Chinese tech firms are throwing out applicants over the age of 30
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I mean, the idea that people get better with experience... ludicrous! Beyond ludicrous! Unpatriotic!
Not entirely sure I buy it as a industry-wide phenomenon, though. I'd guess this is a particular subset of the industry or something, just as it is in the West.
It doesn't help that as near as I can tell, the undergraduate computer science education has barely changed in the 20-25 years since I took it. This is generally a good thing, not a criticism; it shouldn't be chasing every fresh hot trend, that's not its job. But if the fresh young whippersnappers are supposed to be picking up the hot skillz that will put this 20+-year veteran to shame, it's not clear to me exactly where they are supposed to be getting these hot skillz from. It certainly isn't from their undergraduate education.
First of all, the title of the article isn’t supported by the content.
Secondly, the evidence of the title appears to be a single unnamed recruiter.
Third, of course a vast majority of people in tech in China are going to be young. Do people not remember the economic situation of China 20-30 years ago?
The trees: fire anyone above 30.
The forest: Many development processes that required experience are being outsourced to companies like Amazon, Google, via their cloud computing platforms.
It is now possible to read some docs, follow some tuts and have a service that scales. If the inside is ugly, no one cares. That's the forest.
The problem is that this is how management thinks all over the world because it is short-term profitable.
Find another industry, seriously.
But no, instead you set the wage so that anyone with a choice leaves.
I think the main reason for these places that are mainly hiring young programmers are that they are way less expensive if you count in unpaid overtime you can force them into. Older programmers that agree to that are desperate and not sought after anyway. Young programmers need experience so that they can become older programmers and agree to it.
Nah, roll in, make some money, fuck off in two-three hours.
Yeah, so now your inexperienced developer just deployed something that takes 10 or 100x more resources than it should, and now you have a massive AWS or GCP bill to pay.
(Which brings up an interesting question, at what point does your cloud computing bill reach a point where it's worth it to pay the slight premium for a more senior engineer to come in and clean up the obvious inefficiencies?)
"The problem is that this is how management thinks all over the world because it is short-term profitable."
Not really, as so many early stage software companies are not interested in being profitable, short-term or otherwise. So cost management and profits are irrelevant, just resume padding for the next opportunity.
The company was making hand over fist. They didn't care about the quality so long as the payments were made and they weren't losing customers to competition due to tech choices.
Where they don't work is long term, when investors (or acquisitors) realize that they've been taken hook, line, and sinker. And really, it doesn't even work if anyone did due diligence, but technical diligence is almost as difficult to do well as interviewing.
The ones in charge who are older have what I call a frat house mentality.
In China, seasonal workers coming into the city actually earn more than college degree holders because there's just so many people with degrees. We something similar starting to happen in the US, as more and more people get bachelors degrees, those people get compensated less and less.
Maybe 10 years ago you could say this. But today the statement needs to solidly be:
>This is what the state of affairs has been in the US for years now. More people got bachelor's and were compensated less and less. More positions that previously required a high school degree now arbitrarily require a bachelor's. Students are flocking to trade schools in record numbers, and colleges/universities are almost all in a downward spiral right now.
> Employment of software developers is projected to grow 24 percent from 2016 to 2026, much faster than the average for all occupations. Employment of applications developers is projected to grow 31 percent, and employment of systems developers is projected to grow 11 percent. The main reason for the growth in both applications developers and systems developers is a large increase in the demand for computer software.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
"The proportion of high school students who earned three or more credits in occupational education — typically an indication that they're interested in careers in the skilled trades — has fallen from 1 in 4 in 1990 to 1 in 5 now, according to the U.S. Department of Education."
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/04/25/605092520/high-pa...
This is now 2019.
Working on the cutting edge of higher education AND career/tech programs, the data isn't updated yet just because of the lag for completion rates, but students are HEAVILY moving toward skilled trades.
At my institution we have seen a 14% decrease in 'traditional' programs (think transfer to bachelors programs) and a 9% increase in skilled trades programs.
And a fun fact that those two numbers aren't the same. Fewer skilled trades require formal schooling than 'traditional' fields. Many students are not enrolling at all and are just finishing apprenticeships.
We're in a traditionally strong institution, and our enrollment is flat to 1% up at best. Many institutions in our local system are down in enrollment in the double digits in the last 3-5 years.
I'd argue that protesting is tied to how easy it's to find a new job which tends to be easier with experience.
Moreover, it seems unintuitive that someone with a mortgage and kids to feed could be more discerning about where their paycheck comes from.
Is that actually the case? When I think of protests, I don't think of the elderly.
Middle aged people get more conservative in part because they learned from their mistakes in their younger years: there often is a good reason for the things done in the past and change can be for the worse as often as for the better - they know how to handle the problems of today and don't want to learn how to handle the new problems.
