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Why the Tech Industry Needs to Deal With Its Ageism Problem

• BigChiefSmokem 13y ago
  The sweetest thing to see is an old master working alongside a young buck in tandem. You get the best of both worlds. Anyone who is on either side of that equation is fooling themselves on the reality of engineering and team dynamics.
• steven777400 13y ago
  This seems to come up a lot, and I agree that age discrimination is an issue. However, there are some obvious reasons for it outside of the the "we think older people are stupid" line. Younger people will often be willing to work more, for less pay, in more marginal conditions. (Witness the discussion a while back about whether ping pong tables and catered food was a perk or a red flag) Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms and are unlikely to "write FORTRAN in any language" (JS, Ruby, etc). We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension. Finally, tech startups today are largely focused on the "exit": it's not about building and maintaining a product in the long term. Older employees have the planning, analysis, and maintenance experience to establish a product vision for the next decade. But the startup founder (by and large) doesn't want to think of a product over a decade; it's all about MVP, pivots, and fast exits. Not that any of that is bad, it just doesn't fit well with the average older employee. I'll admit when hiring I have a little bit of the opposite bias. Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage? we should rewrite it all in RoR and JS". Hey man, we're still maintaining COBOL apps here, slow your roll. It's all about long term planning and maintenance for us.
  • Retric 13y ago
    I find it odd when start-ups talk about the top recent grad vs the average older worker. The best experienced workers code circles around EVERYBODY else end of story. The only real issue for most startups is convincing them to actually work for you when they have seen enough BS that there harder to convince than most VS's.
    • asciimo 13y ago
      If by "code circles around EVERYBODY" you're implying quality rather than quantity, then this is not valuable for most young companies. The quantity of atrocious code produced by some young developers is astounding. Often, that code "works," and the young company is pleased.
      • mtrimpe 13y ago
        Experience will also make you much smarter in knowing what you should (not) spend energy on. Startups don't die from producing too little code; they die from not writing enough code that really matters to the end user.
  • elmuchoprez 13y ago
    "We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension." Homogeneity is also the natural state for human beings and not necessarily a sinister plot. If you solve our natural tendency to surround ourselves with people who look and act like us, you'll probably have solved racism, sexism, ageism and just about every other -ism. I' not saying we shouldn't challenge this instinct, but I also don't think we should be surprised that white, 25-year-old, male founders have a tendency to hire other white males in their mid-twenties.
    • jtbigwoo 13y ago
      >> Homogeneity is also the natural state for human beings and not necessarily a sinister plot. It doesn't have to be an organized plot to be sinister. Thousands of people acting semi-independently can end up with a sinister outcome.
    • RogerL 13y ago
      No one is expressing surprise. We are expressing reasons for why it needs to change.
  • sbarre 13y ago
    It is the human equivalent of "right tool for the job" I would think.. Your point about homogeneity is an important one as well. In small organizations, cultural fit - opinions about that culture notwithstanding - is much more important than in larger ones, for the reasons you listed and more. That said, a wise co-worker once said "you can't have juniors without seniors". While younger workers can be a boon to startups from a price/performance point of view, it is important to also have experienced, if more expensive, employees who can provide guidance and direction to those juniors. Otherwise, you can find yourself a few years down the road to growth with massive technical debt and a naive technical platform that was built with good intentions but is now full of problems that are extremely hard to correct. Yup, I'm speaking from experience here. ;-)
  • alextingle 13y ago
    You are talking rubbish. > Younger people will often be willing to work more... Younger people have to work more, because they don't have enough experience to work efficiently, yet. > Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms So, 1 year of "shiny new tech" > 1 year of "shiny new tech" + 20 years of other relevant experience? Riiiight. > homogeneity is valuable to an early startup Wow. Homogeneity is a killer for any team. The whole point of building a team is to find people who can work together, and become more than the sum of their parts. For that, you need people whose strengths cover for their team-mates' weaknesses... the very opposite of homogeneity. OK, it's not all rubbish. I agree with this... > Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage? we should rewrite it all in RoR and JS
    • bilbo0s 13y ago
      "...> Younger people will often be willing to work more... Younger people have to work more, because they don't have enough experience to work efficiently, yet..." You conveniently glossed over his main point... that young people will work for less money. I think that's a HUGE selling point.
      • seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        Young people work for less money because they are inexperienced. The older worker has to provide the same value for their higher pay via experience. And this is where the problem comes into play: the potential employer might not see the older worker as being worth it, especially if it doesn't appear that they can do more than the younger worker. They might also see potential (room for growth) in the younger candidate that they can't see in older ones. And this is all quite reasonable....also remember that most companies are pyramids, with lots of openings in the bottom and much fewer as you go up.... So you as the tech employee must be aware that your life is short if you don't continuously grow your skills so you don't become an unjustifiable expense later in life. Not only that, but you have to become an expert in marketing these skills.
