A comment left on Slashdot

The funny problem is that when I was 32 I heard from one recruiter "Oh, so you are still a programmer? I'm sorry, we cannot offer you sending your cv to our client. You see, we have hundreds of cvs from people of your age, and all are managers, so if you are not, then there is something wrong with you".

Yea, 32 years old programmer is just too old, 32 years old surgeon is usually too young to work alone.

I keep on learning, I have accumulated lots of knowledge working in different areas of programming like system administration, database administration, programming etc. I have been payed to program using over a dozen of programming languages... At interviews I still hear "oh, you know, I'd love to have experience like yours"...

And I still hear "you are too old". What's more funny - people are not embarrassed saying that. Even though that's illegal where I live. Writing "we want to hire a woman/man only" is also illegal, but people still write that, and no one reacts.

I'm afraid I will be totally unemployable in a couple of years, just after my 40, which will come too soon. And I don't want to get into management only position (which is also hard, as I cannot get a management job "because you haven't worked on such a position, and you are too old to start that".

That's hilarious, but on the other hand that explains a couple of things like a-brand-new-hyped-technology, which is just a rewrite of what we had 20 years ago.

The problem is that the management can't tell who's any good. They see "the guru" struggle for several months on a "very difficult project" and then finally come through (with an added bonus that only the guru can understand the system afterwards so it MUST be very complicated) and just assume that he's been walking on water. He's young and went to a very good school... But then you find out it's a simple inventory control merging with the UPS API to ship widgets.

They took that old saw about only the grandkids being able to make the VCR stop blinking 12 and applied it to the entire frikkin world and they are unable to tell that it isn't even remotely true.

I'm almost 40, and I don't let articles like this scare me. Everyone has this fear they are going to be rejected for some reason or another. It's just another idea that you can obsess over at night wondering if you are going to be able to continue living the life you want.

Is this article true? Yes, partially. There will be companies and people out there who won't hire older programmers, and this is true for almost every other profession as well. 15 years ago there was the scare about offshoring all our jobs too. We were constantly told that the people in India were smarter, worked harder, and had cheaper salaries. They said we were lucky to keep our jobs. Is this true, yeah partially, but anyone who as any good found another job at a better company. Are the people in India hard workers and smart? Yeah there are a lot of them that are. I've worked with a lot of people from India, and many of them are great people. They are smart, passionate about what they do, and nice. Heck there is a woman from India sitting 10 feet from me who is brilliant, and a hard worker. Am I afraid of this? No. Sure there are companies that will pick her over me strictly because she is younger, but I don't want to work there anyway. A lot of times companies making decisions like that are the ones that are in real trouble and do it, because they know that older and more experience people won't stay long. You can keep those companies. I've already lived through that. Getting rejected by a company doesn't bother me, especially for a silly reason like that. I'll see where they are in a year, and I'll most likely get the last laugh.

The marketplace always seems to fail in situations like this one. There are always groups that are discriminated against, based on race, gender, age, etc. Therefore a business seeking talent should view those excluded groups as a goldmine of available talent.

For example, imagine if most baseball teams started excluding non-white athletes again. If I owned a team, I'd immediately start hiring those athletes; I'd have by far the best team in baseball in short order (EDIT: To be clear, I'd have the best team because I'd have the market cornered on a large portion of the talent; it wouldn't be because of some imagined (and false) racial differences in performance.)

But in business (and in sports) it never works out that way. Certainly some executives have discriminatory attitudes, but that doesn't account for all. Certainly some will give into and/or are more exposed to social pressures, but not all. With the very high demand for talent, why aren't there businesses snapping up the older developers?

(There also is another problem: Excluded groups tend to avoid that marketplace. They are discouraged by their parents, teachers and peers, and they may not want to have to deal with discrimination every day for their whole careers. But that shouldn't apply as much to middle-aged developers; that labor supply is already in the pipeline.)

Honestly I think its just economic decisions by short sighted management disguised to others as a social issue.

Not to discredit the real ageism that exists, but far more often I think its the fact that older, saltier people are going to demand a higher wage, more work life balance, and see through bullshit easier. All of those things are negatives for a middle manager trying to fill a role. That's right, they become more focused on the task of filling a role than about solving the companies issues.

