Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

Actually I enjoy it better than I used to since I find myself much more productive and I make less bad design decisions than I used to. I code daily in Javascript (NodeJs), Java and from time to time in groovy, python and golang. Being able to switch from 1 language to another, deploying in different cloud platforms also contributes to my enjoyment.

Recently I have had some bad experiences however when I had to work with exclusively young developers in very small teams (3-4 people). I did not like it mostly because either they were not really competent and did not recognize it (wanting to code on hard topics when they showed poor coding skills on easy ones) or because they were very arrogant (notably a Javascript dev who thought that NodeJs was the alpha and omega of the server runtimes) and were showing some signs of ageism. But I blame mostly the weak recruiting process of my company and management persons (for not constituting well balanced teams). Working with exclusively inexperienced (and not well recruited) people can become a nightmare.

But I am mainly worried because in France (and I think the situation is the same in all Western European countries) even if there's a shortage of tech workers, companies are very reluctant to offer decent wages and still prefer to hire young low paid people. Developers are still seen as blue collars in the IT industry and developers tend to hit very quickly the (salaries) glass ceiling. I tend to think that management persons do not recognize the added value of experienced developers. (I admit that things like maintainability or good design decisions are hard to assess).

I keep my skills up to date, but I am also considering about exit plans, well at least moving away from doing exclusively development.

* Salary. Older employees are more experienced, but, just as importantly, they've already job-hopped a bit, so their base is a lot higher. And they've probably a lot more personal financial responsibilities. All told, they're unlikely to go for the same salary as a new grad.

* Interview process. Anecdotal experience, but, the interview process is structured towards new grads. They've studied algorithms recently, so it's at their fingertips. Unless you've brushed up before interviewing you can look sloppy and unsure in comparison. This can be harder if you've an existing job and family commitments. (Note: I'm not saying you shouldn't study; just pointing out that this can happen.)

* It's hard to gauge experience. Simply because a person has been in the industry for 10 years doesn't mean that they're "more experienced". It's very tricky to gauge: it's easy to tell when someone is less experienced than you, but much harder if they're more experienced. Plus, how do we evaluate experience? Design questions? Software architecture? Looking at code they've written? It's very fuzzy, and a lot depends on the skill of the interviewer and their own experience.

* Finally, we devalue experience. A personal bugbear is hearing hiring managers say that they can train up a new grad to be a tech lead in about a year. Unless you've worked on a couple of largish projects - and seen your own designs evolve in response to requirements, I question that strategy. But, who knows - maybe I'm completely off-base there.

EDIT: I'd like to raise a final point: sometimes the impact of experience is only apparent when you've to scale your product architecture or your team. Assuming that most startups fail (i.e. never make it that far), this means most very early stage teams can get by with an ad-hoc process and/or system until they pass that hump.

I don't know for sure, but we need to be careful about looking at obvious problems and then simply assuming that we know the explanation.

Now this is 100% anecdotal, but I know a few 45+ year old developers and most of them are long-time corporate employees and are not really interested in the whole startup / bloggosphere / tech hype world. They have good stable jobs (think Perl, .NET, Java), and are mainly focused on their families and other hobbies. It’s well know that people tend to become more conservative with age, so this doesn’t really suprise me. None of them thought they were being discriminated against at all.

Moreover, my colleague worked with a 58 year old guy who started programming when he was 50+. He currently works for a super hot "big data" startup as a lead Ruby on Rails engineer, and from what I've heard, he's really, really good at his job (and very well paid).

Older developers of HN, what are your experiences?

Everyone else, did you ever witness a case where someone was discriminated based on their age?

I am 55. I am as current as I can be, including when it comes to cloud, nosql, APIs, and the javascript renaissance. I try to do what companies need. My experience is a bonus because of the things I don't do, because of the problems I did not cause, because of the things that didn't happen. These in my experience are valuable even though almost impossible to measure.

I would be fascinated to hear if his opinion changes once he is 40+ ...

"I was part of a team delivering product X, Y and Z which produced this much revenue for our company and which provided this and this value to our clients. I'm experienced contributor in domain W, and am comfortable in providing value using technologies A and B." is much better.

That is, in corporate-ese, where it's all about value and revenue. Learn to explain your value, and forge a career that you can explain in terms of value. As an engineer you create value, but no one else is going to help you capture slices of that value financially - you need to do it yourself. It's not 'selling out', it's about being smart with your finances. Your skills are an asset, and if you don't know how to capture value from your output someone else will.

At 37, a software engineer, I'm pretty sure my career is more or less secure. I do things which I find interesting, but I make sure as well that I can explain my contributions in economic terms, should the need arise to find new employment. I'm not very wealthy, but neither do I need to stress out about money.

