Personally, I worry about this in our industry. I plan to save, invest, and diversify my income. That way I can get out of the sooner, rather than later. I don't want to end up being a 50+ year old who can no longer get a job.
Why would it not? Presumably the age bias is largely the (obviously incorrect) assumption that a person in their 40s/50s/60s simply doesn't know enough or is unable to learn the new things they need to in order to operate in a startup.
I think the 55 year old interviewing for a dev job with the 28 year old CTO will have a much easier time 25-30 years from now than today. At that point I think you're fighting against culture-wide age bias rather than industry-specific age bias.
> I don't want to end up being a 50+ year old who can no longer get a job
So just stay relevant? I'm 28, been coding for 19 years. What was relevant to learn when I was in middle and high school is completely useless now. All those endless hours spent learning how to make games in Pascal, irrelevant technologies. All those endless hours spent learning PHP3/4 and cobbling together websites and crude frameworks, irrelevant tech.
But on a higher level, all of that has proven useful. Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant.
The point of age bias isn't bias against people without relevant skills, its an actual bias against person of certain ages.
Our industry is ripe with stories of folks with extremely relevant skill sets not getting jobs after a certain age (50 seems to be common).
There is some (unintentional I'm sure) age bias even in the response of "stay relevant" as if the implication is that older devs don't do that as a matter of course while younger ones do.
I don't believe that most anecdotal claims of age bias are truly a bias against someone's age, but rather a bias against someone who had a long tenure at a single company perhaps with a single technology on a single product development effort. It looks like age bias because you may be 50, but you worked on the same thing for 25 years.
I don't think the industry is nearly as ripe with unemployed and relevant 50+'ers as you might think. I know many over 50 (I'm mid 40s) that have never and will never have any difficulty finding jobs for the foreseeable future because they've stayed relevant.
The main thing I would avoid is long tenures at employers where you are not working with newer technologies, not producing tangible accomplishments, or not challenged to learn on a regular basis. If you've been at the same thing for many years, it's difficult to differentiate age bias from a bias against someone who hasn't learned much or kept up with the industry.
Older devs that work for (or consult to) employers that use newer tech have no choice but to stay relevant.
Always happy to see your username on threads discussing these matters!
I think you bring up an important point - your average 50 year old developer is much more likely to have spent the last 10 years at the same company, working with the same technology, maybe even with the same title, than the 35 year old developer.
Most of my experience has been .Net web application development in the northeast/mid-Atlantic. I think it'd be damn near impossible for me to get a job writing Ruby or Go for a startup at this point unless I made it a goal (it's definitely not) and spent considerable effort in my spare time working on projects. I'm only 29.
If you're a 52 year old developer who has spent 22 years writing RPG reports for AS/400s and you get laid off, you're either going to end up in doing the exact same job for another company, or you're going to be retiring.
Thanks! And I think your point is pretty well made. Because of how attitudes towards job change have developed over time from being negatively labeled a 'job hopper' to now having it accepted (and somewhat expected), older devs tend to have longer tenures in one place.
Now that even the youngest of the first dotcom engineers are probably hitting their 40s, it will be interesting to see whether ageism will still be a factor in hiring for the industry.
I've definitely seen the effect of that "job hopper" mentality - I left my first development job ca. 2010 after a year and a half. My parents were terrified I'd never find another job because it'd look bad not having been there for "4 or 5 years at least." Since, I've had more than one person surprised that I've stayed at places longer than 2 years.
Much of the career advice I provide serves to counteract poor advice given by parents or university career counselors. Even most general career advice doesn't apply to the industry.
> bias against someone who had a long tenure at a
> single company perhaps with a single technology
> on a single product development effort
I'm not sure if this accounts for 0.1% or 99% of alleged "age bias" incidents but I agree with you: this is most definitely a bad thing for a developer to do to themselves.
I would be very, very skeptical of a prospective employee with a resume like that.
On the other hand, I'd think very highly of a prospective employee with a resume like that looked like that and had additional open-source or other programming projects they'd contributed to. I'd think, "This person loves to code, and has been pushing themselves to grow and diversify their skills despite being stuck in a daytime coding job that encourages no such thing..."
What do you think? What if anything would sway your opinion of somebody that has been maintaining a PHP4 app at BigHugeBoringCo for the last 10 years?
Most of my clients are, as you mention, skeptical of employees with incredibly long tenures marked by limited accomplishments and static skills. I also can't speak as to the percentage of potential 'age bias incidents' that stem from this type of situation, but attitudes towards employment and loyalty are certainly a factor.
Career fluidity has only been a somewhat accepted industry trait for the past 10 or so years. I had clients circa 2005 that wouldn't look at a resume for any candidate that hadn't been at their current job for 7+ years, which eliminated everyone who had taken a chance on a startup during the first dotcom wave.
The generation of technologists that started work in the 80s and early 90s likely had pensions and other retirement benefits that made staying at their job an easier decision, and they were likely raised with different feelings towards employer/employee relationships. Flash forward to 15-20 years into their career, and the job market, the definition of marketability, and job search itself changed dramatically. It's easy to point to ageism, but that's not really it, because the ones that joined startups or moved around a bit aren't seeing that same level of stigmatization.
If someone is maintaining that PHP4 app at BigCo for 10+ years, I'd think that person would probably need to demonstrate that they've been paying attention to dev trends or they won't get looked at. If you're not getting challenging work at the job, you need to find it somewhere else.
I started offering resume and career consulting services to job seekers over a year ago, and a large percentage of my clients are people in this boat who need to reinvent and market themselves to appeal to today's employers. It can be scary to look for jobs today if you haven't looked in 10 years.
> There is some (unintentional I'm sure) age bias even in the response of "stay relevant" as if the implication is that older devs don't do that as a matter of course while younger ones do.
Maybe it's bias. But I know for myself that the older I get, the less time I have to spend on staying relevant. Mobile revolution? Never bothered to learn. Super fancy new JavaScript? Took me years to start looking into. Go? Ugh, don't wanna. Etc.
Ten years ago I was chomping at the bit to jump on any new technology that started showing signs of promise. Nowadays I focus on just solving people's business problems and printing money. Tech is a tool, not a goal.
This already makes my resume look a lot less shiny to keyword matching recruiters. The fact that I'm old/cynical enough to say "expected value of options is 0" makes me all but unemployable.
>There is some (unintentional I'm sure) age bias even in the response of "stay relevant" as if the implication is that older devs don't do that as a matter of course while younger ones do.
Take two doctors. Both learned all their knowledge going through med school. Neither did anything else to stay relevant. One graduated 5 years ago, the other 25 years. Which is likely to have more relevant knowledge? Is it because they stayed relevant? No. It is because everyone has some learning period (be it through college or not), and on average older workers had that period longer ago than younger workers, so the relevancy bonus has decreased more.
The longer since you had a significant learning period (the longer since you graduated school), the more you have to work to stay relevant. This isn't tied to age, only correlated because it is rarer for a younger person to have had their learning period (graduated) longer ago.
Doctors spend a lot of time staying current. IMO, the real issue is you can't have 20 years of experience in a 10 year old technique. Which makes older workers seem like there asking for increased pay for irrelevant experience.
However, there is more than one learning curve involved. Knowing Ruby or Objective C is only part of the story you also want someone that understands non technical pitfalls.
n the United States, many states require CME for medical professionals to maintain their licenses. For example, Arizona requires an average of 40 hours of CME every two years.[4] For a complete list of requirements by state, see State Medical Licensure Requirements and Statistics, 2006. Within the United States, CME for physicians is regulated by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA).
> So just stay relevant? I'm 28, been coding for 19 years. What was relevant to learn when I was in middle and high school is completely useless now.
One thing that older people (50+) have impressed upon me is that learning gets harder as you age. It's not just that your body and mind become tired more easily. In general, if a 20-year-old and a 50-year-old spend the same amount of time studying something, the 20-year-old will do better on a quiz. At least, that's what older people tell me. I'm your age, so I haven't experienced this firsthand.
If at some point your rate of learning becomes slower than the rate at which relevant technologies change, it's not possible to stay relevant. Your deep understanding won't do you nearly as much good if you only know languages and frameworks from 15 years ago.
Learning doesn't get much harder. Making time to learn gets much harder.
The real problem is that while the 50 year old has already had 30 years more learning than the 20 year old, the 50 year old probably doesn't know who the Kardashians are. How can you not know who the Kardashians are? What's wrong with you?
> the 50 year old probably doesn't know who the Kardashians are. How can you not know who the Kardashians are? What's wrong with you?
I know it's just a throw-away example, but I'd like to point out "Keeping up with the Kardashians" has been on TV continuously since 2007. The more prominent Kardasihan sisters themselves are all 34-36 years old.
I don't think anyone in their 50s really would have a hard time relating to someone in their mid-30s, nor be completely flummoxed by a TV show that's been available for 10 years.
More to the point--pop culture is popular culture and seeps its way through all age groups. A better example would be a music artist that's popular only with teenagers or some niche group. I couldn't name a single artist popular with teens/tweens now.
You understand that you are unaware of the younger generation's pop culture (pop music is as much part of pop culture as TV is), but you don't understand how people of my generation can be unaware of your generation's pop culture.
Plausible, but my spot testing by querying people in the office showed that pretty much everyone in their 50s have heard of the Kardashians, and most of them actually know more about their lives than I do due to the fact that they watch the evening news (in which E! Entertainment) immediately follows to give you celebrity gossip.
I'd posit that generations can't have their own unique 'pop culture'. If it's only popular to people born within 10 years of you, then it's not popular. By my measure a lot of 'pop artists' aren't really popular because even appealing to 100% of tweens in the USA, really means you've captured 3% of the total general population.
Learning doesn't get harder, but one does become more selective. Most of the "innovation" (not all of course) in programming, is just re-inventing wheels, the new framework is yet-another-way-to-accomplish-the-same-thing and at the same time, a new artificial way to filter out those "not up with the times" for those "not up with the experience". One thing you learn is that you can learn anything, in a short time, but there's hardly a point in putting in the effort into the new hotness when it'll be passé by the time you're comfortable with it.
> Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant.
I used to think like you.
But I'm 51 now. I've discovered that I was wrong.
The younger the technical interviewer, the less interested they are in my experience. I'm guessing that the less experience they have, the less value they see in experience. I suspect I was the same way 25 years ago.
I now understand why good developers go on to be lousy managers. They get old and get pushed out of development. Mid-level management is all that's available to them.
Fortunately I still have a job in an older development group. I still have some value, for now.
I have to believe this depends on your experience, ability to learn, and location. I'm in seattle and my office is full of 40-60 year olds (with tons of younger people) working on demanding technical work. It's not php programming, it. It's software engineering. Learn to be an engineer and you shouldnot have a problem.
I still maintain there's age-cohort bias (anti boomer, etc.), not strictly age bias.
In 2000, I remember most people over 30 being clueless about the Internet (given that the population who were familiar with the Internet in the 80swas so small...that core group was of course super clueful, but was of measure zero vs. people who were learning about it in college every year.)
