Ageism: a worsening epidemic

The unemployment rate of those 55+ is 3.2% while the rate for those 20-24 is 9.4%. God help you if you're a teen, where the unemployment rate is 16.1%.

http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm

I am a hardware engineer with a lot of software experience to go with it. I have had no work since the "crash" in 2008 when I was 58. Since then no company even returns a "no thanks" letter.

However I must admit there is a lot of karma involved. When I was 30, head of engineering, I was responsible for hiring a total of 30 to 40 engineers. I would have never hired anyone at my age. I didn't even think about it. It just seemed obvious.

So I tell people I am retired, which means I'm old and unemployed. Like others in these comments I am continuing to work, but only on FOSS projects, like the Atom editor. I can now sling full-stack code with the best of them and I figure I could for 10 or so years. But there is no hope of gainful employment.

I'm 29, and I'm not a hiring manager, but here's where my ageism lies: People in their 60s tend to be less open to new experiences.

My ~50 year old guitar teacher told me a story about how he refused to even try guitar hero. I agree that, as an accomplished musicians, it would be kind of insulting to be asked to play guitar hero by your student. But it's such a good opportunity to learn where the student is coming from, and understand how it could teach timing and patterns, even if it doesn't teach fingering or picking.

My ~65 year old dad is still working as a consultant and actively gives paid speeches, and he plays a lot of solitaire and minesweeper on the computer. I've tried to get him to try a few videos game-- I even pitched Kerbal Space Program, from the educational aspect of understand our own space program better. (When I was in D.C. at the National Air and Space Museum, I was recognizing parts that KSP had copied the models of.) He has no interest in it.

My mom, and my aunts on both side of the family are extremely stubborn about their political beliefs, and phrase their responses as: "oh, well, I believe that ____". Not trying to seek a consensus, not trying to crack an argument. Just laying out their own belief. (Their political beliefs range from: common Democrat, pro-choice conservative, global-focused liberal.)

I get the idea that, as we grow older, we've kind of discovered what we like and what we don't like. I usually just have Cookies & Cream ice cream, because it's my favorite. I don't try rocky road again because the nuts give it a bad texture. But if a young person strongly recommended Rocky Road Version 5, I hope I would try it for the sake of trying it.

So that's where my ageism comes from. I've told my younger brother to call me out on not being open to new experiences, if that's something that happens to me in my old age. At the very least, it'll be a good source of brotherly humor.

Bloviating presentation of anecdata. This problem may be getting worse, or better: there's no real evidence here, just scaremongery.

The irony of editorials like this is that it will reduce the likelihood that companies will hire older workers. Who wants an employee who is simultaneously less productive and more narcissistic than a younger one?

Imagine the effect of government saying, "You have to keep any older workers you hire." Think really hard. :)

By the way, lest someone get the wrong idea, I'm 70 years old.

Moreso even than ageism, it's frustrating the way young and old struggle to exchange ideas. The young, I think, are to blame for not being interested. But the old need to come to terms with the possibility that the judgmental attitude which comes easily after a lifetime of forceful experiences may just be too off-putting for the young to put up with.

I plan on working until my mind doesn't work anymore. If nobody will pay me, I'll just work on open source projects. I'm really not interested in retiring.

I see a strong conflation of "older" with "lots of personal responsibilities" that affect job performance.

It's clearly true that 30 year olds are more likely to have kids then 20 year olds, but it seems 40 and 50 year olds get "blamed" for being unproductive because of things like kids, mortgages, etc, than do the 30 year olds.

The interesting study is the 45 year old with no kids, house or marriage. Are they "old" too ?

I think this is a very opinionated and one-sided article. Prejudices exist everywhere and ageism definitely exist. You're most likely to complain about a particular prejudice when: it directly affects you, you think it directly affects you, or it affects someone you know. As far as ageism I definitely understand the point of view the author has. I think the other side of the story here is in the workplace the "more experienced" engineers "may" dismiss the ideas and contributions of a younger engineer even if they are completely valid and logical. This is the kind of social prejudice I have witnessed in the workplace. There are most certainly even more prejudices that exist in the workplace regarding age. I think it's unfortunate that the author decided to rant about an issue and not present all the facts as if a particular group of people have it easier than a different group.

I think people were let go because they weren't good at their jobs, not because they were old. People who have been fired because they weren't good enough are going to have a harder time finding a new job.

Our education system is teaching more advanced topics at younger and younger ages. Hence younger people may be more "up to date".

An older person will experience ageism, but they can combat this by always learning new things throughout their life. I'll take a 50 year old javascript developer who's proactive about testing and CI over a less experienced younger developer.

But I'm going to choose an inexperienced javascript developer over an 50 year old experienced COBOL deverloper if I'm building websites.

Aside from the fact that it's the young who are being wrecked in employment, there are logical reasons why a company in some area of competition may choose a younger person over an older person.

Obviously where experience matters more, companies might choose an older person, such as in a high-level executive position, where I presume most people are older.

But experience isn't everything, and g tests have consistently beaten years of relevant work experience as a single-metric predictor of work performance. I don't doubt that you'd want your kernel security team to be veterans, but other companies are justified in hiring young people out of college and having them learn as they go.

My prescription for a fix:

1. Require age diversity in the workplace.

2. Replace "at will" employment with "just cause" employment

3. Get rid of noncompetes at the federal level.

4. Replace binding arbitration with employment tribunals (as used in the UK).

>If the company is a small company and screens applications manually, it is simple to Google a person and find their age as well as other private information about them.

You only have yourself to blame for making those 'private' details publicly accessible.

Unfortunatelly this is a simple matter of math. Hiring someone is costly, and there has to be a return for the time and money invested. As you get older, you get closer and closer to retiring, so the time you have to return the investment made by the company in you is just not enough to justify such investment.

There's no easy answer. There are too much advantages (as mentioned in the comments: young people are more open to new ideas, easier to manipulate, easier to manage, willing to be paid less, while the older people's only advantage is experience, which may not really be an advantage if your experience is too biased to a single market, company or position). The more competition there is in the market for talents, the wider the gap is. That's not a vice, or inherently evil, that's just a fact of life: as we get older, we get less useful. We lose efficiency both physically and mentally - some more than others, but that happens to everyone.

It's sad, revolting and definitely not fair, but I - personally - can't see a way around this that makes rational, not emotional, sense.