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Comment by jes | Hacker News Reader

I’m 61 and have been working in high tech since 1983 or so, writing embedded software, doing system administration, and managing people.

The article strikes me as good advice. I didn’t find anything to disagree with in it.

Ageism is a thing. People have all kinds of biases of which they may or may not be aware. You have them too, and so do I.

A line from another source that I keep in mind is this: “If you’re always getting angry, you’ll turn your nature against the Way.” [1] It doesn’t pay to be the angry, unapproachable person in life.

[1] https://www.dailyzen.com/journal/bloodstream-sermon

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In addition to ageism, I think the proliferation of the MBA/McKinsey school of thought really works against older programmers. You have an increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge around 1) Programming, and 2) whatever industry they happen to be working in. What's worse, is that they see no problem with this because they think they "understand business".

What this leads to is a lot of dumb decisions. One example in this case is that, to someone who's never written a line of code, a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of. You need to have a decent understanding of the work developers do, in order to understand the value the 50 year-old developer brings and why paying him or her 2 or 3x the 25 year-old is actually a bargain.

One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide and while I agree the senior developers are on a curve shifted to the right, there’s a massive amount of overlap.

Most company’s best 5% 25 year-old developers are probably creating more value than their median 50 year-old developer, even though that median senior dev is creating more value than the median 25 year-old.

> One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide

I kind of disagree with this, although I don't think it's age that separates developers. But developers who can work independently are a lot more valuable than those that require close supervision, and those developers are considerably more value than those who are actively destroying value.

If I understand your comment correctly, I think we're agreeing (that there is a wide range [high variance] of value delivered across the population: think of a bell curve that's "smooshed" down to be short and wide).

Quite possibly. I realised after I posted that I wasn't quite sure what the axis of your plot were (I'm still not).

X axis is value delivered per engineer, increasing with X.

Y axis is a histogram of “number of engineers producing that value”, increasing with Y.

This, but for value instead of IQ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg

Yes, when you look at those differences any performance drop due to age is going to look tiny in comparison.

What I have found though is a lack of willingness to put up with bullshit. Stuff I accepted as normal in my twenties I'd just walk away from now. This is probably good for the employer but maybe not for your immediate manager.

“ But developers who can work independently are a lot more valuable than those that require close supervision, and those developers are considerably more value than those who are actively destroying value.”

True. But most people reach that point after a few years or never.

Yes, you hit the plateau of that curve pretty quickly. You can't just be an individual contributor and justify 3% raises every year for 30 years, when you hit that plateau on raw skill you need to start finding ways to player-coach the generation(s) of more junior developers behind you. I don't think that necessarily means you have to move into management, but it does mean broadening your definition of impact beyond LoC/commits/tickets.

1.5 to 3.0% of those 3% raises are inflation/cost-of-living adjustment, which seem like they should be able to continue forever.

> broadening your definition of impact beyond LoC/commits/tickets.

Is this the 'classic' expectation for a dev? Where I work the least technical person is the PM and everyone else comes together to determine what gets done and how it gets done.

Everyone knows the tech side and decisions gets filtered down to the rank and file. Taking initiatives are expected - I know this is likely the exception not the norm, but I hope future workplaces are more like this and less like that.

>One problem in these discussions is the curve of value delivered by an individual developer in a particular situation is short-and-wide and while I agree the senior developers are on a curve shifted to the right, there’s a massive amount of overlap.

This can also be said of managers. Then why aren´t they discriminated by age too?

Because they are smarter and work the system. Same for sales guys, lawyers and so on. They work the system to their advantage. Developers are one of the few groups that believes in a just meritocracy.

Agree about the value curve. Most developers do stuff that can be learned in a few years and then they just repeat the same thing with slight variation. There are really not that many jobs where you get challenged to grow throughout your career. It’s just repetition (like most other jobs)

Also known as "1 year of experience, 12 times" (or "2 years, 6 times")

I frequently hear that, but in practically every other profession doing the exact same thing for 20 years is still valued. And the underlying reality is you can’t do the exact same thing for 12 years in the computer field. Experience is all the little edge cases that cropped up over time.

"Experience is all the little edge cases that cropped up over time."

Absolutely. I will be using this one.

This is not exclusive to dev work. Same can be said of managers.

Anyone in the trades is doing such a job. If you're a plumber, or electrician, or cabinet maker, or framing carpenter, or a mechanic, even if those 12 years (or 20 years or more) seem similar to people outside the field, you're learning all the time. It never stops, until you do.