Now, it's largely been the case that anyone in engineering/tech has had extensive contact with the Internet, even if not a CS person, since the 90s. 30s/40s today are a lot different from 15 years ago.
In 10-20y, there will be plenty of 50/60 year olds who had grown up with the Internet.
So while this might be a problem now, it's correcting itself with time.
While this may be true at some level, I'm not sure it will be as drastic a change as no-internet to internet. Young people today (and increasingly many not-so-young people) have been growing up with the concept of quickly changing "high technology" and expect incremental change. I myself feel like if the next biggest shiniest thing comes along, I will be ready to jump aboard, with the benefit of deeply knowing that which came before. This is a sentiment which requires constant learning, which may get old after a while, but for now I consider staying with the times as part of the job description.
I don't think it's going to be any time soon, but brain augmentation / neural interfaces are likely in the long term. Whenever they show up it's probably going to be a much larger leap than the internet.
PS: Don't forget in many ways the steam engine was the last major leap and that was in the late 1700's.
Should appearance be a protected class? One often has more control over their religion than their appearance, especially in certain areas, so I can't see why no.
we have 30- 40- and 50-somethings working for us that have 20 years of experience with the internet. the first dot com boom was that long ago (1996). the oldest started in their 30s, the youngest started in their teens. this doesn't even count archaic technologies no longer in use.
we are in a new era, one in which someone's age doesn't really tell you anything about their tech relevance. we generally hire based on experience only, not specific technologies or schools, so we end up with employees all over the map.
> So while this might be a problem now, it's correcting itself with time.
that assumes that the reasons behind age discrimination/bias are purely based on competence (or lack thereof).
I don't see the problem correcting itself when it seems the drivers behind age discrimination are wages and perceived cultural fit (anecdotally more evident in cases where the manager is younger than the candidate)
As a 33 year old tech worker, I have specifically accelerated by plans of getting out of tech by my mid 30s due to ageism in the industry (unless I decide to start my own "lifestyle" startup I can live off of).
I'm not going to be a good culture fit when I want work/life balance, no more than 40 hours a week of work, not on call 24/7, etc.
EDIT: Perhaps I've just been working the wrong gigs. Thanks for the feedback all.
40 hours a week, never-on call, isn't really a problem on the East coast (DC/Georgia/Florida) markets. In fact, I'd say the reverse bias is through in DC/VA/Maryland. Small to mid-size employers expect you to have a family, move permanently into the area, and stay with them for 5+ years.
come to seattle. dozens of recruiters will bug you on linked in. dozens of big companies have 100-500 openings. no one can hold on to people unless they have good salary, good working conditions.
I'm a mid-30s tech worker. I've never had problems maintaining a work/life balance across jobs from tiny startups to larger 2000+ person companies. If you do want to stay in tech as you grow older, there are places to go that don't require abandoning your family.
> no more than 40 hours a week of work, not on call 24/7
I work at a startup in NYC and our culture is like that. Seems like you might want to explore the culture at other companies. There is no reason you need to kill yourself to work in tech. Work/life balance is important at many companies. It leads to longer-term employees, higher morale, better team-work etc (anecdotally speaking as I have worked for companies at all ends of the spectrum).
I don't see the problem correcting itself when it seems the drivers behind age discrimination are wages
This is a situation where it's not age discrimination at all - it's merely a candidate pricing themselves out of the market. Similarly, toomuchtodo suggests that as his life moves forward he'll be less willing to put the work in than his younger peers. That reduces his value.
Perhaps a significant chunk of age discrimination is merely workers being unwilling to recognize/acknowledge their actual market worth.
"Similarly, toomuchtodo suggests that as his life moves forward he'll be less willing to put the work in than his younger peers. That reduces his value."
While my value is reduced by not working more hours than I'm paid for, I would argue that government should be stepping in when tech companies are discriminating against workers who would like labor law followed (paid for the hours you work).
Why is it okay for workers to be taken advantage of (required to work more hours than they're compensated for) but regulation of employers to protect workers (prohibit) employers from requiring unpaid time) is not?
It seems to me we need a bit more data to discover it. The IRS gets total wages paid but not hours worked. Reporting that should make it harder to hide it at least.
I'm not paid by the hour. I'm paid to deliver. This is true for most developers - typically we take a salary in return for getting stuff done.
Now if you want to lawyer up and demand X hours, $Y pay, rigid adherence to various requirements, etc, that's great for you. But if people are not willing to pay you as much due to the fact that those rigid requirements are a pain, you aren't being discriminated against due to your age.
Needless to say I'm opposed to your desire for the government to hobble your competition.
> I'm not paid by the hour. I'm paid to deliver. This is true for most developers - typically we take a salary in return for getting stuff done.
If you're a contractor, yes. If you're an employee, no, not at all.
> Needless to say I'm opposed to your desire for the government to hobble your competition.
Government exists to protect its citizens above profits.
Are you insinuating that labor laws should not be enforced? Or that employers should discriminate against employees who want to actually get paid for the time they work?
Salaried employees are not paid by the hour. They are paid by the week, regardless of how much work they've done. I'm not insinuating anything, I'm explicitly stating that this type of work agreement should not be banned.
If you don't like it, demand something hourly. Just don't prevent me from working however I see fit.
> Are you insinuating that labor laws should not be enforced? Or that employers should discriminate against employees who want to actually get paid for the time they work?
No, he's saying employers will and should pay for work produced and NOT hours worked. If you want to get paid strictly for time worked, then only do time based contracting.
> it's merely a candidate pricing themselves out of the market
the pricing out is not always voluntary, say you are mid-career, you've been working hard, you lucked out with some career choices, you've been getting very good raises due to your performance, now you are paid over the high end for your salary band, which is fine where you are working because you've built up credibility and a solid track record, and it can happen that you are over band when promotions above where you are are tied to politics or company-specific situations (I have been in companies where above a certain level there are only a specified number of position available, meaning if nobody leaves you can't get promoted there)
Your company then, sadly, might fold, and you find yourself having to find a new job, you might even have to take a job at a level lower than you were at, which you are completely ok with, because say it is in a different area where you don't have as much experience but where you always wanted to work in but just didn't happen to.
It is very likely that you will be passed over for those positions even if you would do great in them because
- when you get to the interview you already have the first strike against you because you are applying for a "lower level" position that where you were
- when you get to salary discussion you get your second strike, where you will be asked what your previous salary was, which could easily have been 1.5x or even 2x than what you would be offered for this position
- odds are that since you haven't been interviewing for a while, or since this position was in an area you were not as familiar with, or you didn't sleep well the previous night, you had a "normal" interview, where you did some things great, and some maybe not-so-great
what is the company going to do? go with you, knowing this was a significant pay cut, knowing this was a position level cut, and assuming that due to the above you are not going to be very engaged not to mention you will likely be leaving asap, or would they go for somebody younger, less experienced, where they could give them a 10% bump over their previous salary and so perceive that they would be a lot more passionate for the position?
In the end unfortunately if you do well at your job, you end up being promoted, and once you hit, say, senior architect, or distinguished engineer, or principal researcher or whatever, the amount of positions available shrinks dramatically, and there is the perception that once you've been there you wouldn't be as happy or fit for anything less
I am not sure how this could be worked around, not when there is a widespread perception that "youth" and "energy" are a lot more important than good old boring experience and been-there-done-that-ness (cue the general infantilization of the workplace)
I am hoping that the recent efforts towards making the interviewing process more data-driven (via work-at-home assignments etc.) will pan off, because that might remove some of the barriers, although it does still worry me that in the end you always get to the "cultural fit" interview where you can't be somebody you're not (i.e. younger or less experienced)
Salaries don't increase for an entire career in most cases, and once you hit a certain number of years in the industry we tend to see salaries plateau where some job seekers will receive (and perhaps accept) offers below their current compensation. Employers know that applicants that are long-tenured employees will be earning above market rate due to their specific value to that employer, so as long as the applicant is realistic and understands their true market value there isn't likely to be any issues in negotiation.
Job seekers often get this reality check at some point in their career - salaries don't rise forever - and will adjust their expectations accordingly.
This is a tricky situation. I have no good solution beyond changing social norms to make it more acceptable to reduce people's pay (either within a job or across job transitions). Of course, such a change would need to correspond to a change making it less socially acceptable to live up to the edge of one's means.
I have no idea how to enact such change.
And while I am a grey beard myself (and actively advocate hiring a few more greybeards where I work, albeit for selfish reasons), I fully recognize that "youth" and "energy" will be vitally important for many jobs. Our industry may be a naturally pyramid shaped one.
Along the same lines you propose for "grew up with internet" there will always be a next new hotness. For example many new grads will have no idea what its like to run a physical server because of cloud platforms.
Same thing for Android/iOS programming, or mobile websites, or microservices, or NoSQL etc etc. Some will have had them from school onward, others will have encountered them late in their career.
it's particularly concerning to see this at a nonprofit, publicly funded research university. we would expect something a bit nobler from an institution of this category. the troubling transformation happening to the american university landscape will, i predict, have significant effects on society at large in the coming decades.
Or maybe child care centers and nursing homes could be colocated near public areas like parks and libraries. The old and the young are good for each other. And maybe people should feel comfortable pursuing further education no matter how old they are.
Although that's not what i had in mind when i mentioned education. Grades: Grades are the segregation. We are conditioned from a young age to accept social structures that discourage socialization between people of different age groups. Studies have shown that children learn better when they are in groups comprising a range of ages instead of just a single age.
Most people have an aversion towards camaraderie and integration with people who are significantly younger or older for way too long. Children are only supposed to have a few adult authority figures in their life until college, and even then it's weird to be friends with someone older than a grad student.
When does age discrimination end? Pretty sure the article highlights evidence that it doesn't end.
Alternatives? Not hard to imagine. In other societies past and present (and hopefully future) people of all ages have ample opportunity to make strong social connections with people of other ages. Our social structures actively discourage cohesion between age cohorts.
As an aside, I think that age-segregation in schooling results in behaviour problems.
Teenagers want to take their behavioural cues from older children and young adults, but they simply don't have enough interaction with them so instead take their cues from what they believe to be true via mass media.
Imagine how many fewer 15 year olds would ask "what can I do with calculus" if they had to brush shoulders with 20 year old engineering students and could visibly see what kind of projects you'd work on with a deeper mathematics background?
Cross-polination programs do exist today, but its not the same thing as having it be systemic.
I totally agree with this. When I was young I lived in a very rural area and went to a school with only 20 children. It went from ages 5 to around 10. There was only one teacher and one classroom.
I think a huge part of the advantage of a school like that is that the teacher from the very beginning is in the mindset that every child is going to be at a different stage and needs to be catered to individually. All the children were taught at their own pace and at their own level of ability.
By the time I left that school I was happily doing work that was designed for children 2-3 years older at a regular school. I also had not had the drive to self-learn knocked out of me as seems to be common with kids from regular schools.
