Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?
Well, it's been a while since I touched this theme. 6 years ago, I launched a job board trying to fight ageism in tech (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097)
It did super well in terms of upvotes and comments but not $ speaking (made $0)
This seems to be a current problem but what's the solution?
192 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadIf I had the money I could go hire a half dozen solid software engineers and at least 2 solid DevOps/SRE types today. I'm betting people in other fields could do the same.
And yet, good people remain unemployed and scared.
In the end, HR hiring team fails to recruit because in makes the process to expensive for candidates, and the CEOS hire more HR recruitment becasue they think the problem is the lack of people to hire. HR needs to justify the salary, and makes hiring more a pain in the ass, feeding the vicious cycle.
I miss the times where HR only responsabily was to process salary payment.
Your kid is better off not going to school for a day, or arriving late. They're not doing anything important in school.
Depending on company, maybe they need to hire people to do important things and have responsibility for important things. Somebody who would prioritize things like driving their kids to school over that is a no-hire. They should work a job which is less important, like I myself do.
You can be on a team that runs a service that's a small part of the overall company product offering, which may be a convenience rather than mission-critical to its clients, who themselves may be doing something BS, and that team may still want you to wake up at 3AM when something alerts. Making a blanket statement that just because a job wants you to wake up at 3AM means it must be important (nevermind more important than family responsibility) places way too much trust in the judgement of employers.
My job is unimportant, so I can leave the phone off at night. If I had an important job, then the case would be different.
I think the same can be said for companies. All of us here worked at companies and know how utterly unimportant most of them, or at least most of their projects, are.
> If I had an important job
They don't exist for the most part, at least 90% of them in our line of work aren't.
Not sure, if you are serious.
Maybe we should become slaves of corporations? Should we divorce maybe with our partners because sometimes we go dining and on-call is more important than me having a dinner with my partner?
> Maybe we should become slaves of corporations?
That's why school exists in the first place, because parents are stuck at their jobs and new corporate/government slaves and cannon fodder have to be indoctrinated.
Even the best organizations have emergencies, that's just life. A business which has everything perfectly automated and organized to handle anything that happens is also a business that has no employees, because they won't need anybody working for them.
As far as being on-call goes, there are many different ways to be a part of support without a brute-force approach. For example, create a more robust QA process. Another is to create actionable alerts. There are many ways workers can work peacefully and meet director goals.
And now we're reaching the core of the "ageism" discussion. Every person will have some things that they consider more important than work; their health for example. But as people get older, the more things get added to that list, because they are more established in life. But do you want to hire a person which considers everything more important than their job? Something which businesses value highly is when people are reliable. If the boss can rely on that a certain employee can be counted on to take care of things, that means that the boss can also work to 100% of his potential where they are needed.
A good run company will make sure to hire enough people, or in other ways make sure that emergency situations don't become something frequent. But we can never get away from the fact that the earth spins around the sun, meaning everything in the economy experiences the ebb and flow of seasonal demand. Even Hank Hill has to take care of propane emergencies at times.
>As far as being on-call goes, there are many different ways to be a part of support without a brute-force approach. For example, create a more robust QA process. Another is to create actionable alerts. There are many ways workers can work peacefully and meet director goals.
I completely agree with this.
* Will they be on on-call or out partying with their friends? * Are they committed to the work or will they hop to another company once trained? * Are they able to work within our codebase or just jump to the next hot thing?
These types of questions are ridiculous for both sides.
No, it won't work. Biologically, 25 years old without a family responsibilities will not get it anyway.
If you are 25 years old, single and your friends are similar to you, what would you do? Most I know are working 12-14 hour/day, because they eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work.
You'll notice that you become less efficient over time. I recommend taking a long weekend and coming back and keeping to 8 hours. It's a great discipline if you want to go further in your career.
Reply to below:
Of course. But if you plan ahead properly, it will be extremely rare. To the point where it isn’t economical to have people on call. Because the downtime was caused by a meteor or maybe AWS.
If it is truly mission critical, have a night shift.
Maybe you are writing libraries/frameworks?
Any service running on production can fail anytime, whether you did everything right or not, things break sometimes.