It’s not like learning stops but the curve flattens out a lot. Another problem is that in tech 20 year old knowledge is worth way less than 20 year old knowledge in for example cabinet making.

> Another problem is that in tech 20 year old knowledge is worth way less

This is a widely held position, which sort of makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I'd argue that it's not true. Most of what I know now that is really valuable isn't related to the technology of today or 1986. It's related to how to work, how to design systems, how to decompose problems, how to scale, etc. etc.

I refer to my resume as "a graveyard of obsolete technologies"

I could do the same. But really, it's also my value proposition. "What's that you say? Your org has a dozen crappy systems of questionable lineage and you need to migrate to SomethingFromThisDecade? Let me pick it apart for you and we can build a plan together." It's not much, but it's honest work. (and I happen to enjoy it...so win-win)

You might be surprised at how many companies are running 10+ year old technologies that were designed around the constraints of the 10+ year old systems that they replaced. If that's your thing, you can build a pretty strong career around being the person to keep that system humming along.

But this happens in tech management too. Last 20 years: CMMI? RUP? PMI? XP? Scrum? Design Thinking? Project to product management?

I’ve worked with a lot of young developers and never met a 25 year old developer that’s creating more value than the average 50 year old developer with 20+ years experience. In theory sure it’s possible, but in practice it simply doesn’t happen even close to 5% of the time.

The thing is most people quit the field long before putting in 20+ years. So, I suspect it’s less about the experience than the filtering process.

So senior devs are better than 95% of 25 year olds.

Since finding a "best 5%" is almost impossible, because who knows until you hire them and they work there for a while, the best bet is to hire people who are older. Also, for a bone fide best 5%, they are going to work at the cool companies, and never will work at a sewer processing government utility company in their IT department, or work at for a local chain of tire stores with 50 locations and an IT staff of 3 people.

So, one might as well not even worry about the top 5%.

These days, there is no excuse to have a non-technical manager (unless you are a technical manager yourself). Software is eating the world; it is professional negligence to put someone in charge that doesn't have a detailed understanding of the technology that impacts everything about the modern workplace.

It isn't like there is a shortage of technical managers right now.

I've never had a non-technical manager, even when I worked in sales, and I've been doing this for over 20 years.

This must be industry variant then. 3 of my 4 jobs in the last 30 years have involved non-technical leadership. The exception was working for a "tools" company where software was the product. But the other 3 are at the "edge" where software enables real devices to be more modern/gadgety. In that context, software programmers are a necessary evil to en-smart-ify gadgets that have traditionally been "dumb." And letting software people be part of the direction is too much of a loss of traditional power.

That’s why I recommend that young people should try to work for a company where the CEO comes from a tech background and understands your work. It’s just natural that someone has more respect for a role they have performed themselves.

Why do you recommend this to young people specifically? Wouldn't it be sound advice regardless of the age of the recipient of this advice? Just curious why you've added that qualifier.

I guess i don’t give advice to people my age ;). getting into tech companies also seems easier when you are young and don’t have much of a resume. Having a resume with years in not interesting companies and uncool tech also seems to make you toxic.

Funnily enough some of my better managers have been non-technical. Some of the worst have been people who know enough to micro-manage you to death.

tbf, micromanaging is bad regardless of any other attributes.

> without the hassles of things like kids to take care of

That's not accurate. At 35 there are young kids, maybe even 45. At 50 they're pretty much independent, at least aged 10-12. So actually, if you hire a 32 year old dev you should be more concerned about kids than if you hire a 50 year old. So if that's the concern, only hire 18 year olds I guess, or maybe even 15.

Actually if you hire 25-year-olds, they're probably going to start having kids right around the time you need them the most.

yeah, but the plan is: lay them off once they start having kids, and hire new 25-year olds.

source: 25+ years experience in this industry.

Consulting industry?

Can believe it. But: you don't need the whole industry. You need to find one good place to work in. Those exist. May it pay a bit less than soulless corp? Sure, maybe - or maybe not. But my 25+ yr experience shows they do exist.

The spread is quite wide. I got my first kid at 45 and now almost 50 working 75% to take care of two kids the rest of the time.

The flip side is that I have never been so focused during working hours as now. I’m getting quite much more done in six hours than I used to get done in eight or nine.

Yes I feel more productive than many of the younger, childless colleagues at work. In fact I really don't like going to the office due to people talking WAY too much. I have 8-9 hours and then I need to pick up my kid, not using those 8-9 hours to the fullest is something I simply have to avoid. And incidentally my least productive days are the in office days.

