New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
At the team standup afterward, pretty much everyone was an unreserved yes except the engineering manager who directly said he was concerned about the candidate’s age, and whether he would “fit in.” He wondered out loud whether we could reject the candidate on this basis. The CTO was at the meeting and immediately shut that line of questioning down, although none of us ever heard from that candidate again. Something I’ll never forget as I get older in this field.
Your CTO shut it down because your engineering manager was breaking Federal law in public. However, I don't need to tell you what happens to candidates that the hiring manager doesn't want to hire.
Also, I have witnessed similar situations multiple times. Everyone who worked for over 10 years knows ageism is thriving in tech, especially in the Bay.
Would you consider this to be age discrimination (from a moral perspective; let's ignore legal considerations since those are incredibly vague and convoluted)?
Also, none of the things you mentioned contribute to team cohesion, they are all detrimental to it.
Basically you are describing a CTO that has no idea how to CTO. We can take solace in the fact that his startup will fail hard.
It's straightforward (disparate impact) age discrimination from a legal perspective. The law in this area isn't that vague and convoluted.
> The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit did not agree. In a ruling this year supporting CareFusion, it stated that recruiting practices that have the effect of screening out older applicants — what is known in legal terms as having a “disparate impact” — did not violate the law.
I am not a lawyer, but it appears to me that the law is convoluted enough for the 7th court of appeals to offer an alternate decision.
Disparate impact is not a violation of the US law (neither federal nor state). If the disparate impact is related to the job, it's legal. (For example, a movie studio that turns away old actors who apply to play young characters will most likely win in court, if sued.)
What is reasonably related to the job, is far from clear; the rules are vague, and the previous rulings are complex and inconsistent.
In addition, I didn't want to make my question specific to the US. And the laws across different countries (even the Western developed countries) are not the same.
Expecting employees to work on weekends is even more common, and not just in the gaming industry.
Please remove "partying" from my list; it was dumb of me to mention it, it only makes my example less realistic.
That's troubling but perhaps not a smoking gun, given the specific nature of the job. You wouldn't hire a movie director who never watched movies.
> Expecting employees to work on weekends is even more common
I know, and that's really unfortunate–and if the employee isn't compensated properly or at least given time off in lieu–is wage theft.
The first and second really good developers I worked with were around 35 and 45 when I met them.
Have been mostly unemployed since leaving IBM in 2001, other than a few short stints with NYC area startups.
To F100 corporate organizations I was too “internet” and claimed far too much experience than possible (circa 2002), to startups I was (and apparently am) too conservative, too corporate.
And yes, I tried the non–profit track. Every non–profit I interviewed with decided that I was clearly going to drop them as soon as I could reacquire a job in corporate America.
I’ve found other ways to make money instead of being employed by others.
As an aside, ultimate responsibility for IBM's corporate websites does not _sound_ very similar to the CTO role at a tech company.
Appreciate that it's not similar to today's concept of CTO. I was not only responsible for all IBM web sites, I was expected to design, develop, deploy, manage, diagnose software for all IBM web sites, even those that I had no direct control over. IBM’s own software products tended to trail what we were doing in production by 12-24 months, when they were actually released.
It was a fun job, until it wasn't.
7x24x52 or 24x365
;^)
Nothing to do whatsoever with CTO. It's not event relevant to anything executive or management.
I hope that you can describe your position in a more positive light than this text and without alluding to being CTO, because both will get you rejected fairly quickly in any interview.
SaaS?
Would love to work again in tech but have never cracked getting on recruiters’ radar and I have better things to do than play whack—a-mole with the latest and greatest in applicant tracking systems automated decision algorithms.
How are you supposed to find out the hiring manager's name from a job post? I'd be curious to hear some of these tricks.
Go to meetups. User's groups. Any gathering of technical people. Important people tend to network, but they may not be the "regulars" as they are busy people.
I know more than a couple of technical/user groups where a relatively unknown person giving a good presentation is likely to wind up with an interview on the spot ... if not an actual consulting/job offer.
The key is a good presentation. The content shows your technical chops and the presentation shows your communication skills.
And, while lots of people say "have a GitHub and reference it", I'm going to caution about this. Just like an art portfolio, only put things you can proud of in there if you're going to make it public and reference it for employment. I may make you show me at the interview on your laptop and talk about it and it shouldn't embarrass you.
(Personally, I don't check GitHub unless someone points me at it explicitly.)
Turns out they rejected me as I was `overqualified`.
Equally in my early years pre PC mainstream days, there was an age bias towards older people. With many personal experiences upon that in that time/culture - including, believe it or not `overqualified` (they sat a coding exam and I found mistakes in the exam) for a COBOL job at a bank aged 19 (had 3 years work under my belt already in the field). Recruitment agent said it was because I knew more than the boss and he didn't like that. Was a time also back then when the boss would of previously done the job of those under him in such institutional culture of that time.
Dare say starting out today is easier than it was pre internet boom.
I'm sure there are others who equally have experienced agisim on both ends of the scale in IT.
Supposedly both demo groups strongly prefer their own. Whereas us x'ers were so few, we just had to get along with everyone.
I really wished the response of "over qualified" was made illegal as we all know it is used as a way to say no for reasons that are not legal...like age discrimination etc or other forms of discrimination (note I'm autistic spectrum).
Oh well, I've grown to loath and borderline hate HR departments over the decades thru such experiences. Which have been predominantly staffed by females, not that I'm drawing any conclusion to that, but it has been solid observation over my entire working career and at the very least, curious. Maybe there needs to be a drive for sexual equality with HR departments :/
Dare say starting out today is easier than it was
pre internet boom.
My completely unscientific gut feeling was that it was the easiest to get started in tech in the late 90s & right as the industry started recovering from the .com bust (~2005, when I got my first "real" full-time developer job).
The funny things is that they were already teaching programming in secondary schools when I was a kid (i.e. it wasn't really 'exotic' to be a programmer) but even in my most recent job most programmers are in their 20s.
I was taught programming in school (well, actually self taught from magazines like Byte, computer World and Unix World and a ZX81) in the early 80's, was an acoustic coupler modem that took 30 mins to get a stable line to a mainframe at some college our school had some airtime upon. Today, far more accessible, but back then, was hard on many levels.
Biggest hurdle was HR and one role I went for (was 20 then), had two interviews, HR and then the tech people. Litterly had HR peon say to me "That's a lot of money for somebody your age" and really was a very uncomfortable attitude. Blow the tech interview out of the water, got offered the job and more money than the HR peon bismershed for somebody my age and turned the job down flat solely due to the attitude of the HR peon and made that very clear. Took another job offer, for less money outer principle. Though turned out to be a better job. But had I not had the attitude from HR, I'd of taken that job.
Lot changed in that 15 year gap between mid-30's aged people and people in their 50's today. But then much has changed on many levels and I'd say for the better overall, albeit the age discrimination thing still exists, they just moved the goalposts.
But IT is still a young industry, compare to say accountants. But then accountant qualification from a decade ago, still worth it's value today, not many tech certs/qualifications that you can say that about as the industry changes and is still evolving. That is kinda the crux and what makes IT as an industry, hard to compare to many other industries as IT is just more dynamic.
That said - COBOL has remained pretty darn static. But I moved out of that area decades ago (before you the internet boom and the time you got into tech).
But tech is a constant learning curve, that won't change soon either. Hence any job in tech is not just the job, but a full time education on top of that to stay current.
Ease of access to consumers with the likes of ebay or app stores and lower running costs into breaking into those avenues have opened up many an avenue that was harder to access before.
But that is progress, come 50+, you may end up having the same perspective in relation to when you started out and starting out today.
I applied for a helpdesk position like this, once. Was required to take an IQ test and one of the questions during the interview was about what IRQ the keyboard was assigned to (you know, in the plug-n-play era, when IRQ and COM ports no longer were a "thing" to configure).
Got a response back, later, that I was overqualified.
I easily translated it to, "Wasn't willing to put up with our shit for so little pay."
Bullet dodged but there are some truly caustic employers out there, who will try to gatekeep every possible variance that they can think of, to keep the line toed[0].
Everyone should read Traction by Garbriel Weinberg. It's for startup marketing but job searching is basically marketing yourself in a world that has one dominant channel (recruiters). The efficacy of different channels is time varying as they get saturated- You have to find the one that works for you at any given time
I’m slowly getting more into the front end $cool_kids stack with React, etc.
But, I don’t do the blind resume submittals to job boards and applicant tracking systems. I keep a very strong network of external recruiters, former managers, and former coworkers.
I have never studied leetCode, and won’t go near a job that’s more concerned with how well I’ve read over “Cracking the Code” instead of how well I can architect a system.
