industry.
aeeeee 15y ago
How much do families fit in the with culture of startup? Would it be odd for an employee to have to leave in the middle of the day to pick up sick kids at school? Will you be a "good fit" if sometimes your family responsibilities trump work. What is your desire and inner motivation at 50? It's probably a lot different than the 20yr and 30yr old startup culture. I would say if you are 50 yr old that fits in with the younger culture and have the necessary skills you will do just fine. The reality is though that you are probably at a much different place than the majority of startup employees. You have probably see enough to know how to best spend your time and your priorities are likely different than your peers. The guy doing the hiring knows all of this and where he won't directly use age as a factor in hiring he will take these other factors into consideration. good luck.
- tommi 15y ago
  If you are 50 years old, your kids are likely to be old enough to get to home by themselves. Personally I'd hate to work in a place where it would be considered odd to take care of some private business during the day every once in a while. Stretching and leeway goes both ways.
  - MattGrommes 15y ago
    That's not as true any more. I know a number of couples that "started late" and will be in their fifties just as their kids enter the ~10+ year old age range where after-school activities ramp up yet the kid can't drive. People having kids later is probably going to be another of those slow social changes we'll all have to adjust to.
  - mgkimsal 15y ago
    Divorce happens. People remarry. Many people in their 40s and 50s have toddlers or young kids.
- joezydeco 15y ago
  The fit depends on the makeup of the CEO and the management he has chosen. Regardless, you're going to have to work twice as hard as most of the others in the room. It's easy to walk out the door at 5pm if your work is done. It's not so easy when a crunch is going on and you have an external commitment to make. Nobody likes to look up and see you putting your coat on, believe me. If the CEO understands, it's one thing. If you have a CEO that says "you need to risk your marriage to make this company succeed" (and yes, I've actually heard this), then you know where you fit in. Unfortunately, you don't learn most of this until you're already in. If you find during interviews that the CEO has kids of his own, that's a good sign.
jroseattle 15y ago
I care about quality output, pure and simple. Productivity in our technology stack is what I'm looking for in candidates. I've encountered basically two types of programmers who are 50+ (my guess on their age, based on resume dates). Those who (still) possess that curiosity to learn and the drive to create. They may not be completely current with every late-breaking technology (show me anyone who really does, for that matter), but they embrace change and strive for improvement. They are the ones that make you forget about age -- young, old or somewhere in between. And then there are those who seem like they walked in with their high-school letterman's jacket on, hanging on something they did years and years ago -- and having trouble transitioning to today's world. While many people associate those 50 and older as "seniors", not everyone maintains senior-level status in this business. As we all age, we would do well to remember to rely on our natural instincts for curiosity and learning to keep the fires stoked and remain relevant in an industry that will continue to change for years to come.
- hga 15y ago
  I hope you remember there age, or more specifically what comes with serious experience, when they e.g. look at the symptoms of a bug and say "It's going to be there" (in the code) and are right more often than not. That's something I achieved in C/C++, but only after, say, a decade and a half of working with them. (And this does translate to newer stuff where no one can have that much experience, although of course not as well). Or take architecture. I know I've done a good job there when mine solves problems I didn't consciously anticipate. Again, that took nearly 2 decades from when I first started programming including a lot of reading on good software design, starting in that first year of programming ('77-8) and never stopping. Heck, the older you are, the more time you've had to read and grok the classics. Hmmm, to finish with a riff on some other observations in this discussion, the normal, average outcome of a startup is failure. Perhaps one should consider non-normal approaches to staffing, like recruiting one or more grey-beards of the right sort who can save you days, weeks, even man-months of effort on individual things because of their experience. To paraphrase Scott Adams, sometimes you have the option of working harder or smarter. The latter frequently wins.
