Coding as a greybeard
"I'm 51 and I've been active in this industry since I was 14. I watched it grow from computers with 4k of memory to having a supercomputer in my pocket. I was learning in the age of Apple II and the Commodore PET. When I realized that I could create an explosion of data with just a few lines of code, I was hooked forever. It was such a magical thing. I found some other guys in my high school that were also into computers and we started meeting regularly on Fridays and Saturdays to... Well, to do some things that were, perhaps, not allowed. Since then, I've started three companies, and I don't think I could have found the same satisfaction in any other industry. I am mindful, these days, that I'm 51 because I know ageism is a thing in tech. There's a moment when you walk into a room and people think, 'Oh, he's a greybeard.' I don't have a beard, but you know what I mean. But when I start to talk about things and find solutions, that disappears. I can't change my age but I am in full control over what I do and what I read and how much time I carve out to write code. I can still see myself doing this when I'm 60, 70 years old. Even older. Because I want to keep doing meaningful things."
357 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadAll things equal, I'd hire the greybeard, actual beard a plus.
In the future, I can only imagine ageism being a thing too, but flipped around, when it's realized that older and more experienced people are needed.
The problem is when this attitude backfires into immobilism. Sometimes there are solid reasons why the new hot shit is hot, and just saying "we can do the same already with X" can be reductive (and leading to technical debt down the line).
But yeah, now I'm 43, I see the difference in attitude that I bring when faced with wide-eyed youngsters, even just because they often "drink the kool-aid" a bit too uncritically.
They can be. And when they're great they're GREAT! However I've also worked with people who can tell fantastic stories about punch cards and LISP machines, but also haven't picked up any new skills since the late 90s and have no idea what has happened in the industry in the past 10 years.
I guess I'm a greybeard now even if it's only got a little grey, and I can tell you I've been annoyed at stories of punch cards for 20 years now. They were cute stories in the 1990s, but now I cringe if someone tries to relate "the punch card story". And I mean "the" punch card story because I think they're all lying. Every one of them dropped a box of punch cards they spent a lot of time getting right and had to sort that mess out. I think it's just a meme and old people tell it like it actually happened to them because it used to be a good story. Sorry, it's not. It's more tired than me ;-)
When I was your age, we used to have these older guys telling us about the punch-card days... Shit.
Now I guess "the punch card story" has been replaced by people like me saying things like "I remember when hard drives where measured in megabytes" and "You know when I first installed Linux on my computer at home I needed a stack of 30 floppy disks (and you won't believe what happened when it turned out disk 22 was corrupted)" :)
And soon it will be replaced by "when I was young we had to do web development using nothing but JavaScript and JQuery, we didn't even have an import statement"
Followed a few years later "back in my day we had these things called 'docker containers', and let me tell you deploying them on AWS was no walk in the park..."
Most of the time experience and healthy cynicism is the cheapest option.
I've actually found that not always true. In order to acquire talent, the very large corporation I work for has been hiring younger developers at higher wage levels to compete.
Many people have children in their 20s. Maybe they even met their spouse in school. And younger people can be quite savvy in negotiating salary, even fresh college grads if they've received advice from more experienced folks. I'm astounded by the offers some of them receive.
I personally never had children, and I naturally sleep fewer hours per day now than when I was younger, so I have plenty of time to work.
Every individual is different.
The average age of first child has been increasing but is still relatively low at 26 for women and 31 for men. How many over 50 people have young children at home? Maybe they had children, but at a certain point those children leave the home. And even while at home, teenagers need much less supervision than babies. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2020/05/01/new-stud...
If children are the reason, it would be really strange and anti-empirical to discriminate against 50+ developers instead of discriminating against 30something developers. Statistically, the 30s are the prime child-having years.
That's for the US as a whole. It seems to be higher in the cities one usually associates with tech.
The average age of first child for women in San Francisco and New York is 31-32 [1] [2].
I couldn't find the average for Seattle, but I did find that 57% of first time mothers in Seattle's county are 30+ in 2016, compared to around 33% nationwide. In San Francisco 76% of first time mothers are 30+. Boston, DC, Portland, and Denver also had majority 30+ first time mothers. [3]
Age of first time mothers tends to correlate well with education and wealth, which also tend to correlate well where tech companies are located. Women with college degrees on average are 7 years old than those without when they have their first child.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/women-sf-children-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...
[3] https://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/northwest/waiting-to-hav...
But raising the average 5-7 years doesn't really substantially change the argument when we're talking about discriminating against people in their 50s and 60s, who mostly don't have babies or young children at all. It just makes no sense.
If anything, employers should be seeking out employees in their 50s and 60s, who are least likely of the age groups to have young children at home. If a primary reason for age discrimination is "having children", that is. But I don't believe this is true, and the whole having children thing is just an ex post facto excuse for discriminating against older people. An irrational prejudice can't be explained rationally.
Because it's false?
This submission is about so-called "greybeards", i.e., people over 50. They are more likely to have had children at some point in their lives (perhaps 20 years earlier!) but actually less likely to have young children at home that would interfere with work time.
A 25 year old developer is much more likely to have a baby than a 55 year old developer, correct?
That's nice, but I'm guessing it's not the San Francisco bay area or other areas where tech jobs are concentrated.
Anyway, doesn't an "extended" family include everyone of every age — by definition — and not just people over 50?
> so that might be what's causing the confusion here
Well, I for one am not confused.