You can easily find an older person ranting against the idea of using full stack javascript, unaware of the V8 changes while still having some valid criticisms
But then wonder if their rejection is ageism, instead of the rant
just one example
Treating a person as part of a group is the problem.
And when you are trying to isolate one person out of many, like for a job hire, it's not easy to avoid mass-filtering to speed it up.
Yes, but it's efficient and effective in a large number of cases.
Those with no programming experience is a group. Those who just graduated a CS program is a group. Fresh bootcamp grads are a group. People with 5+ years of experience with your tech stack are a group.
Is there someone with no programming experience who would turn out to be great? Of course; none of us were born with programming experience, but most people are practical enough to not bat an eye when we use past experience as a proxy to quickly pre-filter the possible candidate pool.
Where ___ is: "no formal education", the accuracy is possibly over 50%.
Where ___ is: "Dutch", the accuracy is below 50%
Enterprise software is going nowhere but sideways for 2 decades already.
But yes, the velocity of new bullshit with dubious value that is consistently getting add on top of each other is just amazing.
By the way, I still haven't seen any single project get value out of SaaS auth (both auths) systems. Why the hell people use them?
Also, I had to check: "The key to driving your business forward? One powerful AI platform that keeps your most important assets on track, every decision on point, and your fleet of AI agents at peak performance. That’s Workday."
Well, people here still didn't manage to make LLMs do anything useful. That's despite a strong push from the top to use them, and many very smart people. They did manage to design a very promising tool that uses LLM in a way that uses its strengths and add a lot of value (that seems to be completely unparalleled - and we just invited the entire economic sector for a talk), but didn't manage to make it work well yet. So, our fleet of AI agents at peak performance...
There's isn't a quick fix or easy solution.
It is rare that a company will take you up on that offer though. It really highlights what the money is actually about and how tribal "professional" "business" can be.
Not sure if there is a "solution" for that as a 35 yo hiring manager will probably have an easier time managing under-35 individual contributor comparing to a 50 yo one. Different perspectives, experiences, etc. So by hiring younger IC the manager makes a correct decision. Sucks for us older folks but that's life.
In The Days of Old, the folks running the corporation were almost always in their 50s. They might have been prejudiced towards folks my age (60s), but they didn't have issues with hiring what are now considered "older" folks (40s and 50s), with the only issue being cost (they might be ageist, simply for cost reasons).
The prejudice from younger folks is cultural, not cost. They don't want people around that make them feel uncomfortable. Many younger folks at tech companies, these days, make boatloads of money. It's not about cost.
From where I stand, it looks like a lot of modern tech companies are establishing a "college, but being paid" culture. It seems that many modern tech companies resemble idealized college campuses, more than traditional professional production environments.
Is the company that much more likely to blow up and go out of business due to inexperience of the younger guys at the helm? Perhaps, but it's their company and that's how you gain experience in the first place. And IF it blows up in their face they'll learn (hopefully) and their 2nd, 3rd, 4th shots will be so much better.
50yo+ just need to stay away from these places to avoid becoming collateral damage. We don't have our entire lives ahead of us to make up for the lost time and wages. So not getting hired there is not really a problem.
Of course it leaves 50yo+ with fewer places to work and earn salary. Sucks, believe me, I know.
They didn't want me, because I'm who I am. In a couple of cases, they didn't even try to hide it.
I took it personal, because it was personal. That's the thing about cultural bigotry. It's an emotional, reptile-brain thing. Right back to the lungfish. Not even primate-level thinking.
But what's done, is done. In the aggregate, it ended up being all good for me. Nasty-tasting medicine, but it cured the ill. I don't really want to go back to the rodent rally. I'm having way too much fun, doing my own thing.
A couple of the places I looked at, are no longer viable concerns, and I seemed to have dodged a couple of bullets. Could I have saved them? Maybe, but I seriously doubt they would have listened to me.
With the loss of zero interest financing, this industry is about to meet reality. Say good by to "campus" appearing work environments for the majority.
I had the misfortune of working for two "30 under 30 CEO" led companies. I was in my 40s at the time. Never again. I can relate to the "college, but being paid" description, but for me it was more like "high school, but being paid".