        • Systemic33 13y ago
  • kiba 13y ago
    Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms and are unlikely to "write FORTRAN in any language" (JS, Ruby, etc). They are also more likely to be dumber and lacking in versatility. Older people just have more experience, more knowledge, just by the fact that they have more time to accumulate more knowledge, so they may often may be more productive than 2 or 3 youngsters combined and still have time for family and other hobbies. Of course, that's only true if the older technical folks don't coast and continue to learn since when they were young. (Yes I am a 22 years old who uses modern frameworks like ruby on rails and meteor. The exact profile that software firms want to hire.)
    • nailer 13y ago
      > They are also more likely to be dumber and lacking in versatility. I think you mean 'naive' or 'inexperienced'. Stupidity ('dumb' isn't PC, but nobody seems to care anyway) is generally thought of as something inherent.
      • VLM 13y ago
        Could be interpreted as a darwinian selection pressure such that there are smart and dumb noobs, but by the time they're old timers, only the smart ones remain. (Insert Peter principle jokes, who goes into management jokes, etc)
  • nailer 13y ago
    > Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage? The flipside: I'm old now, but can remember when I was young in the early 2000s. At the time I was in the Unix space. Older engineers were adamantly pushing Solaris 6 and 8 on incredibly overpriced, poorly performing UltraSPARC over Red Hat on Xeon, for the blindingly obvious reason than they didn't really like learning anything new. Of course, that was private: to anyone unfamiliar with the platform, they'd simply say that 'you couldn't get support for Linux'. They knew this was false - IBM and Red Hat were banging down their door to sell support contracts (still far cheaper than Sun's rubbish hardware + good support contracts), and Red Hat had hired a lot of Sun's staff - but if they made enough noise, they thought they could slow things down. It worked, for a couple of years. (Later on I realised that enterprise architecture purchasing choices are frequently based on dinners, golf tournaments, and straight up dropping cash into your account, but that's a separate story. ) Short version: older engineers can be overly change averse, much like younger engineers can be overly enthusiastic about change.
    • malaporte 13y ago
      Maybe we should stop putting all older engineers in the same basket, and same thing goes for the younger ones. I've known some older engineers (older than me, heh) make crap decisions because they didn't like change. Then I've seen younger engineers completely mess up good, maintainable code because they think that knowing one language makes them masters of software development. I try not to hire any of those two persons. BUT, I've also seen young programmers completely fail because they couldn't adapt to a newer (or older...) technology. And I know some very much older programmers who are constantly reading up about new stuff, and loving it. Bottom line, look at who you're hiring, not only how old they are.
      • nailer 13y ago
        > Maybe we should stop putting all older engineers in the same basket, and same thing goes for the younger ones. I don't think we are. I for one judge individuals as individuals. That doesn't mean we can't observe the wider group and make observations. > Bottom line, look at who you're hiring, not only how old they are. Of course.
  • melling 13y ago
    Laugh out loud funny. My first job out of school was doing NeXTstep on real next hardware (early 90's). Fast forward many years, and I'm hanging out on my couch working on my iOS app (i.e. essentially doing the same stuff as my first job). I don't have a plan other than to make something useful and hope it gains traction. I "release early, and release often", and I work on whatever I feel like doing on any given day. I've never been paid to write Fortran, and I've only ever seen Cobol once when some cute girl in my college lab needed help, so I gave it a shot.:-) Anyway, I'd say that you're wrong, but the one thing that I have learned over time, is that it would probably be a waste of time, my most precious resource, trying to convince you otherwise. Ok, back to work... By the way, if any of you kids want to help out an old man, here's my app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?... I've got Russian, Chinese, French, German, and Italian versions too. Like Elon says, seek negative feedback... http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/elon-musk-pay-attention-to-negative-feedback-and-solicit-it-particularly-from-friends_b33687 http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/elon-musk-pay-attention...
  • DanBC 13y ago
    > We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension. I'm amazed this attitude has led to law suits. It feels like blatant, unapologetic, discrimination.
    • DanBC 13y ago
      HASN'T, obviously.
• jdminhbg 13y ago
  This is awful. What does the list of out-of-context statistics about entrepreneurship have to do with hiring tech workers? Who is the "Tech Industry" and how are "they" going to deal with an ageism problem defined by the article as simply statistically skewing young?
• salmonellaeater 13y ago
  While I agree with the sentiment, the statistics quoted don't support the author's thesis. > The average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40. > Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25. > The highest rate of entrepreneurship in America has shifted to the 55–64 age group, with people over 55 almost twice as likely to found successful companies than those between 20 and 34 – in fact, the 20-34 age bracket has the lowest rate of entrepreneurial activity. If ten times as many people over 50 than people under 25 try to start businesses, then the statistics strongly favor the under-25's. These statistics don't mean anything unless you know the number of people in each age group who start businesses. > 75% have more than six years of industry experience and 50% have more than 10 years when they create their startup. What does this even mean? Years worked is not the same as having useful experience. The article would be much stronger if it showed evidence that older workers were more productive, more likely to succeed at starting a business, or were in some other way undervalued by the current job market.