temphn 15y ago
Here is an honest answer that you won't hear from many others. Startups are not the best option for 50 year olds. Most 50 year olds demand high salaries, aren't willing to work long hours (let alone nights and weekends), are far less familiar with new technologies and less willing to learn, and are much more cynical than 20 somethings. The risk, uncertainty, and low structure environment of a startup is just a bad fit for the age group in general. Our society hasn't yet adapted to the fact that as people get older in technology, they get less competent but demand higher and higher salaries due to their increasing fixed costs (mortgage, etc.). Those who will argue with you about the above facts want to eat their cake and keep it too, like the women who want to have kids and pregnancy and a social life but also want to make it big at a high tech startup. People do not want to acknowledge that tradeoffs exist: that women with young children can't put in long hours or that old folks just aren't as plastic and supple. Some engineers age like Ken Ritchie, and stay sharp. Some go into management or do consulting on legacy systems. Those are all legit options. A 50 something should have enough savings to bankroll his own startup; that too is a legit option. But working at a YC-style startup is not likely to be a good fit.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Our society hasn't adapted to the fact that people get less competent and unjustifiably more expensive with age because it isn't true. People who get less competent get less competent; people who demand unjustifiable compensation demand unjustifiable compensation. Some of those people are 50+. Some of them are 25. Some 20-somethings code for 2 years, write an O'Reilly book, and then reposition themselves as "architects". So many young people did this with the title "CTO" that the term "CTO" got tainted. This is something I was taught in 3rd grade, but apparently hasn't percolated into the public school system, so we're having to teach it to adults at great expense: one needs to be vigilant about prejudice. Or, in some cases not, because one of the subtexts behind ageism is that talent is getting more and more expensive, and firms want to avoid engaging with that reality. At least 21 year olds come bundled with the pretense of inexperience, so you can pay them 40% of scale. If I sound self-righteous about this, I apologize; I'm really not upset by it, because it is one of the more easily exploitable market inefficiencies our industry cultivates. You guys pay for the "Rails programmer" who foreaches through N+1 queries because they don't grok SQL joins; I'll pick up the 50 year olds who've shipped Lisp and written RISC assembly.
tptacek 15y ago
We did. Age wasn't a factor in the discussion. If you can play, we want you in the game.
vaksel 15y ago
some? yes most? You won't get hired, because you'll be seen as a bad cultural fit for the company. Only real way to get in as someone that old, is if you are going for the position of a CTO
- tptacek 15y ago
  I wonder how many of the people on this thread who share this opinion have started successful companies.
ziyadb 15y ago
Companies in general rarely hire older employees exclusively for their technical ability. The typical 50 year old programmer has worked at numerous organizations, with dozens of teams, using at least as many technologies. This directly contributes to the development of non-technical skills such as communication skills, management skills, insight, and stronger perception. They're rarely oblivious to these skills (as demonstrated by the relatively low numbers of older professionals selling themselves as "programmers").
- devs1010 15y ago
  I find this not necessarily true at my company, in fact the oldest people in the engineering department are exclusively developers where the managers tend to be younger or the same age as them. This may depend on region, as well, the area I live in now is rather different than Silicon Valley where I think people wouldn't stick around for years and years as "just a programmer" but in lower-cost, slower-pace areas, I think programming is often just another job to people and its something that people will just continue to do for their entire career.
sgricci 15y ago
When I've hired people, while working as an engineering lead at a startup, It's never been about age, it's been about skills + personality. Out of a development team of around 10 people, I'd say 2 were >= 50 years old, a few 30 somethings and the rest around 20-25.