I'd wager that if you got old farts to agree to the same bullshit terms pushed on younger people because they missed Legal Contracts 101, the gap would shrink.

What's funny to me is that a contractor I was the dude picking up the pieces after the technical debt inevitably bit them in the ass, so in the long run companies that make decisions like that end up paying more for them.

I actually gave up my share of my first startup because it was built on exploiting this fact, and I felt a proper counciling of the customer would include something along the lines of "we are more expensive than a full time person, but do less than a tenth of the work of one since we split our time between many clients, therefore we should be a temporary stopgap and a continuing advisory position", which obviously didn't go well for an msp style it support company.

I'm increasingly convinced the business world is full of short sighted incompetence.

Point 1: I see a lot of highly-upvoted comments blaming management for why engineers are messed up. Hardly surprising for such a venue, I guess. If we're going to blame management, though, perhaps we should look at why the managers themselves are messed up. Personally I think it might have something to do with the conceit that management is the uber-skill, so important in itself that a couple of years (at most) of generic training in management qualifies a person to manage any activity effectively even without a shred of domain knowledge. Pfeh.

Point 2: maybe not all of the blame lies with management, and the most important exercise for a crowd of technical people involves introspection instead of blaming others. We get enough of that in politics; we don't need a bunch of little techie-Trumps playing the same tune. Some of the blame belongs with the engineers themselves, who hoodwink naive managers or exert peer pressure to create a culture of deliberate ignorance. When "disruption" is one of the most popular words within an industry, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that even one's thoroughly disrupted predecessors knew a thing or two worth learning. Good software engineering is a lot like recycling - instead of incinerating all "legacy" code just because it's legacy, find the parts (ideas) that can be used as part of something new. New solutions to old problems can be found without having to reintroduce the old problems in new code.

A solid solution is to have a professional union/association with a meaningful exam for entrance, meaningful certifications for specialties, and the mandate to avoid committing professional malpractice (strike/walkout enforced). The ACM could do that, but has chosen not to: the IEEE's attempt is sort of a joke.

Having spent the last 3 months totally involved in the US medical field regarding a family member's life-critical condition, I can say with confidence: the professional credential/certification process works really well when built well, and software engineers with an interest in seeing our field should strongly consider the medical community as a working example - remember - "rough consensus and running code".

I certainly can relate to everything that the author expresses. However, I'm also quite certain that this is not exclusive to the software engineering disciplines. Somewhere around 2004 or so, I began seeing many US companies (including many large ones) abandoning analysis and planning and lots of other proven PMBOK type activities in favor of more reactionary methods.

When I talk to many people under 35, across fields, they often complain about workplace disorder, mismanagement, and lack of planning. They also complain of an overload of work and of working too many hours. I don't think this is a coincidence.

In other industries, the the wisdom of experienced workers is the only thing that keeps capital from completely fucking over labor. Why don't experienced workers play the same role here? When I read stuff like this by experienced workers, I sometimes hope to see that question answered...

Being a Software Developer, a "socially invulnerable" person, I won't be bothered by people saying something as misguided as "all your experience is obsolete". I'll have a good laugh.

I think some of us take themselves a bit too much seriously. As a programmer, you have not just First World, but actually Zeroth World problems. In the world of struggle we are having a guilt-free easy ride.

I believe the trends the author has pointed out are not just the failings of the tech industry but are part of a larger cultural backlash against expertise.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-0...

(side point: in my new company we did a SWOT analysis and one strength was "old farts" -- we've already made tons of mistakes and have learned a lot.)

I didn't see the original slashdot discussion so didn't have context, but IMHO the phenomenon described is more that programming in the USA and Europe has become a blue collar job, as it has been in Japan for decades. I think this is great -- the tools have become strong enough that someone with limited (but nonzero) training can produce solid apprentice and journeyman work. (masters, well, I know I will never be even close to some of the master machinists I've been lucky to work with; they can't craft code like I do).

The fact is you don't need a programmer to throw together a viable web site. Isn't that great!?

