Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination. I wish companies also added age in the diversity reports, and if they did talk about why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering. If we wish to make engineering career to span several decades, we should all actively try to get o address this.
No, there's a small percentage of older folks in software engineering. In almost any other engineering discipline, you'll find many older engineers who enjoy long careers, and whose perceived value often grows with age. That's because actual engineering principles change very slowly.
Most software jobs do not involve much engineering in the traditional sense; most of the effort is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week libraries and frameworks, information that will be often be outdated and useless in a few years.
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.
Expectations on whose part? Based on what I read here on HN, many employers don't want to even interview older applicants because they are just so sure that any older person is going to demand too much money.
For a software developer working on standard CRUD database-backed applications, the difference in productivity and usefulness to the company at 5-10 years is really not that different at 20 years.
This effect is also compounded by the fact that the less experienced developer now looks a lot better if he is essentially doing the exact same job that a 20 year experience developer is doing.
Note that what I'm talking about has very little to do with "keeping up with the latest frontend frameworks" or stuff like that. Software engineering in this sense is like a trade - if your sink is broken and you need it fixed, would you hire pay $15 / hour for a plumber with 5 years experience or pay $30 / hour for a plumber with 10 years experience? You know that the sink can be easily fixed by most decent plumbers so the amount of experience they have really doesn't matter beyond a certain point.
The hierarchy of the trade union is what sustains this service model in the marketplace.
In that situation I would consider the "Master Plumber" akin to a lead developer or project manager. Which goes back to my main point - in software development you eventually need to either move to a management/leadership role or specialise in domain specific fields like security, computer graphics, systems architecture etc.
But they will shut it off if you don’t fix it in, say, 10 days...
Find a decent plumber who isn't so busy that they will do a small job like fixing a sink - now that is the real problem.
And bad plumbers can create chaos in ways that would make lawyers jealous - we had to call the police on a plumber once....
Presumably because you're paying him for his ability to apply his broader knowledge and experience to this domain; he is not coming to the table with the same limited set of tools as the new graduate. He will be up to speed more quickly, and his solutions will tend to be more comprehensive because of his wider perspective.
If the interviewing company isn't looking for that, then the offer reflects their present needs -- not the candidate's capabilities. I could see how that's insulting, since that's a whole lot of wasted time.
> I've always enjoyed talking with them about how software development used to be back in the day. From your words I see that you value their knowledge of things past, but I don't see anything about enjoying the discussion of current/future development with them. Is that not something that you value as much, or that you find in some way lacking? Or something that you haven't explored because of age?
Re: enjoying talking about current development. I do enjoy that as well, but that's not specifix to age or experience. The sane discussions can be had with less experienced people. Older developers uniquely offer those experiences.
How many companies maintain a framework/stack from 20-30yrs ago? The average new company will die after ~7yrs from start date. Only a few major monopoly-style companies survive like IBM and Microsoft. Which is basically the only software that runs forever on that type of scale. That's only a percentage of available jobs.
And even within IBM and Microsoft there are countless sub-projects within the company...beyond say the classic Windows OS, Word, etc from the 90s there are tons of other programming work going on (for ex: VSCode is JS or IBM's cloud + consulting work). Very few of those newer projects are going to look much like the 20yr old one you cut your teeth on early in your careerr.
I don't think no one is saying age discrimination doesn't exist. But this is a unique problem in our industry rarely found in other fields.
Very few of those newer projects are going to
look much like the 20yr old one you cut your
teeth on early in your careerr.
Overall the experience of developing a comparable-scale project in java on tomcat in 2001 is not that different from a modern one in ES6 on node.js in 2019.
All the popular languages are sadly still descendants of C, just with variations on the strongly/weakly typed spectrum, and if functions are first or second class.
The hard stuff is still identifying requirements, managing expectations, and writing code that can adapt to changing requirements overtime. None of the hard stuff has anything to do with the language or framework you are using.
