Report: Ageism in the Tech Industry

Focusing so heavily on computer science trivia questions favor those who recently went to college, since those tidbits are so rarely needed at the drop of a hat in industry those neurons wither away with more time away from academia. Older developers know you can just look it up.

Take home quizzes and side projects require significant time investments. People tend to have less free time as they get older due to family obligations, changing priorities, and so on. People directly out of college likely have less of these external time pressures and would have less of a problem solving your so-clever little project that only takes 20 hours.

Until we, as an industry, get over the lie that hiring must be incredibly accurate and therefore favor the so-called "false negative", we won't get rid of this kind of discrimination and we'll continue to harm people simply because they're older; not to mention losing out on potential co-workers with a plethora of knowledge and experience.

It's bizarre to me that ageism exists. Other forms of discrimination can be traced to othering someone because they are dissimilar to you. Every single human will become an older person one day, barring early death. Perpetuating this cycle is self defeating in the end.

In offices of extremely young teams without a lot of mentorship the big focus is on abstractions and frameworks. The primary technology is JavaScript. I get the feeling of people wanting to move really fast and build cool things, but with huge limitations around their understanding of the technology.

In offices of much older developers the focus is more heavily directed towards code design and architecture. Contrasting to the previous group the older folks feel more confident they can build just about anything and don't mind jumping into the technologies directly, however their focus tends to be more narrow as though there are a set fixed few ways of doing things. This group generally tends to treat web technologies with an utter disregard and prefers to isolate themselves in Java.

Actual fullstack people are rare to either demographic but tend to have a wider understanding of how things work outside their comfort zone.

> By contrast, 3 in 10 (27%) respondents say that the average age of employees at their company is 36-40 years old, making them members of the younger end of Generation X. The over 40s (Gen X and Boomers alike) have to share the remaining 26%.

That's 56% of tech employees between 31 and 40. Xennials FTW!

One of the things I like about working here is that when I go to company events, like the internal conference that I'm at this week, I see people at all age levels. Plenty of young people, but also plenty of people my age or older. And the people older than me aren't coasting until retirement - they're mentoring, leading new initiatives, working on exciting projects. It gives me hope that I'll be able to work on interesting things until I'm ready to retire.

All this to say, there are plenty of companies that value age and experience, but you might have to look outside of the startup scene.

I worked at a startup for the last 4.5 years which had a lot of older (40-50 yr) people (the founders were in their late 40s). I also interviewed a lot of older people (both with positive and negative feedback). What I noticed is two clear groups:

One set of older devs have been in the tech industry just because they needed a job and have somehow kept up with the technologies in a reactive manner. This set of people have mentality of "this is how we used to do this back in 19xx/20xx". It doesn't always work out.

The other set of people are genuinely interested in technology and proactively seek new things, present papers, blog about stuff, and are always on the look out for the next improvement and the next thing. This set of people tend to learn from their own experiences and improve on things while providing guidance to devs in their 20s/early 30s. This set of people never have trouble finding jobs.

The bottom line is that the tech industry requires you to do continuous learning and be enthusiastic about stuff. If you can't do that you'll have trouble finding jobs when you're older.

Edit: I’m seeing the same pattern at my current job even though the percentage of older devs is lower here.

It doesn't matter how privileged you are. You might think "hey, I'm a straight cis white male, I'll never have to worry about discrimination!". And then 20 years later, you're middle-aged. Hello age discrimination!

Or, "you'll join a young team of developers ...", a type of phrasing that makes it very clear who will be a "culture fit" and who probably won't.

Recently I came across a job ad from a SV startup company that contained the text "We are looking to hire talented young developers for backend development" . The message doesn't get much clearer than that.

- Older workers are genuinely more well qualified and are going to demand a substantially higher salary than younger workers.

- Younger workers are less likely to have family and other outside commitments that may take priority over work related issues.

- Younger workers may still see things like web technologies becoming obsoleted every few years as an exciting and invigorating thing, anxious to learn the next big thing (that will then be obsolete 3 years later).

- Pair the above two to yield the fact that younger workers may be more inclined to spend their own time pursuing interests that could improve their perceived value as an employee.

- Older workers have a better understanding of employee-employer relationships and may be less inclined to accept unreasonable 'friendly nudges' that can encourage younger workers to "give 110%" [without corresponding compensation]

- Older workers are going to have a better idea of what they're worth than younger workers who will, almost invariably, dramatically lowball their worth. This gets back to point #1, but also arises in things like contract negotiations.

"Ageism" suggests people are discriminating against individuals because of their age. Choosing to hire people who have certain characteristics, even when those characteristics are less prevalent in older individuals, is in no way discriminatory. And in framing it as ageism we ignore why people may prefer younger workers and the discussion of whether these reason are legitimate.

I half wish we had a way to completely remove any identity related characteristic from the hiring process and end once and for all any allegations of discrimination. Full on voice scrambling, audio only discussion, and VR in lieu of on-site interviews. Only downside would be a necessary restriction on certain topics that could implicitly reveal identifying information. It'd be like the dating shows of the 90s. After you'd made an offer that was accepted, the block would turn and you'd finally get meet your new employee.

1. Old battle hardened veterans who can just jump in and clean the floor. The desire more battles and will confront problems head on

2. Folks who are in the industry for a long time and are productive as a consequence of experience and not because they desire to be there

There are folks intersecting the two sets above. But more often than not, folks in 2 are folks with families, mortgages and other commitments making them risk/battle averse. That kills their hireability.

The reasonably confident, smart old folks are the ones who just walk into companies and bash the young interviewers right away (I experienced this as the young interviewer myself).

Young engineers fit the above categories too but they get the benefit of doubt and get hired for potential. Older folks don't seem to have that luxury.

2) I've worked with old timers who do nothing and get paid a ton. I still can't figure out what they do all all day. I think they go on 10 coffee breaks and browse the web.

I suspect the latter is a stereotype that motivates the former.