devs1010 15y ago
I don't work for a startup but just wanted to comment since I work with a lot of older developers, one who must be well into his sixties is rather interesting as, while he does have his spots where he seems a bit stuck in the past, is constantly trying to inject new technologies into the organization. We're a primarily java shop and he writes a lot of scripts in Ruby and always wants to bring more ruby into projects. I also know he has probably more of a passion for developing software (personal projects) than some of the other developers, who are younger (but still much older than me). I think its really just based on the person. If they really love building software they will keep up at any age because they see the benefit in their own projects.
HarrietTubgirl 15y ago
Sure, but here are some prejudices people will have about you going into an interview: - You don't want to work enough (~80hr/weeks). - You aren't familiar with new technologies or languages, and aren't curious enough to learn. - You think slow, and don't have the ability to push stuff out the door quickly. - You want a senior position as an "architect" or "senior engineer" instead of being an IC like everyone else. - You want a bigger salary than everyone else. - It's going to be hard for people to relate to you and communicate with you. If you can fight against all of those, go for it.
xarien 15y ago
Speaking as a founder, yes I would. I'd also fire one just as quick. I'm of the mindset that both employers and employees need to be flexible with one another. I may need you to pick up technologies you're not comfortable with and you may need spend your early evenings with your family. I may need you to work 60+ hours on a given week and you may need to work some of that on off hours. It's a give and take situation with any startup employment. What's objective is what can you deliver and can I obtain a positive ROI from hiring you?
FirstSow 15y ago
Youth is not a skill. I don't hire green college grads. And I look at anyone with less than 10 years of experience with suspicion. Knowing Ruby or Scala or whatever syntax is fine, but it's far less important than the underlying skills: OO design, distributed systems, threading... Specific languages and frameworks come and go. Many of the twenty somethings don't really understand that. As for working 80 hour weeks, you're fooling yourself if you think people of any age can do that productively for an extended period of time. Plenty of research exists on that topic. The key to hiring is to hire only A players who will be highly productive and produce quality code. In my experience A players are not twenty somethings. Do you think Delta Force recruits green beans fresh out of boot camp? Absolutely not. They recruit from the Rangers and Special Forces. Of course we can't all hire A players. But I can.
- hga 15y ago
  Actually, I like hiring one or so nearly green college grads of the right sort, who are willing to be mentored. As long as they are self-directed, can start working given basic directions and then ask you the right questions (my favorite example from a guy who'd only done C++: "where is new in C?" "ah, in C we malloc...."), they can be very productive and follow your vision. And as they learn, help to refine it. I believe in trying to balance your team. A very few green apprentices (too many take too much time), enough seriously experienced masters (you're not likely to get many) and then journeymen in the middle, all of these aspiring to reach higher levels.
deleted 15y ago
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- kls 15y ago
  You'll be too expensive. Senior iPhone dev's are commanding $120-140k. Many only have 3 years experience on the platform. For some it is their first platform. That's close to the top of the industry pay. You won't fit in. If so I would suspect some serious arrogance and ego on the part of the company. Most of the start-ups that I have been part of have viewed older members with reverence for their experiences. 90% of your experience will just be in the way of what needs to get done. This is illogical, 90% of what we do is reinvent the wheel in the next platform, we are currently reinventing the mainframe-> desktop -> web -> mobile wheel. A lot of the current hot start-ups are just building web solutions around concepts that where available on the desktop. Albeit with some innovations, but there where accounting systems before mint.com, a developer that has 20 years in accounting software experience, I assure you, is not going to get in the way.