My last job where I thought I was being hired as a senior developer I was asked “what was my 90 day plan to create a modern software department to create two green field projects”. It ended up they were looking for a dev lead.
The next job interview I spent most of my time white boarding architecture. I wasn’t asked a single development question. I just explained what I did on my last job.
As far as comp, if I were in a position to travel a lot, there are plenty of consulting companies willing to pay me more than I am making now - all I would have to do is send out a few emails to my network. Again not bragging. After working 20+ years if you can’t get some type of consulting gig you’re doing it wrong.
I’m not really architect / principal level just yet (probably 3-5 years of continuous improvement from that I would say), but I feel like I’m just barely getting ahead as a senior making $200k paying $2300/month in rent with no hope to buy and about a 40-60 minute commute (depending on whether I drive to BART or walk). Just wondering if there’s something better out there.
My commute is 30-40 minutes depending on traffic and we just bought a 3000 square foot 5 bedroom/3.5 bath house + a large office, new build in a great school system for $335K with 5% down. Our mortgage all in is a little less than $2100/month.
The most senior hands on developers/individual contributors/team leads can make between $130K-$160K. Even with that, it leaves more than enough to max out a 401K, and have enough fun money to do most of the things we want.
But like I said, just from talking to hiring managers over “informal lunches”, there are positions for overpriced “digital transformation consultants”, “enterprise architects”, etc. where you can get $200K and live in a lower cost of living area as long as you live near a major airport.
Without knowing regional pricing information it's hard to say they "should be able to save enough to buy something at some point".
If he is only paying 2300 rent he is living in a small apt even 60 minutes out. The cost of everything in the bay makes you wonder where money goes.
Lunch is a minimum of 25 bucks, bottle of cheap beer 10.
So your rent plus debt servicing should be around $4000... leaving your around $4000 a month for everything else. You should be able to live pretty well on that! That is more than most people make total.
Don't we all.
> Food, utilities, insurance, car expenses (I don’t drive much, but it’s fairly essential for me to have a car to get certain places; it’s also paid off, fortunately)
We all also pay for this.
> probably $2000-2500/month
Dude you still have $1000 probably free just chilling if you are strict.
I don't get this, "you are not where you should be" mindset.
The student debt sucks, but you are doing extremely, extremely well. Making more than some doctors.
As for “doctor money”, according to https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2018-compensation-overvie... I make below the average salary for every physician specialty except public health & preventative medicine, and I’m several years older than the typical newly minted physician.
I also live in an area where you need to make at least $80k or so to qualify for a 1br apartment, according to the “3x rent in gross salary” rule used by a lot of landlords. With my large, fixed expenses (student loans), I’m not convinced moving to a lower CoL area actually improves my bottom line, either.
I’m not poor, and, like I said, I’m getting ahead slowly now, but I’m by no means rolling in it.
You could say my career trajectory is behind being in my 40s and still being an individual contributor, but I don’t see any scenario where I would have wanted to be a person manager. (Been there done that. Went screaming back to an IC role).
But, I do see a narrow path where I can retire at the standard retirement age and be okay with a paid off house, enough savings to be okay, and hopefully social security between me and my wife collecting half of mine instead of her own.
Based on the comments in this thread, I'm guessing leetcode has done some successful marketing in the valley. I'm an East coaster.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see if your company is solving hard problems (tm) or problems at a scale that has never been done before why you need smart people (tm). But I find it ridiculous that some companies care about how well you can do esoteric algorithms when they are hiring you to do yet another software as a service CRUD app or some internal bespoke app that will never see the light of day outside of the company.
I’m not even convinced knowing hard computer science is important in most jobs. One of the best developers I know graduated from a well known but not well regarded private for profit college. Didn’t know much hard computer science but he reads like crazy about best practices when it comes to writing software. His code and unit tests are things of beauty to maintain. We worked together at three separate jobs. He’s also in his mid 40s and he codes on his own time and does side projects like someone in their 20s.
I got my start doing assembly in the 80s as a teenager, bit twiddling C on x86 PCs and mainframes for a decade, but none of that matters when I am spending half my day as a “full stack developer” and the other half as the de facto “AWS Architect” (in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king).
I am 33.5, and looking for a job in India. I absolutely abhor doing leetCode, but atleast here it seems to be the only way - even within my own connected network.
I've always been a strong believer in being a generalist - at least in my experience, the best developers and architects have some knowledge of networking, Windows, Linux, security etc. Basically, they know enough that they can quickly get to grips with almost anything that's thrown at them.
I guess some have moved into management, and others have made enough money to retire, or they've moved somewhere with better value than the Bay Area. They're likely to avoid companies where everyone's in their twenties and the offices looks like frat houses. But even so, I'd expect to see many more gray-haired engineers around here than I do.
Another factor is that high compensation means people can afford to retire earlier. I know a couple people that saved up a couple million, and then moved to "flyover" states with low CoL to live off passive income. It's often achievable by 40s or 50s depending on how much money is spent on kids. Especially if you have one or zero children it's within reach.
1. https://i0.wp.com/d24fkeqntp1r7r.cloudfront.net/wp-content/u... (separate male/female isn't part of the point I'm trying to make, this is just the graph I had on hand)
I don't have precise numbers, but based on a cursory scan of my linked-in connections, some of my cohort has followed that path and moved out. Another big subgroup is the people who went to google or some other Big N. In particular a lot of the high performance people did this.
Another person who replied to you suggested that CS/programming is just a lot more popular now and I think that is big part of the reason why it skews young. When I graduated (in 1997), CS was not a popular study. As a consequence, startups back then had a wide age range (20-60+), but still were quite youthful overall.
I did 250 Leetcode problems, practiced System Design, and Behavioral. In the end, I found doing 250 Leetcode was probably overkill, but it definitely helped.
This will probably get me severely down-voted, and I do understand the antipathy toward having to Leetcode, but the way I see it is that I'm really lucky. I get to sit on my butt, do what I love, and I get paid really well to do it. If interviewing is extremely hard and I have to study, yet again, at 48 so be it. There are plenty of people in the world who are so less fortunate than I am.
[Edit] s/250 Leetcode/250 Leetcode problems/
Not to mention the fact that I will spend the next two year learning front end frameworks and Docker ecosystem. I’m 45
That said, it sounds like you and I are both "cultivating" and "tending to" our profession. I think that's what it takes to stay competitive and have longevity imo.
I got into vicious codependent cycle with my job by the time I was 35. I didn’t know enough to be competitive and leave, I was bitter about my pay and they just kept me around because I knew where the bodies were buried. Since then, it’s all about optionality. If I go more than a month not enjoying my environment it’s time to leave.
Considering swinging the pendulum the other way to hands on technical again and let others do the BS work. Do you know anything about the north Atlanta market? Companies, salary range, culture? Or maybe ones to avoid...Thanks!
With today’s data privacy concerns and tough European regulations I don’t think this attitude is acceptable.
I hope the field makes a return to appreciating fundamentals.
That being said, I was on the hiring committee at my last job and personally, I found the best way to hire engineers is to just chat with them about previous projects. I'd usually run through one or two, "just confirming you can code" whiteboard questions and then ask them to tell me about a project they are proud of that they had a large part in. If you ask questions that dig into the project ("How did you do X?", "Why did you do Y?", "Now that it's over, what would you change?") you can usually get a pretty good idea of their skill level and knowledge as a developer as well as some great insights into their personality.
Obviously, that's much harder to scale and more subject to bias, but it worked for me.
Short of industry wide collaboration with some kind of longitudinal study, getting an idea of what does and doesn't work in terms of false negatives is nearly impossible.
1. are my false positives low?
2. is the time it takes to fill a position low?
If the answer to both of those questions is "yes" then the system is great for me (and I've seen the system described above provide affirmative answers to both these questions in a startup setting).
Determining whether a hiring system is locally good is significantly easier than determining if it's good in general.
The problem is that you don't know the cost of the false negatives; you don't know whether the people you didn't hire would have greatly improved your processes / code / business
It’s probably not the stuff you know how to do that makes or breaks your company. Either someone else does it, or you “figure it out” and hopefully you know if you did it right before it’s too late.
How do you hire someone to be good at stuff you aren’t already good at? There’s gonna be a lot of those in the false negatives pile.
Realistically if a dev gets a leetcode interview they don't want to do, most of them can just cancel and likely get an interview with someone else next week if they're actively applying to jobs.
To that end, I'm 43 and last on the market a few months back, accepted an offer within a week of looking, had 3 pending final/onsites (including Amazon Seattle) and at least another half dozen in earlier stages that I shut down.
I do nothing to hide my age on my resume. Since turning 40 I've been on the market 3 times now, each time interviewing w/ 10-20 companies, and only once did I get the sense that agism was at play.
