10 ms·
Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hindsightbias 3y agoAnti-ageism is the affirmative action for tech workers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- meltek 3y agohttps://archive.is/GYrTa https://archive.is/GYrTa
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slibhb 3y ago[flagged]
- HumblyTossed 3y agoI'm not any "dumber". I'm a much better dev at 50 than I was at 30.
- slibhb 3y ago[flagged]
- Kluggy 3y agoIQ is a meaningless measurement. You can be way more effective regardless of how your IQ changes over time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HumblyTossed 3y agoI had plenty to spare.
- nvy 3y agoDo you have any reputable research that shows people produce better-quality work in their 20s vs say, their 40s or 50s?
- slibhb 3y agoVirtually every genius is most productive before 40, usually before 30. Counterexamples exist but are rare.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoOften has to do with family obligations, they are a lovable distraction.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Kluggy 3y agoOur industry isn't powered by the rare genius, but by the magnitude of line coders that the best impact they can do is just not cause issues as they develop the next version that adds feature x and y promised by some sales engineer to a big client. Sure, by 40 you're not likely to change the world. But in your 20's, you're not likely to change the world either. It's a long shot. Focusing on the fact that the long shot odds gets worse as a reason to not hire people just doesn't make sense.
- fendrak 3y agoBefore we age, we lack experience, context, produce less useful work per hour worked, and get paid less. Legality aside, isn't it rational to discriminate against younger people?
- slibhb 3y agoYes, there are valid reasons to discriminate against young people. (Being paid less isn't one of them though, that's a point in their favor).
- renewiltord 3y agoYes, dude, that's why it's legal. What you've done is show that despite the symmetry, one is legal and one isn't.
- endisneigh 3y agoI don’t think this is the retort you were intending.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- johnny99k 3y agoThat's why it's better to start consulting as you get older. Much less discrimination. We have 65+ year old consultants/developers at our company.
- mulmen 3y agoAny suggestions on how to actually do this? How do I get started? Do I moonlight?
- gostintheshell 3y agoI'd suggest starting with being around the interfaces between orgs.. Anywhere you can put your head down and work for days without talking to other companies is a luxury to indulge in sparingly if you are insuring for future employment as not the cheapest labor in not the cheapest land.
- mulmen 3y agoI don’t understand. How do I transition from a FTE at a corporation to a contractor? How do I get the first contract?
- pojzon 3y agoIn most cases its "by having previous connections" or "pure luck". If it would be easy - everyone would be doing consunlting coz it pays way better and work-life balance is also better.
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoIs work life balance really better when you have to worry bout finding your next gig and also that everything’s on you (don’t have a team/others to fall back on)?
- pojzon 3y ago
- qpingo 3y ago[dead]
- paxys 3y agoThe article calls it an "open secret" in the industry, but it isn't even much of a secret. Most companies have explicit "manage up or manage out" policies for engineers, which means that if you have been at a certain level for too many years you get fired and replaced by someone younger. They say you need to work hard and get promoted to senior staff/principal/director/VP, but then the promo budget says only 2 people in the org can get promoted to those ranks every year. So what about everyone else?
- antisthenes 3y ago> So what about everyone else? They probably just move laterally to another tech company with a decent pay bump. Not the worst outcome.
- paxys 3y agoDoesn't quite work as you'd expect if you are 50+ and applying as an SDE.
- 77pt77 3y agoNo. They get kicked out of the field. Like someone said, it's an open secret.
- panzagl 3y agoDepends on how you define 'the field'- if you mean SV cutting edge unicorn selling ad stuff, then yes. If you include some place like Lockheed Martin or Northrup Grumman doing boring non-cutting edge stuff like aerospace or signal analysis, then no.
- 77pt77 3y agoOf all the companies you chose those 2? Curiously I was specifically thinking of people that worked in LM. One worked there for decades, didn't want to manage people and they just kicked him to the curb.
- 3y ago
- javajosh 3y agoDiscrimination is what happens when you don't have good measurement for capability. People have to make decisions, and in general you have more applicants than roles, so you use heuristics. Obviously its wrong (and illegal) but it's not going to change until you offer a reasonable alternative that measures technical and social (personality/EQ) merit.
