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Comment by jasoneckert | Hacker News Reader

I've seen and heard of age discrimination in non-tech industries, but in the tech industry I believe that age discrimination is often mistaken for skills obsolescence.

As a software developer for as long as I can remember, I'm actually at the top of my game now in my 40s - I can software engineer (plan) off the top of my head, and my tenacity is balanced with a sense of direction I never had as a younger developer. I spend half the time developing and produce 10 times the results (there's still crunch time every so often though).

The trick is to keep your mind active - I have a job that allows me to do a lot of side development projects outside of working hours, and I always take on a new project at least once a year that is out of my comfort zone (if it looks impossible, it's perfect).

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Whenever topics like this come up on HN, there are always tons of people in their 30s and 40s posting comments like this, which boil down to something like: "I'm not old enough to experience age discrimination yet, and I'm scared but I'm going to keep up with the latest languages/frameworks so I will be special and not be discriminated against like all the other developers, who allowed their skills to deteriorate when they got older."

On the other hand, when people who are already in their 50s post about this topic, they are saying things like, "My phone interview went really great and they were impressed by my skills, but when I went in their attitude changed the second they saw how old I am."

My take is a bit different, and it may explain the phenomenon you've noticed on HN.

TLDR; I believe a lot of people mistake price discrimination as age discrimination.

Long version: Let's say you need some code monkey to slap together go or rust services. Well, sure, you get a lot of people applying with 25 years experience, you also get a lot of people applying with 5 years experience.

Now here's the rub, it's highly unlikely that anyone's been coding go or rust services for 20 years in any case. (To be honest, it's even unlikely that anyone's been coding go or rust services for 5.) So any of those applicants, as long as their references check out, will do.

Which salary do I want to pay?

If I have a low level, quasi hardware layer service that I need coded in C or C++? Fine, yes, experience matters. It matters a lot in those instances, and I'd be foolish to hire some kid to do that. But there is less and less of that kind of work. (Flip side being that such work is more and more critical.) The dirty secret of the tech industry however, is that most work is just CRUD equivalent stuff that could be satisfactorily accomplished by any warm bodied techie. So it just makes no sense to pay more for those warm bodies.

Isn’t that solved by specifying “junior developer” or “intermediate developer”? Or by including the salary range?

Well, as a rule, I never included salary range. I ask for salary requirements. Then only proceed down the evaluation and hiring path with applicants where the salary matches what is available in the budget. Better chance you get an employee who's happy with the pay that way.

I always specified entry level, intermediate, etc, but as times get harder, what you start to realize out here in flyover country is that everyone is applying for all positions. They don't really care about the title or labels. (At least, I suspect it's because times are getting harder? I don't know of any other reason highly experienced people would be applying for some of these kinds of positions.)

It should be - but I’m positive that everybody with over 10 years experience is calling themselves a “senior developer” by now. There’s no level after that, so most everybody over 35 is a senior developer.

There are “principal developers” and architects, but just like with products and the “Innovator’s Dilemma” at some point, your skillset overserves the market. After a certain level of competence, experience doesn’t add value if you’re applying to be a developer for yet another software as a service crud app. Either be happy with salary stagnation and cost of living raises (if that) or move on to greener pastures.

Well, I’d be way happy if I could spend the next 20 years making what I’m making now (adjusted for inflation) doing what I’m doing now, but it seems like there’s a certain age where your salary expectation is $0 - IF you’re in software. I don’t get why this doesn’t happen to doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.

I keep reading that. But from what I’ve seen from corporate America and outside of the startup culture, if you keep your skills and network current, there are still opportunities. That being said, I’m 45 and the oldest ICs that I know are late 40s early 50s. One has started only applying for remote work.

If you make it to Senior Principal Staff Engineer they'll bring coffee to you.

I wish it were "over 10 years." I help review resumes for my company and on a nearly daily basis I see people with one or even two "senior software engineer" jobs and 6-7 years of experience.

It always sticks out as an, "Oh REALLY?" But without talking to the candidate you never know if it reflects poorly on their knowledge of their own limitations, or is just a sign they happened to work for companies with title inflation. I've seen both.