Sure they do. They're just slower at it. I've seen plenty of established companies jump on React bandwagon right after jumping off Angular, for example. One year and the "new" framework is thrown out of the window. (But all the software written in it remains and creates maintenance liability.)
Funny thing is, more often than not they don't even need SPAs in the first place.
Some companies for instance have a very stable business and keep a stable stack, but then hit a wall when trying to hire. They'll see average people coming to them, but those are not as efficient as their current staff who is now super experienced and want people who can match them.
Or they'll try to find graduate level people to train forward, but newcomers have no interest in the old stack, as it won't pimp their resume that much to their eyes.
Solution: keep using trendy frameworks.
Veterans will be happy to see shiny things, recruiting becomes that much easier, buzzword capacity increases all other the map. And all of these have a real benefit, in people retention, hiring cost, marketing opportunities that can cover the man/hour cost of moving frameworks.
So you are an expert in Java service oriented architecture? Sorry, but we are now looking for developers with Spring Boot 2.x Microservice experience.
Are application server / Java XML SOA graybeards also paid a lot?
My current technological focus are Spring Boot applications, seasoned with everything that comes with that: SQL, devops basics, etc. If Spring Boot is still a thing in 10 - 20 years I'd be extremely surprised.
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.
The usual defect is that generation N isn't very good at D_n-x where x is greater than the mean experience of the implementing engineer(s), and often isn't even very good at D_n-1.
When you need a finicky "dependency manager" just to get started writing something, you've already lost.
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.
There is a combination of seemingly relentless growth in demand and people deciding they've had enough and hitting the management track however. At least in London/finance. The number of people I started with that are still coding on a daily basis is very small.
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.
But if the firm survives the startup phase, you really want anchors, both in technical and cultural dimensions. A certain type of tech-manager feels threatened by that, I think, so they jettison anyone who might be too independent.
Not to mention, experience matters. There are a few folks on my team who are the go-to folks, not because of their title, but because they tend to know the correct answer/are able to diagnose and fix your weird issue. Those people, without exception, are neither young nor managers.
"Sonny, that reminds me of the time I canceled a 3 month reporting project with two hour's worth of awk..."
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.
Of course, reality gets in the way and they often have to cut corners every now and then.
Your investors don’t care about how well architected your code is or the amount of automated test coverage you have.
People who are now old enough to be grandparents INVENTED computers and the internet.
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.
My dad is also retired. And the only thing he doesn't seem to be able to do is nothing.
I am not sure I can make 10 km these days...
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.
If people started posting blatantly racist things here, should we not say anything?
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.
Older folks like me, got lots of "culture" questions that were so vague. I'd ask what they mean but they can't really explain what they were getting at. I'd just explain that I've worked with a lot of different people, mentored new employees, etc.
When we compared interview notes younger folks, never heard that phrase. Now that could be nothing, but it felt like something.
One guy from the camp actually had the HR person call him up and say they were concerned about his age. When he asked her what that meant, she couldn't explain exactly. He thought maybe she realized what she said and was embarrassed, he was annoyed so he asked later what they were concerned about "oh your age, you're older".... nope, she apparently didn't think anything was wrong with that.
Meanwhile I got my job eventually. I see folks come and go. Younger folks realizing they don't like the work and moving on (nothing wrong with that) others invited to move on. The president of the company says to me one day "You just seem to get a lot of these things, you can talk to customers, our sales guys, I like your communication.." and so on. Like yeah, because I've done other technical things before, have experience. Experience pays in a lot of ways.
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.
These engineers, in my experience, have the greatest likelihood of being great hires. They require less management, understand getting results, and have a much easier time working with more kinds of people. They write code with an eye for maintenance, and are more likely to stick around for the long haul to maintain that code instead of job hopping for promotions and raises.
