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> why aren't there businesses snapping up the older developers?

There are, the problem is three-fold. One, older developers are too numerous for any one firm or group of firms to really hire all at once. Second, the job market is way more geographically constrained than people want to admit. (insert rant about "all companies should be remote" here) Third, older developers that need jobs need to be able to find companies willing to hire them.

The last aspect is the one that really matters from a social perspective. The market can come up with a matching service to pair job seekers with companies, but just having the service exist doesn't mean that all companies and all job seekers will use it. Motivated individuals will find it, but not all individuals are motivated.

The lesson here is that markets can't solve all social problems. Sometimes they exacerbate them. In these cases you really need a social solution.

> The market can come up with a matching service to pair job seekers with companies, but just having the service exist doesn't mean that all companies and all job seekers will use it. Motivated individuals will find it, but not all individuals are motivated.

And I'll add, few businesses are that motivated. Most look to get their hiring done as efficiently as possible; it's a burden, a delay, and a cost.

If there would be such a lack of talent, salaries would be going up and working conditions would be getting better and better. So I bit doubt the lack of talent narrarive.

The problem is being addressed both supply-side (H1B body shops) and demand-side (salaries and working conditions are broadly better than they used to be IMO). So it is hard to say.

I do think there is some truth in "ten years of experience" versus "one year of experience times ten". There are a lot of jobs in this industry where you only have to know so much, and that's all you have to know. CRUD forms are CRUD forms, at least until they change the technology stack.

Software is a fad-driven industry, but I think the underlying reason for continual new-stack fetishism is to shake-out the 1x10 people, rather than say the 5x2 people.

I am more cynical. I think that reason for new-stack fetishism is incompetence combined with what I call "signaling game". Many people are unable to talk rationally about benefits and costs or solutions, so they jump anywhere where crowd goes to signal "I am passionate hacker".

If people would think for themselves, you would see much less of herd behavior and less insecurity induced posturing.

Salaries have gone up, and software companies regularly rank among the very best companies to work for in the world. What exactly are you expecting?

It depends on which company you talk about. Google and Facebook are not the same employers as Uber and many startups (I know that some startups are good employers). But more importantly, we had a bit of coder shortage locally. It meant that companies were:

a.) Willing to give applicants time to learn and hired them for technologies they did not knew. They hired people who were changing careers. Many position were treated as truly entry level positions, meaning dudes got hired for demonstrating a bit of iq.

b.) People negotiated part time and still had pretty good career. Some people worked long hours, but it was by no means required (ok, you had to be assertive and say no and stand your ground, but in the end nobody could afford to punish you for it).

c.) Nobody cared about things like culture fit (as someone below cares - did you grew in right culture?). They were starved for people doing the work.

d.) I have seen old programmers.

Not all of that was shining, specifically some people should not have been hired. I am not saying it was some heaven on earth awesome in everything for everybody situation. Just that the environment was different.

Markets are only efficient under the assumption of perfect information. There's no point offering higher salaries and better working conditions to attract top talent if your hiring process can't measure that talent.

One huge factor in the U.S. is how broken the healthcare model is. Older employees tend to need more healthcare, if for no reason other than more commonly having families, and the employer is paying for all of it — and at a significant multiple of the base cost anywhere else.

I've heard plenty of stories about people who left startups or consulting because they needed BigCorp's insurance plan. That's understandable for the worker in question but puts a strong pressure on the employer in favor of hiring single 24-year olds.

I like your analogy. I may have an insight into why the theory of hiring just talented people does not lead to guaranteed success (regardless of whether they come from a disenfranchised group or not).

The problem is that the skills of an individual are only part of the formula for success. In team sports and in companies, people need to work as a group to achieve a common goal. This involves leadership, management, teamwork, and individual contribution.

Super talented people, by definition, are great at individual contribution. They may be good team players, or they may not. Their individual talent is not a barometer of how good of a team player they are.

Add to that the management skills of the coach or team leader. If they're lacking, even skilled team players will have much lower chances at success.

Finally, there is leadership. If inadequate, there are no clear goals, there is no culture, and no guiding principles. Progress will be made haphazardly, at best. Long term success will be severely compromised without good leadership.

The marketplace is not failing. The ingredients to success involve more than superior individual talent.

I agree that it depends on much more than talent, but that hypothesis wouldn't explain discrimination against older workers: There's no reason older workers would be less capable in the non-talent aspects of what you describe, and there are strong reasons that they would be more capable: Experience, acquired skills, and maturity.

On the other hand, part of creating a team is fitting in, and many organizations take the easy way out and avoid diversity on their teams - even though research shows that more diverse teams produce better results (what good is the 8th team member with the same experience and frame of reference?).

> The marketplace always seems to fail in situations like this one

The free market fails because ageism, sexism, racism is cultural and sometimes so deep we don't even realize we're doing it.

To a lot of HR types even now, being an older programmer is seen as failure as they cannot understand why you wouldn't move into management.

HR will probably catch up, but for that to happen we need to keep talking about it and showing that it's an issue and it's actually better to give some of these people a shot.

The free market optimizes in a way that isn't "fair". Young people are measurably quicker thinking and willing to work longer hours for less pay. They cost the company less in insurance and sick pay as well. Young males tend not to have familial responsibilities and don't get pregnant.