Lost a lot of respect that day.
Tool advocates/salesmen may not like you though.
That said, I met a millennial COBOL programmer a couple years ago.
I work mostly on Windows, so maybe my case is special, but I'm still using knowledge about 8086 machine language I learned 40 years ago when I'm looking at a memory dump from a crash report today.
I occasionally dip into web-based stuff and although the top layers are different, underneath is usually HTTP / TCP / UDP / IP. What I learned with Ethereal in 1998 is still pretty useful today.
Truly new stuff doesn't come around that often. Maybe it's the difference between thinking about fashion and clothing.
I wonder if the uniform might be an important variable in blurring the age-gap.
There's also the fact that standards are changing so quickly, new hires often bring useful information to companies while existing employees are often (stereotypically) set in their ways. In fields such as medicine, new hires are almost a liability.
The analogy for ageism in programming is that after a while, one is expected to go beyond writing code and into more high level strategy, design, and mentorship.
https://thenewstack.io/remembering-roger-faulkner/
Ageism in this industry is real. I think the root cause of it is investors, it's where the origins of this phenomenon are. They prefer younger entrepreneurs who in turn hire people like themselves, and so it propagates down the hierarchy as the company grows. It's transitive. In fact this is true for all types of discrimination.
I switched to entrepreneurship and feel the same effects here. Good luck raising money or even finding a co-founder. It's tough. Not going to shave my beard though.
I have no idea what could be done here other than for the aging tech people to unite and form their own companies, investment funds. Just like the other discriminated groups do - women, then racial and other minorities.
Edit: I should add, I was talking about a hands-on engineering job, not management. I love coding and not going to quit it because of ageism or pay or other circumstances.
People were attracted to what they imagined was the depth of my experience. Not that this imagined depth isn't real, but they didn't usually investigate far enough to know whether it was real. The gray beard was all they needed.
Never could grow a beard, so 'graybeard' has never been a literal issue for me. :)
In my mid 30s, I could, at a distance, pass for late 40s or 50. As I've moved towards that milestone, I don't think there's been much of a change. That's not just me thinking that - I get told that now and then.
Taking your observation in isolation, there are two implications:
1. that those 40+ years old were, in average, hired when they were in their 30s, when they weren't grey beards;
2. a possible factor that causes their long tenure is that they now struggle to find other jobs.
Now I'm 51 and lucky enough to be able to seriously consider not taking another job after the current one runs its course (which may be a long time, I don't know). But if I do go out after another job I may invest in a few months of facials and spa treatments to get that maximally youthful look :)
On the plus side they perceive you as Talent with Potential, or something. On the downside it means you get treated like a junior by some jackass Uncle Bob fan who has just a handful of years of real experience. It levels the playing field in a crappy way.
I often like to write up for myself a "full" resume with plenty of details about everything, making it way too long, then tailor it as needed for any specific job I want to apply for by cutting out stuff less relevant for that specific position until it's short enough, like 2 pages max.
My long and colorful history is a feature, not a bug.
This meme is slowly dying, but let me do my part here to kick it along to death faster.
Nothing here is intended to offend per se, because I consider everything I say here to be the natural order of things, and there's nothing wrong with it. Still, it's the truth.
I'm in my mid-40s now. I've hired a lot of juniors over the years. Never once have I hired someone new and gone "Oh my god, they know so much, my job is at risk and I'm going obsolete!"
No, what happen when I hire junior is that I look at where they are now, and where they need to be to be a fully functional member of the team, and kind of sigh and make a plan to try to get them there as quickly as possible, plotting a minimal path through the thicket of things necessary to be a functioning software engineer nowadays. Six months is generally a bare minimum time line for this. Sometimes it's more.
And that's just to get to functional. A well-rounded engineer that I can plausibly just pass a project to and see them largely get it done correctly and without blowing their own or my foot off? Years. Years. And I just mean that from a technical perspective... it's yet more before I feel comfortable inserting them into the political layers.
Again, not intended to be offensive. Everyone has to pass through this phase. Every mature programmer should expect to be mentoring like this; if you're in your 40s and haven't had to do this at all, take a careful look at your career, something's probably wrong. (I don't mean management; I mean mentorship.)
There was one intern a few years ago who turned my head in that he had parity with me on a couple of interesting and unusual skills, but still... it was parity at best, not amazingly better than me. And while he had some amazing building skills for an intern I could see the skillset was still very, very lopsided and he needed a lot of work on the question of what to do, rather than just the doing of things. It's OK. That's normal. I'm not even sure how to hypothesize someone coming out of college with amazing skills in knowing exactly what to do. From what I see even when 20-year-old startup founders get this right it's a combination of mentorship from investors and sheer luck. I despair of even imagining how to teach this skill from anything other than experience, beyond simply sensitizing a student to the fact that it is something they should be looking at as they grow as an engineer.
There was a brief window in the 1990s where the industry underwent a technological convulsion and switched away from expensive mainframes to commodity computers and the internet/web. In that brief window, which I was lucky enough to capture and ride, a fresh young whelpling who had spent the last couple of months fiddling with this newfound "web" thing could do some things that the mainframe folks couldn't. There were still plenty of lessons that could have been learned from the mainframe folks, but for whatever reason, be in the internet just not being there yet, an unbridgeable cultural gap between the hacker mindset and the IBM mindset, whatever reason, the communication and wisdom transfer just didn't happen. That hasn't happened since then and I see no prospect of it happening in the next 10 years, not because the next 10 years won't see change but because the people like me of that era have already ridden any number of waves since then and adapted and I don't see that sort of convulsive surprise happening again.