Don't blame me, I had 4 years experience when my company had a mass exodus so everyone who was left there got a salary bump (+23% for me), and of course they had to title bump since that was way past 'Software Developer'.

3 years after that, I went to work for a company that had the same thing happen and now I'm a 'Technical Lead / Software Architect'. I didn't choose the title life, the title life chose the shitty companies I worked for :(

There's pretty severe title inflation going on at some companies. I know of one company that awarded the "senior" title for people with as little as 3-4 years experience and had several more grandiose titles for people above that level.

Will that expose the company to accusations of age discrimination? They aren’t even interested in applications from developers with more than ten years of experience!

> it's highly unlikely that anyone's been coding go or rust services for 20 years in any case. (To be honest, it's even unlikely that anyone's been coding go or rust services for 5.) So any of those applicants, as long as their references check out, will do.

This is a common misunderstanding: yes, Rust is new but prior experience with everything else is not capped at 5 years and it matters a lot. Over my career, I’ve had to fix or replace a number of those “any warm bodied techie” apps where they had incorrect results, security issues, unusable performance, etc. because the developers had been marginally proficient in a popular tool but lacking more general skills and, most importantly, the ability to recognize that they were out of their league.

I hired a guy with a masters in EE who is crazy smart as a help desk tech. He’s since moved up.

Our job was his first interview in a year.

    > ...the dirty secret of the tech industry however, is that most work is just CRUD equivalent stuff

No.

I see this a lot on HN, the idea that "CRUD" applications are trivial, but it's a myth. It simply is not true.

I think folks are just extrapolating from "Pet-shop" or "Northwind" examples that they've seen in tutorials/docs and assume that that is what, say, enterprise developers actually do at the same level of complexity. It's not and it has never been the case.

CRUD apps are simple. You need one or two architects and seniors to make sure that things don’t go off the rails and to gather the requirements and once you have that, some boot camp grads can do the grunt work.

When I was a team lead, I wouldn’t overpay for a crud developer.

I call myself an “enterprise developer/architect” on HN for context - meaning I don’t work for the cool hip startups but let’s call a spade a spade, I’ve spent the last 10 years working on yet another software as a service crud app or bespoke internal apps. Yeah I spend some time in meetings, dealing with “cloud native” infrastructure and I can hold my own up and down the stack.

> I see this a lot on HN, the idea that "CRUD" applications are trivial, but it's a myth.

Nah, it's true. For the average small to medium size company, CRUD apps are mostly "plug library A into framework B, with a dash of glue logic" and you're done. The most difficult part is the yak-shaving needed to get things to work together.

Things like embedded systems or scaling to FAANG levels are much more difficult.

"If I have a low level, quasi hardware layer service that I need coded in C or C++? Fine, yes, experience matters. It matters a lot in those instances, and I'd be foolish to hire some kid to do that. But there is less and less of that kind of work. "

You know, that could be. Dunno why you got the downvote so here's an up.

Offshoring of manufacture probably has something to do with the dearth of work. Development was bound to follow mass production.

I'm 54. Have been in sw dev for 40 years. I have kept my skills (aws api / node.js / css / html5 / etc) up to the point were I am over qualified for many of the positions (laid off 3 years back from IBM) I apply for. Before I updated my LinkedIn profile pic I received many interview invites. Now I get none. Recently I started looking at the people that these sw dev companies _actually_ hire. They ask for 3/5/10 years experience but I found that in almost every case (95%) the devs they hired were under 25, straight out of collage with 0 experience. Last year I applied for 300 positions, now I don't even bother looking to dev work anymore. I have 3 kids at home and we are close to bankruptcy. Let me be very clear here: The _only_ thing that matters in gaining employment in sw dev (in my city at least) is your age. Edit: Also should mention that I often offered (have no choice) to work for much less $ then what junior would be making.

Sorry if what I'm about to say is rude, please file that under me being ignorant rather malicious.

Given your struggles to get a job and your very valuable experience, what's holding you back from going as a contractor / setting up your own shop?

That is the route I am now going. Until my last breath I'm going to build a sw company and hire 100's of people. Like all companies I'll have a page on my site that says how moral and inclusive we are except that we won't be hypocrites like most (all?) other sw companies. This is my delusional dream.