The elderly have a decline in ability (which they often don't want to admit). They need to be conservative because without their habits they cannot handle life. They also need to trust others to help them do things they no longer can. They thus tend to be too trusting because they have no choice but trust someone without knowing if that someone is trustworthy.
Note that I did not put ages above. People go through things at different stages. People can be taught wisdom to some extent. There are thousands of different things to apply the above too: once you get past about 5 years old you are probably simultaneously in each stage for different things you deal with.
Young workers bring naivety with them. They think they can "make a difference" and have little to risk by pushing back.
The older workers seem to settle into happily getting their tasks done so they can go home and do something they enjoy - hobbies, family, etc.
The main problem is employees are "at-will." Meaning they can be fired at anytime without reason. companies have no incentive to not overwork employees. Laws regarding "at-will" need to be changed
Which is why when my department asked to hire a senior person to replace someone who transferred on leadership made us hire an entry level person to train up (then the next person left and we were allowed to hire a senior person).
Not that I don't believe it because things like that appear to happen informally in the US as well, but article would have been better with some supporting numbers.
1. Given Large supply of Developers as compared to Demand.
1.1 What causes Poor Software Quality Control and Poor hiring practices(resume padding or tech hiring offloaded to non techies)?
Are things like Long/Odd Working hours, Poor wages(race to the bottom), Talent flight and High attrition rate, Poor productivity etc just enforcing a vicious cycle till things hit some sort of equilibrium(software that just works and is barely maintainable and business margin is based on things like PPP between countries)?
1.2 How do good things come about; Like Decent/Good Software Quality Control, Good Hiring practices? Perhaps these cases have just okayish wages but poor working hours/balance? And there is an implicit bias towards a Younger talent pool because of focus on productivity.
2. Given short supply of workers as compared to Demand I have seen similarities to 1.1 and 1.2, the only difference is that people have options and always gravitates towards better employers and work conditions; the wages are overall much better than case 1 period. There are still many interesting economic questions to be answered here, but likely different, more specialized ones as compared to (1).
It'd be nice to entice them to resettle in cities other than those on the west coast, too, but that might be a local culture problem, less amenable to remediation by legislation.
I was already in a technical field, was laid off after a company buyout, I changed careers and took a coding bootcamp.
A few like minded classmates and I would compare notes after we did interviews.
The other two older guys and I got a lot of "culture" related questions. One dude was actually told by the recruiter that they were worried he was too old, he was surprised they'd actually say it to him so he asked ... and the recruiter repeated herself happily.
Meanwhile the younger classmates reported hearing nothing about "company culture" in any of their interviews...
The description of culture was often pretty benign ("we like to have fun" and so forth) but I couldn't help but wonder if it wasn't just a placeholder for some bias. On one occasion I got a description of "we're a young office".
But that wasn't really a big deal, I was used to HR reps at that company not understanding anything about benefits.
The kicker was that her profile picture in the email was her in the company bathroom, taking one of those "hold the camera up in the air to accentuate cleavage" type photos.
I didn't even want to keep her her email open too long...
Religion is off-limits in the US.
It's humbling. It's also encouraging to extrapolate that into how much more room there is to grow.
When you've got a few years of experience your career progression speaks for itself (hopefully). You're differentiated because of the sequence of jobs you've held, and you can prove you can ship things because you have shipped things. 20-somethings usually don't have those luxuries.
At least one place never shipped a product and closed down... but god damn they had a lot of toys in their office and everyone was having a great time playing with them. ;)
Meanwhile I got a job at a place along side a younger guy who straight up was a way better programmer than me, but he really struggled with stuff like working independently without being told exactly what to do, and just understanding customer business logic / what questions to ask and so forth. Good kid but just needed more experience working. He moved on to a better place for him where he could get more structure.
In literally everything else, hierarchy is by age.
Consider that a bad computer program business can still make a bajillion dollars. Maybe the fact that its CEO is young enough to understand the problem matters. Or maybe it's as simple as, young people who are more skilled than older people, and now can be in charge. Most of the value may be tied up in something else, but most of the competitive advantage may be tied up in the age.
My feeling is, the ability for young people to be in charge is similar to (but not as impactful as) other historic opening-of-opportunities for people in the workforce.
Hierarchy is by age because ability to lead and make good decisions is heavily correlated with age, because that's heavily correlated with experience, one of the most relevant metrics. It is so heavily correlated with age that many companies and/or unions have in various ways institutionalized that connection and reified it beyond what is justified by the facts.