- ska 3y ago> Discrimination is what happens when you don't have good measurement for capability. This is obviously not the general case for discrimination, often it flies in the face of good measurements. Do you mean in this particular case, that because we don't have good metrics for developers, discrimination easily slips in?
- javajosh 3y agoYes.
- imbusy111 3y agoI did feel a disadvantage myself when I was job searching a few months ago, but for me it was my personal attitude coming through more than anyone judging me by my age. I felt that I just cannot get excited anymore about some of the bullshit the company leadership is throwing around, and neither could I overlook the massive mistakes the companies are making based on my own interview questions. But I do understand that a very small minority of these companies will actually succeed regardless of the nonsense. Otherwise the venture capital logic does not work. Also my pay expectations were higher than most junior employees, cause I have a mortgage, family, etc. and I can see how it might be hard to justify paying for my experience when you're building yet another standard webapp. Luckily for me, I was able to find a spot with experienced leadership building something actually new.
- 7thaccount 3y agoLol. Yeah once you've heard the HR hype a few times you know how hollow it is and just want to fast forward past it. Glad you found what you need.
- ttyprintk 3y agoThis. Interviewers and executives are often younger than me. I never make the claim that I’ve seen this or that mistake being made before. If I need to inject something, I say “anyone read [that book on JAX]” or “happy to help setup a long-term Kanban for Kubernetes if we go that way”.
- mech422 3y agoHeh - most are younger then me as well ... I had an interviewer about 15 years younger then me ask "what was the most important thing I learned about DevOps"... my reply was "dont deploy on Friday" :-) I got the job (and a chuckle) :-D
- annoyingnoob 3y agoI used to work for someone that LOVED to deploy on Fridays. She would make us all stay late if whatever she wanted to finish this week was not done yet. So many 7pm on Friday deployments, ick.
- wheaties 3y agoI feel this. I got the "you look older than your profile pic" comment during an interview last year. That one was fun. Dude wanted to know if I could even code anymore.
- 77pt77 3y agoOnce that impression has been made (and it takes a fraction of a second) it's effectively engraved in stone and can't be changed. You disproving their assumption by showing you can code will only elicit extreme disgust from them.
- supportengineer 3y ago"If you ever feel the need to defend yourself, you have already lost."
- pojzon 3y agoWhere is this quote from ?
- 7thaccount 3y agoIsn't that illegal in the US and opens up doors for lawsuits?
- Izkata 3y agoLikely yes: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc (second paragraph) I'm not sure what if means by "certain" applicants and employees, but my guess would be jobs where it's relevant, like physical labor, are excluded.
- duderific 3y agoI would imagine it's extremely hard to prove though. The prospective employer could just maintain that the applicant "wouldn't be a good culture fit" or similar.
- rm_-rf_slash 3y agoIn my past experience, Apple was full of graybeards who could code circles around younger devs. They’re the ones who knew how to build and maintain high quality software. I’m not sure if it’s the same way now, but I was highly impressed with my former coworkers’ caliber. Ageism isn’t an inevitability, it’s a choice.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoI worked with them (not as an Apple employee). I had tremendous respect for their work. Apple's quality has been declining recently. I have been trying to get both SwiftUI and Core/CreateML into something I can ship, and keep slamming into walls.
- DragonStrength 3y agoIt was true when I left a year ago. I was surprised to find the next hire after me was 20 years my senior. I actually felt like my mid-30s “youth” worked against me at times there.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago> Ageism isn’t an inevitability, it’s a choice. No you see, that's precisely the problem. Going bad because of your age is a choice. Being descriminated against because of your age, which is what ageism is, is not a choice.
- costanzaDynasty 3y agoThe jokes on them. The generations are getting smaller and smaller. The lack of junior roles is making that pool even smaller. A giant bubble is forming. They spent the last 5 years talking about diversity and how great it is and how it makes better teams. Now every job is 5+ YOE. Do as I say, not as I do tech.