Innovation is still coming out of computer science and trickling down into the real world. And highly experienced programmers are also contributing cool stuff. But as programming has opened up as a discipline to a significantly larger pool of people, is it any wonder the density of new ideas per capita would go down?

(oh, and CS has always scorned reading the literature, to its detriment).

About this:

"I’m not bitter; I just believe we’ve fallen into a bunch of bad habits in our industry which need a good recession and some creative destruction to weed out what is limping along."

A recession might actually make things even worse. At least part of the problem in the industry is the growing power of monopoly. Firms are increasingly protected from competition, and therefore bad habits can thrive because the bad habits are not enough to bring down the firm. That is, there isn't enough competition for the firm to be hurt by its own bad habits. And this lack of competition goes back to the declining rate of new company formation:

http://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-businesses-economic...

Also, see this chart:

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-decline-of-usa-inve...

I believe much of the problem mentioned in the article is about us not being software engineers but only programmers/coders. If we, as an industry, would have adopted engineering discipline instead of producing systems in light speed by just coding, what we are talking now would be different things.

In case anyone else is wondering, this is the original Slashdot discussion: https://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10352645&cid=540224...

I don't think it was linked in the post.

The author is quite arrogant himself. What's wrong with looking up solutions for complex problems on StackOverflow? It saves a lot of time and in most cases will end up better than what you come up with on your own, because it has been tested and improved by hundreds of users. And if you manage to find an improvement, share it to make the code better.

Reinventing the wheel every time is stupid and it really seems more like he's the one not able to adapt. When I can do the same things faster and better than you, because I make use of available resources, then I'll be the better choice for most employers, regardless of the age.

Experience is good, but constantly learning and adapting is even more important in this industry and he seems to think he doesn't need to do that.

> (I’ve met programmers with years of experience who couldn’t write code to maintain a linked list.

FFS, our industry is huge and there are many problem domains and many specialized areas of expertise, most of which don't require you to write linked lists. It's like expecting someone who's building windshield wipers for a car to also know how build an alternator (this analogy may not be great, but you get the idea).

I'm sure if someone spent half an hour brushing up on linked lists, they could easily create one. If you don't do something a lot, you forget. You get rusty. Why is this so hard to understand? This is true in any discipline.

One factor that I think plays into this dialog is that we learn quite a bit over time without realizing it. As I grow older, I sometimes find myself thinking, "I know this, but I know I didn't intentionally learn it."

What I realize is that I know it because of life experience and there is no way I could have learned it (or maybe it's a realization, not a learning) without having lived through all those winters.

The impact of this is that as we gain experience, we can be more deliberate and selective about where we focus our talents and energy, entering into fewer endeavors, but have a higher success rate per endeavor.

Some say this youth-culture obsession is a US workplace problem. That may be true.

To my way of thinking it's a Sili Valley workplace culture problem. Sili Valley is a high-rent district, and doesn't favor people who need more than minimal housing, unless they've already made it big.

Also, Sili Valley is all about the new new things. It will be interesting to see what happens to the present crop of Sili Valley giants in 20 years. What happens when Page, Brin, and Zuckerberg turn 55? What happens when the rapid growth of their companies slows?

Maybe they retire and start concerning themselves with scenic easements and other perqs of the hyper-rich. Or maybe they try to keep reinventing themselves and the companies.

They may make the same mistake Digital Equipment made: responding to a slowdown with a hiring freeze. Once a hiring freeze is imposed, a company loses access to new people and the ideas they bring. The median age increases by one year for every calendar year that goes by. There's nothing wrong with older folks, but not all of us can be managers.

They may make the mistake MSFT made in the first few post-Gates years, and that AAPL is in danger of making now: laurel-resting and inward-turning.

One of the problems of measuring age distribution is this: Averages don't mean anything. Many effective orgs have lots and lots of fresh young faces and a dramatically tapering age pyramid. Military services are a case in point: Sure, the median age is 22. That's because they have vast numbers of 19 year olds. But they also have lots of 30 year old captains, 35 year old majors, and even older colonels and generals.