There are young people who can lead. I suspect in the vast bulk of those cases a lot of that leadership is the wisdom to listen to more experienced people, and adapt it to their local circumstances. There is nothing wrong with that; it legitimately would put them ahead of their peers and bring great value to both them and whoever hires them. I suspect the number of cases of a brilliant young leader who is truly just doing it on their own is so small as to be not something worth worrying yourself about. Probably a lot of young would-be leaders have been hurt by the idea that it is some Platonic aspect of their youth they should be pursing and the fogies should just be ignored if not actively contradicted; that's very rarely a way to get ahead. The cases I can think of where some young founder "showed them" are not cases where they tore up the old rule book and did everything in a fresh new way, but more cases where they identified a particular inefficiency in the old ways and exploited that, because you really can't make progress by simply doing the opposite of whatever worked in the past.
"My feeling is, the ability for young people to be in charge is similar to (but not as impactful as) other historic opening-of-opportunities for people in the workforce."
No, I wouldn't think so. Those other "historic" opportunities all revolve around things that are attributes of people that are immutable. Your age is not such an attribute. Indeed, many wish it were immutable. But it's not. Certainly we want to make sure that young people have a path forward into leadership and management, because society's ongoing existence requires it, but they don't need any sort of special management affirmative action program or anything. Time will take care of your youth, in all senses of the term, whether you like it or not.
Listen, the same exact things were said about women, or Jews, any number of groups of people who were excluded, by whatever means, coercive or not, from opportunities of employment, in various societies in the industrial world.
I'm not saying we should throw out applications of people over 30. I'm saying that management is now open to young people, and it turns out businesses make tons of money despite being full of young people, so all your god-damned correlations are really just a bunch of fucking folk wisdom that doesn't add up to anything.
It's basically the best time, ever, in the history of the world, to achieve prestige or power as an 18-21 year old, ever, a benefit that is available to everyone's kids, including yours, and you're never going to want to change that, even if it personally sometimes results in less prestige or power for older people.
And the reason why that was a bad thing isn't that it is just always wrong to say that skill is correlated with various attributes. Those things are wrong because skill isn't correlated with those things.
Leadership skill is correlated with age. The alternative is, as I said in another post, to say that as a young person, you are currently as skilled as you will ever be. You will never learn anything more. You will never get any better. You will never deserve a raise because you're bringing more value to the business. You are almost certainly not going to agree to this about yourself. Even if you do, I'm going to tell you right now that I think you're saying it just to be argumentative on the internet, and that you don't really believe it. Particularly the raise bit.
If everyone's getting better with experience, age can't help but be correlated with skill. It's a bit weaker mathematically, but in practice, it'll happen the other way too.
The reason we can even entertain the idea that experience doesn't matter is that there was a relatively recent event in which the environment changed so completely and quickly that a great deal of practical experience was rendered irrelevant. However, by "relatively recently", I mean, the mid-to-late 1990s, when we went from mainframes and "big iron" terminals to commodity computers and the web. Since then, there has been no similar sea change.
"you're never going to want to change that"
What I "want" is utterly irrelevant. I certainly do not want a world in which people celebrate failure to learn from experience. But that want is also irrelevant to what actually happens, seeing as there are still a lot of people working very hard to produce a cultural environment in which we studiously fail to learn from the past. (That's not a crack at you; I'm more taking a crack at modern academia there, which to my eye is to a large degree devoted to precisely that.)
I would advise you to lose the chip off your shoulder, try to learn from people who have already learned the hard way, and stop thinking you've got it all figured out, because ironically, if you do in fact want to displace the older fogies, it is precisely thinking that you've got it all figured out and that you don't need to listen nobody, nohow that will prevent you from doing that. The correct path is to A: listen to the people with experience B: think about it a lot C: think about it in your local context and then D: tweak it as appropriate for your local environment.
I would also advise you to carefully distinguish between people like me, who include step D, and those who don't. That D is all the difference. By no means would I expect advice from those who have gone before to apply 100% in a changing world. However, the world does not generally change discontinuously, nor does it change as much as the tech industry sometimes fancies itself changing. It's still going to apply 98%. That 2% can still be a big deal; it's the difference between Uber/Lyft and a conventional taxi company. But it's a lot easier to get there with the procedure I outlined in the previous paragraph than to try to reconstruct the entire knowledge base from scratch.
If, on the other hand, you want to start a business where you don't focus on customers because that's what your old fogie advisors told you to do, and you don't worry too much about revenue because that's what your old fogie advisors told you to do, and you don't worry about how you're going to get repeat customers because that's what your old fogie advisors told you to do, and you don't worry about complying with the local laws because "move fast and break things" is more important than listening to your old fogie advisors, and you don't ask anyone for advice on how to hire properly because it'll just be old fogie advice, etc. etc.... well... I did my part here. It's on you. One less "young person" to worry about upstaging me in the future, I guess.