- pojzon 3y agoAI changes the landscape alot. Even as an experienced engineer the sheer amount of knowledge you get access to from a single prompt without having to read any tutorial or book can change a Junior into Senior very quickly. I just hope it wont face the same issue google had: - starting with good answers and evolving into mud
- mrcode007 3y agoIt only works for established technologies. New inventions are by definition not in the training dataset. What then?
- bdcravens 3y agoUnfortunately the majority of jobs aren’t really innovation roles.
- greedo 3y agoAI won't be as impactful in generating good results (though it may result in middle management firing devs/admins since they think they're easily replaceable). As an example, I asked claude.ai to generate an ansible playbook for patching a Docker cluster. It created one, something I'd expect a junior admin to be able to whip up pretty easily. Then I noticed something funky. The playbook was OS agnostic, just using some where clauses to handle debian, RHEL, etc. Nice stuff, but wrong. One of the tasks was to clean the cache after apply updates. The AI got apt correct (autoclean), but assumed incorrectly that yum had the same parameter. Just a small detail that would have shown up when the playbook was run, but when it can't handle the small details, why bother?
- swatcoder 3y agoWhen I was coming up a long while back, there were exciting employers that filled their ranks with ambitious recent grads and lavished them with ping pong tables and soda fountains in the "war room" full of knock-off Aeron chairs and various configurations of conference tables. We'd work crazy hours and move fast with tools we didn't really understand. Most of us would get laid off multiple times as the companies we were working for evaporated, but a few would find themselves in the right place at the right time and win the lottery. Only a few of those companies from era that remain, and most of the people who stayed in that game ended up with a four page long CV with a dozen unknown or comically failed employers, with all sorts of inflated titles. But there was this other set of companies that were obnoxiously boring, with middle aged engineers in goatees working sane hours in semi-private offices and cubicles with peers they'd been working besides for 10 and 20 and 30 years. They'd been around, they had a business model that was proven, and they had the institutional knowledge to sustain it. Many of those companies are still around and many of them are still stocked up with middle aged engineers in goatees with short CV's spanning many years. I think the proportions between these two company styles varies based on how how much money is being shoved into the industry, and I think it can be hard for an older engineer who dallied with the kids for too long to situate themselves at the more stable workplaces. They often don't really fit in with either culture.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoaka, seemingly boring enterprise software is the place to go. Some of them are actually very good places.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoIt's a safe and stable place to go. Of course, if everyone wanted safety there wouldn't be so much rush into startups or entertainment industries, especially by young starry-eyed creatives.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoInterestingly though.. there is a lot more upside than most folks realize. Look at the execs at some medium sized enterprise software shop - they are making a lot of cash.
- screenobobeano 3y ago[dead]
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoAgeism is pretty much only talked about when it affects older people. Younger people - broadly millenials and younger - have just had to make piece with the ageism they've faced their entire lives and continue to face. I understand that one day I'll be old too, but my sympathies are limited and it'll be nothing truly new for us when people start dismissing us for being old, since people have been dismissing us for being young plenty. It'll probably hurt a little more since I tend to identify more with younger people than Gen X or older millenials, but in the end it won't be anything I'm not used to. So consider this me playing the world's smallest violin.
- raziel2p 3y agohow do you think ageism affects young people?
- screachymodem 3y agoHang in there buddy. We hire qualified people of all ages who like to learn and get their work done. I'm GenX and I've heard all the age stuff before in my youth as well. (1) Be yourself (2) Provide value (3) Take on some of the boring stuff that adds to business continuity Number 3 is not sexy, but good management notices.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoThanks. I appreciate your words of encouragement.
- antod 3y agoThat is such a weird take for a young software dev to have - you are uniquely positioned in an intersection of both age and the industry you're in to have faced extremely little ageism. Compared to just about anyone else working their way up and gaining experience elsewhere, you've had it easy. The lack of perspective is staggering. You'd fully deserve that violin played for you later on in your career.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
- pojzon 3y agoThe thing about ageism in IT is a matter of statistics. If you hire a bad junior you are few thousend in back. If you hire a bad senior you are tens of thousends in back. Noone wants to make bad decisions, so we use stereotypes we know to prefilter. Its not very pragmatic but lets be honest as engineers we know world is not pragmatic.
