Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry
oldgeekjobs.com
oldgeekjobs.com
I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places.
I live in NH, on a farm and work (mostly) remotely. I've got a network of contacts, I get pinged w requests for contracting work, I do the job, I get paid. No one asks me about my age (45) or judges me because of it.
Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots.
The rapidity with which people flip the idiot bit on you, due to puddle-shallow signalling in the Bay Area really takes my breath away.
- The sound of keys clicking in a phone interview automatically means you are Googling the answer in an interview. Never mind that you are a dynamic language programmer and you are writing a 10 second scriptlet to answer the question.
- The mention of anything that sounds "audiophile" automatically means you are a terrible douche who naively believes in all of Monster Cable's woo. No need to actually evaluate what you are saying through knowledge of physics.
- You must subscribe to the magical powers of [insert paradigm/language here] or you are a dirty mudblood who's simply too dim to appreciate the magic. (Don't say anything like, "Soft factors, like how well your team works together, swamps the effect...")
- You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks, or you obviously never covered the topic.
This isn't even to mention weird prejudices and half-baked knowledge about older technologies. It's as if people didn't understand that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695816 is also a parody of programmers misunderstanding of technology.
This kind of thing is the worst in interviews. Like getting asked some fill-in-the-blanks question on the pillars of OOP or to define some random bit of jargon or what-have-you. That coupled with the "have you seen this question before" interviewing is just infuriating.
Quite frankly understated.
When I interview someone, I will usually ask if they've seen the question before, so that I can skip it -- is there something wrong with that?
I suspect that this was meant to refer to interview questions with an "Aha!" answer, that are unlikely to be answered correctly by people who don't already know the answer.
For example, I think, "How would you detect a cycle in a linked list?" is a bad question because, if the candidate implements Floyd's algorithm on the whiteboard, the likely assumption is that they remembered it, not that they came up with it on the spot.
This area has a high density of people who conflate academic computer science with software engineering, or who think the latter is some easily learned demi-skill to be looked down on, etc.
Which is mind boggling. I took an introductory "software engineering" class in (a reasonably prestigious) university ~15 yrs ago which was ostensibly about learning how to use the right tool for the right job, and one of the assignments was to build a web application in C++!
Perhaps the intent of that assignment was to show that it wasn't the right tool, but that was certainly never communicated by the professor.
I didn't really learn any software engineering until I got my first job and had to build software, with a team, that people actually used.
Only recently a friend of mine narrated an interview tale. I don't exactly remember the precise question, but apparently he was asked to solve a problem in 30 mins(Two problems is what interviewer expected him to solve in an hour). One of such problem apparently he couldn't solve it in the time complexity the interviewer expected him to. Though he got some solution working in an hour.
He later on went and googled it and apparently the algorithm couldn't be solved unless you knew about Suffix Automata(http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/20861)
Long story short, these days apparently without everyday exposure competitive programming exercises(spending hours every day on sites like codeforces, SPOJ and hackerrank) there is no way you can clear interviews.
Reminds me of the Aho-Corasick string-matching algorithm.
Edit: in a further comment, you assert an unspoken insult being communicated in a perfectly neutral sentence. I guess what I'm saying is I bet you bring quite a bit of the negativity you experience to your interactions.
I am not convinced that your assumption about his negativity is any more valid than his interpretation of his experience.
My own experiences in SF has been positive. I've found people are generally very excited about what they are doing in life, optimistic about the future and most importantly, willing to lend a hand. (This is in huge contrast to the cut throat image of the valley in the media; while individual startups and industries within tech may be cut throat, I wouldn't describe SF tech world as "generally cut throat")
One thing to keep in mind is SF has a fair share of folks who move here for their first job. These people are just entering the workforce and are maturing more, not less, each day. I've seen some pretty radical transformations of the same people over 1-3 years. A lot of the portrayal of the Valley in the media is of a fixed non-evolving mindset, which again, is the opposite of my experience.
It was entirely certain that he did not understand that he repeated the 2nd option I gave him. Furthermore, when I tried to correct him, he behaved as if I was lying to him.
I take it you're not familiar with the wonder that is Yes, Minister?
(More broadly, and to explain the joke for the benefit of HN, a large amount of British oblique humor and especially political and civil service culture relies on the art of the indirect insult.)
I like that quote. Copied it to my notes for future reference.
To expand more on the topic, I wonder if remote workers are a good way to bring some revival for smaller rural communities.
I visit some of those places and many have a beautiful setting, everyone knows each other, there is a sense of a community. It is quiet.
There is probably a tipping point where if enough companies would hire remote workers, people won't be afraid to move to such communities. Currently many (including me) even if they do remote work, would probably be hesitant to move, because if they have to jump ship, they know there is a smaller chance of getting remote work again. So staying closer to a tech center seems like a better option.
The advantages I've had by moving from Arkansas to here have been numerous, and mainly this is due to human nature causing companies with enough co-located employees to leave remote workers out of the loop.
The OP is right though: I find the "herd effect" that occurs from a bunch of very similar people especially potent in SF. What's funny is how diverse they think they are based on superficial traits like maybe ethnicity, but the reality is they tend to be very uniform in socio-economic background, age, and education.
But for a developer working from home the company can't tell the difference between a bug that took three days of plugging away to find and one that you knocked out in twenty minutes before binge watching House of Cards on company time.
Most professionals have enough personal integrity to work when they say they're working, but the ones that don't can be very corrosive to morale and a big drag on productivity. I got the impression that's why Marissa Meyer forced everyone at Yahoo back into the office.
The presumption is that remote means lower value or productivity as a default in classic companies. It's not necessarily a matter of luxury either; your C levels don't work from their yachts in a marina normally. Some are just too rigid in approach to change how they work even if it's demonstrably negligible. I had a client before that had a mostly distributed team and wouldn't let us increase the hourly rate unless we relocated to an office - few people even at the offices ever talked that often and we hardly ever met in person with the client ourselves even for those five miles down the road.
The usual tech company reasoning now is that the tools for remote work do not facilitate creative, spontaneous insights that are critical for competitive companies.
The cheapest house I've seen in Boulder has been around $450K. If you want a condo or town home in Boulder, you're looking at about $270K and that's probably going to be on the out skirts of town and built in the early 90s.
There's also permanently affordable housing. They are subsidized properties that you have to qualify to purchase, but you can't re-sell them for more than you bought them for. I've always made too much money to qualify, even right out of undergrad with a BS.
We were supposed to get a modern "rural electrification project" in the 90s for broadband, but cable companies stole the money, aided and abetted by Congress.
Depends, REI has better internet for ND than anything I've seen elsewhere. Some of the rural telephone companies do quite well. Its really luck of the draw.
> We were supposed to get a modern "rural electrification project" in the 90s for broadband, but cable companies stole the money, aided and abetted by Congress.
The key part of the last bill that killed it was the requirement that "broadband speeds" were not available in an area. The bill didn't specify a minimum price or that its was universal to the area. So, it pretty much killed a lot of attempts because broadband is available for $1,000 a month.
My parents are just about to install an 80' tower on their rural property, because a local WISP is the only unmetered option available.
I feel like the cellular revolution has really crippled itself by virtue of nearly all "cellular wifi hot spot" plans being data capped to some number of GB per month. There's just so much culture I can't share with my parents if they can't spare the data to watch online video.
This situation becomes only more frustrating each time you hear about a provider upgrading their network to an even faster technology. "Cool, so now I can exhaust my monthly data plan in... 10 minutes?".
(Somewhat similar to the frustration of seeing Apple make thinner and thinner devices, rather than throwing in a bigger battery -- is this really what your customers want?)
I was told 8mbs down and 2mbs up. That worked great for about 6 months and then it started to degrade month by month. I assume as more people subscribed to the service. By the end of 3 years I was only getting about 2mbs down and 700kbs up. (at 3am I might get 5/1). Worked ok for browsing facebook, but the main issue was really bad packet loss on the upstream end.
Through reading many of the administrator manuals for the antennas I found online, I came to the conclusion that it was just bad technology and exacerbated by inappropriate default settings. The gist of the way the canopy protocol works is that it is very easy for the AP to transmit data to an end point. The problem is how the data is transmitted to the AP from the customer end point device.