I think in a way we're the golden tech generation, we screwed our elders by discriminating against them when the industry was in disruption and now we're screwing the younger generation like in any other mature industry.

I'm saying "we" as in "my generation", I don't feel I personally took a big part in any of it.

I've found that most people don't really care how old you are as long as you provide them value.

But I don't work at a corporation so I guess that puts me in a slightly different position. Instead I record and sell video courses that teach modern development practices. All of that started after I was 30.

I guess my point is there's plenty of ways to live a fulfilling life as a software developer without ever being put in a position to be discriminated by anything.

I may ask if we want to keep the oldest jobs on the resume (which tend to be irrelevant anyway) or to list graduation dates that reveal age. I go through a quick exercise with clients to show how old they are "on paper", the basic formula being that we assume you were ~22 when you graduated college (or if no grad date or college education is listed, we may assume you were between 20-22 when you started the first job on the resume). If we remove the oldest job(s) and delete graduation dates, we can often mask age a little bit if that is desired.

Many clients decide not to try masking age, as any company that might discriminate based on age isn't a place they would want to work. I respect that as well.

As part of a team in my office who currently interviewed and hired DevOps Engineers (I admit it is different than hiring a Programmer): there were quiet few older candidates we reviewed and interviewed but majority of them (as per their resume) seemed to be stuck in the past or it seemed there peak was 10 years ago.

And oh yes, we hired a 40+ year old whom we are extremely happy to have in our team.

The industry is expanding rapidly. 20 years ago we were a lot fewer people. Even if we had perfect retention, the +40yo's will comprise a much smaller part of the workforce, than in an industry with less growth.

It's also not very surprising that older workers are more experienced, limiting the potential positions. But I suppose there could be an issue if you are older than average yet have mediocre skills.

Things often become wacky are when you have a massive glut of growth, thus, you get a ton of people hired into "senior" positions without actually having to know anything.

I remember my first "senior" title was after having about 1-2 years of experience. Everyone was like that, they threw titles around like mad, in part because I think it made the company look smarter on paper for an acquisition.

Anyhow, I avoid places that seem to inflate egos and expectations, and I've had far fewer issues with age-ism. You just have to be prepared to move on when the environment gets toxic in any way.

In tech it works the other way and you will be insignificant by 40.

I was guilty of this with databases when we had the NoSQL fad; why was I giving up ACID compliance? "Because we're entering a new generation of database design, also, what's ACID?"

Shameless plug: at Aha! we have pretty decent age diversity on our engineering team (and in the rest of the company). If you want to work with us, check out http://aha.io/jobs

When friends nudge their kids in the direction of building skills or a career in tech, I try to find ways to let them know how I look at our industry - a somewhat lucrative place to spend the first 15 or so years out of college, but sadly not a place to build a sustainable, lifelong career.

I wish that weren’t the case, but it seems to be true. Our government needs to step up and hold companies who have a dramatically skewed employee age distribution accountable.

That leaves just 26% of the workplace roles for staffers over 40, Indeed found.”

Innumeracy sucks at any age.

This is coming from Indeed, which is a job searching site. I think its fair to infer that younger people would always look for jobs more than older people since younger people are just getting out of college and/or trying to figure out what really interests them by job hopping. I would imagine an older developer that has already his/her interests figured out, and has a network built out would visit a site like Indeed less.

I'm only 26, so you would think that I'm the "prime" years of my career, but I work for a large enterprise tech company, where I'm the only one under 40 on my team. I would say the average age overall is around 40 for the people that sit around me. They all seem to like place they work, and much more relaxed about their career future compared to me or my friends that are still deciding what we want to do.

Many older developers I know are often unemployable due to the fact they have let their knowledge stagnate, but as a 40 year old looking around and seeing older developers taking longer to find that next role, perhaps you chalk it up to discrimination.

What is culture in a work place as we know it these days in the realms of startup shops?

It's stuff like:

- can you be a good drinking buddy?

- do you look young and hip?

- can you carry on a small talk and talk about stuff like favorite rock band, movies at company events? Never mind that to be a rockstar coder at your young age, you never watched a movie or went to a concert BUT instead spent all your time coding and learning how to code faster/better.

- do you have any interesting hobby like rock climbing or traveling that makes you an interesting person? Never mind that having an interesting hobby will actually damage your chance of becoming a good coder, cause it will take so much time away from coding. With so many things to learn and keep up with, how do you have the time to have an interesting hobby?

- oh also, can you give a good talk on a tech topic? like a good tech sales person? But why would you want to be a coder that will surely hit an arbitrary salary cap while working full 50+ hr a week, when a salesman will make more than coders due to sales commission (while working practically a part time job)? And don't forget about all the extras salespeople get like traveling.