• thoughtsimple 13y ago
  I wonder if ageism is really that much of a problem. I'm 51 and still working as a software developer but all of my contemporaries have moved on from development to something else. I've definitely experienced ageism but I suspect that it is rarely institutionalized. Instead I think that people like me are relatively rare. I have no real interest in management or another career--I like being a developer. That means when I show up for a job interview, I don't exactly fit in since it is likely that few of the candidates are my age or older. Sometimes I can overcome this and other times I'm not really given a chance. I mostly work as a contractor so I have frequent job changes and I haven't found it to be that much of a problem. It is just another hurdle that has to be overcome. The group I'm working in now, I'm the oldest developer by at least 10 years.
  • asciimo 13y ago
    Do you think that your contractor status is defending you against ageism, to some degree?
    • thoughtsimple 13y ago
      It's possible that being a contractor shields me a bit but that isn't why I mostly contract. I really don't have a lot of tolerance for corporate politics that inevitably crop up. I find that as a contractor I'm usually outside the day to day maneuvering that you find in most organizations. Most contracts are for a limited timeframe for a particular project that many times is in trouble. I find those types of gigs rewarding. I will work for a startup as a full time employee but it would have to be the right position. Right now I'm contemplating doing something myself but I haven't decided exactly what yet.
  • SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
    Contracting is the way to go for the older crowd. How else could I be making $125-$250/hour? No company is going to pay me $250k-$400k in salary, and if they did, they'd expect to own me 24/7. This way I get to work part time, have lots of time with my kids, and when I do work overtime, I get paid for the extra hours. So I know they aren't asking it lightly. At least right now I've had no trouble finding gigs. Work's been finding me, in fact. I have more options available than I can take. And between gigs, I can work on personal projects, one of which may turn into a real business someday. It's all good. :)
• francoisdevlin 13y ago
  Personally, I think ageism in the industry is great. Let my competitors ignore the large pool of experienced engineers out there, and hire some young kid who is "cheaper". While he's fixing his design for the tenth time, I'll pay that expense old dinosaur to do something boring, like get it right the first time.
  • smrtinsert 13y ago
    More importantly your guy gets to go home on time and enjoy dinner with his kids!
    • Terretta 13y ago
      Even more importantly, so do his colleagues in network/server ops. It's a cascading effect.
  • kemiller 13y ago
    Last team I built, that was exactly how I hired. My team of 5, all 35+, could run circles around your typical team of 20. Only downside was it was sometimes hard to get them to try new things.
    • amorphid 13y ago
      Why would I want to try something new when Perl and MySQL running on Solaris and Apache gets the job done so well? Just kidding :). As I get older, I do find it easier to rationalize using the older, mature thing over a newer, less tested thing.
  • mahyarm 13y ago
    I'm currently slowly cleaning up the mess created by older developers because they were inexperienced in mobile development and under the startup pressure gun. I'm understanding what their situation was and they are not bad developers. Old != Great. All of these heuristics just help you save energy in evaluating people, you need to evaluate people properly in the first place.
• peeters 13y ago
  In issues like this, it's important to interpret statistics correctly. For instance, the article cites this: >“Eight of the companies, the study said, had median employee age of 30 or younger.” In comparison, the Times reported, the median age of the American worker was 42.3 years old. Ageism is not the only explanation for this discrepancy. The software industry has exploded in growth in the last twenty years. Most other industries have not seen the same rate of growth. When a labor pool for an industry is strained, it sends a signal to young people to pursue a career in that field. As a result, the labor pool is filled by proportionally more young people. Eventually the growth of an industry will cease. Then less young people will pursue it as a career path, and the median age of laborers in that field will rise.
  • VLM 13y ago
    The growth appears to have leveled off in the early 1980s except for the momentary dotcom bubble more than a decade ago. Google and the computinged wordpress blog claim the BLS reported 550K-ish programmers in the mid 80s and about 500K now. We're in a long term decline since 2005 and it looks like we might drop below 400K by the end of the decade, but for the last 30 years its more or less been around 500K. To quote the computinged blog "Getting reliable data on programmer employment is surprisingly difficult." Going into the field would have been a brilliant idea in 1975, but in 2013 its kind of like becoming a UAW autoworker, its more like when are you going to be downsized, not if.