Part of the reason is because I hadn't spent as much effort on this earlier in my career; now with the concern of agism, every time I'm on the market I try to level up my skillset.
- Whenever I need to hop into a code share w/ a co-worker (I'm remote FWIW) the ability to quickly suss out an idea has greatly improved from having a decent aptitude with those types of exercises.
- Any non-trivial PR usually has at least a few portions that could be extricated to challenges like these. Being able to slice through issues like these in 15-30 minutes vs. say hours helps w/ my cadence. It lets me focus on the issues that are unique to the business.
The 30 minute pairing challenge we give during our interview (which I took myself) was something that was pulled and simplified from our source. I ended up having to implement something very similar just weeks after I started.
Of course being good are things like this isn't necessary to being an effective sr. developer, nor is it sufficient (even for an entry-level). But I do very much see it as a skill that is helpful and worth getting good at.
Better outcomes, better industry productivity, sure. But ‘hiring fairness’?
The (open) question is, can we do better?
But, why did we get through? Maybe the process really is capable of separating wheat from the chaff. Maybe the process works 85% of the time, and the 1 time it didn’t work in recent memory is someone who has already left the company. Maybe only capable people self select into the process for some reason. Maybe we’ve been phenomenally lucky.
The point is, just because a filter allows the right people through doesn’t mean it’s necessarily any good.
I define “good” and “right people” to be that which produces efficiency, quality, innovation in the business. So a good filter to me is good wrt these outcomes.
The industry is starving for ‘good people’ and ‘good outcomes’ and we should work to optimize this imo.
Any other measure divorced from outcome to me seems... weird.
Triplebyte claims the industry average onsite pass rate is in the neighborhood of 30% (https://triplebyte.com/blog/12-000-engineers-evaluated). I suspect that the huge majority of those who fail onsites get jobs. Is that efficient?
What I’m saying is that the notion of ‘fairness’ should have little relevance to improving this side of things.
I don't feel comfortable saying here, but the Blind app is an excellent resource for finding what total compensation (TC) you can expect for different companies and years of experience (YOE).
That said, there are plenty of resources that have been helpful to me:
1) http://highscalability.com/
2) http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032175.do
3) https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
Hope this helps!
Mid 40s myself, stayed in one tech stack for too long but have been redeeming myself in the past few years with .net core, AWS, Docker and trying to get into React.
I find myself struggling most with the front end bits, but it's just a question of staying with it.
Have always loved tech, and highly passionate about it. Having a family with a kid on the ASD has really restricted available hours to tinker though, that's my main challenge.
Anyway I found what you and others here wrote quite motivational, so thanks again.
One thing that I'd like to mention that I didn't before is that the interview process can be taxing, draining, and it can be an emotional roller-coaster. Try to stay positive and keep at it. Good things will come!
And yes can confirm that when I had to go through the process, and was less prepared, it was certainly very draining. So spending time learning/staying on top of things in peace time will certainly help during "war". :)
Staying physically healthy, lifting weights etc is another thing that hasn't been raised so far, so would just like to put that in. Can always adjust perception through that, and also it is something we truly need to be doing now that we're getting older. It also helps for mental health.
The part that is missing from nearly all interviews are an opportunity for the company to sell itself to the interviewee. So as the interviewee, I'd like to say that if you make me jump thru some hoops because you feel like I should go through the same hazing process you went thru when interviewing, I am going to think that you are only focused on what I can do for you.
How about this, as an interviewer, say something like... "This design question is gonna suck because I don't know how to ask it better, but if you can just hang in there long enough to help me understand you can think about something non-trivial, that'd be fabulous. We both know you're smart, and I just need to imagine working with you in something complex."
My last three jobs I was hired as the “adult supervision” as either an individual contributor who was more equal than others or as an official dev lead. I was specifically asked by the director those types of questions and how would I rewrite a 20 year old PowerBuilder app that had been maintained by two “developers” who had been their for 20 and 13 years.
I went through the training process they would go through, setting up source control, setting up development, QA environments, automated testing, and CI/CD.
Then he was shocked when I said that I wouldn’t rewrite it from the ground up. I would upgrade to a newer version of PowerBuilder that supported COM, concert the whole app to a COM object, put a C#/WebAPI wrapper around it, write some automated integration reads and contract out some front end developers to put a web interface on it.
Then slowly move the PB logic to C# and keep the stored procedures after upgrading to the latest version of sql server.
Finally move the stored procs to code.
All this to say, that’s what’s wrong with some “senior developers”. They’ve spent their entire career at large companies where they haven’t had a chance to work up and down the entire stack. If you spent your entire career “coding” at a large company, you’re not that much more valuable to most companies than someone with 5 years of experience b
At that job we had to hire some overpriced/clueless “AWS consultants” since I didn’t know AWS at the time. Now I could manage that. I still wouldn’t try doing anything on the front end. There are people much better than me.
So, trust me when I say I don't object in the slightest to being asked to study and learn things. LeetCode-style problems look like one form of recreation to me.
And yet, I still think this comment is shortsighted because:
* I'd guess a lot of what's on LeetCode isn't exactly untrodden territory for any developer that got their start before 1995.
* Distinguishing oneself can work in the individual case, but it generalizes poorly. Imagine employers and would-be job-seekers alike internalize LeetCode knowledge as a standard distinguishing mark. Like college degrees, distinguishing points often over time become standard expectations. The likely outcome is that about as many devs in their 20s & 30s can brandish the same "distinction" that devs 40+ can and the incentives to prefer youth perform about the same.
Individual efforts to improve ones lot are a good place to start, but they rarely solve systemic problems.
Most developers are doing CRUD apps or at most apps where the complexity is in the business rules and process.
But why is there this assumption that if someone studies Leetcode and algorithms then it means that they can't do anything else? Why is there this all or nothing mentality?
If someone studies Leetcode and algorithms, wouldn't one assume they know other things as well in the software engineering realm? I have plenty of friends in the Bay Area who are thriving at FAANG who studied algorithms and Leetcode intensely.
If they were told a web page was slow would they know enough architecturally to know how to find the bottleneck and no the solution for solving it? No the answer is not based on finding the o(n) complexity of reversing a binary tree.
Of course not, the main purpose of the leetcode is to ace the interview.
Doesn't mean they do not know any of those questions you mentioned above.
I, for example, did all you mentioned above and also practicing leetcode.
And I've seen developers come from doing Node green field APIs at Netflix to waist deep in a 15 year old Java application with Spring MVC and some underlying Struts yet to be removed and don't understand why debugger stopped going any deeper and they lost where they start 10 classes ago from shared modules.
Then they don't understand how refactoring a core message for alerting customer across the sight has tight coupling, wanted to something fancy and broke the key business features, try to argue it's better but a business unit just list functionality of it's product. Instead of researching, and coming up a plan with a team to refactor using TTD and Strangle Vine method from the legacy tightly coupled code, to a separate module with better testing and following SOLID principles.
Welcome to multiple Fortune 500 companies.
Absolutely. Unless you're working on a greenfield project or refactoring code for extreme performance, understanding the operational side of the business will get you more points towards the mythical 10x programmer status than algorithms.
I can't count the times I've seen scope creep and deadline slippage because the developer didn't really understand the need & use case and built something other than what was required.
I am having very difficult time getting the offers (duh, when performing like this). Did you always get to receiving offers? I seem to always get the, we decided to go with another candidate... line after my onsite.
I've only had 2 company's fly me out so far and the only companies that I have gotten offers at don't do LeetCode. It's extremely frustrating or maybe I'm just not prepared well enough yet and need to be more consistent with my study and practice (and don't pay as much either) or maybe I'm just not smart enough. I feel stuck.
Will it ever end or am I stuck grinding for the rest of my career (life)? Will I ever be able just breathe and relax again? I'm not on the West coast, but interviewing on the West Coast. I'll rent out my condo or keep it around as a home away from home if I ever get an opportunity.
This happens to me too.
> Will it ever end or am I stuck grinding for the rest of my career (life)? Will I ever be able just breathe and relax again? I'm not on the West coast, but interviewing on the West Coast. I'll rent out my condo or keep it around as a home away from home if I ever get an opportunity.
Dude just try for companies on the west coast. Why is this the end all be all? Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Charlotte, Raleigh, Colorado Springs. . . So many cities with low CoL and six figure salaries for Developers, Security Engineers, Linux Admins, Infrastructure Engineers.
You even have Denver, DC, NYC, Charlotte, Arlington, Seattle, Tampa, Minneapolis, so many options. Stop limiting yourself San Francisco when there are so many great cities, with awesome opportunities.