> You have an increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge

After seeing this time and time again, and because I was getting older, I made a conscious decision to move into management. Be the change you want to see in the world, right? Now my output is mostly spreadsheets and powerpoint, but I enable my team to do good work as I insulate them from the bullshit. I can always get down into the trenches or work on a side project if I need to scratch that creative itch.

Yes! It's probably just a demographics thing that will even itself out in the future. I mean: People like you will become managers and there are many programmers in the younger generations to draw candidates from.

Haha!

Cause nobody every changes, loses their edge or falls out of touch with their tech roots, right?

We just need to get these clueless dinosaurs out of power before the current woke kids take over!

I really respect that attitude.

I happen to be doing a security assessment on some products (PuTTY etc) at the firm (Fortune Global 100) where I am interning.

It baffled me to read a directive from management that said that we should shy away from open-source projects - I must confess that I was somewhat frustrated at the sheer ignorance in the memo but your comment allows me to see a silver-lining. I hope that one day I can rise up to management and make decisions based on greater nuance than simply saying "OSS bad and insecure".

I think the general aversion to OSS is more that there is no responsible actor. In many cases, if you integrate a third party paid solution you can file a bug on that solution with reasonable confidence it can be a priority. If you use code from another team at the company you know you can file bugs on them. If you write code yourself you have confidence in fixing it. There is a danger with integrating OSS that you have code in your stack that no one knows well enough to fix and no one is responsible for. If something breaks you might have to learn a sizeable amount of code and domain knowledge to make a fix. Filing bugs on OSS is not viewed in the same way as filing bugs on paid third party solutions as whether the bugs are a priority to an OSS solution seems more risky.

Note that large amounts of OSS is used in companies, but it's generally code that developers are expected to know well enough to dive into if need be. And code that is popular enough to be well tested for bugs and known that breaking errors in the framework will get fixes. Examples would be things like Python or Node.js.

As a manager a potential problem you can have is a major bug your team is responsible for that no one is qualified to fix and thus your only reasonable time estimate is unknown. Avoiding certain parts of OSS is often a precaution against this situation.

> I think the general aversion to OSS is more that there is no responsible actor.

I have filed many bug reports for paid software over the years. The bugs were fixed exactly 0% of the time. If they ever gave a reason, it was along the lines of "you are a special snowflake, nobody else has had that problem, so it isn't worth fixing".

Eventually, I just stopped filing bug reports.

Things aren't better with OSS, either, though I resent went bugs get closed because they're old.

Our policy with D is we never close bugs, no matter how old they are, unless we fix them or no longer have users for it (like D version 1).

> I resent went bugs get closed because they're old

I'm picturing the guy who came up with this idea sitting at his desk surrounded by unopened bills.

well, you're wrong because of all the ideas my ADHD mind ever came up with - that wasn't one of them.

While I understand your lack of success with bug reports, and I thank you for your stance on (not) closing bugs, note how the average manager got what he wanted:. A proof that reasonable effort has been made, and it's not his fault. This allows survival in a politically piosonous environment. If the bug got fixed is generally not their concern, others will have to deal with it and move on.

Besides, I once got Oracle to fix a bug. It took months and I basically had to spell the fix out to them, but it actually is possible.

Nice job! How long did you have to wait for the new software version after the bug fix?

A few months ago, one of our young devs got a PR accepted to fix a tiny little Spark bug that had been bothering us for a while. The big boss meeting was happy, plenty of virtual pats on the backs and congratulations.

And then someone had to go and ask when we'd see the fix in our DataBricks cluster.

> I have filed many bug reports for paid software over the years. The bugs were fixed exactly 0% of the time

In my experience, the big difference is buying software (good luck with getting Microsoft fixing a bug in office or windows; no one even tries) vs buying a service. If we bought specialized custom software support for some expensive hardware, those companies jump when there is a question.

They jump if you paid for a service contract. If you paid for a product, those companies owe you something fit for its intended purpose, and bugs are not that.

What's the point of keeping open bugs if you never fix them? It's not a cost free decision.

They are still problems that need fixing, some day someone may be doing work on the project without knowing what to work on and having a backlog of issues categorised by importance/etc will be useful in that situation.

It is cost free. It prevents people from filing it again. It provides insight into later problems. It provides a place where people can ask and offer advice on working around it. Sometimes an intractable bug becomes more tractable later. It can provide a clue to a later bug report. Sometimes someone new has a brainwave on how to fix it.