• Hossenffefer 13y ago
  I think this problem will take care of itself. It is a numbers game. Eventually all these twenty-somethings will be thirty-somethings; and with that they will need the long term work relationships needed for raising families and planning for pivot into the Golden Years. Statistically the vast majority of them will have to work for money and I very much doubt that people will just exit the game at 30. They will just have to adjust their expectations.
  • gregrata 13y ago
    I have no doubt Zuckerberg will be changing his tune in the years to come. "Young people are just smarter" That has to be one of the most stupid things I've heard! :)
• andyhmltn 13y ago
  Sadly enough, I've experienced this. At my last job, after requesting a pay rise my boss just said no and followed up with 'well you should think yourself lucky, your pay is pretty good for someone of your age.' I quit about 2 weeks afterwards.
• nknighthb 13y ago
  > It seems the young engineers, growing up in an era of unlimited storage, didn’t know how to tackle the problem. Starting off with some ageism and general cluelessness of your own doesn't help. If they wanted a "young engineer" to generically optimize data storage, I would be at least half-competent, and could give them the names of several engineers far younger than 77 who would be excellent at such work in general. What neither I nor virtually any other engineer, young or old, would know, and what the engineer who helped build the thing would, is anything about the specific equipment and code in use on Voyager. This is specialized knowledge, just like a lot of the knowledge young 2013 NASA engineers have. It is equally as beneficial to employ those engineers to modify the systems they built as it was to employ Lawrence Zottarelli to modify the system he built. Age is unrelated.
• Pxtl 13y ago
  So, at last count of criticisms our industry is ageist, sexist, able-ist and racist. Did I miss anything?
  • GrinningFool 13y ago
    If that's all you're taking away from these criticisms, then yes - you likely are.
  • Torgo 13y ago
    You left out elitist. I have heard that one a lot.
  • vdaniuk 13y ago
    And software engineering (web development, coding) is probably one of the most egalitarian industries.
• danso 13y ago
  Unfortunately, the list of companies with the oldest workers -- IBM, Oracle, Dell, HP, among them -- would evoke eyerolls from most young hip tech workers today. What's Apple's median age? Of all the big young tech companies, I would think that Google would be the one to benefit most from older, experienced employees (besides the group of all-stars it already has, such as Norvig)...Google's business encroaches on a lot of other domains, and domain knowledge is something that (usually) gets better with age. Perhaps in 5 to 10 years, there will be a bigger group of 40+ yr old professionals with enough tech experience/savvy to be more obvious assets to tech startups.
  • nailer 13y ago
    > I would think that Google would be the one to benefit most from older, experienced employees (besides the group of all-stars it already has, such as Norvig) +1. Google and Microsoft do a great job in this regard. Not just hiring older workers but getting new stuff built by people with massive amounts of experience. - Ken Thompson and Rob Pike (C/Unix fame) are bringing you Go. - Anders Hejlsberg (TurboPascal/Delphi) is bringing you TypeScript.
  • rdl 13y ago
    Apple's median age is pretty old...40s, probably, with plenty of people in 30s and 50s. Probably way more 20s than 60s, but certainly older than a lot of companies.
• lettergram 13y ago
  I know personally, I intend to create a company after I get experience from industry. I am a 21 year old college student, so that means ill be somewhere between 28-35 when I start a company. At which point I will probably higher younger for cheaper. Perhaps that is part of the reason those companies have such younger workers. Most Programmers either do consulting, start their own business, burnout, or change career paths by 30 based on the 20 or so I talked to. I could be totally off, but from what I know and have seen this seems to be the trends.
• hawkharris 13y ago
  Great closing line: "Avoid ageism. It isn’t rocket science. Even when it is."
  • herbig 13y ago
    I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I thought the closing line was terrible. It's a very complicated issue, and not something you can just say to avoid.
    • hsmyers 13y ago
      So you are suggesting that discrimination on skin color is complicated? That discrimination based on prospect is older the the person conducting the interview is not something you can just say avoid? That a woman wouldn't fit into your macho 'Brogrammer' culture? I'd go on but you seem to be a fan of very short sighted thinking. Check that. I would like to suggest that wisdom from the prehistoric days of programming seems to fit best here: 'Use the right tool(individual) for the task' Nothing else is relevant. The only subject worthy of discussion in an interview is can they do the job. If the answer is yes then you can solve 'other' problems after they become a problem...
      • DanBC 13y ago
        People have unconscious biases. Merely telling them to avoid those biases is unhelpful. Giving them ideas how to avoid those biases is more helpful. "Have someone screening applications. That person also removes anything that identifies protected characteristics" is one tip. (In the UK those are age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil union, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion, sex, and sexuality. In the US they are race, colour, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexuality, pregnancy, citizenship[1], familial status, disability, veteran status, and genetic information.)