That said, doubling my salary a Big-N for a few years and getting experience at a larger tech company is what I'm mostly chasing at the moment. I want the experience, I want to see what it's like for myself. I can just rent out the condo I have now easily, pack a bag of clothes and go.
Thankfully my mom makes enough for things to work out, and they own a piece of rental property, and my dad stashed away a lot of money for retirement while he worked (to the dismay of my mother).
Additionally, the company I work at is half (or more) people hired straight out of college which kinda makes me feel weird. It's a small company that has been around ~15 years or so, and I feel like their hiring practices would lead to their ass getting handed to them in court.
I like the people I work with, but something definitely feels wrong.
Almost all of the US economy is a monopoly or cartel dominated by 1-3 corporations per segment.
If youre over 45 in a machine shop or in any trade (plumbing, electrical, automotive, HVAC, etc...) your biggest barrier to getting any job is picking up the phone when it rings. Johnson Control, Honeywell, heck even people like Nest and Ford are kicking down your door and offering you any money to join.
I don't find this to be the case with other areas of IT. We have a lot of folks in the late 40's to middle 50's working through out our IT Department and organization.
For example if a 25 yr old coder is $X per year surely, even if you have terrible age discrimination, there must be some salary level, say $0.75*X where having the older worker is preferable?
Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market? Is it that people value youth so much they will pay a 3x markup for it or something?
If there's a large pool of super skilled people begging for work I don't quite understand why someone wouldn't want to leverage that. I get why maybe you pay older workers less if you discriminate, but to not hire them at all seems strange.
On one cost issue. Let's say you're in a city other than SEA, LA, SF, NYC and Boston. A 55 year old on a good insurance plan will often cost you anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 more per year in healthcare benefits versus a 20-25 year old. The cost of a 45 year old employee further increases with time due to that (over 10 years, from 45 to 55, an employee's health benefits cost can easily climb by an additional $5k-$6k per year). So if the salary in question is $90,000 (again, outside the elite tech cities), that bumps the cost of the employee considerably as they age. Some states - such as NY - have laws that alter this equation though. When an employee goes from eg 20 to 35 years old, there's a far more modest healthcare benefits cost increase (30%-40% increase would be more typical, starting from a lower base cost versus the 45 year old; from 40 to 55 the cost can easily double, from a higher starting point).
This is another serious issue that people frequently run into with the US healthcare system.
Jesus freaking christ I never realised that being European. This is a game changer for older folks, I guess I'm out of luck if I ever want to move to the US and I'm already over 30, ha :/
If you're making eg $150,000 or $200,000 in SF or NYC and working for a stable company, an additional $500-$600 per month for the company isn't nearly the concern versus if you're working in Cleveland earning $75,000.
If you're with a decent company with good benefits, it's also not an unusual situation more generally speaking. Half the country receives its healthcare benefits from an employer. Companies in the US are used to forking over very high costs for healthcare benefits. It's an accepted cost of employing people here. Being unemployed at 55 in the US, with weak savings (can't bridge yourself to the next job) and struggling job prospects, is a very serious problem however. That's the sort of situation you want to avoid in the US.
If you're self-employed the healthcare costs can be a real killer also, obviously unless you earn enough to offset it properly. As a very young entrepreneur I simply went without healthcare coverage. I was fortunate to not have any meaningful health problems in those years, it's blatantly a serious risk to take.
This sucks, but it definitely explains a lot of discrimination at the higher-end of the scale. The OP has a 71-year-old who couldn't find work. It must be very difficult for an employer to agree to hire this person, get them trained up on their specific business processes, only for them to have a serious health issue (and/or die) inside of a year. I get that this can happen to anyone, but the likelihood is of course greater the older you get. Maybe employers could take out some kind of insurance on their employees, with the cost based on the actuarial tables and taken out of the employees' salaries (kind of what you suggest).
My experience suggests that a fair chunk of the population of software developers are incapable of sustainably creating positive business value overall (even if they were paid nothing). If that model is the correct one, part of what you're paying for in a younger applicant is they might be good, whereas with an experienced yet unskilled applicant, they might already be the equivalent of a scratched-off lottery ticket that isn't a winner. (There's no price at which you would buy it.)
Note that I'm well into the age range where I would be discriminated against if age discrimination were rampant. I'm also not claiming that experienced workers are more likely than younger workers to have a negative value. I'm merely claiming that their value is more likely to be determined and less likely to change in the future.
I’ve not found age to be a good proxy for capacity or capability; I know exceptionally good (and many poor) coders at every age range I’ve seen in our field.
As for “looking for a job”, that’s a normal thing. Most experienced candidates will have a network to help, but moving to a new area or new field is also normal and hurts networking effectiveness.
I'd love to consult one day, but I haven't cracked that code. I have 18 years of systems automation, operations, and now management experience.
Something isn't good enough.
I think you either don't have the right track record, or you're selling yourself incorrectly, by which I mean you're charging too little. Whiteboard interviews are out of the question as a contractor: I simply don't have time for this circus. One thing that helps with such things is pricing your services right. And that means charging more than you think is reasonable. The more you can charge, ironically, the easier these discussions get. The effect compounds further if you have several satisfied former clients who can give references.
My selling point is really simple, too: you've tried and you've failed, now let me show you what's possible.
Finding clients outside of that requires what I expect is a social media presence, possibly publications and talks. None of which I've undertaken.
No one trusts the "resume/CV" track record, not in contracting and not in full-time roles. It's either word-of-mouth or some other method of trust, if it isn't a set of interviews.
I've picked up a decent full-time role to refurnish my image, as running an infrastructure with staff, you'd expect, should be impressive.
I'm skeptical of the contract market.
And to go back to the original thread, I found myself getting spurned due to age for any role which wasn't technical/managerial in the world of full-time work once I went back to it.
He recently killed himself, because he could not find clients and work due to ageism etc. He got sick as well and for a while was homeless. Once he got grey hair they didn't want to hire him anymore. He was 55.
I didn't work on drivers; I worked on mostly higher-level stuff (Newton, HyperCard, Quicktime, AppleScript, and several projects that did not ultimately become products). I worked at Apple from 1988 to 1998, and after that moved on to a successful startup.
In 2004 for I developed an incurable chronic illness. It was one that is hard to diagnose and hard to treat. I eventually found a doctor who could figure out how to handle it, and became able to work again.
Before the illness, I was in that category where I never applied for jobs, because there was always someone bugging me to go to work for them. In fact, my work at Apple was in two chunks because someone bugged me to go to NeXT, then someone bugged me to join a startup, then someone bugged me to go back to Apple. After Apple laid me off in 1998, two startups immediately bugged me to go to work for them and I chose the one that looked better.
After the illness, it has never been like that again. Since 2004, I have mostly been self employed, mainly as a contractor writing code and technical documentation. I choose to live in a place with very low cost of living, so that when I'm working I can stack up piles of cash to live on between gigs. I'm using one of those piles now to work on a product of my own design.
I've contemplated suicide a few times in what I think is a relatively dispassionate way. It was always during fallow periods when my buffer was getting threadbare, and I was in danger of becoming a financial burden to loved ones. I always decided against it because, first, it's irreversible and other choices aren't; and second, because the harm I would do to my loved ones by making that choice probably outweighed the harm I would do by becoming an expense to them.
Although I didn't make your friend's decision, I also don't judge it. I believe I understand in general how it can seem like a reasonable choice in some circumstances.
Since we're talking about ageism, I'll mention that I can't prove that the drastic change in my employability is a case of ageism, nor a case of discrimination against people with chronic illnesses. I suspect it of being both, though, partly because age and health are (not necessarily reliable) proxies for other qualities that employers are legitimately interested in, so I can see what the motivation might be, and partly because the differences between before my illness and since are just so stark and sudden.
Exercise is tricky. Too much or the wrong kind makes my condition worse. Luckily, over the past few years I've discovered that I can walk several miles a day in modest-sized chunks, and I have a dog who reminds me regularly to do it.
Younger workers = less experience = lower pay.
Older workers also cost more in insurance premiums, have more "life events" that pull them away from work and are potentially harder to sell on corporate environment.
At least that's what management often think.
The only name in this thread I recognise (although, to be fair, most people aren't using their real names), and as an aside, a name that a seventy-something year-old Vietnam veteran running an apartment full of automated test machines in Greater Tokyo was surprised I dropped when he told me that the Digital Mars compiler was testing well. That compiler was always well behaved. I wonder if his age would have been an impediment to finding work at in the US; in Tokyo he suffered only the problem of being a foreigner.
For many industries it's something other than opinion
and that's why i think your explanation is closer to the truth. higher salaries for older workers wouldn't matter. what does matter is that management thinks older workers will bring the wrong sauce to the product, exhibit reasonable skepticism of the (probably unsuccessful) product concept, generally fail to buy in to the vision and sass their 24 year old masters.