That would require a project be worthwhile to stick around long enough for an opportunity for someone new to come along, let alone come along and be interested in it. It's obvious that most career programmers are only used to ("interested in"?) pushing devops shovelware onto GitHub and other forms of busywork, so it shows in their bug-handling hygiene.

Have you ever filled a bug for the JDK? I was at 20 emails, plus having to create accounts and give paperwork that our company had a license for a one-liner correction of a major bug when I decided to abandon and wrap my code in an exception catcher and manage it on my side...

“ I think the general aversion to OSS is more that there is no responsible actor. In many cases, if you integrate a third party paid solution you can file a bug on that solution with reasonable confidence it can be a priority”

I know that’s what management believes but in reality it’s a complete illusion. I can’t recall a simple time where we got a bug fix within reasonable time from any of our 6, 7, or 8 figure software vendors. You get fixes only if you have paid for custom code but tickets against the actual product disappear into the void.

In contra other replies here, we have repeatedly sent bug reports to vendors and got productive, timely, comprehensive support and fixes: Hashi, Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, and others. We're a Bay Area company of about 500 people, not a market behemoth in any way.

This is my take as well. I build and sell electronics, coded in Rust. (Cortex-M). I started using OSS HALs, device drivers, utility crates, peripheral access libs etc. Each of them had bugs, missing features, or awkward APIs. I got about 10% of my issues and PRs addressed. I now use almost exclusively internal code (with exceptions for debug tools and the cortex-m lib). If there's a problem or limitation, I fix it myself. Far easier than spelunking someone else's code, or hoping a maintainer fixes it.

Do you make the internal code OSS?

Some of it - my custom HAL is OSS, and I've published the full repo code to one of my firmwares.

And do you get any PRs/issues? Are they all solved?

I've had a few. All solved except one. I suspect only a few people are using my lib, and all are hobbyists. A particular challenge with this lib is I'm attempting to support most (newer) STM32 variants using a single HAL lib, which makes ops testing tough. (This allows me the flexibility to choose whichever variant I'd like on future projects without modifying the code base). I've published code so others can use it as an example.

Reading between the lines of your questions: I'm not throwing spears at the lib maintainers; I'm pointing out that relying on 3rd party code may cause complications. In my case, I made a decision on each individual lib.

There is a bit of a programmer trope "its easier to write code than to read it". This leads to reinventing wheels, duplicated effort, etc. When it comes to open source, I take the position that we are all in it together and try to come up with fixes for problems that I see in existing projects, even if I've never used the language before or the codebase is messy. I also think being able to work on code that came before you is a useful skill to have.

>reasonable confidence it can be a priority.

hahaha, you so funny

> I think the general aversion to OSS is more that there is no responsible actor.

Unless the OSS in question has an enterprise support subscription that is useful, the best responsible actor for OSS projects is all (or a subset of) your employees. They know your workload best and know the issues that affect you most and can learn the skills needed to improve the OSS that you use. Having a diverse set of companies contributing to an OSS project makes it suitable for a more diverse set of use cases and circumstances.

Do you think the "clueless middle managers" the OP alludes to view themselves as such? Or are they too protecting their teams so they can get real work done?

We all see ourselves as the rare exception, the one bucking the status quo and doing things differently.

Thank you for this. We have someone just like this who went into management for the same reason. He does an excellent job of it, I only wish everyone shared the appreciation for his powers of insulation and fighting in the devs' corner all the time.

Quite often your efforts aren't visible to everyone, but it's visible to some and they're thankful for it!

Echoing this. Please for the love of God get your MBA.

Its really, really easy. If you think weekend courses are going to be too much because you remember Engineering in college, I can tell you from experience that they won't be.

Agree. Getting my MBA was way easier than my CS degree.

MBA is a walk in the park compared to CS. Seriously.

I did business school before comp sci, and then a MSc in CS and it got easier along the way, so you may just have gotten better at the game of school

A Masters in CS is easier than the Bachelors.

It may be "easy" but unless you're in the right program at the right time in your life, and most importantly, have the right career trajectory, the MBA itself won't magically "open doors" into an executive suite. Certainly it's not any faster than just painstakingly climbing the career ladder.

It depends on why you want to get a MBA. If it's for credibility - go to a top 10 school. If it's to learn - you might be better off learning on the job than taking weekend courses.

A weekend MBA from a nowhere school has very little value.

The young MBA people are intimidated by people who can reject their schoolbook ideas coherently. Most of those people are older, but not all of them. I started noticing this before I was thirty, either reacting to me or to someone I agreed with who happened to be older. It only gets worse.