The idea that someone in their 50s just has to be old and out of date is not just silly but downright ludicrous. Getting to "well rounded" in 2022 is something that will require you until your mid-30s minimum anymore.
I think a lot of the ageism that still lives in the industry are people wh...
It's happening right now: the field is being flooded by data-kids who reason in different terms. They are statisticians first and programmers later. Their models can do stuff that bit-pushers like me will always struggle with. 10-15 years from now they'll run everything, and you won't be able to code a helloworld without specifying a ML model.
(In fact I've been generally unimpressed by the people I've seen so far. The ML math is complicated, but there's a whole lot of "just fire this at that without understanding why" in the actual practitioners. I've found I have a better understanding of what is and is not possible and why than they seem to rather often. This comes back to my extended education background, though; my training is old but less obsolete than you may think, a lot of modern ML stuff isn't some totally new thing just invented yesterday, but a couple of slight tweaks to established stuff that worked really well combined with finally having the CPU firepower to use it.)
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[1] My standard reference for this is a guy called Geoff Hinton. Some people in machine learning may have heard the name. Quoting:
AMT: Ok, so you have been working on neural networks for decades but it has only exploded in its application potential in the last few years, why is that?
Geoffrey Hinton: I think it’s mainly because of the amount of computation and the amount of data now around but it’s also partly because there have been some technical improvements in the algorithms. Particularly in the algorithms for doing unsupervised learning where you’re not told what the right answer is but the main thing is the computation and the amount of data.
http://techjaw.com/2015/06/07/geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning-...
[2] Check out the birth dates of the current generation of deep learning luminaries. Geoff Hinton: 1947. Yoshua Bengio: 1964. Yann LeCun: 1960. Jurgen Schmidhuber: 1963. It goes on. Go ahead and tell those guys they're greybeards who don't get what the kids today are doing.
I think the current ML world will have an overfitting reckoning. ML can optimize situations that are very normative, but struggles to create good solutions to situations in which the best outcomes are fairly distribute (but still specific best actions in certain scenarios).
ML cannot tell you what data or choices even matter in life, it can only help optimize those things once we've decided that. This is where age comes in as there's a correlation to, perhaps causal by, age on wisdom.
It seems like current ML (at least large-language models and transformers) will actually run out of publicly-accessible data to train on - the current models have scraped the majority of the useful text and image data on the public Internet, and it's not clear that we'll gain access to orders of magnitude more data, which according to the Chinchilla paper is the bottleneck on transformer performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321522
I have one kid in college an another going into her senior year of high school. Seems like very few their peers are going into computer science. I know it is not for every body, but it is surprising how unpopular it is.
There's a lot of great programmers coming up, but I often find their depth of knowledge to be limited. They can get to elegant solutions, but when it comes to how it fits into a larger distributed system architecture, security, scalability or long term maintainability they seem to start falling short. I've watched a lot of less experienced engineers want to just hit the "reset" button nonstop during an AWS outage, for hopes that resetting the system will clear up the problem and not intuiting the likely causes and consequences.
They simply need more time to expand out their layers of knowledge and experience. It will happen over time! I do feel that I was born of an era when many of the layers were more obvious to interact with and less abstracted. It is easy for a developer to get many years into their career and never interact with assembly these days - such was far less likely in the early 80's unless you wanted to only run slow BASIC programs forever.
It only pays off when you win the startup lottery and can cash out.
;-)
(I'm 60. And you're right.)
Kids these days... No respect for their elders!
But yeah, spot on. That's exactly the specific issue I have with tech ageism, at least from the corporation's perspective.
I'm not saying that it's good to discriminate (on age or anything else), but from the dehumanizing RoI-oriented perspective of the corporation, it's just the dumb move to push the aging and the elderly on the side.
Why would you spend so many resources to bring a person to the top of the game, and then right when they start becoming really clever and useful, you start minding the color of their beard and render them obsolete?
It's like waiting for a green banana to become edible, and when it's at the perfect balance the one that's just right for you, you just pluck it and chuck it in the bin. WTF?
In any team I've worked, the guy with the gray temples has always been the most relaxed and significant contributor to any discussion - precisely thanks to the experience they developed over the past three and sometimes four decades.
Conversely, young upstarting devs who think they're interfacing with dinosaurs tend to not fare well.
That's probably because they lack the acumen to recognize golden egg-laying geese when they encounter them, and profit from the experience.
It's like a spectator sport.
The reverse is true, of course. ‘Expert beginners’ and those just looking to avoid any hard work or responsibility until they retire are equally as dangerous.
If you’re a non-technical business owner, manager or anyone else who relies on tech and the people who build and run it, it is completely impossible to choose wisely, as you simply don’t know who to believe.
I’ve got myself to positions of high trust in companies and then found my advice ignored both when I warn against:
1. Hiring those I can see are not just bad value but going to destroy tech and teams through arrogance and being given more responsibility than they should have (yet).
2. Leaving the dangerously incompetent ‘seniors’ and workshy in positions where they are either preventing any kind of growth or, worse, accelerating a death spiral which ends in either zero ability to compete or a tech disaster of some kind (lost or corrupted data, breach, etc.)