And, weather doesn’t adequately explain the high CoL anywhere outside California or Hawaii. “It’s where the jobs are, so everyone wants to be there does,” and it also explains California. (Hawaii is special— it’s an archipelago, so, cost of shipping goods plus weather is really the best explanation, given the lack of a compelling employment story.)
> Younger workers = less experience = lower pay.
If that's really the case then "age discrimination" doesn't necessarily indicate deliberately avoiding older workers to the sake of the fact that they're old. Say you have to fill a software developer role and the highest TC you can offer is $100k. Not unheard of for a company, say, one standard deviation below average. You interview a bunch of 40 year olds and 50 year olds and all of them have existing salaries way above that. What is the recruiter supposed to do, keep interviewing people that they almost certainly won't accept the offer? Ostensibly that' the law, but in reality anyone in that situation is going to shift their attention to people that would be willing to work for that kind of compensation.
This is partly what it's probably best to publish salary ranges as part of the job description, at least for companies other than top companies. The above scenario does mean that the minority of older devs that would accept that salary range get filtered out, and that's suboptimal.
You missed a step.
Older workers = more experience = more responsibility = higher pay.
Without that extra responsibility there's no reason to pay someone more simply because they're older. The pay should be based on what the job is, not the age or 'experience' of the person doing it.
"Old guy here is a low/mid level person after 20 years, so he clearly isn't a superstar. Young guy here is low/mid level person, so he has potential to be a superstar."
Hiring committees, smothered by the legal ass covering around race and sex discrimination, never even think twice about making this discriminatory argument. It's even officially enshrined in hiring plans as "expectation of trajectory", a rule that only applies to old people. And before you say "ok but that's a logical argument", it's exactly the same logically correct argument as the (illegal) "bases on my limited knowledge, a white/Chinese/male candidate I just met is more likely to be successful at this job than a black/Hispanic/female candidate".
Of course, by definition, most people aren't exceptional or even in the top 10% and our society unfairly (and unwisely) punishes them for getting older.
But it seems to be a rule of life.
Rich get richer. Top performers get more/better offers.
Poor get poorer. Non-top performers get less/worse offers.
I remember reading something where Paul Graham of Ycombinator said top performers never apply for jobs. They are often referred and handed jobs. And on the other side, you have ton of (supposedly) not so great workers who are sending out job applications by the dozens trying to get a job.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...
If you're a protected class and you have a job, that's great! It will help you a lot. But the unintended consequence is that companies are more reluctant to hire someone in a protected class, because if they are legitimately bad at their job, they are harder to get rid of.
I still think we should have protected classes, but the protection needs to reach into hiring too. Maybe make companies have to submit written justification for not hiring someone in a protected class? I don't know I'm just spitballing here.
Now, if you want to make the argument that older employees don't boost the companies D&I numbers, while at the same incurring the risk of a protected class, that's a subtly different argument....
Hiring needs to be less regulated, not more so
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/08/01/anthropology-of-financi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept
> The Hartz concept, also known as Hartz reforms or the Hartz plan, is a set of recommendations submitted by a committee on reforms to the German labour market in 2002. Named after the head of the committee, Peter Hartz, these recommendations went on to become part of the German government's Agenda 2010 series of reforms, known as Hartz I – Hartz IV. The committee devised thirteen "innovation modules", which recommended changes to the German labour market system. These were then gradually put into practice: The measures of Hartz I – III were undertaken between January 1, 2003, and 2004, while Hartz IV was implemented on January 1, 2005.
Ireland: 5.4% UK: 3.8% Germany: 3.1% Portugal: 6.3% Poland: 3.5% Czech: 1.9% Sweden: 6.2% Finland: 6.7%
That about ~230mil people. Mate what are you talking about.
Try France: 8.7%, was 10% as recently as 2015. Italy: 10.2%
Of course, unemployment is much worse for young workers in these countries. If you can't fire anyone then hiring is risky, so jobs tend to end up taken by older workers who then "camp" in the jobs even if they suck. Reverse ageism at work!
Maybe accounting is like bimodal legal salaries, you either make it to the top, or you are out.
When I used to be employed by other people, I specifically remember being told "we can't really promote you to director, you are too young". I wasn't inexperienced (I started working full time at 16). It wasn't that I hadn't earned it. It was because the old farts on the board wouldn't take me seriously.
Discrimination sucks.
Above middle management, political calculus dominates meritocratic concerns (in the short term). This is true in any organisation because we’re primates. You won’t “earn” your way into senior management and you won’t help your case by informally complaining.
If you want a promotion you need leverage. Relationships with (potential) shareholders and creditors, a credible threat to decamp (and cause damage), et cetera. If you can’t threaten to leave you have no leverage. If your leaving wouldn’t cause the Board and senior management pain, you have no leverage. (If you have no leverage, that’s fine—get it.)
Speaking as someone who spent a lot of their career being young (and impatient).
Explaining why we discriminate is not helping those who want to see this stopped.
It's like explaining why old people get discriminated upon. Yes, there is a logic to it. No, it is not acceptable. Yes, that is how it works now. No, that is not how it will always work, humans are constantly evolving. The way you talk sounds defeatist. It sounds a lot like the old 'thats just the way it is' when people talk about change.
BTW, I totally agree with you as to the fact that the logic you are talking about is correct in that is how things work NOW. Though we have been overcoming this. Or else there wouldn't be black or women in any boardroom. Change is happening. I don't believe those who say it will always be the same.
P.S. this happened to me more than 10 years ago. I ended up quitting and since spent the majority of my life working for myself.
I’ve been told this and it sucks. I made the mistake of trying grovelling and complaining. Both failed for, with hindsight, fundamental reasons.
If you’re ambitious, you have to develop a political sense. Keeping stock of leverage relationships is key. If you lack leverage, you can’t make demands.
If you’d represented revenue and threatened to take it elsewhere, the CEO or Board may have overcome their biases. (If not, you’d get what you wanted by effecting the threat.)
That's fine. I actually did.
But it seems really inappropriate to say this here.
We are discussing the insidiousness of discrimination with the hope of socially being more conscious and finding ways to improve this.
It's kinda like going into a place with victims of racism and saying 'get over' and 'use your white voice/dress more white' when talking about the issue of racism. It's out of place, even if the suggestion is coming from a good place of wanting the best for the other person.
P.S. I had a department with large numbers and strong growth on my side for leverage, that is why the CEO considered me in the first place. The numbers took a big hit after I left. If the board would have had more people in their 40s and less in their 70s-80s, I would likely have been accepted. Explaining to me that this is politics is a bit pedantic in assuming I don't understand politics.
That's not what I'm reading in the comment. They are telling you it's a different game, they focus on what kinds of value you bring that they actually care about, and you can have leverage in such situations if you are such a person. From there, you automatically know to be the person delivering on the metrics that matter to upper management. Maybe to see if you even can before getting a job in a specific organization. They're telling you how to be more effective in the event you want to win more at that level.
Not ways to avoid getting biased against. Or justifications for biases. So it makes sense to keep the comments on topic.
Even if my case wasn't an ageist thing, which is a lot of assuming on your end, it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
It takes a certain type of person though to go out and doubt someone when they say they have suffered from something and have nothing to gain from it.
The assumptions are very pedantic, explaining them only furthers the pedantry. It's not that I don't understand them. It's that I understand them too well.
Except getting them to take you seriously is part of your job in upper management. Age matters but your view of them as old farts makes me suspect you did nothing to gain their favor in other ways. As someone else said, those ways have little to do with job based merit.
I'm not that young anymore. I called them old farts because that is what they were. They discriminated on me based on my age alone, so that makes them old farts in my book. I wouldn't have been considered for the director position without any leverage, the numbers dropped for a good while after I left.
There are respectable old men and women. Just like there are respectable young men and women and there are snot nose kids who discriminate against old people. In general, people who discriminate lose the right to respect from me and I might refer to them in a despective tone when commenting on an anonymous site where I'm answering informally.
But it seems really inappropriate to say this here.
We are discussing the insidiousness of discrimination with the hope of socially being more conscious and finding ways to improve this.
It's kinda like going into a place with victims of racism and saying 'get over' and 'use your white voice/dress more white' when talking about the issue of racism. Or suggesting that racial discrimination is justified. It's out of place, even if the suggestion is coming from a good place of wanting the best for the other person.
P.S. I had a department with large numbers and strong growth on my side for leverage, that is why the CEO considered me in the first place. The numbers took a big hit after I left. If the board would have had more people in their 40s and less in their 70s-80s, I would likely have been accepted. Explaining to me that this is politics is a very pedantic in assuming I don't understand politics.