Bad managers can be reluctant to hire them or keep them because they can be intimidating to manage. They quite often have more experience than their managers, and are more inclined to challenge their ideas. Inexperienced software engineering managers I've met think they have to know more than than their team or they'll be a threat to their position. There are also the usual "soft concerns" that are very similar to the ones leveled against hiring women, such as being more likely to choose work/life balance.
I was lucky in that I worked with my first grey hair for several years before becoming a manager and taking them on, so we already had a working relationship. Without that, I imagine I would've fallen into the traps above.
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.
On occasion, it's video.
ADHD, PTSD, dyslexia, social anxiety disorder, etc.
Just because someone is white and male doesn't mean they're not struggling or discriminated against.
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...
So, you aren't bad for wanting that; specialization (to the degree of artisan) seems to have fallen out of vogue (except for rockstar roles, which some exist in programming).
I really admire the generation older than me having that sort of experience, as I think by the time I was exposed to later PCs things had become more and more abstracted. Not that we should return to my romantic notion of Commodore 64s, but there's something that feels holistic about it than a more conventional PC setup today.
I left the company to work for a small startup and negotiated not to be a team lead. I reiterated that at my last review. I’m much more effective just being a member of different teams and guiding the teams through just mentoring, advising and demonstrating.
If at all possible, I plan to be here at least another 4 or 5 years, but this will be my last software development full time salaried job hopefully. I’ll be 50.
I personally haven’t heard ageism being that much of an issue from other developers who are also 40+ who have kept their skills and their network current - ie we hardly ever get rejected from jobs we apply for. But, I definitely plan on contracting or consulting after I leave my current job.
Answer: F1 contains '123 ', F2 contains '12', because both of these are alphanumeric moves even though F1 has a numeric picture.
https://www.google.com/search?q=gender+discrimination+silico...
Front page articles from New Yorker, Guardian, NBC Affiliate, Wharton, NY Times, Atlantic, CNN
Now with age discrimination silicon valley
https://www.google.com/search?q=age+discrimination+silicon+v...
You get Entrepreneur, Wired, Axios, The Ladders, Dice, USA Today, Market Watch, FT.
In the mainstream press, gender discrimination is focused on much more than age discrimination.
Uncle Bob has a nice article explaining that the number of programmers doubles every five years: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
So the chance of encountering somebody over 40 in a project is about 2^4 or one in 16, assuming lots of people in their early 20s are outnumbering those in their forties. It jumps to 32 for people over 45, 64 for people in their early fifties. I know people who are still coding in their late sixties. I'm 44, and most people I deal with are below 30. Most of the people my age that I know or used to work are by and large still active in the field though a few of them have become managers. Also, seniority means they tend to be big earners and typically too expensive for small projects. Quite a few are doing very lucrative free lance gigs at premium rates, disappeared into big corporations in some senior role, etc.
After that, you had better be visibly up to date on your field, because it will be people’s starting assumption that you are woefully behind the times. And, in fairness, it seems like many docs at that stage of their career are.
Can't say I've seen this in Ireland, I found that good experienced developers are highly valued. Do you think it's worse in places like SF than the rest of the USA ?
That's because the vocal parts for the "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" are mainly white well-off younger people.
Gender causes naturally draw them in. And through they are predominantly white, race causes make them appear as hip and invested in other cultures.
For them being old is not a reality. If it's anything, it's obscene. Why don't these old people just die?
That's the same reason those giving coverage to "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" also get a free pass on pissing on poor people (whether "white trash" or black/latinos/etc when they're not subjected to race-driven but poverty driven abuses).
But median age for programmers is ~40.
That's encouraging, but a bit difficult to believe. What's your source?
But here’s a BLS page, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm
Adding up a few related categories that’s only counting about 2 million workers, so it’s also possible that some younger workers aren’t being properly counted in the right category. Dunno...
Also keep in mind, a whole lot of programmers are working on some legacy enterprise applications instead of working at young companies on web apps. In some companies the age distribution is going to skew much younger.