Ironically to me personally, even as I write this, my wife and I are watching a relatively young person basically throw their financial future away, against the advice of all of their family and friends. In this case not because of an active rebellion against the old fogies, just someone not used to taking advice, and who takes the advice not to do something as a personal criticism, rather than an attempt to help them. It's not an HN-type of situation either. A tech startup may be a lottery ticket, but there is a chance of winning, and as long as you don't hang on to a failing business too hard, the worst case scenario isn't really all that bad; you made a living, you got a heck of a lot of great experience, and you can walk into any number of jobs or even perhaps another startup if you still impressed your investors even so. In this case, the best case scenario is that after 20 or so years of exceedingly hard work, they'll catch up to where they could have been if they just got a normal (non-tech) job, and both the average and worst case scenarios are substantially worse. Failing to learn from other's experience isn't just an academic problem. It's a real problem.
I've been subtly persuaded by a recruiter from applying to a company via persistent "culture fit" questions. The recruiter _kept_ reiterating how awesome the office's on-tap beers, foosball tables, and casual culture made it a fun place to work.
I'd steer the question back to benefits, remote work, policies, etc. Only to have the recruiter hammer again on the "fun" stuff, talk about how the co-workers enjoy getting a beer together after work. Eventually I got the hint.
Later I found out that the company has a reputation locally for constantly hiring new college grads and burning them out via overwork, shifting project requirements, and random changes of software infrastructure. Guess I dodged a bullet. But it's interesting that probably many of their problems could be solved just from hiring a few experienced devs, data engineers, and project managers.
The hint wasn't that you're a bad culture fit, the hint was that there are no benefits.
You don't have to be over 40 to need benefits.
I worked at a similar place, and it was a fucking disaster. They would be in the office for 12 hours a day and maybe do 5 hours of work. Meanwhile, there were endless gokart races, pingpong tournaments, and general nonsense. People wouldn't just waste their own time but also made it nearly impossible to focus on your work.
I made it nine months because I was too foolish to quit faster.
It definitely skewed older at the time I joined, although we've hired quite a few people in their 20's/early 30's since then.
It's a difficult situation for a good recruiter. On one hand, you don't want to discriminate illegally, but on the other hand, you want the company you're working for (and the candidate) to be happy with your results.
30+ women/men are the staple of science, and if they are not the staple of software engineering then you’re making a big mistake.
I really don't know what any of the places I interviewed at are REALLY thinking too. Just suspicions.
You can also look at HN. Ageism topic posts usually have comments that a proper HR person could sense from across the building, fast enough to slam the emergency power cutoff button, mid-sentence.
It seems like there's often also an upvoted comment by a claimed middle-aged person, saying how they're so dumb now (which we who make a living with our brains should find alarming).
The Age Discrimination In Employment Act only prohibits discrimination against workers age 40 and older. There is no federal restriction against disfavoring workers at age 39 for being too old, nor against favoring workers over 40 at the expense of younger ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discrimination_in_Employme...
Bad managers operate on the assumption that writing software is like making widgets - it's just a matter of man-hours. They don't believe in the 10x developer, they don't even believe in the 1.1x developer; their employees are just meat in a seat.
"But does it have legs? Will it put butts in seats?"
One way humans learn to be less awful is when they observe the same bad behaviors they've been engaging in on their rivals or frenemies.
The opposite seems to be true in corporations and nation-states: any bad behavior by a competitor is an excuse to adopt the same practice and lobby for lax laws when regulations prevent that; competitiveness trumping societal sustainability.
No one wants to be an unpaid part-time kindergarten teacher in addition to the normal job.
Culture fit is a problem with younger colleges only when "culture" implies "juvenile behaviour".
Obviously this isn't the case, but I do find it curious that the market doesn't seem to prove a strong enough incentive for the people making hiring decisions to overcome their biases.
When you combine "wages are lower for women" with "the free market," you get "businesses will insist on hiring more women any way they can."
But when you add in "techbro bias against women (and mutual disgust at having to work with the techbro fraternity with constant harassment)" and reference again "women in tech get paid less" you get fewer women available in a market (because a free market goes both ways) and less chance of women being hired on despite HR and management constantly pushing for more women.
I've seen situations where the best candidate was interviewed first and failed (just because he was first). Then by the time the company got around to finish interviewing 5 more, several weeks later, the interviewees got so tired of interviewing they just accepted the last candidate, even though in my opinion there had been several better ones earlier.
Or the biases just aren't there in the way somebody from the outside perceives them, or the market would very much take care of it. This kind of reasoning ("the fundamental market mechanics totally don't apply" vs "my perception is probably flawed and things aren't as easy as they seem") reminds me of most people's early reactions when they encounter bugs: "this must be a bug in the OS/compiler/interpreter" vs "I must've made a mistake/misunderstood something". With more experience, they usually find out that it's somewhat unlikely to be the first person to encounter a super weird bug, and very likely to make mistakes.
At a certain point, you start fervently hoping it's "I must've made a mistake/misunderstood something", because then you can fix it. But good luck waiting for the OS/compiler/interpreter to be fixed, or digging into an unfamiliar open source code base to fix it yourself.