I'm a developer who started on Hollerith 80-column punch cards. I'm still doing good work. Others can too. But not in Sili Valley: we have too much sense to jump on the latest js framework.

I've always wondered whether the descriptor young startup /young company etc. in a job post is put in to warn off older (>30) people from applying.

Which can be depressing when you search http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/ for the word "young".

Interestingly, companies don't tend to describe themselves as "male startup", or "white startup"...

tl;dr Language matters.

One of his points is key and seemingly goes unmentioned in these comments. The total disregard for software engineering (the field of study, that is) by developers. Even the very basics of software engineering are unknown, and if mentioned, frequently discarded if they don't fit with the zeigeist.

I seriously considered getting an IEEE membership for a long time, but decided after several long conversations with people in the field who had one that it was not worth it.

For someone who laments the failure of modern programmers to learn from the work of the past, the author seems to completely ignore the contributions of ML, ML-style type systems, and related languages to the profession of software engineering. Perhaps this explains the snide (and, frankly, uninformed) dismissal of Swift as a hype-ridden "subset of Lisp".

Aside from that, I agree with the author's points.

This perception causes discrimination which is illegal (if you can prove it)

This is why there are a host of lawsuits for ageism and a bunch of job portal like https://www.giantsforhire.com/ or https://oldgeekjobs.com/ poping up

I keep on reading about ageism in this industry, but haven't observed it myself. Yes, devs are over-proportionally young in the companies I've seen, but from my (limited) insight into recruiting, this roughly reflects applications. Also, it's not that most of the devs in the companies I've been are just fresh out of university; about half of them are 30+ years old. My impression has always been that this just reflects the growth of the industry and related increase in graduates.

Quite possibly, this "young, dynamic, better" culture is more prevalent in startup-heavy areas like the US or eastern Europe, as opposed to western Europe where I live.

We don't really have a great required body of knowledge or mandatory licensing for people to work in the field. The whole industry is still in the Middle Ages in terms of how we choose people to build things.

How we got here: Tech bobble gold rush, big tech (google/s) takes best talent, investors only want good enough (build to a price), young bro-grammers fill need, flood of millennials (like the Chinese army) take over IT. Now we are moving as fast as we can, in the cheapest vehicle we can build, caring other people's property. Some of this is good. (SpaceX?) Some is pandering gossip (Facebook?) Some are rubber dog turds. (Ha.. sh-- sells) The pendulum swings: Mainframes connected to dumb terminals sending CICS to real time computing (PCs) to AWS connect to browsers sending HTML/CSS. So the bro-grammers think they are inventing something new. Wisdom is learning from other's mistakes. Developers today think of anything older then 5 years as obsolete. They are excited by what they think is NEW but really they are just naive. Time is the flame in which or lives burn. If only more would take a moment and seek wisdom their products and lives would be enriched.

I've been IT for 40+ years. Still working. Still seeing the same mistakes made over and over again. I have a few young people I mentor and I've seen them move way above their co-workers.

So here is some words of wisdom if your new in IT. Find a co-worker over 50 and ask for advise.

> when they run into an interesting problem tend to search Github or Stack Overflow, even when it is a basic algorithm problem (I’ve met programmers with years of experience who couldn’t write code to maintain a linked list)

This comment feels incongruous with the rest of the article: why wouldn't I refer to a standard implementation rather than trying to solve it on my own? Isn't that a commendable case of not ignoring the 'old junk'?

Is it really true anymore that '30 is considered “old”'? I've worked with many people that are 30+ in the industry, and working with many right now, and I don't see any tendency to regard them as "old". Maybe it's my own bubble or more localized phenomenon, but I don't think it's true anymore.

Also remember that of all of the professional industries, ours is young and still maturing.

I believe that being an old programmer will become accepted in time. I believe that posts like these help to bring this issue to the forefront and it's good that it's being discussed.

I'm sure there's some kind of problem here... But from a person trying to hire a more experienced engineer, I can tell you getting someone in the door is hard.

I've had an open spot for someone with 5+ years of experience for nearly 6 months. I've done maybe a dozen interviews and made two offers. Still unfilled. At this point I really need more people and may have to start looking for new grads instead.