I am in my mid-60s and I don't feel like I have suffered any age bias either at large companies like Google or small startups I have helped.
I sort of grew up with computers. My older brother and I got a mini version of a mechanical difference engine when I was a kid. When I was about 11 my Dad got me occasional use of a time sharing system, so that planted some desire in my brain for using computers. In high school I took a class at a local university.
It disturbs me to hear younger people talking pessimistically about their future careers. I advise them to keep learning and working on things that are useful and that they enjoy working on.
Edit: I did run into age bias, or at least I think it was: I had done a homework interview assignment and phone interviews for a back end job for Wikipedia and it seemed like they very much liked what I offered. Then, 1 minute into a video conference interview, I was brushed aside. So, I should have said that I have never had on the job age bias.
I wonder why? Is it because there's something potentially odd about hiring someone with more experience (and perhaps thus a much greater skill level) than you when you are both on the same career track?
I have never had to do it, but I'd like to think the 60-year old version of me would be much better at my job than I am. Thus, if I hire them, I'd wonder "why am I tech lead? It really should be the other way around".
I think this is one of the root issues, the perception that management is somehow the natural next set for software developers.
Why should that be the case? It'd be like you trained all your life to be the best violin player you can be, then after some years somebody pats you on your shoulders and tells you it's time to start conducting.
I am mid-career, and interestingly I had a couple of short stints in management early career, as much as it helped me quite a bit now with team leading duties and in seeing things from the point of view of my manager when we have 1 on 1s, I would never want to be in management as my full time job.
Management and software engineering are, or should be, parallel tracks: there is no competition, so a software manager should be as thrilled to be able to hire an experience software developer as a young hospital administrator be excited if they are able to snag a renowned surgeon for their hospital.
Guess I'm an outlier. I like people with experience more than not. I respect more older devs than I do younger. The older devs tend to have the best projects on Github.
Then again, I don't allow stupid data structures or algorithms questions in interviews. I can pretty much tell someone's experience level by the types of interview questions they ask.
Oh, it is Mark Watson! When I first came across your blog (via Clojure stuff) what fascinated me most about you was your sustained passion despite age. It actually gave me further assurance that my current passion for programming need not wither away in later years (contrary to what most people think).
Such subconscious biases are what tends to allow some people to get away with being borderline useless, and others shot by cops or fired without warning.
Just playing devil's advocate, but isn't that a logical approach? If two junior programmers show up on my doorstep, and one is 25 and the other is 55, why wouldn't I go with the 25 year old (all other skills being equal)?
If I'm lucky, maybe the young person will want to work with my company for a decade or two, or even more. Would the 55 year old want to work for several decades more?
Of course, I am also worried about age bias. I'm curious what will happen if/when I decide to join a company again after age 40.
I always see this argument but find it possibly disingenuous. Given the rates of turnover for programmers, or even non-programmers, I don't see how people can realistically think this. Young programmers have even more incentive to change jobs more frequently.
It's easier to let the data speak for itself, from the BLS:
the median tenure of workers ages 55 to 64 (10.4 years) was
more than three times that of workers ages 25 to 34 years
(3.0 years). A larger proportion of older workers than
younger workers had 10 years or more of tenure. Among
workers ages 60 to 64, 58 percent were employed for at
least 10 years with their current employer in January 2014,
compared with only 12 percent of those ages 30 to 34.
It would be for the ‘wisdom’ and life experiences; ability to take best decisions when no data is present (better intuition due to more life experiences); knowing that the person would be less likely to quit due to impulses; probability of having better intra personal skills; and so on…
The guy at 55 knows what he can give, he's a known quantity at all levels. He will likely hit the ground running without requiring extensive training, because he's seen it all before; and once he's settled, he will have no incentive to move on -- he stopped dreaming about jobs at Google/FB/Twitter a long time ago. If he has a problem, he'll just say it straight to your face with no anger, because he's tired of management bullshit and just wants to Get Shit Done. His kids won't need trips to the doctor/school/footie practice, because they're old enough to own their own cars; and that means the family doesn't have to go on vacation on that same school-holiday week all other young parents are fighting over.
The guy at 25 could decide at any moment that he really wanted that travel-writer career after all. He could find out he's so awesome with Scalisp 2.3 that TrendyCo is ready to sign him at 10x his current salary; or that he hates Scalisp so much he'd rather volunteer at Ebola clinics than write one line more. He could get married, have babies and see his productivity killed by sleepless nights, marital arguments, a divorce. More importantly, he will likely get bored after a few months and start angling for org changes you don't really want to have. When he has a problem, he'll just sulk because he doesn't know how to bring it up, and maybe he'll spread some venom around so the team as a whole will also suffer. He'll want to replace battle-tested solutions because he doesn't understand them, likely hitting again all bugs and corner cases that made the original implementation hard to understand. And after a few years, he'll piss off to double his salary because he has 3 years of experience in Rubynodexpress.js so qualifies as Lead Ninjastar for ShinyCorp.
When you look at it that way, why would you not hire the 55 guy?
As it is a 25 year old who is clueless or green. The argument that the younger guy "can learn" whereas the older dude cannot, is just baseless.
In fact, an older guy who ends up in a junior position willbe much more aware of his lackings and will likely work hard and humbly to overcome them... whereas youngsters usually "know everything" already.
My money would be on the older person sticking around longer. It's very uncommon for anybody to work at the same company for decades any more, but older people tend to have children, mortgages, and other commitments that keep them from jumping around too much.
Besides that, younger people will require larger raises to keep around because the difference between 1 year of experience and 3 years of experience on a resume is significant, while 30 years vs 32 years isn't. The older person will ask for a higher initial salary, though.
I'm also skeptical the 25 year old and the 55 year old will have the same skill level, assuming the 55 year old has been in the industry for any significant amount of time.
Edit: I didn't see "junior" in your comment when I wrote my reply.
Fair enough. This is one reason why I tend to use the phrase "age related employment issues" instead of age discrimination or age bias. It's a mouthful, and it certainly includes bias or discrimination, but that doesn't tell the whole story. I actually think the problems here run deep.
There are many aspects of the high tech workspace that don't really appeal to a lot of people, especially as they enter middle age (but by no means limited, plenty of young people don't like it either). Ping pong tables, video game consoles, open offices. The office setup is also a factor - I read an article (NYTimes, I think) about a middle aged woman journalist whose company was purchased by a modern tech media company. She lost her private office and worked in a big open room, with back visibility, where her (often much younger) coworkers were able to track her more frequent trips to the bathroom.
Funny thing for me, I was disappointed with this culture even when I was young. I majored in literature as well as math (with a cs focus), and I remember when I was younger how drawn I was to movies that kind of glamorized adulthood for me (the party scene in the movie "Manhattan" where the intellectual avant guard banter really appealed to me - I know it was a fantasy, but aren't all aspirations about what you want to grow up, to an extent?).
I started working at Sun Micro after grad school, and while I didn't want to be a lawyer or in finance, I envied something about my friends who went into these fields - they were treated as adults. Their getaways were to nice restaurants, our office getaway was at Dave N Busters. It was a letdown. And I'd say that tech culture has double down on this kind of thing since I was a grad student back in the late 90s.
Honestly, a lot about tech culture is really very unappealing to people who don't want to live in a permanent state of extended adolescence. I'm willing to take this a little further and say it isn't an accident - I do think that some elements of high tech are vaguely threatened by the notion that programmers and other technical types are actually adults who might prefer to go to dinner and the opera than dave n busters ad laser tag.
It's more of a gut feeling, or an intuition, but I do think that this plays a much bigger role in the disinterest a lot of people have in tech - including young tech workers themselves (who, in spite of a few notorious statements, generally are not the source of age discrimination). A lot of people, to quote someone fairly insightful on this issue, actually value propriety, protocol, and privacy, and will look elsewhere for a career if those things are in short supply in high tech.
On a brighter note I always felt joelonsoftware addressed this in a very positive way.
How much of your career was contracting, if any? Were you an employee of Google? I have heard Google is probably the best of the SV tech giants when it comes to age discrimination, FWIW.
I think contracting is a lot different and in that case more experienced consultants are preferred over younger ones where as it is the opposite when it comes to permanent employment.
The thing I don't agree with is that we should be expected to keep learning. As if knowing how to design and write software isn't enough for a solid career, we must learn the "newest" programming paradigm, latest js framework, etc. But this gets in to deeper issues of our profession that allows ageism.
Edit: Just looked at your website and it looks like you are 100% a contractor... Again, I think they are 2 very different labor markets for contractors and employees.
> The thing I don't agree with is that we should be expected to keep learning. As if knowing how to design and write software isn't enough for a solid career, we must learn the "newest" programming paradigm, latest js framework, etc.
Things change, people do discover better ways to work, and not knowing fads does impact one's ability to work in a team.
I'm in my mid 30's and I've already seen better sets of technologies appear with order of magnitude improvements twice. And I expect to claim one more time when the current fad of strict but flexible languages get sustainable.
re: "The thing I don't agree with is that we should be expected to keep learning." I believe that in many fields it is important to keep learning, not just in software development. 20 years ago one of the brightest developers I knew made the case that object oriented programming was the 'final paradigm' and that we didn't need any other model for organizing code and data. Now, I would be tempted to say that functional programming is the final paradigm, except I know better than to make predictions.
I absolutely agree with you that learning many frameworks is probably not a good use of our time. "Just in time learning" of frameworks is usually good enough but knowing a few programming languages, and occasionally learning a new one makes sense.
Right, and I think you are anecdote after anecdote of what is wrong with our profession. I wish I could put that more gently but this is something I'm pretty passionate about.
I'm definitely not advocating for the end of all learning and I hope you'd give my message a more charitable interpretation.
The idea that OO was new 20 years ago or functional programming is new today is completely backwards and is the attitude that ensures that it looks like our profession is running around with its head cut off for the next 20 years and ultimately contributes to the ageism that does exist in our industry. I'm extremely happy for you that you've found a niche as a contractor but I think you'd experience it more and understand the stress people feel if you were to apply for full time employment.
I appreciate your reservations on proclaiming functional programming the final paradigm, but why can't we just proclaim that a solid foundation in the pillars of computation is all one needs and as long as the tools and frameworks we use from one project to the next are built on those pillars then we can accomplish things at greater speeds and at larger scale?
I used a functional programming style in Scheme and Common Lisp starting in the 1980s (and wrote books published by Springer-Verlag for each language 20+ years ago) so I do know the history.
I really don't think that there is a final programming paradigm. The greatest thing I have seen today is news of a more programmable quantum computer. There is a lot of room for new ideas in programming languages for quantum computing.
I think there is a lot of headroom also for type inference applied to dynamic language like Ruby where entire programs are automatically type checked.
Computer science progress is in general accelerating rapidly, not just a few high profile areas like deep learning.
Yes. The time to put energy in is when there's truly a new paradigm at work. Not when it's just another version of something you've already seen a half-dozen times before.
Bootstrap? Cool. Maybe follow that up with 1 or 2 other grid systems. But if you start chasing every layout framework coming down the pike, you're wasting your time.