The fact you're talking about strong growth and large numbers is why I don't think you understand politics. That doesn't matter to the board. It's the foot in the door at best. Did you align politically with the board? Did they know it? Would you be a reliable pawn for them? Did they think they could work with you and get you to do what they wanted? Did you have strong support from other department heads? Did you have strong support from other in higher positions? Did you have any major opponents? Any secret opponents? Did you know of those opponents through your connections? I could go on but point being, that doing a good job is pretty low on the list of things which matters in politics.
Even if my particular case was not about ageism, we can agree it happens against the young unfairly, even if sometimes. Even if I'm too much of an asshole for it to happen to me.
So, my point stands: can you please explain to this self righteous, incivil person who deserves the discrimination he has experienced, why it is OK to discriminate against the young but not the old? Or are you going to admit to being a troll like you did on the other comment when I addressed your weak arguments?
People who engage in age discrimination, against young people, should be fired or fined out of existence.
Discrimination is discrimination.
But I'll address what you are saying:
Insurance can charge people without using ageism.
Before, insurers found that black people needed to pay more. After all, they were barbaric said the insurers. Then it became illegal.
Insurance companies still exist. Doing away with barbaric old practices is a good thing and as has happened when women got the right to vote, or civil rights, or other major positive reforms, the world continued on without falling apart.
It's sad that even in a rationalist place like hacker news, ageism is still something that can be openly admitted to. At least racists and sexists generally have to hide their ignorance if they don't want to be shunned by society.
Or they understand that this site is in the end entertainment. Sarcasm makes it more fun for both the writer and the other readers.
You're projecting how much you care about this issue onto me. Reality is, I don't care about it much at all, it's a mild intellectual diversion to me. You're hurt by this, you're infuriated by this, you're driven by this. I'm not.
1- Rational: Your original argument is flawed, you realize it and have changed but can't admit it 2- Irrational: You can't defend your argument since you haven't, but won't change 3- Plain Nasty: You are trolling.
I'm inclined to think 3, though most people don't use their real name when trolling.
You're free to think you've won, I don't care. Although one piece of life advice for someone who seems to like arguing and seems to be good at it. People will often stop arguing with you because they find it tiring. You'll think you've won and pat yourself on the back. They'll think you didn't win. Instead they'll just think you're good at arguing (but still wrong), an a-hole and will dislike you silently from then on.
Normally I would have stopped responding by now but I find this side conversation insightful.
If you are intellectually honest you'd just admit that is your perspective. Or clarify.
And it is just as bad.
edit: And right for the position includes personally not liking you or thinking you're not acting appropriately to them. I doubt they cared much for how the company does compared to their own egos.
Even if my particular case was not about ageism, we can agree it happens against the young unfairly, sometimes. Even if I'm too much of an asshole for it to happen to me.
So, my point stands: can you please explain to this self righteous, incivil person who deserves the discrimination he has experienced, why it is OK to discriminate against the young but not the old?
P.S. Odd how in your last comment when I argued against your logic and you couldn't answer any more, you said: 'I don't care about this you do' and then proceed to post a bunch more times in this same thread.
I didn't say it was. I said, it's okay to discriminate against personality traits which generally come with age. For example, lack of emotional stability is a negative trait in management and it correlates somewhat with age. As I said, it's about being able to portray those traits and that you possess them independently of age. Moreover, just like work experience matters so does life experience. Your brain changes with experience. It also changes drastically until you mid 20s. So, just like work experience (as measure by years working) can be a proxy for seniority so can life experience (as measured by age) be a proxy for those traits. Hopefully, people independently test things instead of relying on proxies alone.
Finally, the difference between youth and everything else you've mentioned in terms of discrimination is trivially simple. The young naturally become old with time. The old do not become young with time. Blacks don't become white. Women don't become men. A few years of wait versus eternity of wait is the difference.
It seems your post makes this argument without actually stating as much. So I'm trying to get where you stand on age discrimination against the young.
P.S. this is irrelevant to requesting experience, that is a requirement independent of what age the person has.
A certain equanimity and humility often is attributed to age and the acquisition of wisdom. Perhaps this is what was referred to, rather than an actual judgement based on age.
People frequently do not confront behavior directly, rather using euphemisms or attributing decisions to other aspects to avoid a heated and personal confrontation. One of the necessary skills of leadership positions is to be aware of this and respond to the real, underlying issue rather than the superficial one.
Well, let's leave the world of theory, which I'll let the ass-u-me crowd dominate:
Even if my particular case was not about ageism, we can agree it happens against the young unfairly, even if sometimes. Even if I'm too much of an asshole for it to happen to me.
So, my point stands: can you please explain to this self righteous, incivil person who deserves the discrimination he has experienced, why it is OK to discriminate against the young but not the old?
If this is a small company with less responsibilities, then I would consider this a problem and more so ageist, because less complexity and moving parts doesn't require more experience.
But I agree with the others a little bit as well, you seem to lacking a little EQ.
On the other hand, older people can't get jobs and their livelihood + potentially the livelihood of their families is at risk.
Like the other posters are saying, the real problem is that learning how to develop good software (or any other technical product) takes time. This is an experience-based subject - art? craft? - and while I have seen many very talented younger engineers and developers, their lack of experience with a whole list of factors that don't involve slapping some code into an IDE, or what have you, usually means they end up being far less productive than people like to assume.
Bay Area culture has produced a lot of great things, but this stereotype has got to go.
Still, finding a job where my boss would know more is more and more problematic.
When I was 33 I was rejected by a recruiter with "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing teams. There must be something wrong with you, so I cannot pass your papers to the client."
Still, looking for a job is a very traumatic experience. The companies are looking for unicorns: young, cheap, without family (aka drinking in evenings, working on weekends), with lots of experience, and academic knowledge (which will never be used).
A couple of times I heard from guys, who would be my managers "oh, I'd love to have your experience"... the rest of the interviews went smoothly. In all the places I even didn't get to the step where they asked for the money requirements. They just didn't answer.
I'm looking for a remote job now. I even made a nicely stripped resume on one page. My normal has 3 pages. It's a very traumatic experience, especially that most of the remote companies require knowing almost only some new stuff, totally ignoring my 18 years of experience in everything else.
Btw... a surgeon of my age is usually not experienced enough to make surgeries on his/her own. A programmer of my age is usually a useless resource, which is happily replaced with someone just after the college.
All this makes me sad. The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
No one cares that I wrote C for DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the late 90s or the systems I wrote with a combination of C++/COM and Vb6 in the early 2000s. I only go back 10 years.
In fact, I negotiated not to be a team lead at my current job.
I got the job. But, when I interview there are certain things I want to emphasize and that wasn’t one of them.
This is very culture specific.
Example: Like you, I usually keep a revolving ~10 years history on my CV. As the years progress, I drop anything > 10 years, as it's really no longer relevant.
Anyways, I was pointedly asked one time during an interview, recently, for a company in a different country, "Where's the rest of your work history since university?"
That was almost 20 years ago, now. You have any idea just how long my CV would be, now, with all of that information?
/tableflip.gif
And then just carry a copy or two of the full CV with you to the interview. If someone wants to see it, let them. Generally interviewers have just been curious.
So they are 23 year olds write lots of managing experience? Sometimes I just dislike this industry with its title inflation. I am 33 having been a recruiter for a short stint, I can tell you most of them just checkbox candidates because they have no idea what they are hiring. As they say, no one ever got fired buying an ibm.
Back when I hired into my company in ‘96 (I’m 47 now and 23 years at the same place), all the managers were in their 50’s and 60’s, who had done real engineering.
Then they become younger and younger, and eventually my manager was an idiot in his late 20’s whose relevant technical experience was “designing a power supply for an FPGA”, with me in my 40’s and an expert in my field. I told them I was leaving, so they gave me a promotion, and now I report to a 50 something female. She is a good manager.
Fortunately I’m at they point now where I’m the graybeard in the basement who gets to solve all the hard problems.
No one ever got fired going Big Blue...
I know a director or two lol.
Forget surgeons. My dentist is nearing retirement age and a younger dentist was brought in to be groomed to replace him. The youngish dentist on more than a few occasions mentioned he couldn't/wouldn't do certain procedures because one with more experience was necessary.
The 'young' dentist is no more than 30 years old. And in coding world, if you are over 30, you are considered over the hill.
> The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
What is valued is someone who can get productive with new trendy framework right away, while receiving minimal pay.
Pure hyperbole.
This is a hard requirement to meet because as you go up the hierarchy of positions, the first level leader initially knows more than the junior contributors, but that pretty rapidly flips. Maybe the second level of leadership still knows more than the first, but almost never after that. How could someone be an expert practitioner in all the varied disciplines that they likely oversee? It skews towards general tech leadership quite quickly.