It must first send a request to send (RTS) and then wait for the OK. By default the AP's are set to 10 miles line of sight, which adds in even more delay for the timings. The end result is for a busy AP, most of the RTS requests will be ignored. Which works ok for browsing the net, but I was getting 5-20% packet loss on upstream, which basically meant talking to people on my voip office phone sounded fine to me, but people on the other end only heard bits and pieces of what I was saying. Trying to VPN into work was very painful too.
I dealt with that for 3 years before I finally realized that ATT had 6mbs dsl for $60 a month. I switched and was so happy.
Try rural Sweden.
This is sad but not unexpected since politics and big companies play in this space.
>I visit some of those places and many have a beautiful setting, everyone knows each other, there is a sense of a community. It is quiet.
Depending on what part of the country you're talking about, many of those beautiful small communities are very bigoted also -- and not just in the South.
There are absolutely small towns where open discrimination is a problem. And there are absolutely small minded jerks that have a problem with people of color.
But what I've observed personally living in the south and travelling the country is that the south is often less functionally segregated than other areas of the country. It's sheer demographics if nothing else; when the population of many major southern cities are majority minority, then it's difficult for people to avoid living and working next to each other.
Where the dynamic gets really interesting because of all this is with people that want to fight inequality, but don't realize that they have a massive blindspot when it comes to what functional racism looks like because they don't actually live in functionally diverse environments.
>But what I've observed personally living in the south and travelling the country is that the south is often less functionally segregated than other areas of the country. It's sheer demographics if nothing else; when the population of many major southern cities are majority minority, then it's difficult for people to avoid living and working next to each other.
Functional racism (or any other "ism" tends to follow groups with enough wealth to insulate themselves from people who are different and people who have so little that they need to be reassured that no matter how little they have they're always better than someone.
>Where the dynamic gets really interesting because of all this is with people that want to fight inequality, but don't realize that they have a massive blindspot when it comes to what functional racism looks like because they don't actually live in functionally diverse environments.
This. It's like a bunch of 5th graders debating foreign policy.
Only if there was some sort of a "survey" on people's attitudes in different parts of the country. Perhaps people with competing ideologies would represent one side or another and then the general public would decide to pick one of those choices to represent the majority view from that area. This way we'd actually know what a majority of the population in a given state/region believes.
Of course it would suck for the reputation of a certain part of the country where bigoted, white supremacist people keep getting the majority votes year after year, decade after decade. But I guess that reputation would be well deserved if those representatives keep winning so consistently for so long a time.
Is it "assuming" when you base your opinion on things said by federal courts?
Edit: It looks like Nex-Tech now offers gigabit internet. It's around $200 a month with cable and phone but to be fair it's rural Kansas. I use to pay $65 for their 10/5 when that was the mid-tier Internet only package. So they've really improved their service.
the recent trend in insane housing prices has definitely accelerated it, just from my circle of anecdotes.
I think a lot of the startup failures of really early stage startups might be due to the entire team being exactly the same age and right out of college. So they make mistakes that have been made many times before. Put another way there are many mistakes that can kill you and the more experience you have on your team the better you are at identifying them-- but you have to have innovation and new ideas too.
Which is not to say that any of these sets of characteristics are exclusive to a specific age -- this is just generalizations.
It's the older women who rock both architecture and quick execution. :) ("I'm sorry, but you opened the door, counselor")
Age does not immediately confer advantages or disadvantages - we just often use it as a proxy for "experienced", "more methodical", "slower", "inflexible", "good mentor". (Your pick here)
All of those are independent of age. Please don't compose a team by age. (Speaking as an older person. I bring a lot of things to the table, but my birthdate isn't one of them)
Like I said, you want diversity of ages. I'm in my late 40s, I work with 20 year olds and 30 year olds and a guy whose even a fair bit older than me.
Hire the best people first, then make your team diverse, both across thinking and across ages and across everything else.
But there's a synergy I've noticed more than once when pairing a 40ish with a 20ish. OR even a 20ish, 30ish and 40ish three person team.
I'm obviously not (and it should be clear in the above message) calling for quotas, but it's a good goal.
Homogenity reduces ingenuity.
You couldn't pay me enough to live in a place like SF.
I'm curious; where in rural Arizona are you based off ?
I get paid less at this job than I would if I was willing to commute to the city where my office is located. But I consider the mental and emotional benefit of not having that daily grind to be worth more than the wage gap.
I greatly prefer to slow pace of country life after a day working, whether at home or in the office. The technology industry is stressful enough without the added stress of city dwelling, in my opinion.
* be an excellent communicator * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. * be a whole stack developer * manage "up". Think of things before your manager does, alert the manager to dangers and problems, give expert advice, avoid the problems. Managers love people who solve the total problem; they hate people who solve one very very narrow niche problem and then leave them (the manager) dealing with a leaky bag of shit. Saying "well, that wasn't in scope!" does not make them happier about holding the leaky bag.
I guarantee you that no one bidding $5/hr and working on a timezone 12 hours away delivers this.
So, to recap:
1) work in a city when young 2) make contacts 3) be good at what you do 4) manage up ; solve the REAL problem
Do that and you'll have lots of work and make good money.
I agree, and I hate it. What happened to the days when I could just be productive? Now, I have to spend hours "working as a team" (ie, socializing) on Slack. I hate it so much that I've dramatically cut down on the work I do. It's not that I'm asocial, it's just that I don't want to be exchanging memes when there's work to be done. I want to do the work, and do it well, so I can spend time with my wife and kids. Work for work, socializing for after work.
Even with IRC, it didn't use to be like this. What happened?
For the record, I'm not talking about being responsive, or good communications. That's critical. I've always responded to client emails within 2-3 hours (I break up my day into 3 email checks). But I find it impossible to get much done with teams that expect me to hang out in Slack or Hipchat all day long. But the younger kids love it. Maybe they code and chat at the same time, I don't know. I can't do it.
Doesn't anyone just hire people to do a job anymore? Are even contractors doomed to spending their days "meshing"?
You work with people. Those people know people. They know other people. Someone says 'I need a good PHP guy' and a guy in the network replies 'I know a guy, SadWebDeveloper - here is his email address'. Boom: you have made contact with someone who wants to hire you.
Join the Whatever User Group in your area. Go to the meetings - introduce yourself. Be a presence on their mail list. Boom: more networking contacts.
This is a really good example. TJIC and I have talked on the internet for -years- via email and twitter and blog. A customer of mine mentioned she was looking for a local developer (Los Angeles) but couldn't find anyone who met even her minimal standards.
I said 'Hey, I know a guy', he lives 8,000 miles away, he's about a hermit and a half, and he knows his sh*t' and a few weeks later TJIC got some months of work and everyone was happy.
And now, here we are, talking. Maybe I can be converted to a networking contact. You never know, hunh?
No they don't. And your solution to not being stuck with closed and insular groups is join some closed and insular groups so that your name can be passed around as one of the group.
All you have to do is set your mind to it.
...and you're doing a great job so far!
> No they don't.
Could be you are a deaf and mute yak herder in Outer Mongolia and suffer the heartbreak of psoriasis. Your situation is unique and you have my pity.
For those of us in the mart of competitive commerce there is no possible way a person can exist in this economy without knowing people.
> join some closed and insular groups
You have no idea what you are talking about.
You have my pity.
It may very well be that the best way to kick start your career is to move to SF or some other big city. So be it. I did the first 20 years of my career in the Boston area.
I have no idea what you mean about websites being racist. For picking lower cost developers? It seems odd to call people who give work to people in other countries "racist". Isn't doing that exactly the opposite of racism?
I'm telling you not to use those websites.
Move to the city, make contacts, do good work.
Or establish relationships with people instead of lowest common denominator platforms and let the quality of your work sell itself?
Word of mouth and personal recommendations are worth more than how many stars you are on a platform.
Just so your communication skills improve, discrimination is not the same as racism.