Same goes for imperative vs. functional programming. There's a big difference. You should know that.
I think where the problem arises is when there's some new cool version of the same thing. You probably already know how it plays out, so your rational response is to not bother. But if you don't have it on your resume, you're going to be doing some fast talking.
There's a difference between learning in order to execute and learning in order to impress. If you want to stay in coding, sadly, you gotta keep learning. And the things you learned all have to do with marketing yourself, not being a better programmer.
I think that's the part that sucks most about getting older as a coder -- watching the community walk away from solution delivery in order to intellectually amuse itself with 4 or 5 year fads, which usually involve a cool video and a ton of hidden complexity.
I recently realized that when my son in my age (37) I will be 67 years old, and getting (hopefully) ready to retire. This made me realize that in 30 years there is no way that I will be able to stay competitive in this field, and be able to find a decent job.
And less 30 years worth energy, enthusiasm and liabilities. What is knowledge worth in the era where any algorithm can be looked up in a google search.
Young people work for longer hours, don't fall sick often, come in on weekends and are more productive.
and how do you know =which= algorithm to look up in google for your particular requirements? knowledge is not only knowing where the hammer is, knowledge is also knowing when a screwdriver would be more appropriate.
Well that is easy too. Even if you have cursory information about a problem stating that in terms in which you could get an answer is very easy these days.
You seem to be describing a situation which existed two decades back where a person's only portal to information was a library.
Well there you have it, ageism manifest. Why not go with the younger which can be exploited so much more easily!? We can burn their candles, pay them peanuts, have them come up with half-assed solutions copy-pasted from stack overflow, and laugh all the way to the bank!
A tech CEO in his mid-fifties once told me: "There is no ageism in the valley - by the time you get to your forties and fifties, you are either a CTO, or you weren't very good to begin with".
This is typical bullshit coming from some asshole manager.
People who aspire to be managers think they're God's gift and it's the ending point for your career.
By definition, there will always be less numbers of managers than technicians.
Being a manager is a different skillset and not everyone WANTS to be a manager.
Typical comment from a clueless pointy haired boss!
I've found that I've had the best luck interviewing with people +/- 5 years of me. This has trumped gender or ethnic differences. (Sample size of just me)
I'll also say that I only had a handful of non-college interviews before my mid-30s, so I don't have a ton of data on if this were true when I was younger.
> The email, from their boss to a colleague at another university, said Ms. Taaffe and her fellow teachers were “an extraordinarily change-averse population of people almost all of whom are over 50, contemplating retirement (or not), and it’s like herding hippos.”
In the Standford med school, an IT admin named Can______ was pushed out for the treacherous crime of being older, and no pretext was used to pretend it was anything else because their supervisor admitted it openly.
People have to realize this will be them, and that normalized hate is unacceptable and speak up against it.
I don't see "ageism", exactly. I see the experience bar being set very low. When "senior software engineer" means 5-7 years of experience, then what are you with 30 years? You're completely outside the comprehension of most hiring managers.
If you want to be regarded as more than "old person with a bit more than 5-7 years of experience", then you need to use those years to learn how to do harder things than most people with 5-7 years of experience know how to do.
Keep asking yourself "What's the next thing I need to learn to advance my career?" That probably isn't the next web framework (learning that just lets you tread water). It might be Android or iOS, though.
I am 47. 27 years of professional experience. Got hooked in Basic. Fell in love with Pascal, C, C++, Smalltalk, Perl, and Java. Most new technologies are a re-encarnation of something that I did already the first time or second time around. I don't think my resume looks trendy. Still, I feel my skills are better than almost all of my friends and coworkers. They are 21-35. But, I see things that they don't. Subtle things like code organization, error handling, readability. I have a better CS background (compilers, networking,theory of languages,operating systems, relational theory, machine language). I know 100 ways in which a project can fail. My code is terse, I have been working on it for a long time.
Yet, I am scared to loose my job. I don't know if the recruiter will look past my age and lack of trendy technologies in my resume.
If you want to feel more assured start interviewing now. See what questions they ask and feel more familiar with it. You don't have to go on site anywhere or actually take another job. The questions you'll be asked might be academic, things you never think about anymore but the wrong answers can bar you from the next step.
This is one of the reasons I spend time on the weekends doing projects in new technologies. I can put Rails, React, Angular, Swift, etc. on my resume and answer questions about them (and point to projects I've used them on). I see keeping up with new technologies as an important part of my career development. If someone is truly biased against me because of my age, there's not much I can do about that. But I definitely have control over whether someone is biased against me because I haven't kept up with technical developments.
No. I really, really wish it weren't what weekends were for. Believe me. And I don't spend all of my weekends doing projects like that. But the reality of the industry is that not being up to date on technologies handicaps you in a job search. So as long as my day job isn't providing me the opportunities to learn these things, I feel like I have no choice but to use my spare time to do it myself.
My parents are doctors. They are in their 60s. And guess what: they still spend evenings and weekends reading medical journals, attending conferences (around the globe) and doing whatever else is necessary to keep up with new developments in their specialties. That's just what it takes to remain relevant in fast-moving fields.
I think what software developers need is some perspective. We aren't the only ones who have to spend time outside of work on keeping our skills sharp and learning new stuff.
Don't you think there's difference between reading about surgeries and performing those surgeries (Or POC surgeries :))? I do get what you are saying, not trying to be mean. What I'm saying is the effort and time commitment to do weekend apps sometime end up taking whole weekends including nights...all because we love doing this.
slacker hat: perspective is one of those words they use when they want something from you, like "duty" or "contribute". Doctors get so much more job security, prestige, and straight-up money than software developers. By the time we're in our 60s, many of our classmates who went into medicine will be living in neighborhoods and moving in social circles that are completely inaccessible to us.
I see this all the time but you can't compare apple (doctor) to orange (software developer).
Doctor is more "trustworthy" (perception-wise) as they get older while Developer is more in-demand when they're younger.
Doctor also technically made way more money than Developer (in general though, the statement may not stand if you compare Silicon Valley but you get the idea, even in other countries, Doctor probably made more than Developer).
Doctor also keep their job longer than Developer.
Doctor can read but does not necessarily have to demonstrate that to their prospective employers while Developer can't just say "I read Objective-C for Dummies therefore I am an expert of Objective-C".
These were just ones of many things that I can think of.
You forgot: Doctors have a strong professional organization that works for them, handles things like certification, keeps the labor supply favorable and wages high. Developers, on the other hand, swallow the "unions are bad" mentality and compete with each other in the usual "labor race to the bottom".
I don't think the AMA has much affect on employment of older doctors. He's right - older doctors are in demand because they're assumed to have acquired some wisdom along the way. The same is not true of software developers.
I'd be studying all night long if I was a doctor too. You can practice anywhere in the US, choose low-cost-of-living locales where you dont need 15-years worth of salary to buy a home. You have supply tightly controlled by a Board (i.e. cartel.) Wow...if only developers go those types of benefits.
> Is that weekends are for? I do that too but do wonder at times...
They are for doing what you want to do. Sometimes I code all weekend for fun, or go in the boat or sleep or play Diablo all day. But the reason why many people on this site are good at what they do is because they love doing it. Even if I was not paid to code, I would still immerse myself in coding (and IT in general). I am fortunate enough to love doing something that also can pay well.
Definitely not what weekends are for. I've looking over the past 5 years of my life and it fills me with regret at not having a lot of new experiences. I love coding but I'm going to disengage for a bit and find new hobbies. I don't want the highlight of the next 5 years of my life to be Github commits.
Realistically it doesn't even have to be done on the weekend per se. Typically averaging about an hour every day learning new stuff should be totally doable on a weekday.
As long as you have the drive (motivation can be different - some ppl like to hack, some are worried about their next gig etc) - this shouldn't be a problem.
We live in an age of forced autodidactism (I personally like it, but we should not expect everyone to) and growing hypercompetition. The Average is Over/Superstar effects, and shrinking number of well-remunerated, non-cognitive, non-high skilled jobs means that anyone that wants to stay ahead (or even in) the game now has to be prepared to train nonstop (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-...)
Fair, desirable, optimal? All debatable depending on one's perspective, but unstoppable. I think the only way we'll be able to get a handle on it is to manage its effects through policy (which has to happen eventually, given how many people will be affected, and how few will actually be able to be one of the "superstars"), rather than turning this train around.
Also, to be clear. I think that having many years of experience, hard-won judgement, really strong foundations, and experience with a variety of technologies (even if they aren't the newest) SHOULD be enough to be seriously considered for a job. Someone who has been in the industry for 20 years and knows a bunch of languages and frameworks is most likely going to be able to pick up a new one quickly. And he or she will bring with them experience that a younger programmer with more knowledge of some specific new technology can't provide. In a perfect world, companies would understand that, and take it into account when they're hiring. But in reality, that doesn't always happen, and all I can do to prevent myself from being impacted by it is make sure I have the right keywords on my resume, along side my years and years of experience.
At 37 I'm somewhere in the middle and I think there are two major factors at play in terms of SV age bias.
The first is a proliferation of young founders who have no experience and thus no frame of reference to evaluate older developers, so they just pattern match on the new tech they are familiar with. Nothing really to be done about that since convincing twentysomethings (particularly SV funded ones) of their hubris is a sisyphean task, and in any case it leaves talent on the table for those of us who actually know the value of a dollar.
The second, more troubling factor is founders who actually understand the value of experience, but prefer to take advantage of ambitious kids who are willing to work extreme hours for little equity and less salary. All else being equal, it's easier to find strong talent that isn't aware of (or bad at negotiating) their own value at a young age compared to when they get old and jaded.
As slimy as that is, I think it's a somewhat self-correcting problem in that good programmers are still too thin on the ground and startups who pass over old or minority candidates that are actually good will be at a competitive disadvantage. There is certainly a flood of young people going into technology via bootcamps or other means, but my experience so far is that there is a natural and unquantifiable talent component to being a good programmer which can not be solved by education. I firmly believe anyone can learn to program, but only a minority can ever learn to program well. At the moment, I interpret having learned to program before "startups" became a career move as a strong positive signal; chalk one up for the olds!
They may very well be at a competitive disadvantage, but unless something magical happens to communicate to someone that fact as "having contributed to failure" or "at the margin, caused the failure", that disadvantage doesn't translate into anything that helps either discriminated against individuals, nor does it help improve cultures that allow or encourage discrimination.
The individual or even group decision-making (with regards to not just company goals, but to lifestyles and associations) means that things like that end up as a wash. Make it more concrete:
28 year old founder decides to pass on excellent 47 year old programmer. What does that do the founder's life or company? Let's speculate on some possibilities:
- It does nothing, because even though the older developer would have been better, their level of experience wasn't even necessary to do the job well.
- The business winds up marginally less profitable, but still succeeds.
- The business fails, somehow, because at the margin, missing out on hiring that older developer somehow started a chain of events that could have been prevented if said older developer were hired.