• ianstallings 13y ago
  I'm getting on the old side of the average, approaching 40. But in my experience I've never seen a startup founder tell me that I or anyone else was too old. Mainly because the industry really is a meritocracy and it's about what a person can do now, usually. Fortunately for me most juniors don't know all my tricks just yet. I will say this though - I have to constantly step my game up to stay relevant. At 50 I will be expected to not only know programming very well, but the industry as a whole including analysis, planning, finances, management, etc.
  • darkarmani 13y ago
    > Mainly because the industry really is a meritocracy and it's about what a person can do now, usually. I think a bigger problem is a combination of the Hawthorne effect and the idea that most methods will work for small problems. You don't get to see the superiority of the "right" solution until you are under heavy load. Most startups don't come under heavy load for 18 months and by that point, they end up throwing more hardware, bandaids, people at the problem and don't realize that the fundamentals were wrong from the start. The success of infrastructure, fundamentals, and strong devops are apparent if you do it right, but not when you do it wrong. This is a bad feedback loop as it doesn't covert the people that are doing it wrong.
  • a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
    > I have to constantly step my game up to stay relevant This doesn't strike me as the case in other skilled professions. A successful middle aged CPA, MD, lawyer, or finance exec often has the option of more or less coasting on accumulated relationships and prestige. This idea that a skilled software engineer must always be training up on his own dime and time is really kind of strange, in the bigger picture.
    • ianstallings 13y ago
      I never looked at it that way but one could draw analogies to things like new techniques in medicine. Such as a new robotic operating mechanism or new ways to treat people. On the other hand CPAs seem to have had their work set in stone since people used tables and numbers, I feel for those guys. Lawyers probably have so much research to do I doubt they ever really stop learning (albeit it's charged to the client) . But learning is probably what keeps me from getting bored. I will say though, if I have to learn another JS framework I'm going to === my eyes out.
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• RogerL 13y ago
  I'm replying to this one only because it is on the top; I am not singling the author out in any way. This is all so foreign to me. I moved to SV 2 years ago, and I am 47. Y'all are in such a bubble. Every day the recruitment ads state 'change the world - join our social dog teeth brushing cloud service'. I'm only very slightly joking, merely to avoid calling out the actual companies and services. You know what changes the world? Dialysis machines. Microprocessors. Crash avoidance systems. Artificial hearts. More efficient aircraft. Factory automation. My point is that it takes experience and time to build something important and large. You can't 'move fast and break things' if you are writing an accounting package or code for a chemical reaction chamber. You don't 'pivot' into a new $1B investment in new microprocessor. Sure, if you are starting up the social dog teeth cleaning service you probably don't need much more than a few 20 somethings willing to kludge together 10 different half baked components (full stack developers!), and there is no point to knocking that kind of environment - I'm sure it is very cost effective. But I see this kind of thinking and lack of planning leaking into other businesses and ideas. I look at job ads for very difficult undertakings using the SV buzzwords of the day - pivot, agile, and so on, and my neuron starts throbbing. Moreover, I rather worry about all the people coming up in the bubble, thinking it is bedrock reality. I may be wrong, but I suspect the world's appetite for social X services is small. No, I don't suspect it, I know it. Things like microprocessors, thermostats, smart Tvs, graphics cards, dialysis machines, car entertainment systems, accounting packages, factory floor software, and so much more are the engines of our economy. And I see so many posters on HN that I would never hire for a job that required engineering and planning. They don't have the skills, they aren't learning the skills, and when they are 30-35 all they will know how to do is 'program by magic' - change things until it works. Ya, no, you can't work on my flight computer. This is probably just personal, but there is a very sour taste in my mouth whenever I hear about 'pivots' and 'exits'. I get why they are important in some HN type companies. But our world is truly built on products that require forethought ('move fast, break things' - new motto of Boeing? Not so much), planning, solid engineering, and great technical skill. I wonder why so many 20 somethings pour their talents in lives in something that will be discarded in a month when their myopic 'leader' goes chasing after the latest shiny thing to catch his eye (which is, IMO, the usual reason for a 'pivot'). I guess it pays well. I wish they were working on a better JIT, a lower wattage cpu, or what have you. I wonder at their job prospects when they are 35, have a family, don't have time to go back to school to learn calculus or what have you, and didn't 'hit' and make fuck you money. And I wish founders would actually do a market survey before launching the 5th dog teeth cleaning service in the same tiny geographic area. So many postmortems on here are truly head scratching. You didn't realize that this tiny pocket of under-served market, which is of keen and relevant interest to dozens of companies all around you, maybe, just maybe, has huge barriers to entry or scaling, and that every other company already explored it and wrote it off as unprofitable? Everyone but you is leaving money on the table? Hmmm. Sorry, I am just having a 'wow, the silicon valley bubble sure is weird' moment. And I'm old, and cranky. Get off my lawn. But seriously, be very, very careful about taking the ideas and lessons from some tiny start up and trying to apply it to anything outside of that very odd, self-referential world.