Recently Ford was in the news here in Michigan regarding layoffs. They found emails saying if an employee is over 55, have a career of large success and as a result are paid above average then lay them off.

Ford is facing huge challenges as the entire industry has to pivot to battery powered vehicles and they want to get rid of their best and most experienced people?

This will not end well for them. I'd be just the opposite and try to convince these folks to work until 75!

That sure sucked but this was not about the age but about the cost.

They wanted to fire the most expensive people. In union shops seniority tends to go in hand with higher pay.

And I'm guessing their thinking was that the closer someone is to retirement, the more likely they are to accept a payout offer.

This is likely a direct result of the EV transition. They now have a lot of people with 30 years experience that’s seemingly irrelevant.

> a 25 year-old developer is the same as a 50 year-old developer, but at half the cost and without the hassles of things like kids to take care of.

I was a fairly good programmer when I was 25. I'm a MASSIVELY better programmer at 57 than I was back then. My memory is a bit worse, and for certain kinds of problems, I may be a bit slower than I was at peak (maybe around 42-47). But hire me now, and you'll get a better programmer than you would ever have gotten from this body in the past.

And, guess what: no kids to take care of because they've already grown into fully fledged adults and lead their own lives.

> increasing number of managers who have little to no domain knowledge

I think it's on the downward trend though.

Where I work, more managers than not used to be an engineer, and the younger they are, the more likely they're going to used to be engineers (or straight up converted).

Isn't the trend against this approach? It seems at least in tech, the view is that this is not so good.

> Ageism is a thing.

Indeed. I’ve been in the too while executives at a large, publicly-traded company denied specific hiring requests because their LinkedIn profile pictures “looked too old”.

On the other hand, that company was terrible to work for many reasons. They weren’t excluding older developers because they thought they were less knowledgeable. They were excluding older workers because the company knew they couldn’t trick them into working 12-hour days and putting up with abusive management practices. Young people could be convinced the bad things were normal. Older devs knew better and wouldn’t stick around anyway.

I've hired a few 50+ devs and every time I regret it. Those specific devs learn much slower. They had a complex about their age that made them difficult to work with and connect with. Their work product was bad and no amount of intervention corrected course.

Being only in a senior role that late in life itself is a red flag.

What's above senior? Senior++?

Staff, principle, fellow?

More seriously I think something that can happen with older folks is they might fall into working in a single place with a single set of tools for a very long time so when they transition to something different it may be hard to adjust. Not necessarily because “they are old” but because if they did one thing and only that thing for 15 years it’s hard to change.

They could have had those roles already. Once you're in those advanced IC type of roles, there aren't really a lot of places that you can go. A lot of the time that role depends on your domain experience within the company -- Usually to "move up", you have to go down a role to a bigger/more-challenging company.

Thus at BigCo, hiring senior devs of advanced age should make sense to do.

s/a staff engineer/architect.

Many companies don't have positions titled staff, principle, etc. A lot just stop at senior, or use numbers, etc. My current shop has SE1,2,3,4,5,6. 4 is what most tech companies would call a staff engineer, 5 a principle, and I'm not sure if we actually have any 6s at the moment.

Numbers are equivalent to titles. You presumably don’t have senior as title either.

This is entirely dependent on the company. Netflix has one level "Senior Software Developer". My former employer only went up to Principal Developer. My current gig has one Senior Staff Engineer, me. The thing is, I didn't get better in the month between leaving my last gig, and starting this one. So these titles are a bit ambiguous.

Principal software engineer. Or software architect.

Many companies do not add fancy titles

sometimes it's just junior, regular and senior programmer

Master of the Universe, of course.

Often some variations on https://staffeng.com/guides/overview-overview

This is incredibly wrong and I hope you get an opportunity to meet people to change your mind.

I had an older employee in his 60s work as a dev even as he was slowly dying of cancer and receiving treatment. He showed up every day, doing his work, proudly contributing code even at deaths door, until his last day. He had worked 30 years in IT and was a senior dev and there was nothing wrong with his productivity, attitude, etc.

I was blessed to know him. I hope you find strength to open your mind and realize there are wonderful people of all sorts and ages all around you.

Your anecdata of one doesn't sway my real world experience. Cognitive decline starts at 25 for everyone, and no amount of midwit theory that everyone is equal will change that.

In this thread alone you said “hired a few” older devs, and yet discount one person’s experience as “anecdata” while you claim to have “real world experience.” The difference between the two is not “a few” - 1.