In all cases, the founder goes on to find another job, makes plenty of money, is able to surround themselves with the type of people they'd rather be around (people their own age) and never is even aware of any impact on anything. To that person, it was just "didn't hire someone, something happened or didn't, life went on well, and founder was still happy, ultimately."
What I'm saying is that the "disadvantage" and other related theories start sounding like a secular version of Karma; people use them as a way to tell themselves there will be justice (not that you're necessarily doing that, I have no idea), when in truth it's likely there will be none.
You can try to "prevent" the discrimination through your own actions, which is by no means easy (https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/dealing-with-ageism-in-te...), but as the article makes clear, even in egregious cases, it's hard to prove or do anything about. Look how long we've had these various kinds of incredibly well-intentioned anti-discrimination laws, and look at the success rates on the suits / how often they're brought. The results are terrible. It's just too hard to prove.
You raise a very good point. To be clear, I don't think the problem will solve itself, the key bit is awareness of the problem, which gives the necessary information for the market to correct itself, at least partially.
Here's how I think this could possibly play out: Facebook and Google start paying 21-year-old kids $200k directly out of school, startups start paying ridiculous unsustainable salaries based on VC salaries. Savvy founders and hiring managers at other companies realize they can't economically compete for 25-year-old golden boy talent and start looking at other demographics to find the talent. Over time those savvy companies will thrive while the others are crushed by having to pay for inferior talent at inflated prices with bubble-time VC funds.
Obviously this only works if people realize that older and minority talent is getting unduly passed over. And also I don't know how strong this effect will be or whether the existing tidal wave of bias is too overwhelming for such an anti-trend to even register in the marketplace. Whether or not this would even constitute justice goes beyond my thesis (I believe in ethical business, but justice is quite a tall order).
Nevertheless, as a hiring manager, I see any market bias that I am aware of as a competitive advantage to me, and I'm convinced that effect is real no matter how small.
Yes, individual companies can use some of this type of information to hire high-quality underrated/underutilized potential employees; older people, people with no degree, people from non-elite schools, etc. that get passed over may make fantastic hires that others miss. There's definitely room for "moneyballing", and savvy companies would be wise to attempt to use this in their hiring calculus.
Broad correction, though, seems unlikely to happen, whether attempts are done via the market or via legislation.
I was on the other side of the table: as an interviewer (plus a resume screener). I've seen this before with my own eyes but then my experience is just an anecdote: back in the 1998-2005 era, people keep piling on multiple technologies: C, C++, Java, Perl, XML, XPath, XQuery, XForms, SOAP, etc but whenever I looked into their resume, it becomes quite clear that they "learn" these technologies while working on something that:
1) I've never heard of,
2) or the needs to incorporate enterprise solution from back in the days (e.g.: form builder, complex enterprise frameworks, etc) doing some enterprise system
In most cases, again this is my anecdote, none of these developers pass the interview.
NodeJS was hot in the last 2 years (thought it has cool down a bit lately) but to me, NodeJS seems to have the risk of becoming one of those X[technology] revolution in which could lead to a negative signal if one has it in one's resume (plus it's a chance for me to grill candidate how good he/she is when it comes to JavaScript idioms, patterns, best-practices, automation-testing because at the moment, I know the majority of developers who put JavaScript on their resume don't actually practice "good hygiene" when it comes to JavaScript while I know for sure the number of Java developers whom I've interviewed before at least could demonstrate a better/solid software engineering skill).
The programming language keyword padding is a response to employers who inexplicably list very specific language and technology demands. You never see a job posting that says: "Wanted someone who's smart, works hard, and ships software".
Imagine a want ad for a carpenter: "Home builder wanted. MUST use Makita brand circular saw."
In my area, usually the employers with job-posts that mention a long-list of techs are from health insurance/claim industry.
Occasionally I saw ads like that being posted by small game companies/digital marketing companies; they fall under the "fishy/avoid" type of companies.
Luckily the sane/majority of the companies here listed their main preferred technology.
I'm on LinkedIN and I don't mean to brag but I never listed long-list tech stuff on my LinkedIN. I'm still being recruited albeit I... kinda suck though. I'm definitely not Google material (just between you and me ;)).
Do not worry too much. Its much easier to "hack" dumb recruiters then C code.
As someone who recently graduated and is "one of them damn kids" - a lot of people from my graduating class know a lot more about marketing then actual programming.
Since 2008 - the world has became a much more cruel place - and that has forced many of us to graduating since then to play an arms race with "trends" - switch jobs constantly and be selfish.
The way I see anyone who has been writing production code since 1990 is a WW2 veteran. You guys have been through the PC revolution, Internet revolution, survived the dot com bubble, shipped code before git, stackoverflow.
I think if you projected that experience into confidence you could easily do whatever you wanted - you deserve it !
Recruiter here, just a couple ticks younger than you, and the less experienced recruiters probably won't look past your age. The key for you is delivering a clear marketing message that can't be misinterpreted by even the dumbest of recruiters (or avoiding those gatekeepers entirely), while knowing that your experience will have much more appeal to the more experienced engineers internally.
The resume doesn't need to 'look' trendy, but it can't look stale either.
I'm right behind you! Some ideas I've tried, who knows whether they work or not:
1. Remove everything from your resume past 6 or so years in the past. Put a little note at the bottom saying that your extended work history is available upon request. Nobody wants to read a resume over 1 page anyway.
2. Don't list any years on your education--just list the institutions. That's an easy way to leak your age.
3. Regularly scrub for "outdated" technologies and topics. Instead of writing perl scripts to parse log files and output reports with Tcl/Tk, you were a full-stack developer who processed data analytics from critical business infrastructure.
To be honest, if I were looking at a resume that reads like I expect yours would, I would probably pass on it unless I was looking for an architect/principal software engineer, and in that case I would need to see interesting technical accomplishments and leadership experience as well. Less experienced developers are cheaper, probably have a more current education, and are less set in their ways (e.i. more trainable).
I recognize you will probably make fewer dumb mistakes than a younger developer, and your experience probably enables you to learn new technologies faster (though I'd wonder if you didn't list any trendy technologies on your resume). On the flip side, if your resume showed a long period without any significant career advancement I might question your competence.
It's difficult to codify "career advancement". What does it mean? To whom? I've been a "programmer", "analyst", "database administrator", "developer", "consultant", and "manager". What order shows advancement?
Well, it is a bit of a red flag if you list them in non-chronological order (unless you wrote a functional resume that was tailored specifically to the requirements for my position, in which case you get bonus points).
You should be able to show career advancement via the achievements you list for each position. There should generally be a trend towards increasing responsibility and successively more impressive feats at each stage. Some lateral movement is fine, but if that's all you've got it suggests that you lack focus/get bored easily.
True. The description/achievements are key. I guess my point was that the distinction in my titles was largely a result of HR practices at the organizations and not an indicator of advancement. For example, at most companies an "Analyst" position is higher than a "Programmer", yet I had that first. And if I didn't choose to become a manager, showing growth at my current position would be difficult.
What are we talking about here ? Comparing a developer with 10 year experience vs with 20 years ? Or one fresh out of school, with a senior developer ?
Because around here, your salary will be determined by your actual responsibilities and the only way for a guy with 20+ years of experience to make more than one with 5-10 years is to have been in that company for during those 20 years, accruing benefits.
Similarly, contract price are about the same. They haven't even raised much in the last 10 years. Unless you become consultant on a specific topic, you are getting paid the same regardless how much more experience you have over 3 years.
The inflexibility has a flip side too: a developer that has been developing for 20 years is most likely doing exactly what he wants to do. Can probably count on him to be there to see the project through production, and not having "move up" or strategically move to other office, technology stack, companies.
I can tell age stories too. But lets get real: people change as they get old. They have different experiences and different referents. They have seen both more and less of the industry, since its been changing a long time but changes faster these days.
Indeed, you get a different employee when you hire an older person. Sometimes that's helpful; sometimes not. We can't wave a wand and make that go away.
So far the only kind of "age-related" "discrimination" (note the quotation marks) that I faced that I know of have been the "you're too expensive for us, we'll hire a junior engineer and train him" type deal.
I do prefer/tend to work for small companies and startups so even though I have a reasonably decent "enterprise development" and "CS" type backgrounds I'm more or less up to speed on (or at least aware of) the latest developments in the industry so if a potential employer wants to see me hack some homework CRUD assignment using whatever hot-shot stack they are looking to use it won't take me long to set it up.
In the OP, the manager is frustrated with the "extraordinarily change-averse" employees over 50.
One of the reasons I love being in tech (I am 44) is that you become so familiar with change your start seeing it as an inevitable force of continuous opportunity, instead of something to fear. That mindset keeps you young at heart.
I suspect that age discrimination lawsuits are more likely from slow moving industries, like the academia example in the OP.
The only place where I felt concerned about age discrimination is at YC. "How old are you?" is the third question on the application even before the question "What will your company do".
Having been invited to YC HQ twice now (thank you), I don't think age discrimination is an issue and I can't fault them for asking. But being asked that question upfront still messes with my psychology.
As someone who works at OSU I can confirm that this place is exceptionally backwards, and change can bring people to tears. Due to the severely broken HR system here young people generally leave within 2-5 years, and the older folks are almost always just waiting out the clock on their retirement.
Age discrimination might be a serious problem elsewhere, but with OSU's chronic issues I'd be hard pressed to believe these people were discriminated against.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadSo wouldn't the future be a little more forgiving when the number of 50-something engineers is quite a bit more than (presumably) what it is today?
I think the 55 year old interviewing for a dev job with the 28 year old CTO will have a much easier time 25-30 years from now than today. At that point I think you're fighting against culture-wide age bias rather than industry-specific age bias.
So just stay relevant? I'm 28, been coding for 19 years. What was relevant to learn when I was in middle and high school is completely useless now. All those endless hours spent learning how to make games in Pascal, irrelevant technologies. All those endless hours spent learning PHP3/4 and cobbling together websites and crude frameworks, irrelevant tech.
But on a higher level, all of that has proven useful. Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant.
Keep improving. Be an engineer, not just a coder.
The point of age bias isn't bias against people without relevant skills, its an actual bias against person of certain ages.
Our industry is ripe with stories of folks with extremely relevant skill sets not getting jobs after a certain age (50 seems to be common).
There is some (unintentional I'm sure) age bias even in the response of "stay relevant" as if the implication is that older devs don't do that as a matter of course while younger ones do.
I don't think the industry is nearly as ripe with unemployed and relevant 50+'ers as you might think. I know many over 50 (I'm mid 40s) that have never and will never have any difficulty finding jobs for the foreseeable future because they've stayed relevant.
The main thing I would avoid is long tenures at employers where you are not working with newer technologies, not producing tangible accomplishments, or not challenged to learn on a regular basis. If you've been at the same thing for many years, it's difficult to differentiate age bias from a bias against someone who hasn't learned much or kept up with the industry.
Older devs that work for (or consult to) employers that use newer tech have no choice but to stay relevant.