Experience in software development is sadly irrelevant for much of the software development industry. Instead what is today valued is knowledge of some new framework, the ability to describe data structures and algorithms (for interviews only), and the ability to pick-up (hack) at things quickly and without complaint.
All of these things are equally well done by a newcomer, of which there are ever increasing numbers. What future does someone increasingly older have over time, in an industry where the only qualifications (really) sought are "smart, eager, compliant, cheerful, and quick to learn"?
I’m not saying that it’s not a real phenomenon, but pretty much all the evidence I’ve seen is anecdotal or fairly weak.
While it’s true that a lot of older people are great programmers, I also think programming ability is only about 50% of what most people are looking for. The other 50% is about how well you work with others, and I have to say, when I read a lot of these anecdotes I can’t help but feel like some of people these people aren’t getting hired because they come off as stubborn assholes.
Also, studies on this issue tend to not be well known without effort looking them up. The asshole factor is relevant but not as much as you would expect.
The actual perception that older workers haven't kept their edge is actually a common bias I've seen while gathering people for hiring. This bias is probably common amongst younger looking at older workers (eg 25 year old not hiring 35 year old) but also amongst older looking at less older. Eg a 50 year old won't hire a 40 year old because they wonder why the 40 year old even wants the position. Those two viewpoints seem to be recurring patterns at least in my experience.
You probably want hard data. I'm sure it is out here, Department of labor?
And the article isn't even about Software Devs.
EDIT: evidence of this in this thread said by others:
"Also, the SV is really the bastion of anti discrimination. Which is great. But they replaced it with something else, ageism."
"I have been unable to rejoin the supposedly "hot" SF Bay Area tech industry. I can get interviews if I whack 15 years off my web development career on my resume. I don't pass the in-person or video interview stage, because then the employer sees that I'm older than 35."
But the law suits of companies based on statistical analyses of the number of older people in the company made it seem like a company can be sued for not having an expected distribution of ages but it’s not clear what assumptions are baked into these analyses (ie is it assumed a priori that all ages are equally productive). Certainly older people are more productive in certain contexts than others (eg I’ll take an older more experienced surgeon over the new junior attending any day, but I’ll bet on the young person in a football match or tasks that require a lot of cognitive flexibility).
You seem to be contradicting yourself there, why you would you think an older surgeon lacks cognitive flexibility?
It’s easy to impress a 24 year-old with a decent salary, a stocked kitchen, and lots of dumb little perks they can brag about (never mind that they are being paid, sometimes literally, in peanuts). They don’t start thinking about job security and labor power until it’s too late.
Also, let's be realistic: the vast majority of entry-level software developers just are not good enough to pull off the kind of thing you describe. They would be laughed off.
Look, you made a bad argument. It's not a big deal. The fact is that the situation you described is frankly ridiculous: the notion that, were it not for older workers depressing wages, entry-level workers would cause compensation to go up by being so good at what they do and geographically flexible that they can go from metro area to metro area telling employers to fuck off until somebody recognizes them for the genius that they are. (It's a nice fantasy, though.)
I suspect as you age your Bayesian priors become stronger and stronger so all new data only mildly updates your priors. Young people have very weak priors, so new data can easily affect their thinking.
Anecdotally, my mom has had a smart phone for more than 5 years but she still has just memorized certain functions she knows how to do like texting and placing a call. Ask her to do anything else and she throws up her hands. My 2 year old daughter, while not able to text or place calls, has a much more intuitive grasp of how the phone works and has been able to learn a lot of functionality on her own.
Or another example is that I've noticed from my (albeit limited) experience that all the surgeons I've worked with who used robotic surgical systems were younger (30s-40s). Anecdotally but I think there's a pattern there. Younger people tend to be more open to learning something radically new.
So while virtually all skills benefit from repetition and experience, some skills require more cognitive flexibility (ability to forget what you already know and start fresh) and demand frequent learning and re-learning.
Along similar lines, we have a decent amount of senior (read "older") people at our company that are well paid. But, most of the work we do can be done by less experienced people who are much cheaper. That almost always means they are young. We don't discriminate based on age, but if you just looked at the ages of people that we mostly hire then that data would look like we're discriminating based on age when age is not part of the decision at all.
also, the government can be viewed as having an interest in keeping people employed in general so that they do not become dependent upon government for sustenance.
That's a really big "if", and seems to have no supporting evidence.
Let me turn this around into an only slightly less unsupported statement:
Youngsters in programming are desirable because most programming has become a shitty job where you need obedient people just slightly smarter than average but no smarter. Genuinely smart people are actually unwelcome in most programming jobs.
Programming now is mostly plumbing garbage data between crappy APIs that change every 6 months according to whim and fashion and you don't need smart people for that. In that environment, any knowledge you learn has a half-life of 3 months and you are solving the same problems over and over in different languages and APIs.
Or, alternatively, most VC money is chasing scalable "fad" social businesses, and having youngsters is useful because they are willing to expend enormous amount of money following fads while attempting to get laid. Again, knowledge half-life is under 3 months.
People making actual money and solving business problems seem to have no problems with hiring older people.
maybe the company should have had policies that gave their managers more clues?
> he sells air-conditioning now.
probably makes more (and accomplishes more) than many engineers, especially ones at vapor-ware startups.
Nah, I think management is just a job that requires experience and certification like any other job to be truly good at. People have this idea that "it's management, how hard can it be"... Turns out, really hard.
Only the qualified should be managers, not some 20 year old whose only qualification is being 'good with people'.
I posted a portfolio that showed, if you want this, hire me! My resume was standard, listing out my projects and summarizing my experience.
I had good references that I rarely shared unless it was the last stages, so they wouldn't get bombarded. I applied weekly to new opps, keeping track for the inevitable unemployment record as well.
Results: My huge project list showed my age. Some companies clearly weren't interested... they wanted new programmers, younger, not stuck in the past, etc. I couldn't understand some companies purpose, so new agey with today's internet and reddit culture.
Still, I got 20–30 emails a day! Constant phone calls, messages, occasional scams. Did 2 in-person interviews. I found a great new job, remote programming, in 3-4 months! It was a blur!
The secret is respect, communication, wisdom and quick reflexes, in my case.
This has costed me my marriage, the relationship with my kids who don't talk to me. That lead to a decline in my mental health and physical health. Lack of connections costed me a lot of friends too. I quit all social media because that too radicalized me a lot (nothing else to do when you're sitting on your arse).
For some parts of 2018 and most of 2019 I was homeless. In the past 6 months tried to kill myself twice. Once with heroin (never took it before), second time with Fentanyl. Making sure nobody would find me I went into the woods on a several day hike and shot enough to kill a horse, but both times I woke up with a massive hangover 2 days later. I can assure you it wasn't a cry for fucking help. Everything was done right and I am not supposed to be here, yet for some reason I still fucking am.
When I still had the energy to open up to people after they asked why I'm falling apart nobody listened. Everyone focused on me losing my family so they told me I should get "help", others told me I should just lower my expectation when it comes to jobs. How much lower can you go? Junior jobs are pointless because they don't want to talk to people my age but people who they can "shape" to their ideology.
But seriously fuck them, and fuck their ignorance. They dare to ask "what is the problem" yet when they hear they are so incapable of helping that their best and only suggestion is to "seek professional help". Yes why not outsource the problem to a professional because sure as fuck I have no time to bother with your problems (which compared to my non-problems sound pretty fucking real).
Nobody even considers that my problem isn't drugs, or being suicidal, or becoming estranged, and that my problem is simply that I don't get a job. I never thought I would end up at this point because everything went well for me. Well at least until I got "old". Guess we all gotta go at some stage. I had a great time so maybe I shouldn't complain. It's probably better to leave when you're still ahead (I made the mistake of still being here).
throwaway for obvious reasons.
If you ever want to talk, hit me up.
I'm still housed, and my home life is okay, which is a damn miracle, since I have been unable to rejoin the supposedly "hot" SF Bay Area tech industry. I can get interviews if I whack 15 years off my web development career on my resume. I don't pass the in-person or video interview stage, because then the employer sees that I'm older than 35.
Many of your points resonate with me intensely. We're not sick, disabled, immoral, nor incapable. We're just unemployed, given too much evidence that our societies consider us useless.
I wish you peace in this wretched time.
> have an IQ that is through the roof
Who talks like this? I would never unironically mention my own IQ. I can't help but feel something's missing in this suspiciously heartfelt story.
Still, I'm sorry this happened, if it happened.
You mentioned that you exited a few companies you ran. If I may ask, were you able to save any money from the companies you exited?
I would do the same if I felt I had to.