I’ve worked with amazing devs and hardware engineers from every age, including 50 and up. I’m guessing your experience with older devs “having a complex” was part of their response once they realized that you are just an asshole. As competent and experienced professionals who have dealt with many assholes before you, they adjusted their dedication to your project to reflect how little they cared about it once you became part of their job. They did enough not to feel guilty, but not so much that they risked working with you for longer than it took to find a better job.

I like how the story of the "amazing dev" above only tells about how he accomplished checking into work everyday and battling cancer. Every senior dev under 35 that I've hired has a much better narrative surrounding how well they work.

I also like your story about me, because there isn't a single person who works for me or with me that would describe me as an asshole. I'm just an asshole to morons in denial on this flaming turd of a "tech forum". If you don't plan for your expiration date in the programming trenches, then you won't see it coming when it hits you hard.

There's a reason the average age of a programmer is 39 just like there a reason why the average age of a construction worker is 38.

The median age of the entire US labor force is 42.5, construction is 42.9, and "Computer systems design and related services" is 40.6 according to the BLS.[1] In other words, on the scale of human life expectancy, the difference is probably negligible. Even if you were being serious and earnest, you're basing your hypothesis on data that is either incorrect or outdated. (If you actually meant to include mean instead of median, your source isn't a robust data analysis by definition.)

> I also like your story about me, because there isn't a single person who works for me or with me that would describe me as an asshole

If that's true, it's because you play a different character in person. Tell them about how you are "an asshole to morons" on a "flaming turd" of a tech forum, and how amused you were at the example of a terminally ill cancer patient continuing to work as evidence that old people can develop software.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18b.htm

My data is incorrect, despite the closest you could find to a meaningful dataset is "Computer systems design and related services". Lol.

That's the industry classification with the largest number of "Software Developers, Applications" occupations from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics[1]. As far as I'm aware, there isn't a comprehensive analysis of occupations by age based on BLS data. I'm guessing your source is a survey that probably has a margin of error larger than the difference between any median ages provided by the BLS for industries that employ the most developers.

Taking the industry as a whole is representative of a typical career path. If your narrow point is that people who have entry level positions are young, well, of course.

If you've got a better dataset than the BLS, I'm sure there are many people who'd be interested, and you should share it.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/2018/may/oes151132.htm

I've got full access to Payscale's data sets ;)

> there isn't a single person who works for me or with me that would describe me as an asshole.

...to your face. But you have no idea what they privately think, or say to each other when you're not there.

(I'm with GP, I too guess what they think isn't what you think they think.)

You probably hired a bunch of crappy young devs as well but if you are biased against older folks you will notice it more.

So I should measure geriatric developers against junior developers just to be fair?

Maybe measure - and hear me out on this one - all team members equally, factoring in their total comp. How much more productive is the team for having the individual on the team, regardless of their demographics.

Maybe - hear me out out on this one - I did and that's why they were fired.

Why measure anyone? Measuring is for the insecure. Just trust your gut, obviously you know best...

I wish I could watch the end of your career pan out for laughs. Convinced that you're still as competent as you were when you were younger, but those assholes in charge of hiring won't give you a chance.

Lol ok buddy...

Problem is management is a pyramid (there is no place for everyone, even the best of them) and in some cultures (I´m in South America) a wealthy and contacted people club.

Even if you are really good, you will not get promoted if you came for a non-wealthy background.

I've had the opposite experience. Most experienced develops tend to learn things much quicker because they've got a lot more experience learning new things. I'll willing to bet the third or fourth programming language you learned came a hell of a lot quicker than the first.

What did you intend by "in the too"?

Perhaps "in there too" ?

maybe "in the loo"?

Your version wins :-) Thanks for the chuckle!

"in the room" ?

I think this hits the nail on the head. Ageism often goes hand-in-hand with other negatives and is a warning sign about a workplace. Perhaps, ageism does us older devs a favour because we'll get screened out quicker and not have the misfortune to interview at horrible companies ; That said, sometimes older devs don't help themselves. At a place I previously worked at, colleagues my age or older would make sexist/racist/disabled-mocking jokes, utterly inappropriate in the office but they'd got away with for years. The younger folks generally knew not to do this, and were offended, but then often 20-somethings while careful not to be racist or homophobic would simultaneously be blatantly ageist against their older colleagues. I got treated badly by some younger colleagues there actually, suffice to say it was symptomatic of issues in that company and I found a better job.

For those who haven't yet experienced ageism, it often starts for you when the hiring manager/director is younger than you are. Beware of the age of the bosses when surveilling a potential new gig.