I got a lot more relaxed about language after reading numerous books by linguists (because that is their attitude, they just watch what is going on). In this context, I think the train has left the station (as we Germans say, "der Zug ist abgefahren") and "racist" now indeed has a new much wider meaning in public discourse contexts. It now seems to include "being different", in not necessarily clearly defined ways, the exact nature of the differences are to be taken from context.
I could just yesterday or today read about "racism" in a Guardian article about an attack on a Polish immigrant somewhere in Britain, who certainly wasn't of a different race [0]. However, I'm very relaxed about it - everybody knows what is meant. Also, a shift in meaning in some context does not mean the stricter meaning of the word is lost! The exact same people who may use a word loosely in one context use it with its strict meaning in a different one. If you start talking about biology this will happen. Words and language are extreme flexible, and such a change is not the end of the world.
I think their is some justification: When the word is used in such wider meaning it's more about the effect, not the cause.
My motto for language is the same as in programming: Be as lenient as possible with input - but be strict about output. In the language context that means I won't criticize when I actually clearly understand the meaning, but I myself try to use the right expressions, grammar, punctuation, etc.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/12/polish-man-a... (sub-headline: "...they are treating incident ... as racially aggravated")
The term is used because the person being attacked was thought of as being of a different "race" by their racist attackers (and because that's the reason he was attacked; bot for being non-heterosexual, or for being a fan of the wrong football team). Not because one is in agreeance with the alleged "racial" distinctions (in the mind of the racist).
BTW:
der Zug ist abgefahren
In English one would say "the horse has left the barn."
The idea of having to give up working on my startup goals after 20 years of continuous failure is in itself terrifying enough - But combine that with the fact that I might be penniless; forced to join a mega-corporation to become corporate cattle.
... In a company filled with arrogant lucky people in their 20s bossing me around. I couldn't take it.
I fear the next generation. I think MY generation is already so arrogant - We severely underestimate the value of experience.
I was one of the few people lucky enough to learn that lesson early though.
I once worked with a lady (a software engineer) who was in her early 40s and she always said that she never really cared much about her work. She always left work on the dot.
I was 21 at the time and I had been working like crazy since I was 14 but even back then it was clear that she was a much better software engineer than I was. For me, my career was the center of my life; for her, it was just a way to pay the mortgage.
In spite of what the media tries to tell us; 7 years of obsessive, passionate labour is not more valuable 22 years of 'bare minimum' labour. That's how valuable time is.
You hate where people are close-minded so you're _sticking_ with the countryside..? It's possible that NH countryside is different than the other small towns I've visited, but I have zero data points on that. Another discussion, another day.
I lived in SF for five years and performed a couple of hundred interviews for the companies I consulted with. Software engineers have the capability to produce millions of dollars in profits with the right product. People can quickly get over prejudices if they think you will be able to produce that million dollar product.
Keeping up with the startup Jones's is about relevancy. No one wants a senior engineer barking at them babbling about how "Smalltalk did the same thing 20 years ago and now we're just reinventing the wheel!".
Do yourself a favor in the interview; do a bake off of old style vs new stack implementations. Compare and contrast. It shows your vast knowledge. And it quickly graduates you from grumpy old programmer to a mentor for the entire team.
New web/mobile based companies start all the time in SF, and with each new fresh start comes the chance to wipe the slate clean and choose a newer stack that may provide a competitive advantage. Reactjs with redux right now, but probably something different in a year. New companies. New choice of stacks, all the time. The tides change quickly in SF.
If you've been turned down by a Bay Area startup, I guarantee it's much less to do with your lack of skinny jeans or because you have some grey hairs..
P.S. Also, you're a consultant. You obviously have an understanding of client relationships. Understand that your clients in SF are going to skew younger. One of my best friends was the CTO of a startup where the founder was 20. He was 45.
You may have a team of fresh-out-of-Berkley-engineers and that's it. If you're not comfortable in a mentor setting, you may also get rejected. At a later stage in your career and with a young team, you're expected to contribute more than code.
This is only true for startups and other companies that have small budgets or need cheap labor. If you are going after the high paying contracts you'll quickly learn that being 45 or older is often an advantage if you have the necessary experience. (not just technical skill but also social skill)
These corporations aren't going to allow a 25 year old consulter to come in and take lead of a team or a product. (except if the person shows truly remarkable skill)
If they hire young consulters it usually means they want someone that is cheap to hire and easy to fire.
Naturally that's just the most extreme example; far more commonplace was casual ignorant small-talk generalizing about "the blacks"/"the coloreds"/"the hispanics" in gas stations/convenience stores/the barber/etc. And the soft bigotry of low expectations absolutely permeated an area where people could and did go months, years without seeing a nonwhite individual in person.
Mmmhmm, right.
Anyway, I don't think anyone is saying that it's 100% impossible to find tech work if you're 45. I'm sure there is work, and I'm also sure it's the case that Bay area tech is different from elsewhere. But one of those differences is what gets produced- nobody is designing the iPhone outside of SF Bay, to put it bluntly. And it's important that work at that level is not age-discriminatory.
I'm 35, just started at a Bay area company, one that makes really nice products and has some of the best designers anywhere. And I can already see it coming, so many of the people I work with are 25-27. The people who founded this company are a good bit younger than me. The grey hairs are people like the general counsel. Sure, nobody asked my age, and I look younger than I am anyway. But still, I see it coming.
There's a real irony that tech in "liberal cities" is provincial and close minded and you are avoiding that by being in the country on a farm.
Also: I have never had trouble getting jobs in the Bay Area, though I moved before I turned 45. I did however work with people who were late 40s/early 50s and engineers, so I didn't see a huge age prejudice.
I'm the creator of the site the down blog in the OP links to https://oldgeekjobs.com. I developed it as an MVP last night in one hour.
The blog looks like it's getting crushed under load, so here's the content of the post:
Check out https://oldgeekjobs.com/ if you’re over 30.
In the software development industry it’s hard to get hired when you get past 35 and are still “just a developer”. Employers look down on you because you’re too smart, or they think you’re too stupid because you never wanted to be a manager. Employers will use the excuse of “culture fit” to exclude you and get you out of the hiring pool. You’re too smart to be tricked into working 60 hours a week for zero equity and zero bonuses. You’re too smart to be working on a legacy code base that has low quality and will hurt your future career prospects. Employers know that which is why they love to hire fresh faces out of school and under 30s; give tech companies your young and naive to burn them out and make them piles of cash. You’re experienced enough to avoid that demoralizing burning out.
Check out https://oldgeekjobs.com/ because there may just be a job for you, a place where you won’t be discriminated against just because you’re getting older and wiser.
This isn't necessarily an indictment of you. I'm just a little sick of people stereotyping younger developers on Hacker News when the truth is that most of us get great value for our time and are well aware of the choices we make.
It feels more natural if it progresses through asking what games I've played
A. Turnabout is not fair play; two wrongs do not make a right, especially when your wrong is to discriminate against people other than those who may have discriminated against you
B. Inflated expectations != discrimination
C. Discriminating against someone because they are too old is illegal; discriminating against someone because they are too young is not (both are equally wrong).
D. "I'm rather bitter and sometimes it shows" - Get over it.
It is completely discriminatory in B. when the only people who could possibly meet those inflated expectations can not logically be under the age of 30. I've seen this far too often to dismiss it as occasional - it is/was systemic.
It's the burden of the accuser to claim they were discriminated against because of age, and as we can see, there's no qualms with making lots and lots of articles and "think-pieces" out of the hypothesis. Sometimes "older" workers have unreasonably inflated senses of skills and/or worth, and can't take the ego blow, so, off to coping (see A) above.
Haha thanks for the armchair therapy with D., it's worth every penny from your barely 30 perspective.
My problem is when that site is accompanied by an attitude of old developers being better. Likewise, I would absolutely object to a job site for black people marketing itself by disparaging white people: "give tech companies your white and naive to burn them out and make them piles of cash."
I, for one, have a lush neck beard and am seriously contemplating going with the sandals with socks look.
It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.
There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year).
Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and home-buying wasn't terribly different 15-20 years ago than it is now. Still plenty of opportunity to go into incredible debt. And hell, 2016's 45-year-old who bought his first house in, say, 2000, may just have watched his home's value crash in 2006/2007.
