IBM purged ‘gray hairs’ and ‘old heads’ as it launched Millennial Corps: lawsuit

Which is to say, he basically invented the computer.

Found someone that had developed fixed firmware. Re-flashed them with that. Figured out how to get them to send a notification to his phone when the motion sensor goes off so he knows when the deer are eating his wife's plants.

My dad is 83.

She would have been in her late 40s or early 50s. I thought she worked in banking or sales as many do around here. Turned out she was at IBM building early Unix systems. I was so impressed by our chat. She had left the industry at the time.

She passed away a few years ago now.

That said, anecdotally, my grandmother recently passed away having never used a computer in her life. Never sent an email, googled anything, or had a Facebook account. She was in her 90s and simply never had to use one. I often wondered what that life was like in 2019, but she had nothing to compare it to and thus couldn't really share. All that is to say, there really are both ends of the spectrum out there.

Being an old social democracy we tend to build solutions to be inclusive. This means you can opt out of a range of our digitised options, and it also means we do extensive service design and benchmarking to make sure meaningful software gets to the citizens and that they know how to use it.

Almost every elderly citizen in my municipality is a digitally competent citizen. The ones who aren’t, often suffer from sicknesses like dementia or mental disabilities.

By contrast we have twenty year olds who don’t know how to install a program that isn’t part of “the App Store” or don’t know double clicking with a mouse is a thing.

In the tech part of it, we have old developers who’ve been through decades of soa vs microservices and a billion frameworks who can build solutions that require minimal maintenance. While some of our freshly educated engineers build things that can’t even last a year without needing major updates or refactoring because their hipster packages broke. We also have extremely talented youngsters and old engineers that can’t write a for loop, but in general, age is extremely valuable if you want to actually operate the software after you build it.

Ageism is simply put silly, unfortunately it isn’t just a thing in tech l. I see it in several areas, even in the public sector of a Scandinavian country. I’m not sure what we can do about it, but we need to do something.

A young person from the first world who wasn't say a mennonite not knowing how to send an email attachment is seen as incompetent. An older person who doesn't is seen as not adapting to a changing world.

While stereotyping is grossly unfair on an individual level judging the group based on the right end of the bell curve isn't a good representation. It would be like judging the intellectual capabilities of all children by 12 year old college graduates. Sure they prove capability and not to dismiss them out of hand but certainly not universality - moving all elementary school students to high school wouldn't be too effective for most.

That's encouraging, but a bit difficult to believe. What's your source?

Not dealing with corporate politics by either working for a small company as a salaried employee or working for any company as a contractor is the only way that I’m going to be able to keep doing this for another two decades.

And I say that this assumption without evidence is a textbook example of a prejudice.

Therefore, those "some" are bigots but the good news is they'll stop being it in a few decades, when they'll become the target of this very same bigotry.

I used to be idealistic about software development and architecture and wanted to do things “right”. When I realized that venture capital backed companies wanted me to just apply enough duck tape to get customers to survive until they got their next round of funding or got acquired, I stopped thinking long term.

Me = 35+ years in harness. Black coworkers in that time = 0 Female coworkers in that time = 3

How do I know? My success rate from applying for a job to not getting rejected (ie I take myself out of the running after I get an offer) is close to 100% over the past 20 years. I also don’t blindly submit my resume without an internal referral or through an external recruiter.

Software development is very egalitarian.

I could say the same about age but no one can tell my age yet. I go to interviews clean shaven and most non Blacks can’t tell my age without any outward signs like grey hair or a receding hairline.

I also wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is due to expectations of an ever-increasing salary. I remember one older co-worker that interviewed for a job, liked the company, and got an offer that he dismissed as "not much higher than entry level" and even called the offer insulting. My line of reasoning was that if he didn't have relevant domain experience why wouldn't get paid not much more than a new grad? It was still well into the 100-200k range - in the Bay Area but in a cheaper city (San Bruno I think). More than enough to save and live a comfortable life. I wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is more about being realistic about the fact that years of experience don't automatically translate into higher productivity, paying younger folk commensurate with their contribution - as opposed to other industries where it's entrenched that young people get paid less and older people get paid more.