And you don't have to be 50+ to experience it. My former 30 year old self with a brand new baby had a 25 year old manager, and experienced it constantly. He just couldn't fathom why I wouldn't answer his random slacks at night, or why I thought beer taps, ping pong, and happy hours weren't suitable replacements for good benefits and incentive packages.

Although this isn't the usual use of the term, your comment is a great example of the importance of a manager that values diversity. You can overlook, and drive away, really good employees for really bad reasons. It's not likely that a response to a random slack in the middle of the night had any value to the company's bottom line. Managers that can't accept that not everyone should be like them are bad for the company.

You highlight another good point, in that ageism is just a symptom of a broader psychological phenomena of "othering" others. I suspect that even if I was indeed younger than my manager, simply having a child and entering a new life stage with newer, more important priorities caused me to be treated differently. In a way I think the manager just wanted people who are just like them because they were a lazy manager, and wanted an easy way to relate to others rather than the hard work of understanding other perspectives and experiences. A ton of companies I have worked for preached diversity of thought, opinion, and background, to the wazoo and very rarely have they practiced what they preached.

This is real diversity--some single, some married, some with kids, some without, some older, some younger, coming from all different educational backgrounds, and living in different communities.

If everybody went to the same handful of colleges, is roughly the same age, and lives in the same trendy suburb, it doesn't matter what color they are. That "diversity" is literally skin-deep.

How do you parse this out in an interview?

I'd go with something along the lines of: "I'm looking for a company where I can show up and work hard during the day, and go home to my family at night. Will that fit the culture here?"

Oh god, that can’t be something anyone can get away with asking. I don’t have a family of my own, but I’m tempted to just fabricate one so I could actually ask something along the lines of what you are suggesting.

‘I have a family, how do you guys adjust cadence for people with outside commitments - eg let’s say I need to leave every day at 5’.

Gah, there’s no way to ask without setting off the alarm bells with these bastards.

I'm a 23 year old software engineer and I ask this question on every single interview. It doesn't matter that I don't have kids and don't have to go to bed early every night. I have a life unrelated to my job, and I act in the belief that everyone else also does.

I can't say for certain whether that's cost me a job before, but I'm also probably not missing much if that's the case.

> how do you guys adjust cadence for people with outside commitments - eg let’s say I need to leave every day at 5

This is actually the problematic mindset I'm trying to avoid. I don't want to work at a place where leaving at 5 is "adjusting cadence." I want to work at a place where management sets appropriate timelines, and we work hard to meet those timelines -- during the work day. The company I work for right now has a culture of work hard 9-5 then disappear. It's great.

You might be surprised, I often lead with an ambiguous "so, how's the work life balance here?" and more often than not interviewers jump in with a fair amount of info and sometimes even "knowing smiles". I don't interview with startups though, so ymmv.

I'd not bat an eye at someone saying this. Some of the most productive engineers I've worked with weren't pulling 50+ hour weeks.

I'm actively discouraged from working outside normal hours, FWIW. They don't want people to burn out.

I'm not a dev but the last time I got hired (current gig) I straight-up told them that I'm expensive and creativity is time-consuming. It went over well! You might be surprised at how much bluntness hiring managers can take.

The key thing is really BATNA because that gives you the confidence to say what you've gotta say.

Gah, there’s no way to ask without setting off the alarm bells with these bastards.

That strikes me as a good indicator that you probably don't want to work there. Why is it unreasonable to ask if you are regularly expected to work more than 40 hours per week?

If that doesn't go in, well probably it isn't a company that respect my values anyway, and unless I am in trouble of needing a job right in the moment, well there are other opportunities.

> Beware of the age of the bosses when surveilling a potential new gig.

This is also a form of ageism. Ask questions to find out how people act rather than relying on their age as a signal.

This is very true. It works both ways.

Don't dismiss a younger person's ideas as naive without consideration, just like you shouldn't dismiss an older person's ideas as outdated without consideration.

Being older doesn't automatically make you correct, but neither does being young.

+1 and, if as an older dev you show younger manager(s) that you respect and empathise with them, often they'll love you for your experience and perspective. One thing is to "meet them halfway" , not make them feel threatened. I love my current job so I hope to stay a long time, but, if I was interviewing with someone much younger, if it felt relevant I might ask them if it bothered them about my being much older, and what I could do to alleviate any concerns. That's the sort of frank conversation that might be good in interview (possibly not legal for the interviewer to start that topic, but OK for interviewee). Isn't a lot of this just that people simply need to TALK to each other. ;) Not just older and younger devs but democrats & republicans, different gender/ethniticty/religion , drivers/cyclists etc etc ;) This problem is as old as the hills!