So maybe just tone it down.
I've been a part of hundreds of interviews for dozens of engineering positions at a variety of companies and organizations. While I have witnessed clear-cut ageism with qualified older candidates, it's with the distinct minority of older candidates, and typically only with borderline ones. Compare to even the most qualified female candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of sexism, or non-Asian minority candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of racism^.
So I won't deny that ageism is a problem but - in the case of white dudes - it's the jolt of a sudden uphill at the end of a couple decades of easy slightly downhill coast. Compared to continuous vertical climb that women and non-Asian minorities have to put up with in engineering, it's a pretty modest problem that the affected have both ample time and opportunity to prepare for.
^- The tech industry isn't, at least in my experiences, blatantly racist/sexist these days. Anecdotally, women and minorities have an easier time making it through HR/recruiter screening. It's a more subtle and pernicious effect in tech interviews, where correct answers are overscrutinized for flaws and even marginally incorrect answers are blown out of proportion. Never seen this with older (white/Asian, male) candidates.
30 is old now? Ha! Joke's on them, or indeed anyone who would have wanted to hire me at 25.
All I see is a form to post job-ads, and nowhere to look at them.
The varies a bit depending on the kind of dance, but, yeah, people who can stay in dance much longer than that (and, really, people who can make a decent living in it at all, even below that age), mostly do so as dance instructors, choreographers, etc., with their own dancing (if its even something they directly get paid for at all) sort of an adjunct and means of advertising the other parts of what they do.
There's something much weaker in technology (not just in computing) in the worker -> manager push, where people who don't jump that divide by a particular time start being seen as less desirable as workers. But its brutal in dance (and only partly due to the actual physical requirements of performing the movements.)
It's amazing if you can even live as a dancer. Usually, there's a second job. (I worked in CS in parallel to the dance thing. And at some point looked at the pay checks :)
I am curious, did they need to retire because they no longer possessed whatever it took to dance, or was it because people in their industry assumed they no longer could, or simply because they needed a more lucrative job?
After 6 months of interviews in the Bay, I gave up (due to cost) and decided to try another market... less than 6 weeks and I had a job in Charlotte. I had my first iOS role at a startup another 6 months after that. Even after the startup coughed me up (thanks again Zomato), I was able to get another iOS job in a month. I won't mention (any other) names but I can say that the culture fit issue doesn't really exist outside the Bay.
And to any decision makers out there, you are making a mistake if you assume someone like me can't fit on a team of 18-30 y/o. I fit in so well, in fact, that almost all of my new connections on LinkedIn are these same 18-30 y/o. I have made more friends with interns than I did when I was the age to intern. And my 20 year-old friends have no fear in making fun of my age just as I have no fear in making fun of theirs. We even talk sH$@! about race (oh yeah, I'm also black).
The experience has been awesome for me as well as them (I believe). So, the next time you have a chance to hire an old dev who just wants to be a fu$!@E~!! DEV - just hire her.
People who share complaints here, on Reddit or on more or less similar places, do indeed keep up in general and always have personal interest in tech. But that isn't a magic bullet. They'd have better chances if they had stuck with COBOL, for example.
Go tell that to a recruiter... most don't care about what you toy with; they generally don't even have the slightest idea of what it may be. They just care about what you've been doing at your previous company, if it sounds like the position they have to fill, if the title of the gigs looks good, if the company name looks good or if at least they've heard its name before, and that's all. You are not given a chance to explain the interests you have and side skills you may have developed, it would be all Greek to them anyway and they do not value non-professional experience. Admittedly, I am not talking about California here.
I'm really interested in hearing more of your story.
Yeah, almost all of my connections are people I worked with too. ;)
I wonder if it makes any difference being > ~40 years old but having less experience. Instead of trying to walk in and be the ultra senior person, you just walk and do the job of a mid level dev.
The only thing that matters is if the candidate can do the job and get along with people. Everyone talking about "would I want to have a beer with this person" can fuck off.
I have seen the culture fit thing outside the bay, though.
What’s really happening is two things. First, companies typically don’t like paying people lots of money (even if they are great at blowing millions on other mindless things). Second, these companies do not understand that their unwillingness to hire expensive people is causing months of bug-chasing and monkey-patching in their products.
When your organization is under the impression that “a developer is a developer”, new college grads willing to work for peanuts are very attractive. It takes a good manager to understand that someone’s decades of experience or advanced degree really is worth a lot more money, and not just in the long run. Experienced people have seen more programming constructs in more languages, they have encountered more examples of APIs in more libraries, they have made more mistakes and learned from them, they are more likely to be able to apply suitable algorithms and data formats to problems, and so on. Also, having experienced people on staff actually gives your new developers somebody to learn from.
These companies would NEVER hire an older, experienced developer because they know they wouldn't be able to retain them.
Its worth noting that I work on a dev team where the average age is about 40 (I am 27). We have multiple members of the team nearing retirement. Having the older guys around makes my job much easier and gives me resources that I wouldn't have otherwise. We are able to keep these guys around because we work on interesting projects, don't work more than 40 hours a week, and have a great manager.
Not only that, but they don't have to retain them. . There is a large supply of "~20 year olds who aren't quite Google material" lined up to take on those $80K developer roles. The "churn and burn" strategy seems to be working for these companies so why change?
People only care about how long it takes to write something from scratch. That dictates everything, from which frameworks or languages are "hot", to which methodology people use, how projects are managed, and....who gets hired.
There isn't a big argument that someone straight out of college with low experience who happens to know the latest new trendy thing will probably pump out a semi-functional MVP faster than someone more experienced. More energy, more willing to work late hours at home because of less responsabilities, but also less experience leading to less time spent trying to think about real problems that could come down the road and how to prevent them.
That lets someone code really, REALLY quick. It will blow up down the road and then thats just "normal" and goes in the bug queue and tech debt goes out of control.
I was once in a meeting where someone was like "Well, of course this code is buggy and sucks: Its at least a year old!!!"
I was floored.
Many SF tech startups overtly believe that actually planning your code before you write it is just, well, not very "agile" -- that's old school, that's waterfall, proven to be deficient, that's not how we do things in the new world. Planning an architecture before coding it?? Why, you may as well be wearing a pocket protector and hating on women and minorities from some massive IBM cubicle farm in the suburbs while chainsmoking and punching your code into paper cards.
In the new world, you break things and move fast -- when you're assigned a massive new project, you just sit down and start typing. When your unplanned, non-architected code turns out to have serious structural issues that make it unextensible and unmaintainable, why, you just layer another level of crap code on top of that to plaster over the cracks, and another on top of that, and so on.
I wonder how much of this has to do with the churn-and-burn VC culture, where they fund hundreds of startups with just enough money to build an MVP so they can "test for market fit," then burn 99 of them and move on to the next batch.
Peanuts being a ways north of 100k a year at the bigger companies.
> advanced degree really is worth a lot more money, and not just in the long run.
Are we talking PhD?
Agreed. I started working in tech when I was 22--now I'm over 30. I've never witnessed old-age discrimination. What I have witnessed are start-ups, built on newer tech, (AWS over on-prem, nosql over relational, etc), passing on candidates whose last reference book was the Data Warehouse Toolkit and still want to be called WebMasters.
The law of the tech industry is when you stop learning--at any age, you lose market value.
You can always catch-up and learn something that becomes important/mainstream, but you can't un-waste your time deep diving on a dead-end technology.
So I focused on skills and went into contracting as soon as I could. Now the reason I don't work for startups is that they keep trying to pay me with a mystery box of stock options and I'm not buying it.
Another bonus about contracting, apart from the money and flexibility, is that you get left out of company politics.
So tl;dr... Life doesn't owe you anything. And I recommend contracting as a career / lifestyle choice.
And if you work 80 hours a week, you get paid 2x as much.
This isn't a dig at freelancing / contracting. I did it for a while and it was great. But you have to be realistic. Also, billing 80h per week would be near impossible unless you had someone else managing your business for you.