- cod1r 3y agoI definitely feel like it's the opposite. A lot of jobs require a proven track record with the number of years being like 5+ YOE. I graduated last may and still haven't gotten any offers. That being said, it's probably just me having a skill issue XD.
- balls187 3y agoYeah it does cut both ways. In industry with just enough experience to be useful but not enough wisdom to avoid being exploited. Who wants to hire someone with kids, a mortgage and a life outside of work?
- kevinventullo 3y agoFor what it’s worth, it’s a lot harder to get a job right now than it was even just a few years ago.
- andrewstuart 3y ago"Call this an unfair generalization if you must, but old people are no good at everything." - Moe Szyslak
- teunispeters 3y agoOne of the more subtle ways this is exhibited is by only preferring certain recent tech stacks, or orienting interview questions around computer science concepts that are only quite modern - especially if either of these have nothing to do with the toolset actually used. (or, asking for a recent transcript!). I've seen ALL of this in the time I've been looking for work, repeatedly. It's very annoying, but most can be overcome if one's got time and patience.
- paxys 3y agoDon't forget the "culture fit" interview.
- teunispeters 3y agoThat's all over the place. After all, one of the reasons to interview with a company is to see if their working culture is one that'd fit you. But then, I'm Canadian and have yet to find one that really didn't.... ok I know of a couple that do not, but I never applied to them.
- 77pt77 3y ago>asking for a recent transcript What does this mean?
- teunispeters 3y agoOne employer asked for my high school graduation transcript! Another was clearer and wanted university transcript - in essence, grades and grade point average. (the actual terms might be a Canadian thing, I'm not sure what "list of courses and grades" works out to elsewhere)
- 77pt77 3y ago> One employer asked for my high school graduation transcript! I've been asked for transcripts all the way to primary school. Ages 6 to 10. I took that as an opportunity to even get those documents that I didn't have.
- ein0p 3y agoI interview a lot of candidates and the quality of a lot of the recent grads makes it seem like I won’t be hurting for income until the day I croak. I’ve been interviewing people on and off for about 20 years now, and the talent pool has gotten much worse in the past decade. Might be because a lot of kids are choosing the field to “get rich”, might be just general deterioration of education idk. Case in point: over the past month I interviewed 8 fresh grads. Only one was actually good and got an enthusiastic vote from me. What to do with this is not clear to me. If anything you need to be much better educated to make a serious dent in this field today compared to 20 years ago. Which is to say, companies discriminating against the older workers are doing so to their own detriment, in my opinion.
- coolThingsFirst 3y agoWhat did you ask just curious?
- ein0p 3y agoSuper basic stuff about the ML projects they claim to have worked on and a typical leetcode easy/medium problem that does not require that you know the solution, in whatever programming language they felt comfortable using. I wish things were this easy for me when I was starting out. I can’t really go any easier than that - if they can’t even navigate this they’d be absolutely lost here and their productivity impact would be negative.
- devwastaken 3y agoThat's interesting because IMO and other peers - it's not that the interviews are hard, it's that the market is clearly saturated. They either don't get interviews, or even if they "do well" employers ghost and never give feedback.
- ein0p 3y agoAll of the bigtech is still hiring, folks with good track record have no trouble moving around. Perhaps even _too little_ trouble, as evidenced by attrition in my neck of the corporate woods of folks who are going to be darn near impossible to replace. A large segment of bigtech is hiring and firing thousands of people pretty much at the same time. It's psychotic, inhumane and counterproductive (IMO), but that's currently how it is.