- are you an extremely pleasant person to deal with? Buy why? Are you hiring a sales clerk or a coder? Can a coder be just a normal human being, not one with a forced smiles on face?

- are you all of the above so that ones you refer to the company as potential hire will be clones of yourself?

- oh and can you code?

All this in workplaces that are automating human interaction out of daily work and personal life.

And now increasingly shops that encourage/tout remote working where coworkers don't see each other in person.

What do I do? I clean up after the cowboys are gone. We start a new project that has bells and whistles and does nifty cool things, and the young guys come in and work it because it's shiny, and they gladly put in the hours. They ship version 1.0. They add the tech TLAs to their resumes. And then they leave. Often times they go on to new shiny projects. Often times they go to newer shinier companies. And they leave their software behind.

We all know that time-to-market is everything. And the cowboys deliver the product. It may not be the highest quality work, and it may not be the most maintainable bit of code. But the product shipped, and that's what mattered.

Then comes sustaining. Time to address the warts, and when you address the warts, you see that the code has a lot of symbol names like "a1" and "b2". Yes, I know fireable offenses in some coding shops. But it shipped!

And this is where I come in. I clean up what the cowboys left behind. Usually this happens when we start addressing issues after the stabilization period is over, or start adding features the customers asked for but never got since we had to get the product out the door.

What do I do? Give symbols meaningful domain-specific names. Refactor code to remove antipatterns, mostly the copy-paste pattern. I also apply our company's coding standards with which the cowboys didn't want to be bothered. I add unit tests to code that changes. I comment the code (though it's mostly self-documenting when I'm done). I replace ad-hoc functions with calls to standard libraries our company uses that the cowboys didn't bother to learn. I apply idioms and frameworks that our company uses to allow code to take advantage of cross-cutting functionality, such as automated logging. I make the code aware of the daylight-savings-time transition. I remove egregious pattern uses people put in to say they used a pattern.

I also try to not be the expert at my applications, since I don't want to be called at 3am to resolve issues. So I maintain notes on our wiki pages as to what it takes for the software to run, and a list of frequent issues that have more to do with environment and upstream issues than with the code. I've trained our Ops people and given them analysis tools such that it's been years since I've been called at night. I also maintain a list of lower-priority code issues that weren't worth addressing, but that could use work some time.

I don't mind the cowboys. I've had a couple of them compliment me on my refactoring since they had long-forgotten what their code did. I still have this dream of being one. But for now, this is what I tend to do.

My only concern is that one day we'll get a shiny CTO who'll figure out that it's better to outsource all the IT to save money (and to give his buddies where he came from the outsourcing business), and I'll be on the street, after training my replacements. How marketable are the above skills? "Hi, I can keep your software running and maintainable." In another five years I figure I'll have made my numbers and the only thing I'll have to worry about is another 2008.

It sounds awfully like the arguments that traditionally nationalist groups use against immigrants, contending they're less intelligent and accept lower wages because they're culturally inferior and just don't know better

Maybe it's just that younger workers legitimately provide better labor for lower cost. For a small startup, you really don't need someone with 30 years of experience, and it's better to spend your money on someone demanding a lower wage and will work fast.

That’s why we have a 15 year mortgage. It’s how we plan for our kids college, etc. The goal is that as soon as the kids get out of school our monthly expenses will be as low as possible so that we can live very light or seek alternative income if needed.

Either that or I’ll complete a multimillion dollar side project. :)

Please, see the video. It is an awesome informative and it will give you a lot of insight on our current situation. It is not about startups, but about the maturity of the industry itself.

Any coding you've done more than five years ago isn't relevant anymore. I can't remember what I did five years ago. It is probably outdated, replaced or not in use any more. Looking back at my projects from five years ago, I would probably not agree with most of the code, as I've learned a lot of new things. I do care about your projects. This is the most important part for me. What projects have you done, what was your role, what did you do, what did you use, what was the result, and what are your proud of. Also, I hope you varied your work a bit, because when I read you worked 10 years on the same system, it tells me you didn't think enough out of the box and I'd worry about your skills outside of that system. Also, surely you did smaller projects in those 10 years than just saying you 'maintainted and implemented new features for system X'.

I don't care about your Delphi, BASIC, COBOL or Java 1.2 skills (looking at your CORBA). I do care about your Java 8, mobile, and recent webtechnology skills. You don't know what the technology behind a website is? Then it's a minus, as you've missed out on ten years of technological advancements in your field. I'm not saying you should be expert in web technologies or frameworks, but at least have a basic understanding about HTML5, CSS and Javascript, what they do and what they are used for. Like, the basics.