I don't doubt that there are experienced engineers unable to find jobs, but I wonder if there are other regional factors at play. I'm in San Francisco, so it's possible (probable even) that more established companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, etc. are recruiting for the same people.

Well there are many programming opportunities out there for people of all age. You just need to broaden your horizons if not your choices of languages, tools, and even platforms.

at fifty plus the only thing I note with difficulty in moving to a new job is that it is harder to change. learning something new, language, etc, isn't that difficult but I do have to fit in. It is the idea of changing environments that I do not care for.

Many people I know in the placement of developers look not only as skills but how long you have been where you are, because apparently I am not alone in being reluctant to leave even if I say I am willing

Except most of the design patterns you're caught on are wrong too. Programming just keeps getting more nuanced, making it harder for new people to learn about what is considered "the right way!"

Are sysadmins, network/data engineers, or other back-end techs subject to the same age discrimination as programmers?

As an aging jack-of-all-trades, I've been wondering if I should refocus more on back-end skills (and skills lower down the software stack) and start transitioning away from app development - especially web development.

I'm also wondering if Woody's observations of ageism mostly apply to 1) Silicon valley, 2) startup companies, and 3) web development.

If you enjoyed the OP, especially the comments about how unscientific SWE is, I think you will enjoy anything from Greg Wilson, such as:

https://vimeo.com/9270320

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtKO619O5g0

cache: https://archive.fo/aZDJF

Our industry needs to require certification.

Doctors have to go through a pretty rigorous certification process that is independent from medical school and career work.

We need a similar certification process that requires that we know a lot of the things we need to know; and breaks the misconception that the industry is always changing.

For better or worse I only had a couple years to be a heads down programmer. After management hit, programming became more of a hobby. Some of the gray beards really just repeat 1 year of experience over and over, but many are worth their weight in gold.

Anybody who read "Disrupted" by Dan Lyons knows that not only software engineers suffer from this ignorance. It is amazing that nowadays startup companies can become successful even if the ignorance level of their employees is quite high.

Not to pick on the author too hard, as I like the cut of his giblets, but his hair seems awfully brown for a 50-something. My temples and beard are quite gray / grey.

Seems to me the solution for this is for the older-than-young programmers to get together and start companies that produce better software.

Programming, and computer science, is inherently about information. And because information as it relates to the young is so valuable (think about how TV shows value the 18 to 35 demographic is), it's not surprising that leaders in the work of programming can skew young.

The example of Facebook immediately comes to mind. I'm sure everyone has read articles about "TheFacebook" on the Harvard Crimson's website for a good chuckle. But reading those 2004 articles give insight to how Mark Zuckerberg succeeded despite not being a better programmer or computer science thinker than others (including faculty) at Harvard. He was not only competing with an already dominant MySpace, but Harvard computing services:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register...

> “I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,” [Zuckerberg] said. “The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.”

> But Director of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98 said that the creation of a Harvard facebook was not as far off as Zuckerberg predicted.

> “There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College. We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.”

Doesn't seem like that Harvard-built-and-funded Facebook got very far. I'm also struck by how mundane the work of Facebook sounded (including the low salary), as described in this old article, when you compare it to, say, Clinkle:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/3/1/facebook-expands-...

> In order to expand, Moskovitz and Zuckerberg had to write computer programs that would “parse the course catalogs and student newspapers” of the additional schools. Following Columbia, Stanford and Yale, which Zuckerberg said took about three hours each to set up, he hopes to open the site up to Boston-area schools like Boston University and MIT.

As I get older, yes, I start to appreciate the foundational concepts as the OP does. But I think that programming's seemingly youth-centered churn of knowledge is not unrelated to how personal and malleable -- i.e. how varied the goal of programming is, because of how programming is so directly related to the work of how humans consume and disseminate knowledge.

> The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for “intelligence”) worship at the altar of youth

Popular music, athletics, professional team sports, combat sports, hospitality, beauticians, the military (a big one, that one), until recently airline hostesses... there's tons of them.

So the author left a comment on slashdot and received an ignorant knee-jerk response from someone with an inflated sense of superiority.