- steelframe 3y agoSure ageism is a thing, but I can't help but think that long experience in industry can be sort of a "get another job" superpower. After a couple of decades in industry, I've formed so many professional relationships that it's hard for me to imagine that I might have any real trouble finding another job if I lost my current one. I mean, I guess I could be delusional and find it to be really tough at some point, but it hasn't happened so far. People I've worked with have gone on to start their own companies or have risen to senior director roles. In fact for the job before the one I have now a senior director practically yanked me out of my previous company and shoved me into his current company. I don't think about recruiters sticking their noses up at me because of my age or buzzwords on my resume and such at all. If I want in somewhere, I just email someone I've worked with previously and ask if they think there might be something at their current company for me. It usually doesn't take long for their hiring manager to be asking me for an intro meeting. Only then does a recruiter get involved, and they're not screening me. They're setting up an interview loop. Often with people hand-picked by the hiring manager. Look, I know ageism is real and it does happen and has a real impact on people. But on the other hand, if you've been working for 20+ years in industry and have generally left a good impression on your co-workers, how can you not have contacts sprinkled around in your industry who can give you a leg up on the job-finding process?
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago> how can you not have contacts sprinkled around in your industry who can give you a leg up on the job-finding process? I can answer that because I see that situation coming. I just can't be bothered talking to people if I can avoid it. At this moment I have one manager who manages I think 3 people. He gives me problems to solve. I don't talk to anyone else in a company that hires 300+ people. When I leave I won't have any contacts sprinkled around, just my manager. That's how.
- syngrog66 3y agono, really?!?! I have C code older than some of the young dev coworkers I've had. I have software running on embedded devices in the field (in gas stations, for example) thats older than some of them too.
- amatuer_sodapop 3y ago[flagged]
- m0llusk 3y agoMy experience includes taking on a lot of various challenges and doing what it takes to ship quality products on time. But when I interview very little of that comes up or has much weight. Current interviewers usually want an immediate demonstration of a relevant skill in considerable detail. The idea that someone who has shipped many different types of product can adapt quickly doesn't seem to be considered valid. Not only that, there seems to be a lot of weight put on knowing Agile and being able to take orders instead of going on whatever engineering tangent comes up. It seems like engineers who have developed a particular set of desirable skills have a great advantage and those with a lot of proven general talent are mostly not even in the game.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoText-only, no Javascript, works where archive.is is blocked: x=https://www.wired.com/story/ageism-haunts-tech-workers-layoffs-race-to-get-hired/ busybox wget -U "" -qO/dev/stdout $x \ |tr \< '\n' \ |sed '/./s/^/</' \ |sed -n ' 1s/.\*/<meta charset=utf-8 \/>/p; 2,/#main-content/d; /./{ /dfABRF/,/<\/div>/{/<div/s/>/><title>/p;/<\/div/s/</<\/title></p;} /bIqFFZ/,/<\/div/{/<div/s/>/><p>/p;/<\/div/s/</<\/p></p;} /gGcjdZ/,$d;/class=.paywall/,/<\/p>/p; /span class=.lead/,/<\/span/p; /a href=.[^\/]/,/<\/a>/p; }' \ |uniq > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm Simpler HTML, no cruft.
- beej71 3y agoI know a lot of people who has zero trouble getting hired for a whole career suddenly start having trouble in their 40s. In my 40s I started getting turned down (for the first time ever!) for the weirdest reasons. "Wouldn't be able to handle working with uncooperative teams within the company." (Whaaa...? Dodged a bullet there.) "Not passionate about programming." (Did you not look at my resume? My books I wrote to give away?) Are these _really_ the reasons? And you do notice it when everyone interviewing you is under 30. Not that being under 30 is bad, but a diverse workplace is a plus in my mind. A friend of mine started dyeing his hair and landed a job soon thereafter, after over a year of looking. If I were going on the hunt again, I'd definitely do that. My face looks younger than it is. But what a bullshit thing to have to do. (I can hear all the women here saying, "oh you poor thing how will you survive". Yes, yes, I know. It's bullshit all around.) Now I'm in academia for semi-retirement, which is what I really love anyway, where experience has value that remains undiminished by age. :)
- beej71 3y agoOn the flip side, when none of the kids know C any longer, you can hire me out of retirement at phenomenal expense to help maintain your legacy code. :)
- Gordon1188 3y ago[dead]
- suzanneeddie633 3y ago[dead]