49 points by FredBrach 15y ago

kls 15y ago

Yes they do, as long as you keep up with the trends, one of the things that tends to happen is at a certain age, usually in the 30's many developers will decide to sunset. e.g they just stick with COBOL, Java, etc. It can be a good career choice, usually there is an apex where wages decline or stagnate for a 5-10 years and then they see their effective wage start to rise given that new personnel entering the field opt for other technologies and older peers leave the industry. Given that reality a good deal of older programmer choose to take that course. I don't think that age discrimination is as bad in the industry as people think it is. I think rather sun-setting at some point becomes too much of a draw for most and you also have those that defect to management. I know in my start-up experiences when I was young we used to look up to the older developers that took the effort to stay relevant. Personally, I would hire someone of any age if they are proficient and have passion to build something. I think there may be some organizations that may look at older developers and think well we can't get 80 hrs a week out of them, but I think they are the minority and I personally would not want to work for an organization that would expect 80hrs a week a standard course.

hack_edu 15y ago
I always frown a little when my older (by a dozen years or so) co-workers get frustrated when moving to new tech, like git. :( Too often they'll bristle at the mere suggestion that they should keep the dedicating an hour or two of their spare time each week/month to reading and learning new things. Its not hard, regardless of obligations outside of the office. You can't just sit back and rest on the stuff you learned 10 years ago...
- hsuresh 15y ago
  Why should they do this in their spare time? If it is important to the business, shouldn't the employers provide time for their employees to learn new technologies?
  - jfoutz 15y ago
    There's nothing wrong with requireing your employer to do that. To me, it seems like a transition away from being an engineer to an employee. Keeping up with the latest and greatest, learning new stuff keeps you active in your profession. When you're passive about about that stuff, your job hunting prospects decline. In the worst case, you're literally totally dependent on that single employer, because there's nothing else you can do.
  - rgrieselhuber 15y ago
    Because the business will be able to find someone who is willing to learn in their spare time. Besides, the great thing about being a programmer is not that you have to learn new things but that you get to.
    - timr 15y ago
      "the business will be able to find someone who is willing to learn in their spare time. Besides, the great thing about being a programmer is not that you have to learn new things but that you get to." Huh. I love to learn new things, but I hate learning boring technologies that re-solve solved problems. Especially when the old, boring technologies are serving me well. If I could reclaim the hours I spent learning git (which is only a marginal net improvement over svn), I have a long backlog of CS papers about everything from image classification to distributed systems design. Those problems are interesting. Learning another version-control system is not interesting (and the same goes for: editors, make systems, debuggers, and to some extent, programming languages. I don't want to spend hundreds of hours learning another syntactic variant of Algol or Lisp unless I need it for something.) But now that I'm proficient with git, I can guarantee that some obnoxious fanboy is going to come along and force me to switch to some whizzy new version control system that promises to solve all my problems and give me a pony. It's the way of the world, but I'm still waiting for my pony. When I was younger, I'd get distracted by any flash in the pan. Now I'm more conservative about what I'll pick up. Maybe that kind of conservatism is part of what you're paying for when you hire an experienced employee. After all, someone who won't waste hundreds of developer hours switching your whole company to the newest flavor of version control (without sufficient justification for the cost) is a benefit to the bottom line.
- crag 15y ago
  I'm 49 years old. Currently I write python, php, (and all the usual web scripting like js, html, css etc, etc) and c. I've always written c. But spanning my carrer (life) I've written Assembler, BASIC, Xbase, Pascal, COBOL, & Ada. I've worked on various database systems including DB2, Oracle, Sybase and straight betrieve. I've worked on various systems including (my very first HeathKit and TRS 80), Wang, Dec VAX, Netware, BeOS, IBM 360 and AS400's, most of the various UNIX's and of course all the popular OS's of today. I use Git. I also use SVN. And I even use CVS (if I must). This idea that us "older" programmers are resistant to change is ridiculous. If you want to get the "older guys" using Git explain why. I can't tell you how many times I hear younger programmers bashing other languages and tools. And rarely do they know what they are talking about. PS: Let me add; I'm in management now - translation- programmers work for me. But I still write code. With them. On the same projects. For several reasons: (1) I enjoy it. (2) I better understand what they are writing. (3) I like to say to clients "I wrote that". That feels good.
  - jelavich 15y ago
    I'm 49 also, and I still write C and Python. I also have a lot of experience of scaling things operationally, so we have many things to provide. I love learning the new things, if they help me do my job better - like git (HATE svn. HATE). I quickly can spot the fads and will look at them and wait (scala, erlang) for the right place to use them.
    - jnorthrop 15y ago
      > I quickly can spot the fads I'm 44 and this is a very under-rated skill that older developers bring to the table. And one that only experience can teach. The grand-parent posted mentioned it as well when he talks about younger programmers bashing other tools and languages but rarely know what they are talking about. I love hiring older developers for this reason. The problem is finding an older developer who 1) wants to continue to write code, 2) has kept up-to-date with their skills and 3) is looking for a job. That is a rarity indeed. Having just gone through the search for a new hire I can tell you there were plenty of older developers who applied that didn't have proper skills and none who kept up with technologies.

playhard 15y ago

Age does not matter. Skills matter. This is interesting. Have to lookup whether startups have already hired 50 plus year old guys? Maybe phd professors!