That's not reflective of the industry! Thats the slashdot community and you should expect such treatment. There are several sites like this and unless you have a pension for online flame wars its pretty much a waste of time to read :(

Until the early 90s you couldn't push updates for released software as easily as today, so software had to be launched with a high standard of quality.

Then, after the Internet became more ubiquitous the industry started pushing towards "minimum viable products" that get fixed over time, but can still make revenue. Usually keeping the product low profile with low to no marketing.

But after a couple of years, the agile enthusiasts took over and decided that everything should add "customer value", and everything else should be neglected. The Scrum proponents were also very inclusive, inviting non-technical people to become certified... and that's when things went south and the beginning of the low quality doctrine started.

As digital distribution starts becoming more popular, business people no longer wanted to keep a low profile launching a minimum viable product. Now they want to launch their prototype with full marketing and user acquisition.

Post-launch, software gets bloated with additional features nobody requires, rather than finally fixing long-standing bugs. In addition, developers get the blame for defects and if they want a solution they have to fix them on their own time.

Any non-engineer can become certified in Scrum, and that has had an impact in the way Scrum has been implemented. Suddenly, a certification involving 16 hours of training to pass a 35 question exam with 68% passing score is more important than an engineering degree. Then, the vast majority of people who criticize non-Scrum methodologies has not actually been curious enough to try them and form their own opinion. It is the herbalife of software.

A Scrum certification without a software engineering degree should not lead to a managerial position in software. You can hire the best engineers, but with mediocre leadership results will be mediocre.

It is time to acknowledge Scrum has been hijacked by greed and has produced a huge software quality crisis.

Throwaway account here... but I think the real reason for this is because I've noticed two distinct types of developers:

1) Hackers that grew up with technology that are typically very proficient and employable before entering university or having much work experience.

2) People who went to CS school in order to get a job as a developer because the pay is pretty decent and they were always kind of good with computers.

I'd much prefer to work with people that grew up as hackers than people who learned later in life. It's a cultural thing more than an age thing, but I feel like it's very hard to see the big picture if you weren't indoctrinated into it on IRC or forums when you were a teen. I'd imagine it's sort of like growing up on a farm vs going to agriculture school.

Because of this, it's very hard to tell as people get older which camp they came from. If someone is young and knows a ton, it's clear that they grew up in hacker culture and likely have a breadth of knowledge. If someone studied hard for years and never was part of the culture, IMO they will be harder to work with and not have as much general knowledge.

As a bonus, if you grew up in the culture and you're applying for an entry level job, you probably already have a decade of hacking under your belt, and that's work experience that's totally unaccounted for on a resume.

The result of this is that if you see someone young and surprisingly knowledgeable in many computer related areas, they probably grew up steeped in hacker culture and have tons more useful general knowledge than someone without that extra decade of experience.

BTW, I'm not advocating for age discrimination, but it may actually be more of undocumented experience discrimination than age discrimination.

"... back then we saw support staff (such as QA and QAE and tech writers) who worked alongside software developers;"

I've personally been working in the industry for 20 years, full time for 17. I Can't believe I just read someone asking for QA/QAE/QE. Modern dev shops should be relying on automation for test coverage, and the developers of the code should be the ones writing the tests for their code. There is a place for QE, those are Software Engineers focused on tooling around the automation for tests and such.

Relying on QE is an antiquated relic of the bad, very bad, Waterfall days. In those days release cycles were long because shipping software meant that there were releases timed to marketing and cyclical sales. Now software is shipped online. the role of QE has changed to not take crappy code a Dev wrote and validate it, but to be the one responsible for making sure Dev's are actually testing their code and that the code is being measured for quality.

The easiest way to make this obvious, go write some code, say a few files worth, and then try to add tests to it later. You need to go back and refactor, in some cases significantly, to make the code testable. Code needs to be written from the beginning as testable. I always felt bad for QA/QE folk, because they would just get handed crap and be expected to do something with it. This is no longer cool.

(btw Documentation is also a requirement for all code and should be done earlier, not later. Use your own software and try and figure out how others will use it, and document that. Tech Writers should be dealing with well understood systems...)