My experience is that ageism only kicks in when the company culture is overtly focussed on a sort of "work hard; play hard" ethos. If the key influencers in the company enjoy working with a banterish atmosphere around them, then anyone over the age of 40 (and all women) are in for a stressful time.

Thankfully, there are companies out there which do value older workers and will make the effort to encourage a more diverse/inclusive working atmosphere.

We had a banterish atmosphere (lots of smack talk across the cubicle walls) with almost everyone on the team over 40. But it was grown-up banter, not high school banter. It wasn't passive aggressive, "hah hah only serious"; it was just fun banter. If we really wanted to communicate something to someone, it was handled very differently.

And when a woman joined the team, well, there wasn't any sexual harassment or sexism. But don't turn your back on her when she's got a nerf gun...

work smart, play hard.

automate whenever possible.

I was precocious/fortunate so I ran into ageism being “too young” to be something like a Lead a couple years ahead of my peers. In part because I worked in college, but more importantly because that team was so well run, and saw the wisdom in trying out some of my ideas to make things better. So I came out into the world both with programming experience and practical project management exposure.

“They” want very cookie cutter people. The more you try to control things, the fewer pleasant surprises you get.

Aren't what you're suggesting also a form of ageism?

I'm in my late 50s. All the jobs but one I've had over the last ~10 years (there's been about 5 of them) were where I was hired by people older than I am. The one job where I was hired by a person in their early 30s went spectacularly, terribly bad (only lasted 8 months before I bailed and I really should've bailed at 2 months, but I thought I needed to try to stick it out because "that's what you're supposed to do".).

It's also a lot easier to get hired by people who are older than you as they don't have the same biases against older devs... but at my age there are getting to be fewer and fewer folks older than me as they're retiring at a good clip.

You mentioned anger. I've found one of the hardest things to do as a male in his mid 40s is resist the anger that arises in response to nearly everything unexpected, unintended or challenging to my thinking. I never was an angry person, but somewhere around 43 I noticed my first reaction to many things was anger. It is a very blinding, unproductive emotion.

I have noticed something similar and I'm "just" 35. I think the best way to explain it is that I don't usually get angry, so when I do, I don't have much practice and the emotion tends to linger. The problem is not with anger per se, but with violence and loss of thinking. You should practice being angry and expressing it, I think. State your anger, explain what's wrong and tell people you don't want to stand for it. There is a difference between being an angry asshole and just being angry.

I had an anger problem as well. It did great damage in my life and to the lives of people I loved and still love.

For me it was helpful to get therapy for a few years from a “No More Mr. Nice Guy” therapist. You can search for information on Nice Guy syndrome & Dr. Robert Glover.

I’m definitely not saying that this is your issue. I’m only saying you might want to check it out.

Joining men’s groups helped me, too.

I'm going to say something not to be flippant, but in the spirit of being helpful, and I'm being genuine in my question: Have you considered seeing a therapist?

Ageism is a thing but I don't think it is always due to the fact that you are "old". Companies turn old people away because they do not want to pay for "experience".

Why pay twice as much for an experienced developer when you can get a fresh new grad that is "just as productive"? Companies often ignore the fact that there is an experienced Senior Developer sitting in the corner telling that productive Junior Developer what pitfalls to avoid and how to get things done.

And then there's the whole thing about measuring productivity. It's very hard for many managers to understand the qualitative status of a codebase, and to connect future task effectiveness with past decisions that affected that quality.

So the average manager doesn't actually know how to judge productivity. I don't think they think they know, and just are mistaken. I think they know they don't know. So what do they have to go on? Pay, and conformity with their own set of best-loved personality traits (called "cultural fit").

> It doesn’t pay to be the angry, unapproachable person in life.

Besides the ageism thing (because I'm still relatively young so it doesn't, admittedly, affect me) I've noticed the same exact thing about cynicism. If you're always angry you will eventually only see reasons to be angry because no one else will keep interacting with you. Similarly, if you're a cynic about everything you will soon find yourself in an environment that only reinforces your believes because everyone else gets tired of it

It's something that frankly scares me about the career. I'm still young enough with lucky genetics that still get me carded at the liquor store. Yet, I really fear that in the future I'll get rejected from a company because "We are worried you won't be able to learn the new tech".

I've been saving aggressively for retirement for just that reason.

You're doing the right thing saving aggressively, but if some idiots would reject you because, say, you're 54 years old (the age at which Beethoven finished his 9th) - then I'm sure there would be less idiotic people you could work with.

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