I care little about your soft skill trainings, they might have some value. I don't care about your framework trainings, I'd rather see you use them in your work experience. I do care about your Java (Programmer 2) certification, because you are working in a Java shop and as somebody who has done the certification I know the value of preparing for the certification, and I know you are dedicated for this.

I care about what libraries/frameworks you would use, and will ask about the reason for using one over the other. This gives me an idea that you can look outside of your comfort zone, be able to accept other ideas, know how to analyze functionalities of a framework, and know that you should understand a library's internals before using it because of the hype.

I care about your theoretical/general skills: Do you know how to structure your program, do you know about SOLID principles, do you know design patterns, etc. These give me an idea if you can write larger programs, that can be maintained.

I care about how you answer my questions, how you respond to be challenged on a point, how you will defend a point, how you will convince me to use a new library that I don't know about (which I actually do) and sell me it's good points. This is because I want to see you speak the same language of the team, and can communicate your opinion in a professional manner. Get irritated or super-defensive, you probably aren't a good fit for the team, as you'll have colleagues that challenge you as well, and you will just be irritated all day long.

All these give me an idea on how passionate you are about developing software. Not passionate as in 'go spend 70hrs a week here', but passionate as in seeing software development as your craft, your reputation, your skill.

In the end I care about three things: Can your do the work in a professional way (hard-skills), will you be able to work well with your colleagues (soft-skills), and will you be happy to work here (retention).

This was the most explicit, but not the only example.

This is why I am so happy about the recent turn against sexism in the bro-workforce. Bros are ageist not just sexist.

> That leaves just 26% of the workplace roles for staffers over 40, Indeed found.

Seriously? This conflates "range of average ages among companies" with "range of ages of employees at companies" to a galling extent. There's no way this whole argument is a typo...how does something like this get past an editor?

Can anyone share their two cents and pros/cons of being an EM vs IC? Any regrets?

http://examinedexistence.com//wp-content/uploads/2013/12/cry...

This is a simplified view but communicates the idea.

Some might say crystallized intelligence is under-valued in tech. That might be true. But then we should discuss that, not through the lens of social justice against age discrimination.

People who agree with me and readily comply with my will are more intelligent.

Who you gonna hire?

“Hey guys we have no business plan or customers, but please pull a few more all nighters to finish this bit of code.”

22 year old living with 5 roommates is like “yes sure, whatever you say” while 40 year old with lots of experience is like “you don’t know what the F you’re doing... I’m outta here.”

That’s why.

Do not buy into the whole victimization of you based on your age. Resist this temptation.

The truth is that some "old" people are actually "weird" as are some really young people may be "annoying".

Of course the typical 60 year old will not fit in with a bunch of mid-20's people working on the next Godforsaken social sharing app.

DO NOT FALL FOR VICTIMIZATION TALK.

Everyone has a choice of how they save, invest, learn and who they associate with.

Do not like many companies and how they operate? Good, me neither.

Do not like drab catered lunches amd having to eat with assholes and listen to their vapid conversation? Good, I hate it too.

Don't want to work with know-it-all 20's kids (one that you probably were too at that age). Good, I don't either.

Therefore I don't.

I'm an independent software developer and stashing away as much of my money into Rental properties, Bitcoin, dividend producing investments and boring but safe bonds.

If you are worried about losing your job for ANY REASON, then it is your fault amd responsibility to fix your own emotion state:

- why did you take on a bigger mortgage than necessary?

- why did you spend 10's of thousands of dollars on a fancy car (or borrow the money for it)

- why did you not invest your money to work for you.

Instead of you working for money (by 40 you should be able to pull in minimum wage for sleeping and doing nothing).

But most people screwed their 20's and then maybe realized late 30's that there's a thing call Passive Income (as defines by tax code) and Investment Income.

We have a generation of men and women who made terrible life choices and now are shocked that they feel the need to continue working with young people.

Now the victimization brigade is coming to tell you that "It's not your fault you are being discriminated for your age".

Fuck yes it is. Why the hell are you working with assholes?

No one is preventing you from starting your own business, doing amazing work as an independent consultant or pursuing additional lines of income.

What did you think was going to happen when you got older? That's right, you will be treated as you treated older worker when you were young.

Heck, I just called my father "old man" for his birthday last night. Is that discrimination?

Yes.

Is it UNFAIR discrimination?

NO. He did live a longer life and is factually older. Who knows, I may not experience as many years as him. It is FAIR discrimination in a lot of cases.

Only unjust and unfair discrimination is what we should concern ourselves with. The article makes no attempt to articulate beyond a bunch of numbers cuz "discrimination"

You are not a victim.