Hip companies dont hire me, maybe some tech consultants, that would not be considered cool, like accenture or IBM.
A few years ago I was one of the first people in my country tomigrate my company android app to Kotlin, this helped me land in the app development team of a big bank in my country and I was by far the oldest dude. Everybody called me "uncle" there, very common to young people in my country to call older people that, because most where college kids.
They have "reverse ageism." There's some levels that you can't reach, until you are a certain age.
I worked with older people that would have a lot of folks around here, drooling. That company hired some of the best in the world.
One of the most productive guys and all around technical wizard I know is a father of 3 in his 40s.
I do know a few people straight out of college who are rather excellent devs, but the problem with a lot of them them is that they have inflated egos and don't take feedback at at all, and/or they move around a lot.
Imagine building up a guy who works like crazy with a huge body of knowledge, then he's out of the company the next year, and nobody knows what any of his code does.
I've now got a checklist I create for myself to go through when reviewing resumes for the role. It includes a number of legitimate reasons it's okay to reject a candidate and I try to make myself pick one of them. I also have a thing under the rejection section that just says "Are you sure you're not rejecting this person because they're older than you?"
I realize how stupid it is to feel this way, but it's hard to un-train an emotional response.
In the resume, you can remove your experience prior to certain date (which is recommended anyways as it makes your resume shorter and very few employers care what you did 15 years ago), but you do have to list your education and most ATS systems require graduation dates.
Even if you do manage to omit the dates, if you were senior developer or architect in the very the first position from 12 years ago that you have on your resume, the recruiter/hiring manager will be able to put 2 and 2 together.
All the advice I've heard from the career/job search/whatever coaches/advisors was to not try to hide your age but use it your advantage. Trying to hide your age doesn't just make you looking silly, it might create an impression that you're hiding something more serious.
But yeah, looking younger and healthier definitely doesn't hurt, not just in job search but in life in general.
But the vibe I'm hearing lately is that junior engineers can't get jobs, because AI. I don't know if that reflects the reality (I haven't been trying to find a job as a junior in quite a while), but people are complaining about that these days.
Is there ageism? I'm sure. As an old, I'm going to avoid companies that give off a younger, coder bro type vibe. Partially because I assume they're more likely to be ageist. But mostly because even if they *didn't* have an ageist viewpoint and hired me, I know it's just not where I personally want to be.
If you want to go to school because you're interested, then that's cool. But to think you can make a living out of it when you're 30 years older than the tens of thousands of kids that you're competing against... I really don't think it's worth it unless you want to form your own startup that is medical-related.
However are you sure you want to take the cut in prestige/pay?
In the medtech space there's a huge need for project mangers, etc wish medical experience. So knowing how to code and how to query databases along with all that medical knowledge would be a super power.
However, I can't imagine you'd be happy as a junior engineer churning out react code but maybe?
I started programming on a zx80 and trs-80 clone at 11 years old, and have devoured new languages, methodologies, tricks and tips, computer science breakthroughs, and so-on throughout my career, but still do not have work currently.
Weird, it says there your wife did.
I did the rest, being developing, contacting companies and talking to over 40s.
I know it doesn't matter to the topic at had, but I actually went on and read all about your project, and that caught my attention. :)
This is not to dismiss LLMs entirely, but they always get touted as “they can do ABC, as long as an experienced dev reviews the output”. And with LLMs hindering the growth of juniors in one way or another, I can definitely see a market for “senior” developers down the road.
Maybe I'll be wrong, and in 2050, there won't even be human software engineers anymore, but I'm not so sure that will be the case.
This is how you get disasters like Ocean Gate where management would rather hire fresh college grads than listen to experienced hires point out mistakes.
Sure, if you want to use an LLM to produce code that works you need to have enough knowledge and experience to be able to review and, if necessary, request changes.
However, another (IMO, even more powerful) aspect of LLMs, is their utility as a learning tool. They excel at imparting knowledge about new concepts, because they act as a personalized teacher.
I find it doubtful that use of LLMs will result in less experienced and knowledgeable engineers in the future.
Excuse me?