• ihsw 13y ago
  It's not an ageism problem, it's a loyalty and perception problem. Old people by their nature cling to institutions of loyalty and start-ups are definitely not known for staying around for +3 years. Furthermore start-ups also implicitly prefer "just good enough" in order to get your company up and flying enough to quickly accrue investor interest, whereas stability forms the bottom-line of our elder engineers -- and stable systems require far more time than some investors are comfortable with. Even worse, there is the management aspect. Older people have very different management styles, and throwing caution to the wind is definitely not among their managerial toolset. If your company has older people in positions of power then it definitely scares vast swaths of people away -- from eager investors looking to turn a quick buck and energetic young engineers looking to for autonomy to work without anyone second-guessing their decisions. Finally, the saying "old is gold" applies quite well, however that gold needs regular polish to remain shining.
  • ronilan 13y ago
    > It's not an ageism problem ... Old people by their nature ... Sums it up. Very well said.
  • marcc 13y ago
    You say "it's not an ageism problem" but them go on to define an ageism problem. Your comment defines a stereotype of older people, claiming they cling to loyalty and have management styles incompatible with startup culture. This simply isn't true. Some older developers have worked for Fortune 500 companies writing enterprise Java software for their entire careers. These developers often aren't right for a startup. But I've worked with teams of 100+ young (majority in their 20s) developers who can't think outside of Java + Apache + Tomcat + Waterfall world. Age isn't a deciding factor for me when hiring someone. If a 65 year old developer approaches me with proven skills in multiple technologies (maybe node.js + scala + go), I really want to talk to this person. You are hurting yourself with this attitude.
  • VLM 13y ago
    "Old people by their nature cling to institutions of loyalty" You're a little out of date. That applies to the gold watch retirement crowd from WWII and "Mad Men" era and all that. None of those guys are under 80. The kind of people who think "talking pictures" on celluloid is high tech. We are talking about (former) kids who listened to Nirvana on CDs while Kurt Cobain was still alive, not listened to Gunsmoke on the vacuum tube radio during the great depression LOL.
• carsongross 13y ago
  The reality for older developer is that you are going to have to: 1) Move to management to continue advancing 2) Find one of the very few large to midsize companies that has a long-term developer career track comparable to their executive track 3) Start you own thing and exploit the fact that you are more productive than younger developers, and control the purse strings Large and even mid-size and event ostensibly tech companies still, for the most part, view developers as an R&D cost center. They look at cheap development resources, either young kids or foreign, and think "For the price of 1 developer, I could have 10!" Now they have 2^10 problems.
  • buckbova 13y ago
    In nearly every profession there is a ceiling for the doers. There is a position in a senior/lead/architect role and a pay rate you hit within companies that you can't exceed besides some annual 1% raise. Those who are still motivated to move up must go in to management or strike out on their own. Chances are if you have reached this point the trappings of your previous success has made the latter choice a risky undertaking.
• buckbova 13y ago
  Some of my experience on hiring "older" engineers (I currently have over 10 years experience in software eng/dev): 1. They have a family with responsibilities, sick kids, and dance recitals, etc. The bad: Leads to, less professional growth outside of work, more personal days, more sick days, more personal phone calls during work. The good: Once comfortable, they rarely leave the job unless forced out. 2. They attempt to solve every problem with the same set of solutions. Few attempt to find new technologies or try different things. The bad: The implementation may not be the best one available that will set up the business for future success. The good: Solutions are generally predictable. 3. Lack of motivation to prove themselves. The bad: The project deadlines are just met. They do just what's asked of them and not more. The good: Deadlines are met. They don't try to tackle mroe than they are capable of by expanding the problem domain.
  • gregrata 13y ago
    20+ years here. While I'm sure there are some 40-something's that are like the above, I don't know of many - most people I work with are 35-45, are very hard working, innovative, highly motivated, always learning new things, and work a lot. Lots of younger people I work with party a lot (and are hung over lots), distracted constantly, aren't at all loyal, are constantly distracted by the shiny new toys, and super arrogant (and YES, I am purposely using a bad stereotype, just like a lot of the posts here are in the other direction. One thing experience has taught me is to NOT stereotype based on meaningless things like sex, race, or age - look at what someone can do - passion, drive creativity, intelligence, etc. If you base your decisions on foolish stereotypes, in either direction, you are just limiting yourself and your company)
• zeidrich 13y ago
  The problem isn't that young employees have qualities that make them more appealing. That's just the reality of the situation. The problem is when a candidate who has better qualities gets passed over for a younger candidate based on prejudices based on the previous generalization. Say you want a skilled programmer who is going to work for a certain wage and put in an amount of overtime, and you pitch it to a fresh college grad, and a 35 year old who just got downsized out of a job; when the interview concludes, it's obvious that they are both willing to take the wage you're offering, and the 35 year old is far more knowledgeable. If you take the kid because you think the older guy might not be as willing as he claims to put in overtime, or because you think he might be too set in his ways, or because he might be too old to match the cultural fit... That's a problem. People can hire young people because they're cheap. Especially startups, who maybe can't afford to pay for experience. Likewise, someone with a mortgage and kids might be less willing to look for a job with a risky business. So the average age might drop in those kinds of businesses and that's OK. The problem is when you see the effect and invent the cause. "More young people are in successful startups, that means avoid old people if you want to be successful". Instead it could be just "frugal startups are more likely to succeed, so don't spend too much on your labour" in which case given two candidates willing to take the same wage, the one with the better skills should win, regardless of age.
• ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
  The bigger concern is that a prospective employee must show a willingness to adapt and evolve from a technological aspect, as opposed to feeling that whatever they already know is "good enough" An unwillingness to train does exist in the more seasoned veteran demographic; but it's just as bad when you get young developer that is a evangelical about their particular niche.
• badman_ting 13y ago
  The funny thing about the efforts to increase diversity among developers is that it's just increasing the inputs of the ageism meat grinder we're all headed into. So everyone besides white males gets to have a harder time joining the profession, only to get chewed up and spat out like the rest of us. Lucky them. (OK, I admit that's actually not funny at all)
• zdmc 13y ago
  I am surprised that so many of the comments seem to be ignoring the obvious: more experience generally means higher wage in the tech industry. It's a money issue. I've personally worked with older programmers, and there has been little noticeable difference in capabilities (and often added benefits of organizational know-how). The issue is the pay. Incidentally, it's the same reason why big companies are championing H1B visas by saying "there aren't enough US nationals to fill the roles" (even though the numbers don't bear the statement out): companies want to pay less for somewhat equivalent skills. Who wouldn't?
• jamespitts 13y ago
  Experience, skills with the newer technologies, "cultural fit" (in the true, organizational meaning of the concept): I see these as objective measures. They are important. What cannot be overlooked though is the emotional aspect of interviewing. It leads to all sorts of biases, and in a subtle way drives racist and ageist hiring practices. I think that "comfort level" with the applicant is a particularly hazardous feeling as it can be confused with cultural fit. If not checked, hiring people within our comfort zone produces a homogenous work environment and an insular organization. I often find myself thinking more clearly about candidates when I actively counter the "this person is not in my tribe" notion that I believe is behind "comfort level". After all, we are not a fraternity or sorority hiring to make friends. It comes down to being professional and objective, and being mature enough to hire and work with people outside of our generation or culture.
• johngalt 13y ago
  A low average age isn't an indicator of ageism by default. It would make sense that people of different ages would be interested in different types of employers. Consider the following job characteristics: 1. Business travel is a plus to the young crowd and a minus to the older. 2. Legacy technology is a plus to the older crowd and a minus to the younger. 3. Large vs small teams. A younger group will have more generalists, and older group more specialists. A younger team will be small with minimal layers in the way. An older team will need a larger group to support the specialization gained over the years of experience. Picture a large company that designs motherboards. No travel, established technology, large teams of specialists. Now envision a distributed team of <10 working on some new document classification web app on AWS. I'd wager that a completely different age group would be found in each circumstance. Not necessarily due to ageism.
• pkteison 13y ago
  I'm 37. I'm willing to believe there is are two decent reasons for some apparent ageism. I think #2 here is probably in the not-safe-to-share-in-public category, but honest discussion requires embracing one of those every now and then, so here goes: a) When supply of well trained programmers is increased, it happens with 22 year olds, who are graduating from college. There is a 30+ year lag on those folks becoming old programmers. To hire a 50 year old programmer, he would either have had to graduate back in 1985 when there were a lot fewer people studying programming, or else changed careers at some point. And a lot of people don't change careers. There simply aren't as many older programmers available because it's a new field as these things go. b) I've wasted enough years on dead-end tech that I'm more cautious about what I spend my time on now. Things I have become an expert in that are now useless to me and probably not valued by an employer: TCL, Oracle 8i and PL/SQL, Ada, Java 1.1/1.2, EJB, Java AWT & Swing, Struts, Delphi, Flex, Paradox, Access + VBScript, ASP.NET 1.0, ODBC/OLE/ADO.NET, Linq to SQL, Subversion/MKS Source Integrity/Rational Clearcase/Perforce, differences between bash/ksh/csh scripting, awk+sed, perl, prototype. And those are just the dead-ends that I regret exploring, because I think I will never use them again and because I could have spent that time learning something more useful. I know the time wasn't completely wasted, but time spent on prototype would have been better spent on jquery, time spent on linq to sql would have been better spent on nhibernate, etc. Reflecting on that leads to a bit of analysis paralysis when looking at TodoMVC to pick which next framework to invest time and effort in - will this be another flash in the pan, is this nothing but Fire and Motion (1)? I expect many employers would probably benefit more from a team of people who lack that perspective, because they'll be giving up more of their evenings and weekends on things that might pan out. I still do that, but a bit less these days, and I wait a bit longer before I dive in. Some might value my caution, but they probably aren't starting a bootstrapped or VC backed change-the-world-through-web-programming moonshot business. (1) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
• blueblob 13y ago
  In general I, at age 26, agree that experience gained with age can provide a strong benefit in terms of code organization, management, interpersonal relations, and many other factors. I think it's a gross misrepresentation, however, to say: ... Suzanne Dodd, had to coax another 77-year-old engineer, Lawrence Zottarelli, out of retirement to modify the old technology so it could store more data. It seems the young engineers, growing up in an era of unlimited storage, didn’t know how to tackle the problem. Last time I checked we still don't have unlimited storage... and Is this really because the young engineers didn't know how to tackle the problem, or because the code was poorly documented and written in a way that would be confusing to anyone who was not the original engineer? Programming styles have changed; people used to have to use their memory very efficiently and therefore had tricks to use it more efficiently that aren't as popular now (sacrificed for readability/maintainability), that doesn't mean that young people can't learn those tricks, just that they haven't had to.