Not saying age discrimination doesn't exist. I've seen job adverts that explicitly specified an age cap of 40 (despite this being blatantly illegal).

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-age-programme...

It's worth noting that surveying from Stack Overflow can mean significant selecting bias.

Often it's "useless now and outdated in a few years". It's amazing how much software today justifies its existence through a weird self-referential loop that isn't connected to solving any problems outside of itself. Complex tools to manage complexity and so on.

  most of the effort is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week 

The age purge is ongoing even for long-established, mature code bases and projects, e.g. IBM, HCL, etc.

but this is was HR believes, not the actual reality of software engineering nor of software development.

the concepts between persistence, object model mapping, handling user events, propagating user intent to business logic, share data between heterogeneous systems and present everything coherently to the user are not going to change so all the solutions are going to look and feel the same since stems from the same problems.

I mean for example chaining template for code reuse isn't something that only react ever did, I remember turbogear doing something very similar conceptually with how nesting widgets and widget having each their own template and dictionary of inputs that took from the model state directly and the lesson you learn on problem solving and code reuse do stay with you a long time, longer than any single framework.

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, keeping up with the latest tech is a lot of effort, but the majority of software development is using those tools to actually solve problems. And the principles used to solve those problems don't change all that much. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture came out almost 20 years ago but is still useful today.

My experience has been very different from what you're suggesting. All the "older folks" I've worked with know everything about your favorite framework...they just don't care. After you've been through the cycle for 10 years or so you cease to be impressed.

Tell them why you're still in an engineering role.

There is a reason, and some folks are just bad at their jobs, have no people skills or their skills stalled decades ago and they checked out.

Others, like yourself, are still interested in engineering and have no interest in management.

You're at an age where you will always be put on equal footing or above those you interview with BECAUSE of your age. Use it.

This is one of the issues in my experience, you might be in the minority there. I'm pushing 40 and notice I have a lot more interest in new technology and stacks than many of my colleagues (I've always been like that) - but the 'more experienced' they get, the harder it becomes to convince them of the advantages of new approaches, and disadvantages of their 'proven' way of working, especially seasoned developers.

They are also usually in more senior or team leader positions, which means they are very influential or can call the shots. I've seen months wasted on projects that could be just as well written in Python in a few days by a single developer, just because the 'senior dev' had something against interpreted languages and the only option for him was C++. As much as I liked the guy personally, and respected his skillset, he seriously limited technological progress within that company - which was a huge part of the reason I quit there and became freelance. Ever since - I've seen quite a few very similar situations.

Young people will jump into things without looking - which is not good, but saying no to them and blocking off their stupid ideas is a lot easier than saying no to a guy with 30 years of experience...

Not to mention that this is a somewhat terrible attitude to be honest. A lot of 45 year olds might have legitimate disadvantages compared to younger workers. Like say children, health issues, other commitments that keep them from being as flexible as someone in their youth.

So this isn't just an individual issue, it's a collective one. A little bit of looking out for each other rather than treating this like a olympic competition probably wouldn't hurt. And it's probably what got us into this situation to begin with.

"The last thing I want is someone to protect me from widespread discrimination, after all, why would I? Look at all my merits!"

The point of age discrimination is that none of your merits matter, the only thing that matters is that someone doesnt like your age, and you're out.

As a young folk myself I am certainly pro-union, especially for newer fields like IT that are too fresh to know what the benefits of a union can offer.

There are institutional issues, where a single job can take 5 years to learn do do efficiently but company policy is to give raises every year to people who meet expectations (called a "salary ratchet"). In such a situation, if someone has been doing the same job for 15 years they probably have 10 years of raises that were "seniority" based rather than "skill" based.

The discrepancy between what it costs to get the 'skill' to do a job versus keeping someone on who has a lot of history can easily reach a breaking point. Is that ageism? Or is it a failed compensation policy? Would it be better if a company said "The max we are going to pay for this position is $X" and once you get to $X you won't be getting any more raises in this job."? That might work for some jobs, it sounds a bit like forced attrition in others.