Give the whole thing 5-10 years until the impact of juniors learning nothing and having the perseverance and attention span of about 10 minutes and the effects will show in the industry. Yes, LLMs + agents have value here and there, but remember on where they get that value from: they learn from the internet. And papers already show that if LLMs learn from their own output, the quality degrades quickly.
So, more code written by LLMs on Github equals subsequent generations for LLMs learn from subpar examples.
Furthermore, they mostly learn from "en vogue" languages because they have lots of examples. But I wouldn't trust an LLM with a 10 foot pole doing Lisp or Cobol or any RTOS related C code with safety requirements.
I wouldn't trust an LLM to write a proper GPU or CUDA driver. But if there's nobody around knowing how to do that, how do you expect future drivers to be implemented?
In other words, it’s not ageism when one can’t even get an interview in the first place. Assuming you’ve kept your resume concise and removed education dates, etc. Which I have for the last twenty years or so, since the turn of the century! cough
Not only that, young engineers will be build whatever without questioning the value, business people prefer this. They dont want an engineer raising product questions
also, it is true that technology moves quickly, startups dont need experts in tech thats no longer bleeding edge. large old school companies still do, so the number of companies that are viable employers decreases
In a tightly woven, interdependent system like modern civilization, it is placing a huge strain on us structurally as well as psychologically. Add to this it is an easy exploit for power ala “my leadership is great, <out group> over there is your problem”, combined with mass media platforms and the whole thing is cracking at the edges.
How do we mitigate this though? It seems to take a massive concerted effort for a person to overcome those implicit biases. I was speaking with a family member the other day who is clearly primed by media in their country to assume that all current structural ills are caused by immigrants, and when probed about people of that same group that were actually in her life, she said “Well, Mr. so and so that works at the school is just a lovely decent hardworking man.” But she couldn’t take the leap that there are statistically more Mr. so and so’s in the group than the “bad ones” she was hearing about in the news. I’ve seen this pattern across all of business and politics.
Don’t even get me started on the whole “culture fit” hiring standards.
We are all alone, if not for communications.
It is bias in communications, knowledge of the various forms of bias, their methods, and countermeasures that enable individuals and groups to move past argument and towards shared understandings. With shared understanding naturally causes shared compromise and solutions. Without shared understanding, situations degenerate to stalemate, war, welfare states, and economic slave states.
Individual self conversation, recognition of it, it's biases and countermeasures lay a foundation for a rational individual. The lack of formal and public recognition of self conversation itself is hurdle one. Once that is recognized, a foundation for a rational public can be considered.
Then communicating with others inter-personally, with peers, spouses, coworkers, managers, authorities and strangers. Pairs, small groups, larger groups, and audience dynamics: these all have biases, which are often magnifications of the same bias at a self conversation level. New bias forms are here too, and they must also be recognized, understood, and countermeasures established. This is all nothing but communicating, but doing so effectively, causing understanding in others, and gaining understanding from those less communication-ally skilled.
Now let's take these biases and add in mass media, social media, and all the network effects they bring to the communication situation. Strangely enough, yet again the countermeasures that operate at lower levels continue to function here - except now we're dealing with the public. countermeasures now require public education.
I think by spreading knowledge of interpersonal and self conversation biases, their countermeasures immediate and positive effect lay the foundation for widespread respect of effective communications. After all, the lack of it often only needs to be pointed out for people to consider the ease of adopting knowledge about and the countermeasures that enable more success communicating, which directly correlates to actual success. And that is with everything a person does, because this perspective begins with one's self conversation, reducing the bias there, first. That generates a more rational person, more aware, more active. Push this to network effects, and now we're talking societal change. It's a plan to impress secondary considerations on the general public, because that's the primary countermeasure in communication issues: consider further.
I suspect before ageism disappears it will first swing the other way where older tech workers snub young people entering the industry writing them off as vibecoders who don’t know anything and are easily replaced with an AI.
I wear shorts and a t-shirt (often a DEFCON or BSidesPDX shirt) usually, so I'd wear jeans and a solid color t-shirt or possibly a polo to an interview, though I haven't done an in-person interview for a job since 2016. For remote interviews, I'm in sweatpants and a polo.