If you’re trusted, that doesn’t mean that your advice to spend some time building smaller teams of actually competent people - or whatever your proposal is, will be heeded. The smell of money over a short term (or lack of it) are usually going to win.
> You are a 10x engineer, capable of getting more done than others and in a fraction of the time.
I also think ageism is only part of the problem, it's stubbornness in general. Even if you're younger, it's difficult to translate hard-earned experience into respect because many engineers are infatuated with their own designs and algorithms. I've had people reject my advice even though I literally worked 2 years on app dedicated to solving that specific problem we were having. Of course they had egg on their face at the first demo. And they're still using that broken code.
A big part of ageism is our complete devaluation of "soft skills." And we treat anything beyond the limits of cranking out code as soft skills.
I've learned some tact in my old age and no longer laugh when datetime formatting issues cause problems. I now act with empathy and gentle guidance.
But yes, "act with empathy and gentle guidance" is The Way.
Also, never name you previous versions foo.new and foo.old or you will end up with foo.old.old.no-really-old, and foo.new2
Preach on!
I've come to realize that Winston Churchill's joke "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else" applies to everything, not just democracy and capitalism. In tech, you either find the right solution and get ahead of the pack long enough to make some money, or you watch helplessly as the pack applies brute force to whatever problem you were trying to solve and succeeds the hard way. Stuff like video cards and DALL-E 2 come to mind. Visionary ideas bordering on magic succeed (delayed by decades) not due to the current "state of the art" in tech, but despite it. And that work is important, because exhaustively eliminating every other potential solution in the problem space represents the real work of solving problems. That's what an economy is (churn).
So I've been learning to let go, practice nonattachment, drop expectation in all forms, and just be grateful as we head towards the Singularity around 2040 and the decline of the natural world between 2050 and 2100 if people and AI working together can't save the planet. Being clever doesn't matter anymore, effort doesn't matter anymore, because someone somewhere will invent whatever idea you're working on, yesterday, and keep all of the money for themselves.
The greatest failure of our time is that tech not only can't deliver its own end-goal (UBI, freedom from forced labor, self-actualization for all people), it actively stands in its way by fostering wealth inequality. The only winning move is not to play.
As for those of you who don't feel heard in work or life let me just say that that's no excuse not to try. Especially if it's of great importance. Even if you have to stick your neck out under a guillotine in order to say it. I imagine if that guy at NASA who discovered the fatal flaw in Challenger didn't stop at telling the NASA heads but maybe the news, the astronauts and even their families it could have been prevented.
Yep. 59yo here. I've seen so many failed projects over the years that it's just second nature now to know early on when one is going to fail and why - both on the organizational and the technical side. The problem with all of this experience with failure, though, is that it gets harder and harder to get motivated. It's difficult to maintain a positive attitude about all of this because you know human nature and you remember that your younger self didn't exactly listen to your elders when they tried to help you avoid failure either.
Keep my hope up though, there are smart kids out there, it is also human nature.
The other 6 SIEMS no longer exist, I'm sure of it.
It gets harder to drum up the enthusiasm for Yet Another Security Appliance. They all have accounts, and roles, and reporting, and a little black box that does the magic trick...and they're all largely the same.
It's possible you are assigning this sentiment yourself. I've always noticed a great deal of cultish nonsense in this industry. People promoting tools and techniques that have no reasoned basis and are often downright harmful. Where age comes into this is that as you become older you become more confident at identifying this BS and better at dismissing it. Played out in the context of a range of aged coworkers, this _looks_ like they think you are clueless because you are old. But a wise young person would have exactly the same attitude as you have. It's not that these folks are young, it's that they are unaware they're in a cult.
I know that you are correct, that many younglings treat greybeards as people whose knowledge is obsolete.
I'm closing in on 40. I was first mesmerized by computers in 1993 when a shareware copy of Doom was popped into my 486 based PC. "What is this witchcraft!? I must uncover the secrets to how this works!". I've been hooked ever since. When I first started playing with friends over a dial up modem, I was intimidated by all the technical options, prompting me to select my baud rate etc... What does all these even mean? I felt like the people who were working on these computers were wizards full of deep deep knowledge and I was drinking from a fire hose, just trying desperately to catch up. 30 years later, I still feel like I'm trying to catch up!!! Many younglings might think greybeard knowledge is obsolete, but I don't and I still feel like I'm behind the curve, trying to catch up. I know this is probably tangential to imposter syndrome, but man.... I still admire and look up to the greybeards. Edit: Continuing to learn about the old, the origins, and the history is like exploring an abandoned mine shaft still filled with gold and jewels, and I still feel that childlike wonder with technology.
Note: Fabien Sanglard's Black Books are great technical deep dives.
[Edit: Spelling. Though, I liked the term "greybears"]
That's a great line.
But I'm wondering if I should edit my resume to make my age less apparent from it -- remove the earliest part of my career from my resume? I have the academic degrees I've earned on my resume -- remove the dates of them too?
Dyeing your beard feels disingenuous and smells a little funny at first, but it really works. People remarked that I: - Had lost weight - Looked less tired - Must be feeling better - You must be under so much less stress now - You look younger
I look forward to retiring and letting it go gray again. For now I think I need to keep it at least partially colored instead of looking like santa claus.
Well done! Good opening for a Tell HN post!
After the contract is signed, then whatever.
I did take my ID badge for my current job with blue hair, however.