Throw in the conflation of skill with seniority, leading to an expectation of adjusting wage to age (not skill), our culture's infatuation with youth and the reliance on heuristics to save time and you have a situation highly unsuited to our present job-hopping lifestyles. Finding a job is more about "who you know, not what you know", which just makes things worse since age groups tend to cluster. This then gets explained as "cultural fit".
IME HR is all about risk avoidance. HR is not about finding the best candidate, it is concerned about finding the safest. The older folk may be the best, but they are not the safest, because they tend to have empty patches in their resume and the soft skills like wisdom, communication skills, tend not to be expressible in resume form.
It's never easy going against ingrained norms, especially when they are held by other people. Until the current millenial tech companies hit middle age, I don't see things changing much. Business opportunity?
Analytical skills can be tested. It gets much harder on the creative skill and interaction skill side. Software is mostly about people communicating and making decisions. These standardized tests are only good to get accurate results in an area not so relevant later.
Buzzword compliance is another set of filters.
Even being unemployed is used against you. Gaps between periods of employment are seen by some interviewers as evidence of possible prison time.
These same organizations then complain about not being able to find candidates for various positions.
The successes of startups in Silicon Valley really drove up the compensation of programmers. But these same startups have founders/managers who openly state they prefer younger programmers, and direct their HR/recruiters to act accordingly. And now, we have whole classes of programmers who can't get a job at all.
It's pretty obvious no recruiter lost his/her job for passing on resumes of younger programmers.
Also, the SV is really the bastion of anti discrimination. Which is great. But they replaced it with something else, ageism.
Just my 2 cents.
This is the first time I'm seeing this message and I hope this doesn't become a trend.
No ads. No membership. Content for free. Doesn't work.
It looks like some of these detection mechanisms go away as Chrome gets updated but like seo, spam, viruses, and other such problems etc. there is a war aspect between trying to exploit and avoid exploiting.
Some details can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2909367/can-you-determin...
I guess some things around local storage can be used to infer incognito mode, but I think it'd be straightforward to just write all local storage usage to memory instead of disk.
I am 39yo, but I do not relate with these stories from people with 20+ years of experience in tech. I am a frontend developer for two years only, moving to Los Angeles just now and looking for a job.
Anyone would like to comment if my age and my lack of experience programming will compound and make extra hard for me to get a job?
I think every single programmer needs to be looking forward to the day where every single job move is at best a lateral one, so it's going to make more sense to move towards business rather than staying in IC if you want upward mobility as a 'regular' coder.
I suspect IC technical jobs are going to be the next professional class, you're either going to be in when that happens or you're going to be out. You won't realize it's happened and you're not in until you get laid off and replaced by a contractor at a fraction of your salary, and you won't be able to find a job except as one of those contractors.
The reckoning is coming guys. Get ready for it.
>Whenever I hear "We need more programmers! Make more young people interested in programming! Teach programming at kindergarten!" I always get the urge to ask "What did you do with the old ones you had?"
>Where are all those programmers you hired 5-20 years ago? Why is no programmer at your company older than 40? Why do you have senior software engineers that are 25 years old? What did you do to all those people?
>If you can't take care of your employees, no wonder you never have enough.
older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory, no matter whether they liked coding or management more. the ones that failed in some way - meaning a disruption in their spending and earning capability - are the only ones on the market trying to get programming jobs, and complaining about it.
fixing the earning trajectory in a programming track helps fix this outcome too. FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired.
The FAANG companies and other technology platform companies have separate technical and management career tracks. Only those who want to be managers become managers.
Can confirm: Once you "plateau" in a division, the only options are lateralling to a technology you don't know (with the same expectations exacted upon you) or simply going management and that assumes that there's room in management.
Given how frequently "organisational shifts/changes" occur, that could leave you out in the cold, just as well.
or they fall for the money-making scam, where their new car payment is now the same amount as their rent originally was when they began their careers. Buying larger houses, etc. Basically always barely acclimating to their new level of wealth, so that they always try to climb up the next rung.
I recently quit a job that was advertised as a developer but turned into 90% paperwork. Lasted over a year (it was contractor anyway). But in hindsight, basically NO amount of money would make me happy or willing to fill out forms all day. Seriously, even another $100k wouldn't make me feel any better, I'd still be miserable and not doing what I love.
This just implies they like keeping their career trajectory more than coding.
did I really need to spell that out? I know some people can't relate, but its not clear to me how much they can't relate
If your spouse is making even $50K that puts you in the top decile.
https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
You don’t need to move into middle management to comfortable support a family.
Non-optimal.
Gotta make more, gotta save more, gotta send your children to better school.
And thats just the baseline.
How do you think the other 80% of households survive that aren’t making the $130K that an average developer can make in any large city or if you’re a dual income earner with your spouse making about the average of a college educated worker of $50K - how do you think the other 90% of households make it?
But then again, I am also of the opinion that the school you go to doesn’t have as much bearing on your later success in life - as long as it safe and teaching the basics - your home environment.
I look at the top 20 students who went to my (relatively poor performing school) and we were all teacher’s kids or doctor’s kids. There are two doctors, a few teachers, one professor at an Ivey league school, and a lawyer or two.
But my current job is also in the northern burbs where I live.
Vs just sucking it up and doing your own hacking on the own time. Even if you write code all day at work, you should be doing some at home, because we need to keep up on the latest tech in a risk-tolerant environment (like personal projects that can fail with no loss). Companies can't afford to take on the project risk of leading edge/research level tech.
So hack on the cool stuff at home. Treat your job as a job. There's no principal broken by going into management.
Like I said in another post, I just bought a 5 bedroom/3-1/2 bath house, 3000+ square foot house with a large office for $330K two years ago in the northern burbs of Atlanta where the school systems are ranked in the top 15% nationwide. It is the most affluent county in GA and one of the fastest growing in the nation. Three exits down the same size house is going for about $450K and you’re in one of the 10 most affluent cities in the nation -Johns Creek GA. (http://money.com/money/collection-post/4504851/richest-towns...)
Vs just sucking it up and doing your own hacking on the own time. Even if you write code all day at work, you should be doing some at home, because we need to keep up on the latest tech in a risk-tolerant environment (like personal projects that can fail with no loss). Companies can't afford to take on the project risk of leading edge/research level tech.
When I’m at home, I’m exercising, spending time with my wife and son, and just relaxing. If I can’t keep up with the latest tech at work, it’s time to change jobs.
Yes I will do work related side projects to learn a new to me technology, or proof of concepts with newer technology that aren’t on the critical path. I also work at small companies where I do get my hands dirty with everything from the front end to playing around with whatever I want to with a DEV AWS Account.
I don’t do “leading edge technology”. They are probably not widely marketable yet. I stay on the far end of “the slope of enlightenment” going to “Plateau of Productivity” of the Hype Cycle.
My resume is very buzzword compliant
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."
I've been consulting the last few months, mostly brought in to coach CTO's. I'm (somewhat unwillingly) coming to the conclusion that nobody really feels like they know how to manage programmers.
This leads to mismanagement, and nobody likes being mismanaged, (also it usually means you're being underpaid), so devs eventually wise up and get out. If you think about it, this is a natural extension of the "the best code is no code" ethos.
The best situations I've seen are programmers-managing-programmers. I've been lucky in my career to work for multiple "engineer-turned-founder" types, and these have felt the most "aligned."
I suspect that MBA programs should start including a CS component.
I've seen it in my own employment multiple times, my team's(admittedly good-hearted) managers come in and say "We'd like to do (list of 10 things). Now we know the software has limitations, and we don't have any money for feature enhancement, so feel free to tell us no on any of these."
Us: "We can do 2 of those, maybe three if you can give us a couple of days to hack in one of the simpler requests"
Managers: confused, questioning but begrudgingly accepting looks
That's because they don't. I've had good managers and bad ones, and all the good ones were, or had been, software engineers themselves. (Of course, some of the engineers were not so great as managers.) As I like to say, software engineering is about the management of complexity, and if you've never worked on a complex system, you don't understand how to do that.
Mean while the story doesn't focus on any of those things in particular. How is an old gentleman getting turned away from a job at a restaurant chain, Season 52, for, "Not looking young enough" relate to any of that and the broader issue of Age discrimination across the board. The anecdotal stories are cool and fine obviously.
But normally non-tech postings on Hacker-News, especially political news stories/articles, lead to discussion about what was discussed _in_ the article at least somewhat... And I'd like to see that. Just found it odd. Don't mind me if this sentiment isn't shared.
Job ads address people more likely to be a good fit. That's it.
> If you hire a young person they might be 100x or 10x or 1x in a couple years.
100x?
I'm jealous of whatever drugs are available in Silicon Valley, because even 10X sounds fantastical to me.