What I have found is that it can be much easier to find remote work that pays fairly poorly. Usually startups and the like. There is a lot of it.

Can't afford to live in the US anymore but Mexico is working out pretty well.

I've always liked the idea of a consulting firm that specialized in hiring old people. I wonder if there's enough work to keep something like that fed if one were to specialize in 'obsolete' tech and market at a national level.

Heck, to the right client, that one i860 or C80 programmer might be worth gold. Either that, or just do a highly competent job at embedded programming generally.

I'm a middle age female software developer and also found similar experience when I was in the job market recently. The software development positions generally are below 2 years, under 5 years and the senior position at 6-8 years. What do you do if you have 20 years of software development experience?

Recently worked for a (bad) silicon valley YC company, and was shocked to learn that 6-8 years of experience is considered senior these days. Not enough experience at that point to really be senior, but I think there's such a desperate need for developers that they have to do that.

To be clear, I've certainly met people in their 20s that have senior-level ability, but they are by far the exception.

I agree with you that the "senior" title is passed out too easily, but as someone who is 46 this has been the case throughout my entire career, I don't think it is a new problem.

In fact, the 6-8 years of experience you quote is far higher than I would have guessed if you asked me when the average company (incorrectly) starts handing out "senior" titles.

I definitely agree - more precisely, I meant that "6-8 years" is the time by which nearly all people have attained "senior" designation, even if they aren't that good. However, it used to be (in the places I worked, at least) that a person wasn't senior until at least 10 years of experience.

IIRC for those that make senior, five years to senior is about average at Google.

I think you should start looking for jobs that are "developer adjacent". Product managers, technical marketing, sales engineer, solution architect.

Jobs like presales engineers have higher salaries than developers, require 15+ years experience (dev preferred) and excellent soft skills.

> What do you do if you have 20 years of software development experience?

Move to a market where your skills are in high demand and focus on middle/business and back end development. Or better yet, embedded systems development.

I've been at this for 25 years and IMO, the further down the call stack you go the more your cumulative years of experience are an asset.

This doesn't mean you can stop learning new tech, it just means the trends in those lower layers seem to be more sustained and of a longer duration.

"I'm 54. Have been in sw dev for 40 years.....Last year I applied for 300 positions,..."

Being somewhat older than you, but bored, I think about taking up the oar again. My problem doubles down on yours in that my background is all in products with an expensive hardware component or workstation software, neither appears to be a growth industry.

Aside from the inevitable well-meaning advice to become some sort of 'project manager', etc. I wonder if it makes any sense to hit the .gov job markets at all.

Has anyone done that at an advanced age?

My last few years at IBM were as a project manager at big corp. Besides the outright corruption, the new problems were that I was now competing against 6'4" 22yo MBAs fresh out of modeling school. They taught me how to analyse the underside of a bus real quick.

I had a very similar problem and ended up in the streets. The solution was to join a bootcamp, cut things from the resume and get a junior job. From here, you can leverage new connections to get a better job or a promotion.

Joining a bootcamp makes it look like you are new to the field and will settle for an entry-level salary. This is a very extreme solution, but might help you solve this problem for several years.

I feel bad for saying this, but my advice is to dye your hair, join a gym and take some years of your Facebook profile.

Try to save some money to buy a car to do Uber, start a small IT consulting firm or get a job teaching. Most people will advice mild patches but they dont know what it's like to run out of money. I feel your pain.

Yeap. I'm in my 30s and I've seen enough writing on the wall to know that there is no way in hell I should be relying on being a software developer to feed me in my 50s or beyond. We can talk about how it shouldn't happen or it's illegal for it to happen all we want - but clearly it happens.

51 here - 40+ years coding - haven't had any issues with my age yet...

As someone who's starting to "get up there", can you share what critical elements helped you get to that higher productivity? I am definitely much better than when I first started (9 years ago), but I think I've largely leveled off in terms of speed of delivery after about 6.

Some niches reward deep exploration. For instance in adversarial domains like security, you do have to outrun the bear, not just be faster than the slowest guy. And the bear is moving pretty fast these days. Some black hats have been thinking about it for years. You have to know everything they know and then have one more trick up your sleeve. So you're not competing so much with new grads for jobs.

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