It is real in general and in the end of last century it has become severe because of our quickly shifting society (the "computer" and "networking" revolutions, among others)
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.
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.
> Results from three methods of estimating retest effects in this project,... converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s.
If you (and I hope you do) live well beyond your 20s and 30s I hope you'll remember that getting fucked by ageism is real and unavoidable if you work for the man in this industry.
On the other hand is winforms development that different from react/node.js? On the surface it is very different, but good UI principles -which I argue is what truly matters- didn't change all that much, if at all.
The theory that you learn as you work towards your CS degree does not get outdated either, but most of what you use in the average software engineering job is not about theory. It requires knowing the latest languages, frameworks, and practices. These things change every six months. Even if you are not moving to a new language, the language is evolving. Even if you keep using the same framework, the API will change. Crystallized intelligence here is mostly useless.
> A doctor in her 20's will treat 80% of the diseases in the same way when she's 70.
this is patently untrue. I'm in my 6th year of practicing Medicine. During my first day of classes, we were told that 50% of the knowledge we gained would be obsolete by the time we graduated. I took this as a metaphor for the pace of change. However, with the benefit of 2 cycles (Medical School, and then my working years) this has been absolutely true.
We have totally changed both how we approach heart disease/heart attacks (classifications) and treatments. We have a cure for hepatitis C. Dietary recommendations have been upended. Treatment of trauma has changed. That's just a brief overview.
Whilst the underlying biology may remain the same, treatments even over the last 6 years have changed significantly, and continues to change significantly
With the exception of cancer has the treatment of these diseases changed that much since 2009? If you're a specialist I imagined it's changed more but for a general practitioner it seems like treatment hasn't changed a whole lot. Most of the people I know with these conditions are taking the same drugs in 2019 as they were in 2009.
I know that seems less in your face than what your example was, but... to a non-programmer, your job is identical to what it was a decade ago, too. You’re just typing a slightly different pattern words into a compiler than you did before. Turns out, people outside of a technical specialty have a pretty shitty understanding of the internal workings of that specialty.
If you could find an article that describes the changes over the last 10 years, or write a description that would be especially persuasive. I searched for articles online but all the ones I found seemed to make the changes in the field seem minuscule over the last decade.
You could tell the psychs in the audience hadn’t read up on Alzheimer’s in the last couple of years, because their questions were just so damned ignorant. And when I say “ignorant” I mean “knew 99% of the relevant information, but didn’t know about the current state of knowledge regarding diagnostic testing, biomarkers, etc.”
They knew more than they knew in med school. They didn’t know enough to competently manage an Alzheimer’s patient to modern standards. They wouldn’t know how to best (accurately, efficiently) diagnose it. They wouldn’t know when to start meds. They wouldn’t know when was the best time to discontinue meds. Most of the psych in attendance were residents - they were maybe two or three years out of school.
And Alzheimer’s has barely changed at all. That’s one of the slowest changing topics in medicine.
(Not a criticism of psych. Alzheimer’s in my institution, and generally in the medical field, is owned by neuro. They just happen to be a good stand-in for “folks a couple of years out of med school” here.)
My brother just started learning to program last year, and some of his questions have highlighted just how much I forgot that I had to learn at some point. So much so that I think your 90%/10% ratio does actually still apply in day-to-day software development.
https://www.centerwatch.com/drug-information/fda-approved-dr...
And that's just the UI, a real developer would be doing a lot of logic behind the UI, database design, debugging production issues, talking to stakeholders, etc, that's an enormous wealth of transferable skills.
I'd pick the MEAN developer everytime.
Sure in a year maybe the second one would be more productive. But there aren't any allergists that are a year away from productivity. Even if they hadn't learned anything in 10 years.
And you're kidding yourself if you think it takes a year to get up and running in whatever GUI stack was cool this year, the guy with 10 years of experience in winforms obviously knows a thing or two about picking stable mature technologies.