There is also skills movement, which is to say that an engineer that has developed skills and understanding in a particular "stack" may find that when that stack is no longer current, their skill level on the new "stack" is functionally identical to a new hire, with a bonus of additional wisdom. But is that pay the same as their current pay?

People change jobs to get an increase in pay, which works until it doesn't. People rarely accept a reduction in pay when they transfer within a company. It's hard to internalize how you are "worth" $X in one role, but only worth $0.8X in a different role. So that transaction has the person leaving and someone getting hired who currently only makes $0.75X and they get a bump up to $0.8X and they are happy to come on board.

The "new" thing in HR would appear to be that salary ratchets are dead and variable pay on a fixed base is the thing. This is a fairly common situation at big tech companies these days, base pay plus some variable modifier, either additional pay bonuses or stock 'units' that convert to a variable number of shares based on contribution.

My guess is that today's new engineers will find that 10 to 15 years from now their pay is no longer growing and their bonuses and RSUs never seem to quite be all that much better than they were the previous year. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? I don't have an opinion one way or the other, but as a career, engineering is becoming a lot more 'standardized' than it was.

The way I see this expressing itself is that older engineers who are up front about being ok with more median salaries tend to get hired. Ones who insist on their 'top of the tech ladder' salary from the previous place where they worked for a decade or more, have a much harder time of it.

I know from being both an engineer, a manager, and an executive that they equations usually have nothing to do with age and more to do with work product per unit $ applied. It is easier to hire someone below their optimum value and give them a pay raise than it is to hire someone at a premium and ask them to take a pay cut to bring them in line. I also know that Google tried to do this with their 'slotting' system and it had a lot of issues (mostly negative), and that the stack ranking type systems that Microsoft used to have were similarly designed to prune toward the optimum value. Bottom line is that there isn't a good system that I know of for having this kind of salary discussion that works.

I hope you're right because I'm 42 (today!). I doubt any companies I know would actually refuse to hire an older developer, but plenty of them have hiring practises that are much more likely to dissuade an older person from applying; for example, I recently saw an advert that mentioned "regular all-night coding parties". While that's not ageism per se, it's definitely designed to appeal to people who are much more likely to be younger.

When I was an intern in a bank they were laying people off on a massive scale. They only keep critical staff and recent graduate, cause they were cheap.

Legal protections should not be signed away. Collective action is the power labour wields.

Some Higher grades got 100,000 k and 6 years extra pension.

My intent was simply that people should never be deluded into thinking that the fluff like emotional appeals, a company’s ‘mission’, a startup posturing as a family, internal propaganda, etc are things that really matter. If you are exchanging your time for money, my opinion is you should always get to the heart of what’s important: “What’s in it for me?” Related questions: “Can this business be successful?” “What are the true (non-bullshit) hard numbers that underpin this business?” “Will I be compensated according to the value I’m creating?” “What’s the value of the career capital I’ll get out of this?” My experience is that a good number of modern tech companies will leave the answers to these questions deliberately opaque.

Ideally you also avoid working for unprincipled organizations that are rationalizing bad behavior. But that’s not always feasible because it could imply a high opportunity cost. For example, having seen it from the inside, Facebook is in my opinion a shitshow. They will do absolutely anything that isn’t outright illegal (including things that would seem blatantly unethical to a neurotypical person) to pad their bottom line. But they pay well and it looks good on your resume.

And that tragic cycle of ‘do shitty things -> make more money -> grow -> hire more people -> repeat’ is the dumpster fire we’ve collectively chosen to base our society on. ‘Hate the game not the player’ more or less captures how I feel about all of this.

If you stay at a job you love one of two things will happen.

- you will get cost of living wages while people doing your same job will come in and get market wages.

- you will “love” your job and your job won’t reciprocate and you will find yourself unable to find a new one because you haven’t kept your network strong, your resume up to date, or your skillset current and you will be crying “ageism” while people who have done all of the above won’t have the same issue.

Though Weinberg tried to wash his hand of it, it was in fact used as as slogan, and was attributed to multiple sources.

But this is your only argument why I should care about this older folks?