However, lots of people allow their minds and bodies to rot as they get older. My parents, as much as I love them, are not very employable at this point(at least not when compared to a younger candidate). They don't get much exercise and spend a large chunk of the day sitting in front of the boob tube. They are smart people, but their ability to learn new things has gone way down, and I have noticed they are a little more gullible than they used to be. Meanwhile, I have friends who are in their 50s and they have the energy, motivation, and learning abilities of someone in their 20s.
I wonder if this has something to do with the exercise they get, and the lack of TV watching. The calorie defecit from both those things probably slows their aging a tad too. I think if you want to be programming at age 50, you can easily add years, perhaps decades to your youthfulness by taking some basic care of both body and mind. It may seem like an obvious statement, but most people don't actually do this, and it shows in people my age who have the habits of my parents while also drinking heavily and smoking way too much. It's kind of spooky when I see people who were once youthful looking, in their 20s, quickly start to look like they are in their 40s because they don't really take care of themselves beyond basic hygiene.
Exercise and physical activity are supremely important.
Also remember that you are 30 and not 50. I did mention how I've seen people essentially become 40 at age 25-30, but I'm sure there are exceptions. There are also some factors that complicate this:
- Junk food is defined differently depending on who you ask. Much of what I eat is "junk food" in the sense that it's mostly red meat, fat, cheese, and some fish, yet I weigh 145 lbs and always check out fine during physical exams. Someone can also eat food that isn't commonly considered healthy, but they may also not eat very much of it. The French are a good example of the latter as the common French diet includes lots of carbohydrates and sugar, yet they don't have nearly the obesity problem of America, and it's suspected that them not eating as much of it is a significant factor. (Americans often value quantity over quality)
- As I hinted at a few times, calorie intake is actually a factor in how a person ages. If I remember correctly, a 400 calorie deficit slows aging slightly, and it has something to do with activating a protection of the chromosomes during mitosis, but it's not really understood by researchers as to why this happens. Note: This is highly speculative on my part, so keep that in mind. I do suspect that this plays a part in why some people I know age so poorly, and these same people also consume large amounts of food. Please don't just believe what I say, though. :)
- Sugar, which added to nearly everything you buy from the grocery store, has been linked to aging in that it causes oxidation in cells causing damage to proteins. I can't remember how the specific process works, but I think you can look up Advanced Glycation End Products and get a better explanation.
- Many people have this idea that consuming fats of any kind is bad. They really need to get this bad science out of their heads, but it's a zombie theory that doesn't want to die. I remember being taught about how bad fat was in the nutrition class I had in high school, and it's pretty bogus as fat is needed by the body in many ways, including brain function and synthesizing hormones. You can get away without it for a long time, but I don't think that it's sustainable, and maintaining a low fat diet probably has long-term consequences on cognitive function.
I know I've gotten way off-point here in explaining my hypotheses, but my point really was that $AGE != $ABILITY. Someone who is in their 50s could keep up with a person in their 20s, but might be rejected because their hair is too grey, which is sad. The best thing one can do for themselves, if they want to continue their career into their late adulthood, is live both for now and then; eat good healthy food and exercise now, eat good junk food occasionally, and maybe you'll still be coding and jumping into the mosh pit when you're 55. Everyone's body is different, but certain decisions you make will improve your odds of being in better health later on, and those decisions aren't a losing bet.
EDIT: It might sound like I'm advocating for some specific diet, but I am really not.
Back in the day, there were different industries to have experience in. Jet engines, medical devices, etc. Beyond that, nothing had/needed/understood software. For better or worse, it was a pinnacle.
These days "the industry" is "teens using snapchat". The further you are removed from that, the less valuable you are as a coder.
There are still of course jet engines and medical devices to be built, but (as a statement to our society?) those products and thus those skills are not as valuable as advertising.
Even more sadly, this trend is just the start. The current 40's-ish coders have their own industry experience to fall back on. The next generation of coders that will have nothing but 15secOfFame-centric jobs will have nothing to fall back on as younger 15msOfFame-centric things come in.
At some point we'll have to recognize coding as an NFL-style career. Get what you can while you can; you'll be a car salesman soon enough. Granted NFL players have 100x the pay plus public visibility that can help them after they retire.
None of this matters because the Earth will be sand in 20 years anyway. (Sorry I'm still digesting http://xkcd.com/1732/)
> Half of a coder's value is understanding "unspoken" requirements.
Certainly a great deal of what you pay for in a more senior engineer is that ability to see around corners. I disagree entirely with your assessment that this ability is anything narrower than domain-specific (i.e. it extends only so far as 'an experienced software engineer' not so far as 'an experienced photo sharing app engineer').
> The current 40's-ish coders have their own industry experience to fall back on. The next generation of coders that will have nothing but 15secOfFame-centric jobs will have nothing to fall back on as younger 15msOfFame-centric things come in.
To assert this with any credibility (the assertion: previous generations software engineers can fall back into 'steady' jobs because they have expertise in staple products; new generation won't be able to because they don't) you have to have some sort of evidence. Plenty of junior and midweight engineers hop from bank => startup and vice versa. Why would the same not be true of senior engineers? If you specialise in cryptography does it matter whether you're applying it for British Airways or Snapchat?
> At some point we'll have to recognize coding as an NFL-style career.
Why? What evidence supports this conclusion?
> Get what you can while you can; you'll be a car salesman soon enough. Granted NFL players have 100x the pay plus public visibility that can help them after they retire.
If you fail to keep your skills current then yes, you will have a short career. I know many software engineers who are three decades into their career. They're hard-working and enthusiastic. They keep their skills up to date.
An adjacent point: having read The 100 Year Life, it's clear to me that in 20 years our job market will be different to the one we see today. Salary will likely be heavily decoupled from age and closely linked to merit. As older people get healthier relative to previous generations, they will be able to work productively for longer. It's therefore both more necessary for them to keep current and invest in themselves in order to maintain income parity, but also more possible for them to do so (because instead of having hip operations at 60, they can attend J2EE2: No This Time We Mean It, It's Going To Be Huge summer camp).
Because in the deluge of this style of post on HN lately, the most common counter has been "well we elders know the game so much better". Sounds exactly like sports. Yes you can pick up new skills and what-not, but "the game" has changed and the kids at a very fundamental level "get it" and you don't.
> having read The 100 Year Life
Okay....
> it's clear to me that in 20 years our job market will be different to the one we see today. Salary will likely be heavily decoupled from age and closely linked to merit.
Exactly. But merit at what? Old-school coders are the best there are. But they're getting kicked out because they're the best at stuff that nobody cares about. You know, algorithms and correct coding and what-not.
Ultimately, salary is going to be linked to how much you make the company. It's already happening / happened. There's no point to your book. If you "get" the latest social media craze and can figure out the best way to incorporate it, you're way more valuable than someone who knows 100 programming languages, wrote ten, and can solve the entirety of Project Euler in an hour.
Okay maybe the Euler guy might be worth something. (the /s you're wanting). But, given most of us, even if we're above average, aren't that guy, what does that leave? It leaves an NFL-style career. At 1/100 the salary.
Anyway I have two kids. I love programming. I'm good at it. I'm 40. I will steer them away from that as a profession. It's an NFL-style career.
Addendum:
> Ultimately, salary is going to be linked to how much you make the company. It's already happening / happened.
And don't get me wrong, this is a good thing. I guess. Anyway, fits in with the ideal of social Darwinism, and capitalism in general. Which, I guess is as good a thing as any, and likely unavoidable regardless. Nonetheless, it has to be taken for what it is, which is a pretty awesome career thru your early 30's followed by a never-ending gray cloud. Which is great if that's what you want. However if you're expecting a long-term career like I'd assume most are, you really need to plan out your career path in more detail. Most people going into CS don't recognize that, and it really needs to be made more plain.
Looking at all the programmers I've worked with I see zero correlation between age in skill. None in either direction.
You assertion that programming is an NFL-style career is one devoid of any merit of substance. There is no time clock on a programmer's career the way there is in any professional sport.
It also gives those who fit the profile to think about the bigger picture, which can't hurt.
But I'm a manager now so feel free to ignore my advice.
