Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

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I'm always unsure about how to judge whether the lower percentages of older engineers I see is due to age discrimination or just a low percentage of older engineers period. Software developers are young in general. And interestingly the United States has the highest average age [1]. At my workplace I can count at least one "greybeard" on most teams. I don't get the sense that they are discriminated against because of their age. I've always enjoyed talking with them about how software development used to be back in the day. I remember talking to one guy that worked on a text editor back in the 80s that was backed by a mainframe. The terminal didn't have enough computing power to manage the whole document, so it only stored a few pages locally and swapped them in from the mainframe as the user scrolled to them. Things like bulk find-replace were done via an RPC. It's interesting how many parallels this has to modern client-server web-apps. I especially like to hear from people that programmed on punch cards - that's kind of stuff is fascinating to me.

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.

I think you hit the nail on the head. Absolutely age discrimination exists but there are also other factors at play in some situations. Without specific domain knowledge or management experience there is a ceiling to how much experience helps the company.

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.

If your broken sink is connected to a broken pipe under the street in front of your house on your property, and you find that you need to hire a Master Plumber with a team of juniors to fix it, you may find that the same price/years of experience equation exists.

The hierarchy of the trade union is what sustains this service model in the marketplace.

"hire a Master Plumber with a team of juniors to fix it"

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.

Wouldn't that be the responsibility of the water company which is civil engineering

Every house has a connection to the water main - what happens after that connection point is not their responsibility to repair.

But they will shut it off if you don’t fix it in, say, 10 days...

"You know that the sink can be easily fixed by most decent plumbers"

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....

>I also wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is due to expectations of an ever-increasing salary.

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.

Granted, the reaction of my older co-worker has demonstrated (albeit in only one instance) that this assumption does hold true.

> 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?

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?

How much more productive is a developer with 20 years experience working on something [s]he has no direct domain knowledge about vs. one with 2-3 years? Probably not enough to justify a very substantial salary difference.

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.

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