But I wonder if this is mostly a US-centric phenomenon. Or maybe it is a tribal mentality, I wonder if web devs of 20 years ago face the same problem with younger web devs today. Or a large amount of web devs considering everything and everyone who doesn't work in the browser to be stoneage.
As an anecdote, I once worked with a gentleman twice my age who cut his teeth writing assembly for an obscure HP platform, and I had huge respect for him. And it was obvious that even though we were developing a modern full stack webapp in Python and React, he had an excellent mind for the tough engineering questions.
Web development is probably more fluid compared to other areas. Browsers evolve like crazy and make frameworks and other tech obsolete pretty fast. So keeping up here might be quite challenging for all ages I imagine.
One is that I never try to pull rank on anyone or dismiss anyone's ideas or concerns. Respecting others' abilities and experiences makes it easy for them to return that respect as they are not feeling defensive.
Another is I try not to be dismissive of whatever new tech or fads they may be invested in, but rather acknowledge that they are attempts to solve real problems and I can understand what they are trying to do, even if I think there are better solutions. I take a sort of exaggeratedly open-minded attitude in order to head off any assumption that I don't like their ideas because they are new.
Finally, I'm quick to share my experience. Everybody likes war stories and if you always have a war story for every situation people will start to understand the value of experience. Of course humility is important in that. I share my mistakes more than my successes so as to avoid coming across as a pompous windbag.
That's my experience anyway. Who knows, may just be that I've gotten lucky.
Sometimes in an interview when I suspect the interviewer is uncomfortable with assessing "their Dad", I throw a lot of curiosity at them about their skills & career & ask their advice about the company or tech stack they use. That helps breakdown the "too old to learn & won't listen to me" stereotypes.
Also, with a long career, you probably have a number of significant successes under your belt, and, while past success does not guarantee future success, it appears that past failure is a strong indicator of future failure. New teams want people with a track record of success.
I am not sure if its just investors though. If you are hiring someone to do run of the mill crud/etl type jobs then a younger person is a better hire. I've noticed a marked drop in my energy levels as I've gotten older into my 40s.
Weather is unethical or not is prbly an different issue but reasoning behind it makes perfect sense to me.
I say that blunts it a bit because I think I don't blame engineers to look for someone like them — it comes easy, it is probably easier to judge someone who you feel shares your own life experiences.
But yeah, some years back we interviewed a guy for the team who was about my age (early 50's at that time). I thought he was top notch. But a younger engineer on the team pushed hard to reject him for the role. Why? "I think he's a bad fit for the team." That was the only reason we could get for his rejection.
Sure, just an anecdote. I see red flags now though when someone says "not a good fit" (whatever that means).
I don't have studies to back this up, but I find personally it helps give an avenue for co-workers to argue against bigotry without accusing anyone of behaving in a bigoted away.
Also, "cultural fit" questions can be casually ageist as hell. I was asked once (at 40 or so), "We like to skateboard around the office for fun. What do you like to do?" I sincerely believe it was (for the 20-something interviewer) an innocent, almost routine interview question. I diffused the question by saying that sounded like a blast but I prefer Nerf Blaster wars or pranking people by hijacking their wireless mouse or whatever. I got the job offer but I've been on other interviews where I aced the manager's and technical interviews but got shut down by a barely college graduate who clearly didn't think they'd have to work with "their Dad." Not much you can do about that.
I'll get more done because I won't create the bad architectures that they will. I won't write the bugs that they do. I won't head down the dead ends that they do. (Yes, I'll still do a few. They'll do enough more that I'll still finish ahead of them, even with working fewer hours.)
Once you get the job (although, I highly recommend you avoid taking a job if you get a death march software plantation vibe), you manage high demands by nailing management on requirements and milestones and then out-plan and out-deliver your work so you have an answer for "hey, why are you leaving when we're all working overtime?" If you put in overtime at the start, assist other people and show you can deliver, then they can't give you much grief later.
The engineers I've known and worked with were more likely to judge someone as being "like them" for their usage of Emacs vs Vim than their race, and everyone is always trying to recruit more women.
The ageism is more tied to actual technology things. The young engineer thinks the latest blog post they read about how to do async programming or manage deployments is the greatest thing in the world and only wants to hire people who think the same. The elder engineer recognizes it all as slight tweaks and rehashes on older ideas, frameworks and systems and is more ambivalent and not as excited to dive into learning their hundredth new way to accomplish the same task.
If management cares about business outcomes, the elder engineer is great. If management cares about vanity metrics and using the latest, coolest frameworks, the younger engineer is great.
There's such a thing as conscious and unconscious bias. People don't sit in the interviewing room and think to themselves "well this person is white, like me, so I like the idea of hiring them more", but the thought is still there at the back of their mind (and before someone jumps down my throat, no, I'm not saying everyone has this bias, I'm not accusing you personally of being a racist, I'm saying that this kind of unconscious bias is prevalent throughout society)
Emacs vs Vim is a far more conscious bias.
Some of the scientists who originated this work have since distanced themselves from it, because people have run with the concept far beyond what the science supports.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/unconscious-bias-roger...
But there are lots of these:
https://www.6seconds.org/2018/09/04/the-science-of-unconscio...
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/891140598/understanding-uncon...
https://www.mevitae.com/resource-blogs/science-of-bias
- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc...
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201712...