The social web startup is sexy still because of the romanticism of the Zuckerberg-dorm-room-hacking-to-$B story, but it's a relatively insignificant component of the economy. Jet engines and medical devices haven't become less popular.
Right now, Facebook and Google are more than half the online ad industry, and that fraction is increasing. There's a network effect - ad space buyers only need to deal with Facebook and Google; beyond that it's not worth the trouble. Twitter doesn't have enough market share and is still losing money. Instagram exited by selling to Facebook. Snapchat and Pinterest are still standalone, privately held, and may not be profitable.
We're back to having to make stuff that customers will pay for. That's a good thing.
Often it's good to wait a while and see how things play out with a new technology before deciding whether to invest in it. But you don't want to fall into the bad habit of making such evaluations on prejudice, rather than merit.
That's a pretty big chunk of the internet for a "new trend". My boss is in his 50s and he was the one who started us using node. Every month without fail, he repeats the words of his manager in the 90s: "Java is a fad. We'll all be using c++ again in a year". Don't be that guy.
Although 435K is nothing to sniff at, wordpress runs over 15 million sites.
Accounting for the last 3 quarters, 363m seems accurate[1]. Even if it's not 100% accurate, it's still a good gist.
> wordpress runs over 15 million sites.
Keep in mind that Wordpress is a CMS, and it's older than jQuery. You can also use Wordpress and Angular in parallel, so it's not as if people choose it INSTEAD of angular.
[1] https://investor.verisign.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=96...
EDIT: I was also referring more towards the top-10k/100k, given that those are ACTUAL websites. I try to avoid stats that include "hello, world. This is my angular2 todo".
Well, I know that you were just throwing out a random example, but... I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Angular and React. They're actually pretty good, pretty clever solutions to some of the problems the plague web application developers, and help us get a long way to a flexible web environment. Even Node.js may seem "wrong" to those of us whose first experience with a computer was a command-line terminal, but people were saying that Java on the server side was unrealistic 15 years ago. And really, there is a benefit to using the same language on the server as on the client, especially as those two drift closer and closer together.
The problem I see is that the "new devs" (and their 20-year-old "startup founder" bosses) assume that Angular, React and NodeJS, being the new, trendy, hip thing, is all there is and all you need to know. As long as you know those fairly well, the thinking goes, you don't need to know anything about TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, bash, signals, processes, threads... all the things that us old fogeys have spent decades wrestling with. I recently watched a (much younger) colleague of mine reject a candidate because he was misusing the term "route". I asked "you mean like a TCP source route? That's not really that relevant to the UI position he was interviewing for." He seemed incredulous that I didn't "know" that "route" was an "industry-standard" term for a URL (apparently that's what Node.js's Express framework calls URLs - hint, the term "route" never appears in RFC 2616, which actually specifies HTTP). THAT mentality is the frustrating one, and it's all over the place.
However companies don't want to talk with me about getting a job regardless my 14 year of commercial experience. Sometimes I hear during an interview "oh, you did so many things, I wish I could have the same experience". And then I don't get this job.
And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point where they ask me for the money.
I'm thinking about starting my own company with my own products. This will be much harder, but it's better to have this kind of job than none.
And I just stopped replying to the job adverts with "young team".
Same (a bit older now but it started at the same age). I don't care about the salary: it is always more money that I can spend while working, and at the same time I am not going to get from any honest job the kind of money needed to do what I'd like .
The only time I got an interview, the guy wanted me to fill a leader/manager position. I had not applied for it, I had not written I wanted such a position, I had explicitly described the grunt work I wished to to. But that would contradict his mental model: "But... with your age, your experience, we thought you'd be a leader". Well, that's not what I wrote, that's not what interests me, that's not what I am good at. Impossible to pull this idea out of him.
For other applications, I don't know since I get no answer or off-topic answers sent by human robots fresh out of school. So I can just make hypotheses, like too many experiences abroad that doesn't fit the mould of my country, in too varied domains, with studies in different domains, and of course 'why on earth am I not a manager at my age'. I was recognised (at my own surprise) as a top guy in my previous job but I don't get a single chance to (at least try to) demonstrate it again.
So, basically, after only a quarter of the carrier our leaders now expect us to do, we are trashed.
I was arguing that in my previous job I was in fact a technical team leader, I was spending half of each day on showing people how to use databases, I was organizing trainings and conference talks. I just didn't get the job of course.
The most frustrating thing I experience now is that companies don't want to have a programmer in my age. And I cannot be a manager "because you don't have any experience in managing people".
That's sad, frustrating and depressing. Especially that I'm looking for a job now.
Imagine how much harder it is for a Guy I know. He's in his early 60s and has been looking for a job for over six months. Every interview he's had goes really well until they realise he's not 23. Then it's all 'Err, we want someone less technical.' Or 'Err, you're too technical for the role.'
This is someone with over 40 years industry experience, from designing and building mainframes to working on cutting-edge image processing, to managing teams of engineers and more.
Incidentally, if anyone knows of a role which may be suitable for someone like him he'd be really interested.
I did feel really a bad vibe interviewing for a couple of SF based startups, got rejected once for being "to enterprisy, won't fit our startup culture". I think it was because I mentioned using an IDE, God forbid.
So it might be a big issue in some cultures / areas. I don't see it in the Enterprise world at least.
Yeah, they want 20 years of experience. But they still won't hire anybody over 25. Start young, kids!
In reality, greybeards are harder to manage, command higher salaries, and don't put up will bullshit. Basically, managers want a young pliant fool willing to spend three years putting in 60-70 hours a week before he realize he is fucking himself over.
So in this case, I would argue ageism in the industry is mostly about money and business-culture, not techno or geek-culture.
One lesson I learned early in life was to listen to the old timers, It applies here as well, we spurn the oldies at our peril, for they learned lessons we have forgotten and are trying to resolve.
Employers are willing to go great lengths to find the right kind of experience. Combine this with 100% remote jobs and you don't need to worry about getting old in this industry.
Over the years they've seen and accumulated a lot of experience related to how systems work, how code works, domain knowledge. You'll never get that if you hire only college kids.
Someone I worked with just retired last year. He was perhaps not like the famous (infamous now) 10x programmer, but he was easily a 5x programmer. Because he learned how to learn better, he was also faster at picking up new technologies as well.
Also startups and many companies simply don't want to pay market rate for what an experienced engineer would demand. Also mature people are not as easy to bully and push around. It is harder to force them to work till 8pm every day.
Self taught. I've never taken a computer course in any school. I do it because I love it.
The place I work at needs to find and hire exceptionally talented people (embedded software in life-critical medical devices; sloppy or buggy code, someone could die.) It knows it does not have the allure of big names such as Google. So, it does something like the Oakland A's, and plays Money Ball. It goes for the pudgy, dumpy, overlooked players who always seem to get on base somehow. It knows it has no chance at the golden children, the 27-year-old Stanford PhD's who are perfect in every way. So, it casts a wide net, and looks closely at people who might be overlooked by other organizations.
I managed to luck into finding a great, well-connected recruiter. He was instrumental in helping me get placed quickly. And, as you've heard so many times you will probably scream if you hear it once more, "networking". A friend who already had a job at my new company put in a good word when I was going through the recruiting process.
I heard a great line about mathematicians: "Mathematics is a terrible profession. The only people who should do it are people who can't not do it." There are people out there who feel that way about programming. My daughter teases me that when I retire she knows exactly what I will do: spend more time hacking on open source projects.
The core truth of your inner being at some point overtakes you. If you live and breathe to code, if you still secretly wonder why people actually pay you to play all day with computers, you will be fine as you get older continuing to be a programmer.
One thing about getting older: You begin to realize, "Now is the time." No more resume padding, no more attempts at strategizing to optimize career moves down the road. No more doing things you hate in order to lay the groundwork for that ineffable special something that seems to beckon from just over the horizon.
Older people don't need to be told, "Be honest with yourself, find your passion" etc. Been there, done that. Life will do that to you. Expect that when you are in your 50's or 60's, you will have settled in to what really does work for you. For some, it is software development. For others, it is full-time church work. (My wife.) For others, it is gardening. (A retired former executive I wave to every morning as I'm heading out to work.)