Then you have race, where hiring white people is seen as the safest option for the business because they generally aren't discriminated against. It minimizes the risk of your company getting a bad reputation with certain groups, and minimizes the risk of lawsuits when you need to fire people.

With business the market isn't cultural as much as it's about maximizing profitability. That still doesn't make it fair.

Young people may be measurably quicker thinking and willing to work longer hours for less pay, but that doesn't help when they lack the skills and experience and end up making the wrong decisions.

Older people generally aren't willing to work for the same low pay because we have enough experience to justify it.

This kind of discrimination is peculiar because the exact same people are often sought after if you only change their title. E.g. as a consultant I'm sought after at a far higher price point, and my age and experience are a big selling point, where trying to apply as a regular developer would make people wonder what's wrong.

This is more of a perception and marketing issue than it is about young people having an edge, and the pereception comes down to the same reason we ascribe more value to e.g. an expensive watch than a cheap one: Signalling effect.

Being a developer at 40 signals to a lot of people that someone doesn't have the skills to get promoted, because they don't understand that you can be a developer and do stuff any random CS graduate could do, or do stuff that makes you one in a million without getting fancy titles.

Conversely, being a consultant signals to people that I must be able to do stuff other people can't.

You see the signalling effect clearly when pitching for work as a consultant: I have conversations with people that are 90% about me telling them whether or not I can do the work, rather than being interviewed by someone who is trying to figure out if I can do the work. The assumption is that my judgement can be trusted because I'm a consultant rather than some "lowly developer" applying for a job.

Seeing the difference in respect and attitudes (and money...) makes me even more determined not to go back to normal employment.

(There's also a subtle difference there between attitudes to presenting yourself as a "consultant" vs. "contractor")

> you can be a developer and do stuff any random CS graduate could do, or do stuff that makes you one in a million without getting fancy titles

This seems to be the problem at the heart of a dozen disparate issues in software hiring and management. Standard HR and management systems are largely unprepared for the idea that two people with the same title (or even the same degree, from the same school, in the same year!) may have almost-unrelated skillsets. Treating two people on the same team with the same job title as completely non-interchangeable just doesn't happen.

I'm not sure what you mean by "getting a bad reputation with certain groups", companies fall over themselves to appear "diverse", to the extent of hiring people to make it so..

A lot of companies try to have their cake and eat it too, and continue practices they know will lead them to stay white and male while putting together "diversity committees" and the like to appeal to minorities.

E.g. my ex works for a bank where she is on a diversity commitee, where the constant frustration is that the bank is only willing to take actions that everyone knows will have very little effect: The underlying problem is that they continue to insist to hire mainly from schools that predominantly have students from wealthy families, and are skewed heavily towards white students to the extent that if they took the entire graduating classes for the next decade without considering results, they'd still not solve their diversity problems.

But any suggestion of widening their search to less elitist schools and focus on results instead gets shot down instantly.

Thus they remain mostly white, while holding all kinds of diversity events etc. to look like they're trying hard to solve the problem.

To be fair to them, they're happy enough to hire minorities from those schools. The point is they know that will not address their imbalance, and all their other diversity work is window dressing. I don't think it's because they have anything against hiring non-white people, but simply because they care more about the prestige of the schools they hire from than they care about diversity (even if you could guarantee to only consider candidates with equally good results).

I think you will find this many places.

TBH 'prestige ' is fine, sounds like the schools have a diversity problem?

Any school were admission is wealth driven has a diversity problem, and it is self-perpetuating.

As for whether it is fine, that depends on whether they actually care about their diversity goals, and whether prestige is in fact more important to them than job performance. I'd argue that it is likely "prestige" here is simply used to enforce informal social connections and to some extent to avoid diversity at the cost of job performance. If I'd been an investor of said bank, I'd consider it a major concern.

You're saying investors would be concerned that they are hiring for diversity, rather than from prestigious schools?

What do you mean by "avoid diversity at the cost of job performance" - are you saying diversity improves performance?

No, I'm saying investors should be concerned that they are preferring prestige rather than hiring the best candidates regardless of school background, and that given how unrepresentative the schools they hire from are, this is contributing to keeping diversity down and makes a mockery of their own stated commitments.

The internal data that the group that is tasked with improving diversity (and that is largely being ignored) at this particular bank shows that being equally strict about results but considering a wider range of schools would increase diversity and would allow them to actualy do so while making their hiring cirteria stricter. This gets brushed aside, and then the bank keeps complaining about how hard it is to be more diverse afterwards.

In other worse: They are hiring less qualified candidates and use the prestige of the schools as an excuse for avoiding hiring more qualified candidates that would also bring more diversity.

Political realities can ruin your reputation with some customers. The business goal is to maximize profits even if that means not hiring black people in the southern US, or LGBT in Russia for example

If the problem is overhiring not underhiring then there's no market failure: companies waste dumb money on hiring reams of sexy culture fits, smarter/leaner companies hire broadly but selectively at appropriate volumes.

Older and otherwise non-traditional devs miss out on an undeserved windfall, but the market pressure is on drying up the hiring binge not on broadening the high-demand pool.