• cpprototypes 13y ago
  Experience matters a lot in software development. For example, after many years as a software developer this is one of the valuable lessons I've learned: Outside data is ALWAYS dirty. There is no clean data. And part of the value of experience is knowing how to handle this. For example, assume I get a very large data set from a third party that is crucial to my project. Unfortunately, all the fields are strings. Years of experience have taught me the following ways to deal with this: 1) Implement a lot of logic and validation into the program itself or as a pre-process step. This is a lot of work, requires a lot of domain knowledge, you may still miss a few edge cases, it will force the deadline to be pushed back, and increase the budget. However, those are the disadvantages. The advantages are that this could become a competitive advantage. Maybe no one else knows or has tried to clean up this data before. Identifying and doing this work can lead to a whole new business. A classic example of this is GIS data. GIS data is very very dirty. Street, St, St., Highway, Hwy, Freeway, Fwy, all typical examples of how dirty the data is. Companies like Navteq are based on their ability to clean up GIS data. Apple's Map app was a disaster because Google is so good at and has years of experience cleaning up GIS data. 2) Push back on the third party to clean up their data. Doing this takes some finesse and social/business skills. You can't just say, the data is hard to handle. That sounds like whining and laziness. Your manager can't do anything to help you if that's all you have. Instead one tactic is to make a schema (this is what WSDL and XML Schemas were invented for) and tell the third party that their data must conform. Then it becomes their problem. They might push back, but now your manager has something to fight with. But if they agree to conform and the schema is bad, then it will become your fault (the third party will just say, hey it conforms to your schema so that's your problem). So you better make sure the schema is good (experience helps here). And it may require meetings with the third party's technical team to compromise or figure out what a good schema is (which requires social/business skills and experience). 3) Identifying these problems early. If these data issues are not considered or found early, they will lead to big issues later. This is why senior developers get their work done fast and go home early. They don't make mistakes like using floats for currency or assuming a string is always a certain format. Junior developers make those kinds of mistakes and spend 80 hour weeks fixing it in the code, rewriting unit tests, and running scripts against the database to carefully migrate the data. They may seem more "productive" but they created the work (like the broken windows fallacy).
• PaulHoule 13y ago
  I think many workplaces have an idealized picture of what kind of person is a programmer, manager and so forth. I worked at one place where boomer IT staff were happy. One guy told me, "It's great, I just plan to coast a few more years to retirement." Gen X and younger people were miserable at this place. One guy who was 27 was fed up with not being taken seriously so he (1) started an MBA program (which the employer had to support at least partially) and (2) deliberately gained weight, and (3) went to a hair salon and had them do a fancy tint job on his hair with aluminum foil and stuff so he'd get grey highlights.
• sgw1138 13y ago
  Throwaway account. I recently had an interview with a start up from the latest YC batch. First words out of the founder's mouth, after hello: "So, how old are you?" For a moment, I was speechless. Not sure if it was just social awkwardness and shyness that made our young founder jump to that question. But in what universe is that ever an appropriate question in a job interview? (I'm in my early thirties.)
  • gregrata 13y ago
    That founder should be very careful, if he doesn't want his company mired in a bunch of lawsuits: http://jobsearch.about.com/od/interviewsnetworking/a/illegalinterv.htm http://jobsearch.about.com/od/interviewsnetworking/a/illegal... (not suggestion people should just start suing, but this is up there with not wanting to hire someone because of the color of her skin).
• gregrata 13y ago
  A good read on age and genius: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius_pr.html