Bottom line: You would not want to work at a place that is too arrogant and stupid to consider older job candidates, or that turns its nose up at anyone who does not fit a preconceived template, or that looks to monetize the naivete of young developers. Their loss. They are doing you a favor by passing you over. Screw them.
Then again, I won't be an "SDE II" or whatever I am now in 5 years, I'll have started a business, gone into consulting, or gone back to school for a Ph.D (pick 2?). So I don't know.
I have yet to hear anyone I've worked with say something ageist or fearful about age at work. Everyone is very cheerful about their careers.
And to be clear, I'm very, very blunt with management and co-workers about work-life balance. I work 35-40 hours a week when things are slow and step it up when things get hot two or three times a year. I think it's irresponsible to work more hours (it stunts growth, limits productivity, and makes me unhappy).
I don't think that ageism isn't a problem, I guess I just haven't seen it. Then again I've always been sort of disgusted by gaggles of squirming kids, so I've probably self-selected where I've tried to find work. Why in the hell would anyone want to move to SV in their 40's+? That's like going to a college party to make friends or find a romantic partner in your 40's... the prospects are much greener and more attractive elsewhere.
This whole conversation strikes me as very odd.
It can be difficult to see it for what it is because its most common form is as a bias, which can be very difficult to discern, even within ourselves. ( Daniel Kahneman and many others have done amazing work about unconscious / barely conscious biases ). I never saw it when I was younger because I didn't think about it; I didn't even know that it was something I should be thinking about.
I'm somewhat ashamed to admit, but I've felt it myself. I remember when I was still very young, maybe 20 years ago, we had a "much older" guy join my team at work. At first, I felt a pretty strong internal resistance to working with him, never mind that he was brilliant and deeply experienced... he didn't even play videogames! But he was funny too, and he taught me a hell of a lot. He managed to give me advice that really helped my career, plus he knew tons about money and credit and investments.
It took me quite a few years to realize that the 'internal resistance' I felt was solely due to his age. It's a good thing my Mom taught me to respect my elders. Those lessons have served me well.
But I think more than this, people need to understand why experience counts. Here is my opinion on the matter:
You can hire somebody young and they will probably be willing to work longer than an older person and probably get the job done sufficiently well, at a cheaper rate.
For many one-shot jobs, this is fine. But if you want to build something at scale, and have it be maintainable, and reduce your long term technical debt, you should get someone who has fought these battles before and understands the best way to take them on.
I'm speaking from the same experience that many others will: when we look at our younger selves, we realize how little we knew about organizing and maintaining a large project. Even as I age, I realize the me of just 3 years ago was relatively naive with regard to certain high-level tasks.
So, its not just about the hours you put in, how fast you can do competitive coding, and so forth. It is about the more nebulous parts of coding, the larger scope, the organization of a complex system. There is only one way to learn these things, the hard way: lots of time, lots of scars, etc.
Not so crazy if you think about it: right now, 30-year-old people have about 8 years of experience (assuming a 4-year degree) and, as this post suggests, are being discriminated. Now, imagine an 18-year-old guy that study a year (code camps?) to become a software developer and after that starts to work as one. At 25 he would have 6 years of real world experience (let's assume this guy likes the profession so he taught himself while working, in order to compare both developers). Who has more chance to be hired (under the assumption that age discrimination is still a thing in 2021)? 2 more years of experience doesn't seem too much and a 25-year-old guy seems to be more suitable to be tricked into working 60 hours a week for less money.
Update: grammar fix.
So if your old and wise and still working congratulations! Maybe look back, if you can remember that far, and realize you've bern employed this entire time doing something you'd do for free if they didn't pay you.
Damm I love my job!
p.s. Remember the golden rule: Wait for critical mass, hijack, then do the same thing you did last time.
:)
Experience matters a lot. I would also choose experience when selecting a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, etc.
We have a saying in Spanish: más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo ;)
The people I respect and aspire to be are those who are currently in their late 40s or 50s talking about Elm and Elixir. They were the ones in their 30s and 40s telling me Ruby was it. They were right, because they used their experience.
California Today: San Diego Struggles to Keep Its Young Tech Talent [2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12506131
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/us/california-today-techie...
Why should I hire someone who would treat other employees this way?
Both sides of the age spectrum have their merits. It sounds idiotic to me to argue that older people have it worse. Maybe in Silicon Valley they do, but I can't see that happening where I live (Netherlands)
The truth is, it is NOT tough being 3X-4X in silicon valley.
What is tough is accepting to put up with startups about to fail, long hours, mediocre pay, little benefits and immature coworkers. That does limit the size of the job market.
That issue is faced by everyone, independently of their age. The youngers selves just happen to have lower standards in average
And ageism was really born in Silicon Valley, of all places.
Disclaimer: I've got an AARP card so I'm obviously on the right side of this discrimination!
- Average or better engineers. Between the facts that they are competent and have 10+ years of experience, they tend to have zero problem finding and keeping good, well-paying jobs. If they run into ageism, it gets lost in the flood of other offers they're likely to get in the same round of interviewing.
- Below average engineers. These may be the source of some of the ageism complaints, but it's missing the forest for the trees. They are a common sight in government/non-profit orgs or old first-mover companies: folks who may have "senior" in their title but have been doing simplistic work on the same outdated project for their whole career. Have trouble finding new jobs when they are inevitably laid off not because of their age, but because they simply aren't good engineers.
- Dinosaurs, ie- people who were good or even great engineers ten or twenty years ago, but have not kept their skills and knowledge base current. These are the people who are most likely to be affected by legit ageism, in my experience. A slightly fictionalized representative scenario from hiring a position at my last job, for work on a Java webservice: "Well, the 50-year-old blew through the whiteboarding in textbook C and can concisely enumerate the advantages of different caching policies off the top of his head, but has never used Java, worked on a web service, or used an RCS more modern than subversion. The 25-year-old struggled a bit in the coding exercise and gave an imperfect answer in the theory questions, but his resume has a link to his Github, which includes a RESTful webservice he wrote in Java. And the 50yo asked for the tip of the salary range, about 20% more."
I've faced that sort of decision quite a few times, and it's not easy. I could see why the older candidate would suspect ageism played a role if they didn't get the job. But the power is in the candidate's hands to create the better outcome: if the 50yo spends some time familiarizing themselves with marketable modern technologies then they get hired over less experienced candidates the vast majority of the time.
On a personal note, in the above scenario we did end up bringing on the 50yo with amazing fundamentals, and he was a total dud - possibly the worst hire I've ever made. Bungled almost every Git interaction, couldn't work in Linux and frequently screwed up deployments, great imperative code but all his architecture was early 90s-style spaghetti. The important takeaway that I tried to stress with the team wasn't that older devs can't learn and shouldn't be hired, just that THAT dev couldn't learn and shouldn't have been hired.
I've more than accepted that kids half my age are very talented and I need to prove my worth. Boy there are 26 year olds that I work with that are so mature and intelligent that it makes me worry. But my experience does buy some benefits, namely in how careful I code and being able to spot architectural and code issues well before most of my coworkers.
Meanwhile I'm spending 1-2 hrs every night reading and programming and learning new tech so that I don't fall behind. And it's not easy to do this, believe me but if it keeps me employed then I have to do it.
Speculating I would say:
- chose younger hire because cheaper and can be moulded into company specific role. - younger candidate more easily managed by less experienced (cheaper) manager. - wants to keep culture "pure," and needs kids to drink kool-aid. - values power and control over less experienced technically acceptable candidates. - get extra effort and all nighters out of people who think they need "experience." - want to leverage kids love of novelty to react and respond to developments that seem like minor details to people with experience. - younger people have less sensitivity to change. - early stage companies want to reduce exposure to risk from having to re-negotiate once key developer has them by balls.
If you are old, present as harmless. The more hippy dippy and spergy you come off as, the less threatening you will be, the more you will disarm clients/employers.
I interviewed one guy in his 60s who went to school at MIT for his phd. I was excited. And then when it came to the coding exercise not only was he using perl, which had no relevance to our stack (which he was informed about) he took 3x as long to complete the question. I interviewed another older person who had no idea what JSON was. "Oh it's like XML, I get it."
