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A take on why there’s so much over 40 discrimination, and why I expect it to decline somewhat in the next decade: Imagine the crotchety (young) programmer you
by gemstones 3y ago
A take on why there’s so much over 40 discrimination, and why I expect it to decline somewhat in the next decade:
Imagine the crotchety (young) programmer you know. The guy who’s kind of a mild know-it-all, who gets disinvited from business meetings for being too abrupt, they guy you have to front with a good PM to talk to anyone external. Maybe a little autistic, perhaps undiagnosed; regardless, they seem to have trouble connecting and “getting” people.
Early CS - before it was well known that it would be a fast track to the upper middle class - was full of these people. Computers draws that personality type in. Limited interaction with others, working code wins, you can get lost in a math problem.
But we needed more programmers! And now, it’s well known that being a programmer is lucrative. So the younger generation is less full of people who really love computers and want to escape human interaction; they learned computers cause they’re smart, and want to make money. But they’re probably good with people too! Most people are.
Where does that leave the older generation? Over a certain age, you’re more likely to be the type that’s a bit hard to work with, swimming in a sea of graduates who have people skills now. And as you might expect, companies will pick the people with hard and soft skills given the choice. They don’t want to entertain the prickly guy who wants a math problem and a pizza slid under the door, if they have alternatives.
As the pool of devs widens, expect the age discrimination gap to narrow. Not go away, but narrow. People never really liked the no-social-skills aspect of CS nerdiness. They just tolerated it, for a time.
- sneed_chucker 3y agoMaybe. Sounds like a pet theory to me though. I have not found the over 40 engineers I've worked with to be like that. I've always felt that the ageism in tech has more to do with the fact that older workers generally have families, more savings, and more experience at different jobs so they can't be manipulated into being overworked the same way young and single people can.
- filoleg 3y ago> I have not found the over 40 engineers I've worked with to be like that. Keep the survivorship bias in mind. It would make sense within that per theory that the engineers in their 40s who have both hard skills are soft skills are the ones to be the most likely to stay employed. Which is why those ones you end up meeting would be more like that. And that would also align with the fact that many former engineers ended up leaving the field (whether voluntary or not) by that time in their life.
- devwastaken 3y agoNew grads don't have people skills. They're pushed harder into CS than ever. Humanities goes right out the window. Programming is significantly decreasing compensation, the market is full. Faang represents a small number of devs. The reason they want young workers is because they're naive and will do bad things out of arrogance to the harms.
- gemstones 3y agoSure they do! New grads absolutely have people skills. They make silly workplace norms mistakes too, but they generally aren’t clueless about how to get along with people like you see in a lot of programmers from earlier generations.
- jeo123 3y agoPeople skills arent exactly JUST get along with people. That would make Steve Jobs absolute failure in people skill in that niche criteria. He was genius at people skill in area like motivation and business negotiations. Vast majority grads have terrible people skill (40yrs in HR attest to that). Things like ghosting and quiet quitting and ultra job hopping are a thing with gen z and gen millenium. It is extremely rare in gen x and earlier.
- carbotaniuman 3y agoIt would be great if the companies who complained about ghosting and quite quoting quit ghosting and constructive dismissal, but the world isn't all perfect sadly.
- devwastaken 3y agoPerhaps grads from before 2012 years ago before everything took to the net and compsci was pushed harder. People are growing up on the internet legitimately believing that Twitter and Reddit are how you communicate with people.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoHumanities don't teach you people skills. They teach you about people.
- slyall 3y agoThis has happened before though. The dotcom boom ( approx 1995 - 2000 ) saw a lot of non-nerds getting into tech cause of the big bucks. The thing is many of them quit tech in the years afterwards, they didn't enjoy playing with computers all day and went off to other jobs that paid well. Many of the over-40s you are talking about are survivors of that group or went into computers during the slump right after. Even today the same thing is still happening. Plenty of 30 year olds boring with tech and want to become lumberjacks or farmers. Which might just entrench the situation.
- kitanata 3y ago[dead]
- dangus 3y agoI think this is a good theory that may have very little to do with whether or not HP systematically engaged in age discrimination independent of factors related to personality.
- gemstones 3y agoTrue - I expect this to be outweighed by other concerns, like the incentive for HP to shrink labor costs among its more expensive employees.
- naveen99 3y agoIf that were true wouldn’t you see more women in programming like law and medicine. No programming still is mostly the domain of INTJ/INTP personalities. People skills are largely irrelevant, especially in the age of remote work and AI.