I think you bring up an important point - your average 50 year old developer is much more likely to have spent the last 10 years at the same company, working with the same technology, maybe even with the same title, than the 35 year old developer.
Most of my experience has been .Net web application development in the northeast/mid-Atlantic. I think it'd be damn near impossible for me to get a job writing Ruby or Go for a startup at this point unless I made it a goal (it's definitely not) and spent considerable effort in my spare time working on projects. I'm only 29.
If you're a 52 year old developer who has spent 22 years writing RPG reports for AS/400s and you get laid off, you're either going to end up in doing the exact same job for another company, or you're going to be retiring.
Now that even the youngest of the first dotcom engineers are probably hitting their 40s, it will be interesting to see whether ageism will still be a factor in hiring for the industry.
I'm not sure if this accounts for 0.1% or 99% of alleged "age bias" incidents but I agree with you: this is most definitely a bad thing for a developer to do to themselves.
I would be very, very skeptical of a prospective employee with a resume like that.
On the other hand, I'd think very highly of a prospective employee with a resume like that looked like that and had additional open-source or other programming projects they'd contributed to. I'd think, "This person loves to code, and has been pushing themselves to grow and diversify their skills despite being stuck in a daytime coding job that encourages no such thing..."
What do you think? What if anything would sway your opinion of somebody that has been maintaining a PHP4 app at BigHugeBoringCo for the last 10 years?
Career fluidity has only been a somewhat accepted industry trait for the past 10 or so years. I had clients circa 2005 that wouldn't look at a resume for any candidate that hadn't been at their current job for 7+ years, which eliminated everyone who had taken a chance on a startup during the first dotcom wave.
The generation of technologists that started work in the 80s and early 90s likely had pensions and other retirement benefits that made staying at their job an easier decision, and they were likely raised with different feelings towards employer/employee relationships. Flash forward to 15-20 years into their career, and the job market, the definition of marketability, and job search itself changed dramatically. It's easy to point to ageism, but that's not really it, because the ones that joined startups or moved around a bit aren't seeing that same level of stigmatization.
If someone is maintaining that PHP4 app at BigCo for 10+ years, I'd think that person would probably need to demonstrate that they've been paying attention to dev trends or they won't get looked at. If you're not getting challenging work at the job, you need to find it somewhere else.
I started offering resume and career consulting services to job seekers over a year ago, and a large percentage of my clients are people in this boat who need to reinvent and market themselves to appeal to today's employers. It can be scary to look for jobs today if you haven't looked in 10 years.
Maybe it's bias. But I know for myself that the older I get, the less time I have to spend on staying relevant. Mobile revolution? Never bothered to learn. Super fancy new JavaScript? Took me years to start looking into. Go? Ugh, don't wanna. Etc.
Ten years ago I was chomping at the bit to jump on any new technology that started showing signs of promise. Nowadays I focus on just solving people's business problems and printing money. Tech is a tool, not a goal.
This already makes my resume look a lot less shiny to keyword matching recruiters. The fact that I'm old/cynical enough to say "expected value of options is 0" makes me all but unemployable.
Take two doctors. Both learned all their knowledge going through med school. Neither did anything else to stay relevant. One graduated 5 years ago, the other 25 years. Which is likely to have more relevant knowledge? Is it because they stayed relevant? No. It is because everyone has some learning period (be it through college or not), and on average older workers had that period longer ago than younger workers, so the relevancy bonus has decreased more.
The longer since you had a significant learning period (the longer since you graduated school), the more you have to work to stay relevant. This isn't tied to age, only correlated because it is rarer for a younger person to have had their learning period (graduated) longer ago.
However, there is more than one learning curve involved. Knowing Ruby or Objective C is only part of the story you also want someone that understands non technical pitfalls.
n the United States, many states require CME for medical professionals to maintain their licenses. For example, Arizona requires an average of 40 hours of CME every two years.[4] For a complete list of requirements by state, see State Medical Licensure Requirements and Statistics, 2006. Within the United States, CME for physicians is regulated by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA).
One thing that older people (50+) have impressed upon me is that learning gets harder as you age. It's not just that your body and mind become tired more easily. In general, if a 20-year-old and a 50-year-old spend the same amount of time studying something, the 20-year-old will do better on a quiz. At least, that's what older people tell me. I'm your age, so I haven't experienced this firsthand.
If at some point your rate of learning becomes slower than the rate at which relevant technologies change, it's not possible to stay relevant. Your deep understanding won't do you nearly as much good if you only know languages and frameworks from 15 years ago.
The real problem is that while the 50 year old has already had 30 years more learning than the 20 year old, the 50 year old probably doesn't know who the Kardashians are. How can you not know who the Kardashians are? What's wrong with you?
My exact experience.
I know it's just a throw-away example, but I'd like to point out "Keeping up with the Kardashians" has been on TV continuously since 2007. The more prominent Kardasihan sisters themselves are all 34-36 years old.
I don't think anyone in their 50s really would have a hard time relating to someone in their mid-30s, nor be completely flummoxed by a TV show that's been available for 10 years.
More to the point--pop culture is popular culture and seeps its way through all age groups. A better example would be a music artist that's popular only with teenagers or some niche group. I couldn't name a single artist popular with teens/tweens now.
You understand that you are unaware of the younger generation's pop culture (pop music is as much part of pop culture as TV is), but you don't understand how people of my generation can be unaware of your generation's pop culture.
I'd posit that generations can't have their own unique 'pop culture'. If it's only popular to people born within 10 years of you, then it's not popular. By my measure a lot of 'pop artists' aren't really popular because even appealing to 100% of tweens in the USA, really means you've captured 3% of the total general population.
I used to think like you.
But I'm 51 now. I've discovered that I was wrong.
The younger the technical interviewer, the less interested they are in my experience. I'm guessing that the less experience they have, the less value they see in experience. I suspect I was the same way 25 years ago.
I now understand why good developers go on to be lousy managers. They get old and get pushed out of development. Mid-level management is all that's available to them.
Fortunately I still have a job in an older development group. I still have some value, for now.
When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
- Oscar Wilde
I've seen clear bias in our industry. Though I'm in my 30's. I've seen people in my age group clearly discriminate against older programmers.
Save, invest, prepare for your retirement and be safe instead of betting your life on a unforgiving younger generation.
Better. Why just stop there. Avoid the need to do something to make a living. Save, invest and plan for your retirement.
Once you've done that, you could on any day 'enjoy' programming just for fun.
In 2000, I remember most people over 30 being clueless about the Internet (given that the population who were familiar with the Internet in the 80swas so small...that core group was of course super clueful, but was of measure zero vs. people who were learning about it in college every year.)
Now, it's largely been the case that anyone in engineering/tech has had extensive contact with the Internet, even if not a CS person, since the 90s. 30s/40s today are a lot different from 15 years ago.
In 10-20y, there will be plenty of 50/60 year olds who had grown up with the Internet.
So while this might be a problem now, it's correcting itself with time.
PS: Don't forget in many ways the steam engine was the last major leap and that was in the late 1700's.
Older people tend toward higher BMI, and younger overweight people "carry" their weight better.
Discrimination on appearance is already well-documented.
we are in a new era, one in which someone's age doesn't really tell you anything about their tech relevance. we generally hire based on experience only, not specific technologies or schools, so we end up with employees all over the map.
that assumes that the reasons behind age discrimination/bias are purely based on competence (or lack thereof).
I don't see the problem correcting itself when it seems the drivers behind age discrimination are wages and perceived cultural fit (anecdotally more evident in cases where the manager is younger than the candidate)
I'm not going to be a good culture fit when I want work/life balance, no more than 40 hours a week of work, not on call 24/7, etc.
EDIT: Perhaps I've just been working the wrong gigs. Thanks for the feedback all.
40 hours a week, never-on call, isn't really a problem on the East coast (DC/Georgia/Florida) markets. In fact, I'd say the reverse bias is through in DC/VA/Maryland. Small to mid-size employers expect you to have a family, move permanently into the area, and stay with them for 5+ years.
I work at a startup in NYC and our culture is like that. Seems like you might want to explore the culture at other companies. There is no reason you need to kill yourself to work in tech. Work/life balance is important at many companies. It leads to longer-term employees, higher morale, better team-work etc (anecdotally speaking as I have worked for companies at all ends of the spectrum).
This is a situation where it's not age discrimination at all - it's merely a candidate pricing themselves out of the market. Similarly, toomuchtodo suggests that as his life moves forward he'll be less willing to put the work in than his younger peers. That reduces his value.
Perhaps a significant chunk of age discrimination is merely workers being unwilling to recognize/acknowledge their actual market worth.
While my value is reduced by not working more hours than I'm paid for, I would argue that government should be stepping in when tech companies are discriminating against workers who would like labor law followed (paid for the hours you work).
Why is it okay for workers to be taken advantage of (required to work more hours than they're compensated for) but regulation of employers to protect workers (prohibit) employers from requiring unpaid time) is not?
This is not progress. It's theft.
[1]http://priceonomics.com/how-employers-get-out-of-paying-thei...
Now if you want to lawyer up and demand X hours, $Y pay, rigid adherence to various requirements, etc, that's great for you. But if people are not willing to pay you as much due to the fact that those rigid requirements are a pain, you aren't being discriminated against due to your age.
Needless to say I'm opposed to your desire for the government to hobble your competition.
If you're a contractor, yes. If you're an employee, no, not at all.
> Needless to say I'm opposed to your desire for the government to hobble your competition.
Government exists to protect its citizens above profits.
Are you insinuating that labor laws should not be enforced? Or that employers should discriminate against employees who want to actually get paid for the time they work?
If you don't like it, demand something hourly. Just don't prevent me from working however I see fit.
Unfortunately, evidence has shown that employers are using such rules to take advantage of workers. Therefore, it should be heavily regulated.
We disagree, but that's okay. See you in the public policy arena.
No, he's saying employers will and should pay for work produced and NOT hours worked. If you want to get paid strictly for time worked, then only do time based contracting.
the pricing out is not always voluntary, say you are mid-career, you've been working hard, you lucked out with some career choices, you've been getting very good raises due to your performance, now you are paid over the high end for your salary band, which is fine where you are working because you've built up credibility and a solid track record, and it can happen that you are over band when promotions above where you are are tied to politics or company-specific situations (I have been in companies where above a certain level there are only a specified number of position available, meaning if nobody leaves you can't get promoted there)
Your company then, sadly, might fold, and you find yourself having to find a new job, you might even have to take a job at a level lower than you were at, which you are completely ok with, because say it is in a different area where you don't have as much experience but where you always wanted to work in but just didn't happen to.
It is very likely that you will be passed over for those positions even if you would do great in them because
- when you get to the interview you already have the first strike against you because you are applying for a "lower level" position that where you were
- when you get to salary discussion you get your second strike, where you will be asked what your previous salary was, which could easily have been 1.5x or even 2x than what you would be offered for this position
- odds are that since you haven't been interviewing for a while, or since this position was in an area you were not as familiar with, or you didn't sleep well the previous night, you had a "normal" interview, where you did some things great, and some maybe not-so-great
what is the company going to do? go with you, knowing this was a significant pay cut, knowing this was a position level cut, and assuming that due to the above you are not going to be very engaged not to mention you will likely be leaving asap, or would they go for somebody younger, less experienced, where they could give them a 10% bump over their previous salary and so perceive that they would be a lot more passionate for the position?