seanmccann 15y ago
Age would matter for a startup beyond just skills. Older hackers might not be able to "keep up" and "fit in" with many startups. Culture fit is really important, but being old doesn't automatically mean no fit. One interesting thing about a hacker being 50 is that they potentially have an empty nest (no kids), much like their 20s. In some cases they might be able to work "startup hours".
pgbovine 15y ago
i think if you're a 50+ year old tenured professor, your skills are probably not in line with what a start-up needs; you've spent 25+ years of your life optimizing for doing academic research and teaching, not sweating out the details of making product X work seamlessly on platform Y with quirk Z. some 50+ year old tenured professors co-found companies and serve in advisory roles, but i highly doubt that they're staying up late setting watchpoints in gdb and punching their monitors.

splitrocket 15y ago

Yes. I hire excellent people who are interested and interesting that fit into the culture of our company. Age/sex/race/gender/etc. are irrelevant.

MaggieL 15y ago

kls doesn't think age discrimination is as bad as it is. I'll wager he doesn't think gender discrimination is as bad as it is either. He's more likely to age than he is to change gender, so we'll check back with him in 30 years. It's kind of amusing to hear him think of COBOL and Java in the same breath; I've worked extensively with both. Not at the same time, though. :-) He is on target in saying keeping your skillset fresh is key. Like the Red Queen, it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.

kls 15y ago
I'm old. I have almost 20 years in the industry.

aeeeee 15y ago

How much do families fit in the with culture of startup? Would it be odd for an employee to have to leave in the middle of the day to pick up sick kids at school? Will you be a "good fit" if sometimes your family responsibilities trump work. What is your desire and inner motivation at 50? It's probably a lot different than the 20yr and 30yr old startup culture. I would say if you are 50 yr old that fits in with the younger culture and have the necessary skills you will do just fine. The reality is though that you are probably at a much different place than the majority of startup employees. You have probably see enough to know how to best spend your time and your priorities are likely different than your peers. The guy doing the hiring knows all of this and where he won't directly use age as a factor in hiring he will take these other factors into consideration. good luck.

tommi 15y ago
If you are 50 years old, your kids are likely to be old enough to get to home by themselves. Personally I'd hate to work in a place where it would be considered odd to take care of some private business during the day every once in a while. Stretching and leeway goes both ways.
- MattGrommes 15y ago
  That's not as true any more. I know a number of couples that "started late" and will be in their fifties just as their kids enter the ~10+ year old age range where after-school activities ramp up yet the kid can't drive. People having kids later is probably going to be another of those slow social changes we'll all have to adjust to.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  Divorce happens. People remarry. Many people in their 40s and 50s have toddlers or young kids.
joezydeco 15y ago
The fit depends on the makeup of the CEO and the management he has chosen. Regardless, you're going to have to work twice as hard as most of the others in the room. It's easy to walk out the door at 5pm if your work is done. It's not so easy when a crunch is going on and you have an external commitment to make. Nobody likes to look up and see you putting your coat on, believe me. If the CEO understands, it's one thing. If you have a CEO that says "you need to risk your marriage to make this company succeed" (and yes, I've actually heard this), then you know where you fit in. Unfortunately, you don't learn most of this until you're already in. If you find during interviews that the CEO has kids of his own, that's a good sign.

jroseattle 15y ago

I care about quality output, pure and simple. Productivity in our technology stack is what I'm looking for in candidates. I've encountered basically two types of programmers who are 50+ (my guess on their age, based on resume dates). Those who (still) possess that curiosity to learn and the drive to create. They may not be completely current with every late-breaking technology (show me anyone who really does, for that matter), but they embrace change and strive for improvement. They are the ones that make you forget about age -- young, old or somewhere in between. And then there are those who seem like they walked in with their high-school letterman's jacket on, hanging on something they did years and years ago -- and having trouble transitioning to today's world. While many people associate those 50 and older as "seniors", not everyone maintains senior-level status in this business. As we all age, we would do well to remember to rely on our natural instincts for curiosity and learning to keep the fires stoked and remain relevant in an industry that will continue to change for years to come.