In the early 2000s, I wasn't a tech worker yet, but I always assumed engineers were wearing khakis and a polo, so I would have shown up to an interview with black slacks and a button-up shirt, maybe even a tie.
You need to look like you are a person who would be doing the job. You wouldn't hire a gardner with smooth hands, clean shoes, and no dirt under their nails would you?
Car mechanics, you can see it in their hands, and the way they act around cars.
Every profession has its tells, from what we wear, to our physical traits etc.
After a while, you know if someone adds up or not. But part of that is changing with the times. :)
Professional companies are stereotyped to suits and ties, and company attire is often part of company dress code.
Tech companies are stereotyped to kids and what they wear, and company dress code (if it exists) is often super-lax except for executives -- because the executives need to interact with Professional companies and look the part.
There's a lot of in-between, and it really depends on what company you work for and somewhat to what company you want to work for.
They’re not saying that how you look impacts your real ability; or vice versa.
People think of ability as just technical, or just soft. It is mixing it all together that produces true strength.
If I wear a suit at the wrong time, it shows an inability to read the room, and in some firms may even have gotten my manager to ask if I was looking for a job!
So, understanding how to dress how you want to be seen is critical. I'm not saying it's high fashion time, but at least understand the audience, and the aura you want to put out.
Shorts and a Hawaiian shirt are comfortable but I guess that's still not ok in the office even though everyone wants to pretend they don't care.
Whatever it's not like I'd accept a non-remote job these days anyway.
Places with older engineers means:
1. things are done properly
2. less to break
3. no need to be on call
4. excellent WLB (no grind n burnout culture)
5. excellent mentoring and learning opportunities
6. sniper / laser focus on business fundamentals / making money rather than making noise on the internet streets
Go into companies and industries where this culture isn't the norm, however, and you'll find teams full of 40-50+ year old software engineers. Defense, aerospace, government, construction, medical tech, research labs, education.
I have no problem interacting with younger ICs and even embrace my Dad-ness and Dad humor. I like mentoring and growing others, and I think it’s important to advocate for less experienced to get the lionsshare of the glory and attention.
For hiring, I just am not open about my age and mostly interact with people virtually. I don’t have my early irrelevant jobs and don’t show my graduation dates. So I haven’t seen it as a problem.
Have a lot of skepticism towards our ego and question whether we’re acting on status or actually what’s best.
This may well be the value of a senior IC. You will be neutral in most of the situations, so VPs will be more willing to trust you as they know you don't have a hidden organizational agenda.
Boy do I feel this one. I'm 20 years in now and holy shit are there are a lot of bad leaders out there. What they all have in common is that they don't want to be gainsaid. Most leaders are completely allergic to meaningful feedback, hardly any of them ever ask for it. A lot of people seem to feel that once they are "in charge" they have somehow become infallible.
It's too bad because like `softwaredoug I love developing young people, most of them are very hungry for mentorship. I find that most younger ICs are very willing to listen and learn, but the leadership sees it as a problem for some reason that they're not struggling on their own on basic shit. What a waste of time of money.
It was a staff engineer role, very well paid. I was given a take home task for one interview. I did my research and looked into why they were hiring. I downloaded their app, read all the bad reviews on responsiveness, UI, and such. I built something in one hour that would solve the things they had trouble with over 4 years, as a kind of demo of what I could do if they took me.
When we had the actual interview, holy shit did they attack me. "Open your code on this file. Explain what is wrong with your code. I will not even give a hint otherwise you fail. You must tell me what is wrong with your code."
I did get them to explain the "correct answer" despite the pressure, and they were very reluctant to do so. I checked the code afterwards and even cross-checked it with AI and discovered that they were probably wrong lol.
It wasn't age. It wasn't racism, sexism, etc. It was a technical leader being challenged by the idea of someone else being technically better than them. Juniors can do work as fast as seniors; it's more that seniors are trusted to change culture for the better. If someone has trouble finding someone senior enough, most of the time it's because they refuse to let an outsider change the culture.
I did eventually get another job. Similar situation. Take home interview, vastly modernized code architecture than what the interviewer was used to. But in this case, the interviewer actually wanted to make products, get sales, make the customers happy, make money. So the incentives were aligned and they were happy to bring me in to set up policies and stuff.