In the end unfortunately if you do well at your job, you end up being promoted, and once you hit, say, senior architect, or distinguished engineer, or principal researcher or whatever, the amount of positions available shrinks dramatically, and there is the perception that once you've been there you wouldn't be as happy or fit for anything less
I am not sure how this could be worked around, not when there is a widespread perception that "youth" and "energy" are a lot more important than good old boring experience and been-there-done-that-ness (cue the general infantilization of the workplace)
I am hoping that the recent efforts towards making the interviewing process more data-driven (via work-at-home assignments etc.) will pan off, because that might remove some of the barriers, although it does still worry me that in the end you always get to the "cultural fit" interview where you can't be somebody you're not (i.e. younger or less experienced)
Job seekers often get this reality check at some point in their career - salaries don't rise forever - and will adjust their expectations accordingly.
I have no idea how to enact such change.
And while I am a grey beard myself (and actively advocate hiring a few more greybeards where I work, albeit for selfish reasons), I fully recognize that "youth" and "energy" will be vitally important for many jobs. Our industry may be a naturally pyramid shaped one.
Same thing for Android/iOS programming, or mobile websites, or microservices, or NoSQL etc etc. Some will have had them from school onward, others will have encountered them late in their career.
Although that's not what i had in mind when i mentioned education. Grades: Grades are the segregation. We are conditioned from a young age to accept social structures that discourage socialization between people of different age groups. Studies have shown that children learn better when they are in groups comprising a range of ages instead of just a single age.
Most people have an aversion towards camaraderie and integration with people who are significantly younger or older for way too long. Children are only supposed to have a few adult authority figures in their life until college, and even then it's weird to be friends with someone older than a grad student.
When does age discrimination end? Pretty sure the article highlights evidence that it doesn't end.
Alternatives? Not hard to imagine. In other societies past and present (and hopefully future) people of all ages have ample opportunity to make strong social connections with people of other ages. Our social structures actively discourage cohesion between age cohorts.
Teenagers want to take their behavioural cues from older children and young adults, but they simply don't have enough interaction with them so instead take their cues from what they believe to be true via mass media.
Imagine how many fewer 15 year olds would ask "what can I do with calculus" if they had to brush shoulders with 20 year old engineering students and could visibly see what kind of projects you'd work on with a deeper mathematics background?
Cross-polination programs do exist today, but its not the same thing as having it be systemic.
I think a huge part of the advantage of a school like that is that the teacher from the very beginning is in the mindset that every child is going to be at a different stage and needs to be catered to individually. All the children were taught at their own pace and at their own level of ability.
By the time I left that school I was happily doing work that was designed for children 2-3 years older at a regular school. I also had not had the drive to self-learn knocked out of me as seems to be common with kids from regular schools.
I sort of grew up with computers. My older brother and I got a mini version of a mechanical difference engine when I was a kid. When I was about 11 my Dad got me occasional use of a time sharing system, so that planted some desire in my brain for using computers. In high school I took a class at a local university.
It disturbs me to hear younger people talking pessimistically about their future careers. I advise them to keep learning and working on things that are useful and that they enjoy working on.
Edit: I did run into age bias, or at least I think it was: I had done a homework interview assignment and phone interviews for a back end job for Wikipedia and it seemed like they very much liked what I offered. Then, 1 minute into a video conference interview, I was brushed aside. So, I should have said that I have never had on the job age bias.
I have never had to do it, but I'd like to think the 60-year old version of me would be much better at my job than I am. Thus, if I hire them, I'd wonder "why am I tech lead? It really should be the other way around".
I think this is one of the root issues, the perception that management is somehow the natural next set for software developers.
Why should that be the case? It'd be like you trained all your life to be the best violin player you can be, then after some years somebody pats you on your shoulders and tells you it's time to start conducting.
I am mid-career, and interestingly I had a couple of short stints in management early career, as much as it helped me quite a bit now with team leading duties and in seeing things from the point of view of my manager when we have 1 on 1s, I would never want to be in management as my full time job.
Management and software engineering are, or should be, parallel tracks: there is no competition, so a software manager should be as thrilled to be able to hire an experience software developer as a young hospital administrator be excited if they are able to snag a renowned surgeon for their hospital.
Then again, I don't allow stupid data structures or algorithms questions in interviews. I can pretty much tell someone's experience level by the types of interview questions they ask.
You obviously have ton of expertise and experience to make age a non issue. This is not the case for older people trying to break into programming.
Employers often take a chance with younger employee over older ones if all things are equal. That is bias the article is taking about.
If I'm lucky, maybe the young person will want to work with my company for a decade or two, or even more. Would the 55 year old want to work for several decades more?
Of course, I am also worried about age bias. I'm curious what will happen if/when I decide to join a company again after age 40.
It's easier to let the data speak for itself, from the BLS:
It would be for the ‘wisdom’ and life experiences; ability to take best decisions when no data is present (better intuition due to more life experiences); knowing that the person would be less likely to quit due to impulses; probability of having better intra personal skills; and so on…
The guy at 25 could decide at any moment that he really wanted that travel-writer career after all. He could find out he's so awesome with Scalisp 2.3 that TrendyCo is ready to sign him at 10x his current salary; or that he hates Scalisp so much he'd rather volunteer at Ebola clinics than write one line more. He could get married, have babies and see his productivity killed by sleepless nights, marital arguments, a divorce. More importantly, he will likely get bored after a few months and start angling for org changes you don't really want to have. When he has a problem, he'll just sulk because he doesn't know how to bring it up, and maybe he'll spread some venom around so the team as a whole will also suffer. He'll want to replace battle-tested solutions because he doesn't understand them, likely hitting again all bugs and corner cases that made the original implementation hard to understand. And after a few years, he'll piss off to double his salary because he has 3 years of experience in Rubynodexpress.js so qualifies as Lead Ninjastar for ShinyCorp.
When you look at it that way, why would you not hire the 55 guy?
In fact, an older guy who ends up in a junior position willbe much more aware of his lackings and will likely work hard and humbly to overcome them... whereas youngsters usually "know everything" already.
Besides that, younger people will require larger raises to keep around because the difference between 1 year of experience and 3 years of experience on a resume is significant, while 30 years vs 32 years isn't. The older person will ask for a higher initial salary, though.
I'm also skeptical the 25 year old and the 55 year old will have the same skill level, assuming the 55 year old has been in the industry for any significant amount of time.
Edit: I didn't see "junior" in your comment when I wrote my reply.
There are many aspects of the high tech workspace that don't really appeal to a lot of people, especially as they enter middle age (but by no means limited, plenty of young people don't like it either). Ping pong tables, video game consoles, open offices. The office setup is also a factor - I read an article (NYTimes, I think) about a middle aged woman journalist whose company was purchased by a modern tech media company. She lost her private office and worked in a big open room, with back visibility, where her (often much younger) coworkers were able to track her more frequent trips to the bathroom.
Funny thing for me, I was disappointed with this culture even when I was young. I majored in literature as well as math (with a cs focus), and I remember when I was younger how drawn I was to movies that kind of glamorized adulthood for me (the party scene in the movie "Manhattan" where the intellectual avant guard banter really appealed to me - I know it was a fantasy, but aren't all aspirations about what you want to grow up, to an extent?).
I started working at Sun Micro after grad school, and while I didn't want to be a lawyer or in finance, I envied something about my friends who went into these fields - they were treated as adults. Their getaways were to nice restaurants, our office getaway was at Dave N Busters. It was a letdown. And I'd say that tech culture has double down on this kind of thing since I was a grad student back in the late 90s.
Honestly, a lot about tech culture is really very unappealing to people who don't want to live in a permanent state of extended adolescence. I'm willing to take this a little further and say it isn't an accident - I do think that some elements of high tech are vaguely threatened by the notion that programmers and other technical types are actually adults who might prefer to go to dinner and the opera than dave n busters ad laser tag.
It's more of a gut feeling, or an intuition, but I do think that this plays a much bigger role in the disinterest a lot of people have in tech - including young tech workers themselves (who, in spite of a few notorious statements, generally are not the source of age discrimination). A lot of people, to quote someone fairly insightful on this issue, actually value propriety, protocol, and privacy, and will look elsewhere for a career if those things are in short supply in high tech.
On a brighter note I always felt joelonsoftware addressed this in a very positive way.
I think contracting is a lot different and in that case more experienced consultants are preferred over younger ones where as it is the opposite when it comes to permanent employment.
The thing I don't agree with is that we should be expected to keep learning. As if knowing how to design and write software isn't enough for a solid career, we must learn the "newest" programming paradigm, latest js framework, etc. But this gets in to deeper issues of our profession that allows ageism.
Edit: Just looked at your website and it looks like you are 100% a contractor... Again, I think they are 2 very different labor markets for contractors and employees.
Things change, people do discover better ways to work, and not knowing fads does impact one's ability to work in a team.
I'm in my mid 30's and I've already seen better sets of technologies appear with order of magnitude improvements twice. And I expect to claim one more time when the current fad of strict but flexible languages get sustainable.
I absolutely agree with you that learning many frameworks is probably not a good use of our time. "Just in time learning" of frameworks is usually good enough but knowing a few programming languages, and occasionally learning a new one makes sense.
I'm definitely not advocating for the end of all learning and I hope you'd give my message a more charitable interpretation.
The idea that OO was new 20 years ago or functional programming is new today is completely backwards and is the attitude that ensures that it looks like our profession is running around with its head cut off for the next 20 years and ultimately contributes to the ageism that does exist in our industry. I'm extremely happy for you that you've found a niche as a contractor but I think you'd experience it more and understand the stress people feel if you were to apply for full time employment.
I appreciate your reservations on proclaiming functional programming the final paradigm, but why can't we just proclaim that a solid foundation in the pillars of computation is all one needs and as long as the tools and frameworks we use from one project to the next are built on those pillars then we can accomplish things at greater speeds and at larger scale?
I really don't think that there is a final programming paradigm. The greatest thing I have seen today is news of a more programmable quantum computer. There is a lot of room for new ideas in programming languages for quantum computing.
I think there is a lot of headroom also for type inference applied to dynamic language like Ruby where entire programs are automatically type checked.
Computer science progress is in general accelerating rapidly, not just a few high profile areas like deep learning.
Exciting times!
Bootstrap? Cool. Maybe follow that up with 1 or 2 other grid systems. But if you start chasing every layout framework coming down the pike, you're wasting your time.
Same goes for imperative vs. functional programming. There's a big difference. You should know that.
I think where the problem arises is when there's some new cool version of the same thing. You probably already know how it plays out, so your rational response is to not bother. But if you don't have it on your resume, you're going to be doing some fast talking.