- https://psyarxiv.com/dv8tu/
Edit: your contrary sources do not discredit the thesis of the national review article. They conflate the many different (often legitimate) heuristics or subconscious influences on cognition with Unconscious Bias, which is specifically the idea that people can be racist/sexist/whatever without even knowing it, and that the presence of this latent bigotry can be measured with an Implicit Association Test.
The latter, stronger claim is complete BS and is not supported by the science. This is a classic motte-and-bailey tactic.
So I don't think it's just management and business outcomes, the pool of people that you can even hire for the smaller/riskier businesses is just very different than at big tech (or even non-tech businesses with sizeable software and GIS teams).
Don't get me wrong, I love working for startups. But if I were twenty years older I might care a lot more about the bad 401k matching and progressively longer time/lower outcomes for liquidity in startup equity.
Today, hiring authorities are more likely to be young. They also feel uncomfortable with someone who has a huge amount more experience.
Ageism is real.
I don't think that is necessarily true. It really helps if the older peer is comfortable showing weakness at times.
Always, always, lead with "I don't know"
I am 65, and there are still things I don't know.
Sidenote, he also voted to reject a candidate because, "we have too many white guys." (He himself was a white man)
Now the guy who said that was one of the few people in my career that I truly disliked working with but I'm sure for every guy like him who says those things out loud there are 10 thinking it to themselves.
One solution I've found is to increase the frequency of interview shadowing. That way you at least have two people in the room, hearing and seeing the same things, and able to catch and call out biases.
I agree, but I would also like to point out a different form of the ageism that I see all the time in my line of work. I'm in tech retail sales. My stores customer base is a bit older, trending more over retired. There is a certain mindset among this age group that goes back a number of years that computers and technology was the playground of the young, so they think because they are older they can get away with not knowing what's going on in technology. I remember the jokes where some older person (in this case around 30-40) would have serious trouble understanding some technology, be it a computer or VCR, and having to call some teenager to their rescue. Too many older people decided that these newfangled toys are just for the kids, and that stuck. So now I have older seniors looking to buy a computer or printer and not understanding how it works because "I'm an older person, I don't know these things like you younger people."
It feels like the old jokes have pervaded our minds and now the younger see the greybeards as some senior citizen who's out of touch on technology. This shouldn't be the case.
Now closing in on 50 with my share of life experience (good and bad) and some gray hairs setting in, it has gotten better, although people often mistake me for being 10-15 years younger than I actually am.
I am not a grey beard yet but I am getting there quickly. My time in the industry is they value youth because it is exploitable not because they're like-minded. A young person with few responsibilities, no kids, no house, perhaps not even a significant other is easier to get to stick to exploitative pager duty schedules, long nights, etc for little pay and a party once in a while. Older people tend to be more concerned with raw numbers such as salary and total comp which presents a problem for this kind of grifter.
That being said despite having literal grey in my beard I have never had an issue getting a job. I keep my skills loosely up to date (I still don't follow the latest language trends) and know which industries I can move in. Most people age out into management and older ICs are hard to find beyond late 30s and early 40s.
I was sitting at lunch the other day at my large tech company office when I overheard a wonderful conversation from the table behind me about the "kinds" of managers a team might have that included this snippet:
"I mean, you could get someone midcareer, say age 25 or so, and they'll be really fiery and excited, but they won't know everything yet. But it means that you can figure it out. Or, I mean you could get someone super senior like 35, and then they'll be the expert but they'll be old and slow"
Not only did this go entirely unchallenged, but everyone seemed fully in agreement.
This is one example, but conversations like this that assume that by 35 or at most 40 you're all worn out and washed up are fairly common.
Having started this job during COVID, I didn't realize how young everyone in my company is, but after this conversation, I realized that I only know one engineer over 40 here.
(I know some managers that are over 40, but none that I know are yet 50.)
like you say, we need to come together as a community and industry and oppose these and other forms of stealth discrimination.
i’m wondering if the coding interviews are organized to facilitate discrimination by age.
The employee average cost-benefit curve inverts at 40. At least that's what the beancounters will say.
Is it really the “culture fit” i.e. do people feel like you’re their dad, or will it be a factor when they review your CV and see you are not only overqualified, but don’t know React?
I agree with your suggestion and it’s one reason why I’m starting a consulting company. I figure when the chips are down, the bosses need the work done, and the Olds get that. We’ll see, I’m just starting, but I’d love to end up with a stable of 65-year-olds helping startups actually ship.
That means you can legally discriminate against young people.
If ageism is truly a thing it means that there exist old people that are undervalued by the market.
Starting a company or having roles that are specifically 40+ only could be an interesting hiring advantage if that’s true. Especially if mentorship is part of the role.
Also - from friends that teach at university, lots of young people don’t know what a file system is and can’t navigate basic files/folders or hierarchies. They’re confused by files opening in applications (these are CS freshman). A bit unrelated but a lot of the “old” knowledge remains extremely relevant especially when kids exposure to only ios abstracts relevant bits away.
It seems you run into ageism less when you look outside of VC ran companies, but that's based on anecdotes I've heard from others and just my observation.
When I was an SDE 2, I kept contributing (what I felt were) consistent, marked improvements to my team and our products, but I didn't get a promo. Then I let my beard grow out and I appeared a good deal older. Shortly thereafter, I got my senior promotion.
Of course, there's no counterfactual. Maybe I just needed more time under my belt for my promo, or maybe other people were getting their well-deserved promotions before I got mine. But it felt like shedding that babyface helped me out back then. Maybe in a few years (I'm in my 40s now), I'll want to shave again to stay in the sweet spot appearance-wise.