hga 15y ago
I hope you remember there age, or more specifically what comes with serious experience, when they e.g. look at the symptoms of a bug and say "It's going to be there" (in the code) and are right more often than not. That's something I achieved in C/C++, but only after, say, a decade and a half of working with them. (And this does translate to newer stuff where no one can have that much experience, although of course not as well). Or take architecture. I know I've done a good job there when mine solves problems I didn't consciously anticipate. Again, that took nearly 2 decades from when I first started programming including a lot of reading on good software design, starting in that first year of programming ('77-8) and never stopping. Heck, the older you are, the more time you've had to read and grok the classics. Hmmm, to finish with a riff on some other observations in this discussion, the normal, average outcome of a startup is failure. Perhaps one should consider non-normal approaches to staffing, like recruiting one or more grey-beards of the right sort who can save you days, weeks, even man-months of effort on individual things because of their experience. To paraphrase Scott Adams, sometimes you have the option of working harder or smarter. The latter frequently wins.

temphn 15y ago

Here is an honest answer that you won't hear from many others. Startups are not the best option for 50 year olds. Most 50 year olds demand high salaries, aren't willing to work long hours (let alone nights and weekends), are far less familiar with new technologies and less willing to learn, and are much more cynical than 20 somethings. The risk, uncertainty, and low structure environment of a startup is just a bad fit for the age group in general. Our society hasn't yet adapted to the fact that as people get older in technology, they get less competent but demand higher and higher salaries due to their increasing fixed costs (mortgage, etc.). Those who will argue with you about the above facts want to eat their cake and keep it too, like the women who want to have kids and pregnancy and a social life but also want to make it big at a high tech startup. People do not want to acknowledge that tradeoffs exist: that women with young children can't put in long hours or that old folks just aren't as plastic and supple. Some engineers age like Ken Ritchie, and stay sharp. Some go into management or do consulting on legacy systems. Those are all legit options. A 50 something should have enough savings to bankroll his own startup; that too is a legit option. But working at a YC-style startup is not likely to be a good fit.

tptacek 15y ago
Our society hasn't adapted to the fact that people get less competent and unjustifiably more expensive with age because it isn't true. People who get less competent get less competent; people who demand unjustifiable compensation demand unjustifiable compensation. Some of those people are 50+. Some of them are 25. Some 20-somethings code for 2 years, write an O'Reilly book, and then reposition themselves as "architects". So many young people did this with the title "CTO" that the term "CTO" got tainted. This is something I was taught in 3rd grade, but apparently hasn't percolated into the public school system, so we're having to teach it to adults at great expense: one needs to be vigilant about prejudice. Or, in some cases not, because one of the subtexts behind ageism is that talent is getting more and more expensive, and firms want to avoid engaging with that reality. At least 21 year olds come bundled with the pretense of inexperience, so you can pay them 40% of scale. If I sound self-righteous about this, I apologize; I'm really not upset by it, because it is one of the more easily exploitable market inefficiencies our industry cultivates. You guys pay for the "Rails programmer" who foreaches through N+1 queries because they don't grok SQL joins; I'll pick up the 50 year olds who've shipped Lisp and written RISC assembly.

tptacek 15y ago

We did. Age wasn't a factor in the discussion. If you can play, we want you in the game.

vaksel 15y ago

some? yes most? You won't get hired, because you'll be seen as a bad cultural fit for the company. Only real way to get in as someone that old, is if you are going for the position of a CTO

tptacek 15y ago
I wonder how many of the people on this thread who share this opinion have started successful companies.

ziyadb 15y ago

Companies in general rarely hire older employees exclusively for their technical ability. The typical 50 year old programmer has worked at numerous organizations, with dozens of teams, using at least as many technologies. This directly contributes to the development of non-technical skills such as communication skills, management skills, insight, and stronger perception. They're rarely oblivious to these skills (as demonstrated by the relatively low numbers of older professionals selling themselves as "programmers").