There's a difference between learning in order to execute and learning in order to impress. If you want to stay in coding, sadly, you gotta keep learning. And the things you learned all have to do with marketing yourself, not being a better programmer.
I think that's the part that sucks most about getting older as a coder -- watching the community walk away from solution delivery in order to intellectually amuse itself with 4 or 5 year fads, which usually involve a cool video and a ton of hidden complexity.
Young people work for longer hours, don't fall sick often, come in on weekends and are more productive.
You seem to be describing a situation which existed two decades back where a person's only portal to information was a library.
By definition, there will always be less numbers of managers than technicians.
Being a manager is a different skillset and not everyone WANTS to be a manager.
Typical comment from a clueless pointy haired boss!
I'll also say that I only had a handful of non-college interviews before my mid-30s, so I don't have a ton of data on if this were true when I was younger.
This is simultaneously amusing and saddening.
People have to realize this will be them, and that normalized hate is unacceptable and speak up against it.
I don't see "ageism", exactly. I see the experience bar being set very low. When "senior software engineer" means 5-7 years of experience, then what are you with 30 years? You're completely outside the comprehension of most hiring managers.
If you want to be regarded as more than "old person with a bit more than 5-7 years of experience", then you need to use those years to learn how to do harder things than most people with 5-7 years of experience know how to do.
Keep asking yourself "What's the next thing I need to learn to advance my career?" That probably isn't the next web framework (learning that just lets you tread water). It might be Android or iOS, though.
Yet, I am scared to loose my job. I don't know if the recruiter will look past my age and lack of trendy technologies in my resume.
Is that weekends are for? I do that too but do wonder at times...
I think what software developers need is some perspective. We aren't the only ones who have to spend time outside of work on keeping our skills sharp and learning new stuff.
Doctor is more "trustworthy" (perception-wise) as they get older while Developer is more in-demand when they're younger.
Doctor also technically made way more money than Developer (in general though, the statement may not stand if you compare Silicon Valley but you get the idea, even in other countries, Doctor probably made more than Developer).
Doctor also keep their job longer than Developer.
Doctor can read but does not necessarily have to demonstrate that to their prospective employers while Developer can't just say "I read Objective-C for Dummies therefore I am an expert of Objective-C".
These were just ones of many things that I can think of.
They are for doing what you want to do. Sometimes I code all weekend for fun, or go in the boat or sleep or play Diablo all day. But the reason why many people on this site are good at what they do is because they love doing it. Even if I was not paid to code, I would still immerse myself in coding (and IT in general). I am fortunate enough to love doing something that also can pay well.
As long as you have the drive (motivation can be different - some ppl like to hack, some are worried about their next gig etc) - this shouldn't be a problem.
Fair, desirable, optimal? All debatable depending on one's perspective, but unstoppable. I think the only way we'll be able to get a handle on it is to manage its effects through policy (which has to happen eventually, given how many people will be affected, and how few will actually be able to be one of the "superstars"), rather than turning this train around.
The first is a proliferation of young founders who have no experience and thus no frame of reference to evaluate older developers, so they just pattern match on the new tech they are familiar with. Nothing really to be done about that since convincing twentysomethings (particularly SV funded ones) of their hubris is a sisyphean task, and in any case it leaves talent on the table for those of us who actually know the value of a dollar.
The second, more troubling factor is founders who actually understand the value of experience, but prefer to take advantage of ambitious kids who are willing to work extreme hours for little equity and less salary. All else being equal, it's easier to find strong talent that isn't aware of (or bad at negotiating) their own value at a young age compared to when they get old and jaded.
As slimy as that is, I think it's a somewhat self-correcting problem in that good programmers are still too thin on the ground and startups who pass over old or minority candidates that are actually good will be at a competitive disadvantage. There is certainly a flood of young people going into technology via bootcamps or other means, but my experience so far is that there is a natural and unquantifiable talent component to being a good programmer which can not be solved by education. I firmly believe anyone can learn to program, but only a minority can ever learn to program well. At the moment, I interpret having learned to program before "startups" became a career move as a strong positive signal; chalk one up for the olds!
The individual or even group decision-making (with regards to not just company goals, but to lifestyles and associations) means that things like that end up as a wash. Make it more concrete:
28 year old founder decides to pass on excellent 47 year old programmer. What does that do the founder's life or company? Let's speculate on some possibilities:
- It does nothing, because even though the older developer would have been better, their level of experience wasn't even necessary to do the job well.
- The business winds up marginally less profitable, but still succeeds.
- The business fails, somehow, because at the margin, missing out on hiring that older developer somehow started a chain of events that could have been prevented if said older developer were hired.
In all cases, the founder goes on to find another job, makes plenty of money, is able to surround themselves with the type of people they'd rather be around (people their own age) and never is even aware of any impact on anything. To that person, it was just "didn't hire someone, something happened or didn't, life went on well, and founder was still happy, ultimately."
What I'm saying is that the "disadvantage" and other related theories start sounding like a secular version of Karma; people use them as a way to tell themselves there will be justice (not that you're necessarily doing that, I have no idea), when in truth it's likely there will be none.
You can try to "prevent" the discrimination through your own actions, which is by no means easy (https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/dealing-with-ageism-in-te...), but as the article makes clear, even in egregious cases, it's hard to prove or do anything about. Look how long we've had these various kinds of incredibly well-intentioned anti-discrimination laws, and look at the success rates on the suits / how often they're brought. The results are terrible. It's just too hard to prove.
Here's how I think this could possibly play out: Facebook and Google start paying 21-year-old kids $200k directly out of school, startups start paying ridiculous unsustainable salaries based on VC salaries. Savvy founders and hiring managers at other companies realize they can't economically compete for 25-year-old golden boy talent and start looking at other demographics to find the talent. Over time those savvy companies will thrive while the others are crushed by having to pay for inferior talent at inflated prices with bubble-time VC funds.
Obviously this only works if people realize that older and minority talent is getting unduly passed over. And also I don't know how strong this effect will be or whether the existing tidal wave of bias is too overwhelming for such an anti-trend to even register in the marketplace. Whether or not this would even constitute justice goes beyond my thesis (I believe in ethical business, but justice is quite a tall order). Nevertheless, as a hiring manager, I see any market bias that I am aware of as a competitive advantage to me, and I'm convinced that effect is real no matter how small.
Broad correction, though, seems unlikely to happen, whether attempts are done via the market or via legislation.
1) I've never heard of,
2) or the needs to incorporate enterprise solution from back in the days (e.g.: form builder, complex enterprise frameworks, etc) doing some enterprise system
In most cases, again this is my anecdote, none of these developers pass the interview.
NodeJS was hot in the last 2 years (thought it has cool down a bit lately) but to me, NodeJS seems to have the risk of becoming one of those X[technology] revolution in which could lead to a negative signal if one has it in one's resume (plus it's a chance for me to grill candidate how good he/she is when it comes to JavaScript idioms, patterns, best-practices, automation-testing because at the moment, I know the majority of developers who put JavaScript on their resume don't actually practice "good hygiene" when it comes to JavaScript while I know for sure the number of Java developers whom I've interviewed before at least could demonstrate a better/solid software engineering skill).
Imagine a want ad for a carpenter: "Home builder wanted. MUST use Makita brand circular saw."
Occasionally I saw ads like that being posted by small game companies/digital marketing companies; they fall under the "fishy/avoid" type of companies.
Luckily the sane/majority of the companies here listed their main preferred technology.
Do not worry too much. Its much easier to "hack" dumb recruiters then C code.
As someone who recently graduated and is "one of them damn kids" - a lot of people from my graduating class know a lot more about marketing then actual programming.
Since 2008 - the world has became a much more cruel place - and that has forced many of us to graduating since then to play an arms race with "trends" - switch jobs constantly and be selfish.
The way I see anyone who has been writing production code since 1990 is a WW2 veteran. You guys have been through the PC revolution, Internet revolution, survived the dot com bubble, shipped code before git, stackoverflow.
I think if you projected that experience into confidence you could easily do whatever you wanted - you deserve it !
The resume doesn't need to 'look' trendy, but it can't look stale either.
1. Remove everything from your resume past 6 or so years in the past. Put a little note at the bottom saying that your extended work history is available upon request. Nobody wants to read a resume over 1 page anyway.
2. Don't list any years on your education--just list the institutions. That's an easy way to leak your age.
3. Regularly scrub for "outdated" technologies and topics. Instead of writing perl scripts to parse log files and output reports with Tcl/Tk, you were a full-stack developer who processed data analytics from critical business infrastructure.
I recognize you will probably make fewer dumb mistakes than a younger developer, and your experience probably enables you to learn new technologies faster (though I'd wonder if you didn't list any trendy technologies on your resume). On the flip side, if your resume showed a long period without any significant career advancement I might question your competence.
You should be able to show career advancement via the achievements you list for each position. There should generally be a trend towards increasing responsibility and successively more impressive feats at each stage. Some lateral movement is fine, but if that's all you've got it suggests that you lack focus/get bored easily.
What are we talking about here ? Comparing a developer with 10 year experience vs with 20 years ? Or one fresh out of school, with a senior developer ?
Because around here, your salary will be determined by your actual responsibilities and the only way for a guy with 20+ years of experience to make more than one with 5-10 years is to have been in that company for during those 20 years, accruing benefits.
Similarly, contract price are about the same. They haven't even raised much in the last 10 years. Unless you become consultant on a specific topic, you are getting paid the same regardless how much more experience you have over 3 years.
The inflexibility has a flip side too: a developer that has been developing for 20 years is most likely doing exactly what he wants to do. Can probably count on him to be there to see the project through production, and not having "move up" or strategically move to other office, technology stack, companies.
Indeed, you get a different employee when you hire an older person. Sometimes that's helpful; sometimes not. We can't wave a wand and make that go away.
So far the only kind of "age-related" "discrimination" (note the quotation marks) that I faced that I know of have been the "you're too expensive for us, we'll hire a junior engineer and train him" type deal.
I do prefer/tend to work for small companies and startups so even though I have a reasonably decent "enterprise development" and "CS" type backgrounds I'm more or less up to speed on (or at least aware of) the latest developments in the industry so if a potential employer wants to see me hack some homework CRUD assignment using whatever hot-shot stack they are looking to use it won't take me long to set it up.
One of the reasons I love being in tech (I am 44) is that you become so familiar with change your start seeing it as an inevitable force of continuous opportunity, instead of something to fear. That mindset keeps you young at heart.
I suspect that age discrimination lawsuits are more likely from slow moving industries, like the academia example in the OP.
The only place where I felt concerned about age discrimination is at YC. "How old are you?" is the third question on the application even before the question "What will your company do".
Having been invited to YC HQ twice now (thank you), I don't think age discrimination is an issue and I can't fault them for asking. But being asked that question upfront still messes with my psychology.
Age discrimination might be a serious problem elsewhere, but with OSU's chronic issues I'd be hard pressed to believe these people were discriminated against.