It's a simple but profound statement. Ageism (and many other 'isms') would not exist if older people did not discriminate against other older people. Investors would typically be older people.
From that they can deduce your age?
I will certainly expand contributions as needed to help make things successful, but I will not give up my own life to backfill for poor management or hires - did that multiple times and doesn't gain you anything.
That said, making sure junior members are set up for success and get help and mentoring and guidance needed is part of being a senior member. For me, that is part of my calculation when determining timelines and deliverables.
I think software is a place where a selection occur whit ageing: if you're not that good and can't improve, you will get increasingly frustrated and either leave or get to a management post. If you are "good", you will at least stay at your level, but mostl likely improve with age. Average people like me stagnate and i can see myself decline if i don't do anything to retain my skills.
I expanded the memory 1K at a time to the maximum of 12K of RAM.
Two chips for each 1K. I can still remember which ones: code "2114", 300ns static RAM chips, 4 bits x 1024 (hence needing two chips per K).
These days I live in Sunny CA, I’m almost as senior engineer as I can be at Apple (and I’ve got a good chance of getting rid of the “almost” over the next couple of years), and I’m going to retire early as soon as the kid goes to college. Not bad for a docker’s brat from ‘pool.
Can’t say I’ve noticed much Ageism here at the fruit company. I know people who’ve been here for 30 years (I’m coming up on 20) and my direct boss used to work at NeXT.
I'm working for a startup in Canada and I'm the oldest person in the company by a fairly wide margin. It's a bit weird when your bosses are young enough to be your children but apart from that I haven't experienced any ageism. I can't say whether or not I would've got the job if I didn't know someone here though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET
Ooooh, the nostalgia looking at those pics.
Thankful, less then a year later I went the Commodore route starting with a VIC-20 with a cassette drive, then C64 with a floppy drive, then an Amiga with a hard drive before fulling moving into Wintel PCs in the 486 era.
What's most striking to me is that all my bosses three or four levels up are same age or younger than me. That affords me some level of respect so far no sign of ageism.
This customer had a factory where it sorted potatoes. They had a huge weight scale where they would weight truck coming in, full and then going out, empty. The difference was the weight of the potatoes.
The problem was that scale was mechanical and calibrated by officials, which means nobody was allowed to tinker with it. You could read the weight on a big VFD 7segment display, that was it.
They wanted to automate the reading of the weight. Everybody told them it was impossible because of the calibration. But I had an idea. I took a webcam (which could only take photo at the time, no video, I think it was photo man or something, serial based) and I put a colored filter in front of it which would only let red pass and did OCR on the result. It worked for 6years before they got a digital scale.
I've been doing this kind of weird thing my whole life. I find solutions.
Now I have more and more grey hair in my beard and I start to feel a bit "out of the loop" with all those new things (docker, kubernethingy, JS zillion of packages...).
I am a bit scare, I fear the moment where I will just be a relic.
> “These are engineering problems, and we are engineers. Shall we begin?”
It might even be that agism has the opposite effect once you are established in an organization. If you are qualified, experienced and engaged, you might be first in line for promotions because then you fit the image.
The best advice to fight agism is probably to use your network. If you've been around the industry for many years and made friends along the way, that might level the playing field.
The gender gap isn't inherent, both India and China have a nearly equal percentage of men and women in computer science. The gap seems to be a mostly western phenomenon.
Given the genetic differences between sexes a 50/50 split seems very unnatural and forced to me.
To put it another way, why don’t we have an issue with the number of men and women in the NFL?
In the 40s, the 6 people hired to program the ENIAC were all female. google "ENIAC girls". _Cosmopolitan_ ran articles about how programming was one of the few professional fields open to women. Managers thought that programming was basically just typing, so they hired women.
But then people started to realize it was more than just typing. So as the field started to get prestige in the mid 60s, companies started to look for things like college degrees and "personality tests", both of which were biased towards men.
Systems analyst was the person writing up an extremely detailed specification of what a program was supposed to do, which a programmer then implemented in a particular language.
The two merged at some point, when the demarcation line between the two of them became vaguer and overlapped more. This more or less coincided with more powerful 'frameworks' (if the name even applies) and libraries becoming available, as well as a massive increase in computing power which allowed for a near real-time edit-compile-test cycle which made programmers so much more productive that they suddenly weren't the bottle-neck in the process any more.
Another factor was that plenty of 'hobby' programmers found their way into professional IT jobs and they'd been doing this 'programmer/analyst' hybrid thing all along so for them it was a natural to continue to do so.
This happened somewhere in the mid 80's.
Then the web happened and the analyst job eventually became much more high level, nowadays we'd call a person that does work related to what an analyst used to do product owner or similar.
All of these definitions have meant different things at different points in time.
Some permanently some temporarily, but the boost was mostly gone in computing by the 80s... the cohort we're talking about here.
A more charitable reading is ~ "This discussion is about one problem; let's not drag another one into it".
I just recently saw the same thing on LinkedIn[1]: a Finnish guy complaining about how, in another thread he had started on how his dark-skinned wife had been racially abused in Poland, some (Finns, apparently) had whatabaouted the discussion into "there's racism in Finland too!", and when he'd tried to explain that "Sure, but this thread isn't about that", he was accused of "derailing the discussion". No, he wasn't: they were.
And so, IMO, are you here.