It makes them look like a weaker candidate when they are slower or less knowledgeable. If you keep up with technology and trends it really makes a difference. It doesn't matter that "I can pick it up quickly" because as a hiring manager why take the risk when someone already has the knowledge?
Any decent developer, no matter their age, should be able to figure out what JSON is in about as much time as it takes to have a coffee. If they can't do that, you have a real problem.
> as a hiring manager why take the risk when someone already has the knowledge?
As a hiring manager: Because we're not redoing already solved things, we solve new problems. The person with the knowledge holds the advantage for a few months. And then the person with the problem solving skills catches up. Of course, if you keep building the same type of app over and over - which is fine, and equally necessary - those months are never made up for, and experience matters more than problem solving.
Ultimately, you hire for the jobs you need to fill. For my part, I'm happy to take anybody who understands CS and is able to learn over somebody who already knows my tech but is stumped by new problems. (No matter the age)
YMMV.
(At least until you have to process so much XML that you have to do it sequentially, rather than parse it into a tree in memory.)
I'm a relatively inexperienced "manager" (team lead) and I have had staff both younger and older (I'm currently 36). Although my sample set is small I have strongly found my older hires much easier to manage. They understand how "work" works, what's expected, and don't mind dealing with the bureaucratic crap (that I can't do anything about). I really just want someone who doesn't mind coloring inside the lines and plays well with others.
In my limited experience, the younger candidates like to "go their own way" and are more strongly emphasizing resume building so they want to make major changes not out of strong technical reasons but simply because it "would be neat" to try it out.
There are few engineering management positions listed. The few I saw in the bay area resulted in excluding me because of my age (Stripe, I'm looking at you.)
It's frustrating to keep being pushed into individual contributor roles and then have low quality engineering managers hired in above you. (And I know I can do it because I end up leading teams all the time, they naturally form a round me. The members of the team are very happy with me- I have no authority but I end up leading them anyway.)
So I think the route for "old" folks is blocked also by the desire of non-engineers to make engineering management be done by non-engineers.
I ended up not getting a management position however (they're extremely hard to get here in Uruguay), I believe it was because, like you, I didn't have a formal management position (I did end up having a lot of informal authority at my last job, and I've already won a lot of trust at my current one 3 months in).
Being "old" gives you a lot of time to try various ideas. Eventually some should stick if you're truly pushing your skills; not just programming skills but product/marketing skills as well.
We all love youth and there is a good reason for why so. But at the same time because we are older and we tend to have more money and control more stuff. Most of the 30 something coders will rise up to the higher positions in next 10 years.
That sounds like the opposite of what I want so I'd say we don't "all love youth."
If you are a young programmer and your salary merely covers your costs of living (including leisure etc), it seems to me that you need a plan.
Of all of these, I prefer to be a coder.
I'm just 5 years away from 50, and let me tell you: not only do I want to be a developer at 50, I want to be a developer at 70.
Being a developer means getting paid good money to work on problems that are perfectly suited to my INTJ / spergy personality. There's nothing else I'd rather do with my (work) time.
* SmartFlix.com (dvd rental business) * Heavyink.com (comic book ecommerce)
Yeah, I kind of do.
> Sooner or later it has to end.
Why? It doesn't for doctors, engineers, lawyers, accountants... programming is the only job I've ever heard of where decades of experience is somehow a sign on incompetence.
I have a plan that includes retirement savings. At my current rate, I could comfortably retire by the time that I'm 40, but I like working with complex systems, in particular complex computer systems. I tend to write code to understand and modify those systems. Why can't my plan include continuing to convince people to pay me to do what I like and have acquired skill in?
Why not? One of my favorite coworkers ever was over 50 and he still seemed to very much enjoy coding.
From my side I love programming per se (logical/creative thinking, etc), but programming as a profession is stressful: deadlines, unsatisfied clients, changing technologies...
At age 50 I'd rather give my body and mind a rest, and focus in my family or whatnot.
One thing is sure for me: I didn't come to this universe to spend it in front of a screen.
I haven't had a stressful deadline in a very long time. Indeed, I've been weeks or months ahead in almost all cases. I've used that time to get a jump on integration, or help others get a jump on their schedule. By the time I'm ready to ship, the only thing between me and proper operation is disinformation from others.
Now, granted, that's annoying to some people. But just consider that some of that is just ... show business. The people that that annoys are probably not the people you want to work for anyway. And if you do it "my way", you'll know that, and they'll probably know that.
The "changing technology" part is the least source of stress - after a while, you begin to recognize the patterns that tools are designed to solve. So you're down to the fresh ... heck that is Other People's Code.
( the Other People's Code thing is purely about lost or asymmetric information - but it's a really important skill, if for no other reason than to know what not to do).
You just have to learn to separate the act of getting real work done from the act of performing in the corporate Kabuki theater that surrounds getting real work done. At least then you can let it run its course - because very close to all organizations eventually develop autoimmune disease and die of it.
It's not that I am not sympathetic - I am. It's just that after a couple of decades of doing this, you can understand the patterns and apply your efforts to the parts you know you can fix.
But don't let your mind rest. If you rest, you'll rust. A fellah I worked with since 2011 died in 2015 of stage 4 colon cancer, but other than that, he'd still be going well towards 70.
I want to be like that guy, without the colon cancer. And I always have.
For me, age 24, I'd see it extremely difficult to keep the same pace when I'm 50. Maybe I can do the same stuff, but slower.
So by then I wouldn't feel 'discriminated' if someone hires a more energetic, available candidate.
The thing is, though… if you have a purpose, that changes things. I'm an audio DSP guy, not much use at other things, but my purpose from when I was very young was to get my personal recording studio to be as awesome as the ones shown on my favorite vinyl records. This entailed making some real progress on the weaknesses of digital audio, and over the years I have made plenty. That's MY personal windmill.
If you don't have that Don Quixote thing, the stress will grind you down. Money's not enough (hey, I'm in the music business, there IS no money there now whether it's devs or musicians). There has to be some less tangible goal to move towards, because the things you cite are indeed a problem. Apple migrated Audio Units to 64-bit and I updated my entire userbase, including legacy plugins, for free because I knew that they would eventually throw out any support for the original 32-bit format…
Its hardly a physically demanding job.
The point of my original post is: 2016 is a really good time to be a developer, but still, if you don't do something extra you may have it really tough by age 40 (don't blame the "ageists"!).
You can be up to a number of things:
- launch your own startup
- become a freelancer, hack your way into great rates
- find a job with an outstanding salary
- move into management
In a follow-up post, you said that you don't want to spend all your time in front of a screen. Well, I work for places where management is mostly sane, and panics are few. I work 40 hours a week with very rare exceptions. Outside of that, I have a life that doesn't involve staring at screens. It has actual humans in it (plus a dog and a cat).
It sounds like you want to be retired by fifty. Well, I didn't plan well enough for that. Part of that is health issues of some people around me - they need my income, they have some doctor bills, they can't eat garbage so their food is somewhat more expensive. I'd prefer it to be otherwise, but I'm not going to walk away from them. So I need money, and programming pays pretty well.
It's very strange reading this. I'm 48 and it blows my mind to hear that 38-year-olds are unemployable as coders.
I ran airwindows.com for nearly a decade as a traditional product-selling business and brought in about a quarter of a million dollars all told, and then when my payment processor went out of business, I took it to patreon.com/airwindows and started putting my products out for free to get them in the hands of people who can no longer afford $50 a plugin. I'm going to be open-sourcing stuff, too, and continue to develop new concepts.
'coder' as a salaried drudge sounds like you just do what you're told. A person like that cannot run an independent business for ten years, and perhaps shouldn't be 'coding'.
For some of us, for me, it's like saying 'you don't want to be guitar playing (or singing, drumming, etc) by age 50'. It just highlights a really profound disparity in viewpoint there.
I can imagine young slave labor stacking the market against me (this is part of why I went to a patronage model, new as it is to me) but don't tell me not to code. That's crazy talk :)