Claims of Age Bias Rise, but Standards of Proof Are High

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.

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!

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).

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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?

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.

PS: Don't forget in many ways the steam engine was the last major leap and that was in the late 1700's.

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).

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.

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)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.