___
[1]: That really has become much more "typical social media" recently, hasn't it? Can't recall seeing such general -- i.e. not directly work-related -- discussions there even a year or two ago.
That's why it takes some charity to read it that way. :-)
What is exhausting is reading about all these people trying to get more women into CS, but then not realizing how many subtle signals there are saying "you don't belong." If you don't think that has an effect on people (women, in this case), well, you haven't spoken to a person affected by such things...
Eventually, hopefully, we'll have significant numbers of them and need a new term, but it's hard to go back 35 years to fix the top of funnel and funnel leakage problems that existed then.
At risk of not being overly defeatist here, every programmer who follows the SOLID principle should know Barbara Liskov (the L in SOLID) who definitely stayed hands on long enough to be a conceptual graybeard.
I've been fortunate to know a number of women who stayed in extremely technical engineering management to the 35 year point, but the longest lasting hands on woman coder I know is probably 20 years in the code every day, and even her title is a management title now (though she stays hands on in the code) so that's going to get progressively harder for her to sustain, just as it is for guys who take management titles. Like 35 year graybeards, she's a total badass, but she still has quite a few years to go before her hair starts to gray.
Yes, we'll one day need a new term for 35 year hands on coders, but let's not let virtue signaling blind us to the problems of the past.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/260738/do-dwarf-wo...
At FOSDEM 2020, the final talk[2] was outright called “maddog continues to pontificate”.
Ageism may be real in the industry, but there is definitely a sizeable number of programmers who recognise the value of experience and enjoy the “war stories”.
[1]: https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/keynote_fifty...
[2]: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/fossh/
Ageism needs to be kicked from this industry. Yes, defeated, static, close-minded people of all ages exist, but don't tar everyone with that brush just because their hair is grey!
Correction: I meant 49:30.
Old writers and architects are not uncommon.
I think we'll see many of us working until at least 80.
I am 45 btw, and I am still actively learning new stuff and improving my art, I don't feel diminished at all.
The skill and ability and depth of experience held by my older coworkers makes me grateful to have the opportunity to work with and learn from them.
To any older individuals here still working in tech, please don't feel unwanted. Your experience is needed and appreciated, especially by the juniors who get to work with you.
I've learned as much from recent college grads as I have taught them so it's definitely a two way street.
Can you talk more about what you learned ?
> To any older individuals here still working in tech, please don't feel unwanted.
Sadly, in my case, it is too late for that. The message was delivered at 100 decibels, and was received, five-by-five.
The ones most aggressively delivering the message were recruiters, but I was greeted with almost naked hostility, even after "getting in the door."
It was made quite clear, that I am not welcome, and it had nothing at all to do with my technical merits, as the interviews almost never even got that far.
But it all turned out OK, in the long run. Some companies missed out on me, but I am quite sure they aren't regretting it one bit. It's quite likely that the people that interviewed me, aren't even with their companies, anymore.
I've only experienced a bit of age related 'you old fart' stick from a younger colleague once but on the whole, like you say, I've been impressed with my younger cohort.
Love to see, learn and be around that energy. And it's great to be able to bring something to the table based on my experience.
A respectful and egalitarian attitude goes a long way.
It’s frustrating because I want more of the former in my career.
That's what I've seen. Young folks learn latest language/framework/tool/etc and decide the old stuff the grey beards use is antiquated. Then you get real old and realize there is nothing new under the sun (usually) and there was a reason the gray beards were doing it the way they were.
I have been happy about how technically proficient some of my young coworkers have been over the years.
One thing I do try to bring to the table, particularly with new hires, is explaining how much money they are earning compared to their age peers, how learning to live within your pay, day one, while saving a little every month, will make a huge difference in your life, not just when you are really old, but even after just ten years.
It is the one life experience that older workers can share, that will make a lifetime of change for incoming hires, particularly those fresh out of college.
Now I work at a place that burns out young folks and I literally have no one to learn from. It's frustrating, I'm probably going to leave because of it.
There's as much to learn when you are absent of mentors though. Self-sufficiency in the face of ambiguity is a critical skill.
You stop reinventing wheels. You know where most of the holes are and can laugh when the kids fall in them. You know the hype cycles and can spot the fads and fashions. With 10 or 20 languages behind you, code becomes separate and 'above' languages, so you can think in structures and abstract algorithms. Enjoy standing up for principles, you're the man now, and there's not much left to "look up to" (especially in this morally declining business). Not having something to prove means you can know your limits, like when to quit trying to fix someone's "poor little thing with a broken wing" that ain't ever gonna fly. You've time to read all four volumes of Knuth and really (almost) understand. Also, you're not going to win that Turing award now, so enjoy not having to try.
Things to watch out for.
Look after your eyesight and posture. Spend more time thinking about code while out walking. Shout at clouds less because you realise that dumb ideas will die of their own accord in good time. Enjoy the new toys the kids make, even if they aren't "production ready serious" - they will mature in time.
And your hands (including wrists). Carpal tunnel is no fun. Arthritis in your fingers is very much no fun. You don't think of programmers as people who work with their hands, but if you think about the actual mechanics of the job, our hands are critical.
This one is so true
I don't understand why younger programmers are so obsessed with which language is "best"
To me the algorithm/logic in the abstract is the interesting part
I would much rather work on an interesting project/problem in a "bad" language than work on a boring project in a "good" language
I just have to ask: In what way? Any examples?