devs1010 15y ago
I find this not necessarily true at my company, in fact the oldest people in the engineering department are exclusively developers where the managers tend to be younger or the same age as them. This may depend on region, as well, the area I live in now is rather different than Silicon Valley where I think people wouldn't stick around for years and years as "just a programmer" but in lower-cost, slower-pace areas, I think programming is often just another job to people and its something that people will just continue to do for their entire career.

sgricci 15y ago

When I've hired people, while working as an engineering lead at a startup, It's never been about age, it's been about skills + personality. Out of a development team of around 10 people, I'd say 2 were >= 50 years old, a few 30 somethings and the rest around 20-25.

devs1010 15y ago

I don't work for a startup but just wanted to comment since I work with a lot of older developers, one who must be well into his sixties is rather interesting as, while he does have his spots where he seems a bit stuck in the past, is constantly trying to inject new technologies into the organization. We're a primarily java shop and he writes a lot of scripts in Ruby and always wants to bring more ruby into projects. I also know he has probably more of a passion for developing software (personal projects) than some of the other developers, who are younger (but still much older than me). I think its really just based on the person. If they really love building software they will keep up at any age because they see the benefit in their own projects.

HarrietTubgirl 15y ago

Sure, but here are some prejudices people will have about you going into an interview: - You don't want to work enough (~80hr/weeks). - You aren't familiar with new technologies or languages, and aren't curious enough to learn. - You think slow, and don't have the ability to push stuff out the door quickly. - You want a senior position as an "architect" or "senior engineer" instead of being an IC like everyone else. - You want a bigger salary than everyone else. - It's going to be hard for people to relate to you and communicate with you. If you can fight against all of those, go for it.

xarien 15y ago

Speaking as a founder, yes I would. I'd also fire one just as quick. I'm of the mindset that both employers and employees need to be flexible with one another. I may need you to pick up technologies you're not comfortable with and you may need spend your early evenings with your family. I may need you to work 60+ hours on a given week and you may need to work some of that on off hours. It's a give and take situation with any startup employment. What's objective is what can you deliver and can I obtain a positive ROI from hiring you?

FirstSow 15y ago

Youth is not a skill. I don't hire green college grads. And I look at anyone with less than 10 years of experience with suspicion. Knowing Ruby or Scala or whatever syntax is fine, but it's far less important than the underlying skills: OO design, distributed systems, threading... Specific languages and frameworks come and go. Many of the twenty somethings don't really understand that. As for working 80 hour weeks, you're fooling yourself if you think people of any age can do that productively for an extended period of time. Plenty of research exists on that topic. The key to hiring is to hire only A players who will be highly productive and produce quality code. In my experience A players are not twenty somethings. Do you think Delta Force recruits green beans fresh out of boot camp? Absolutely not. They recruit from the Rangers and Special Forces. Of course we can't all hire A players. But I can.

hga 15y ago
Actually, I like hiring one or so nearly green college grads of the right sort, who are willing to be mentored. As long as they are self-directed, can start working given basic directions and then ask you the right questions (my favorite example from a guy who'd only done C++: "where is new in C?" "ah, in C we malloc...."), they can be very productive and follow your vision. And as they learn, help to refine it. I believe in trying to balance your team. A very few green apprentices (too many take too much time), enough seriously experienced masters (you're not likely to get many) and then journeymen in the middle, all of these aspiring to reach higher levels.

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kls 15y ago
You'll be too expensive. Senior iPhone dev's are commanding $120-140k. Many only have 3 years experience on the platform. For some it is their first platform. That's close to the top of the industry pay. You won't fit in. If so I would suspect some serious arrogance and ego on the part of the company. Most of the start-ups that I have been part of have viewed older members with reverence for their experiences. 90% of your experience will just be in the way of what needs to get done. This is illogical, 90% of what we do is reinvent the wheel in the next platform, we are currently reinventing the mainframe-> desktop -> web -> mobile wheel. A lot of the current hot start-ups are just building web solutions around concepts that where available on the desktop. Albeit with some innovations, but there where accounting systems before mint.com, a developer that has 20 years in accounting software experience, I assure you, is not going to get in the way.