Is 40 the New 60?

At 40, I've done some of the best work I've ever done and my pay has been better than ever. I'm 52 now and the trend has only gotten better.

Why? Its because at 40, I had a much deeper understanding of the tech, I understood of the whole business process and I had the maturity to deal with people in a productive way. You won't find all of those in a 25 year old developer.

The only way that age becomes a detriment is if you do not grow. I worked with someone my age who only strong skills are a large enterprise storage system. He is a dinosaur and his future is limited. That's not his age, its the way he chose to build is CV.

I focused on learning new tech; Python, Go, Kubernetes, Cloud, etc. I've also spend a lot of time learning the business aspects of my industry and I've learned to be less of a jerk to people and how to communicate. At 52, I have recruiters contact me all the time.

Age is just number guys. Stay current, keep learning and stay strong.

> while the experience that comes with age is valued in fields like music, it counts against you in tech.

Yup. The Jurassic-scale disasters that are becoming increasingly common, these days, are evidence of unsteady hands at the wheel.

I'm not saying that older folks are better. In many cases, we can be overconservative and overcautious, but that isn't such a bad thing, when the stakes for a blowout are so high.

I have always felt that tech needs to follow the same model as every other damn industry since the start of history, which is to have experience work with youth. They balance each other out.

I feel that when one of them gets too much power, Bad Things Happen.

In my case, I was finally laid off, after a 27-year run at one of the world's marquee imaging companies (which I think was overbalanced by experience). I started looking around for more work, as I wasn't really up for retirement (which I was quite capable of doing).

I was absolutely shocked at how shabbily I was treated, and fairly quickly gave up the search.

I find it offensive, that companies are so self-destructive; especially smaller companies, where a top-shelf employee could "make or break" the company. I have a fairly unique confluence of skills that would have made a startup very happy (I've been ARCHITECTING and SHIPPING software, since my very first engineering project, in 1987. I am quite used to production engineering. I've been doing it my entire adult life. I've heard that could be useful, to some companies). I was also quite willing to work for a lot less money than most, as my retirement was set, and I was looking for work that interested me.

Instead, I was rather quickly told -in no uncertain terms- "Go away, old man. No one wants you."

I took the hint, and found some non-profit folks that were doing work I find interesting, and started working with them, for free.

They are quite happy with my work.

"... our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us about the gutters or the suicides.

or the terror of one person aching in one place alone

untouched unspoken to

watering a plant."

I have no doubt that when these people were actually still coding, they could have answered my questions in their sleep. Quitting coding for engineering management really does one a disservice IMO. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with people with decades of experience who never quit coding even as senior managers and their level of competence and productivity is astounding.

I went to 6 interviews. Every time, I was the oldest at the table, sometimes by 10 years.

The music always went the same... "We need experience, you have a lot of it", 2 weeks later "You don't know React like we do". Best one was "you didn't use an env variable here in the front end".

I've been building the web since 1999. I'm 40. I got a job in a large company, much better pay, WFH most days, predictable timelines.

I don't think I've been managing my career particularly well (15 years in and 5 jobs), and I've avoided management as best I can, but it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Looking at my peers, there are plenty of people 10+ years older than me in IC positions.

I'm curious what the difference is. Is it 40 and only one job? Industry or programming language focus? Location?

Do we have any better sources than a small survey of tech press articles?

I always feel like ageism in tech articles are borderline clickbait: They aim to induce outrage by implying that ageism is rampant in the tech industry but the best we can do for evidence is a few anecdotes and, in this case, a survey of other tech press articles.

Ageism is a thing in the software industry. However, every company I’ve worked for that has had an ageism problem has, not coincidentally, been a terrible place to work with long hours, unreasonable demands, and bad management. Ageism is the perfect tool to select for hires who are too inexperienced to recognize that the situation is bad.

Most of the good companies I’ve worked for have had a broad distribution of ages. Again, not by coincidence, but because experienced developers settle in to roles at companies that are reasonable and treat people well.

I'm ~40 with ~15 years of dev experience and 4 of management experience. I last year I decided to return to IC dev work and started applying for full-stack dev roles.

After two months and not getting few responses to applications, I put my resume in front of my tech recruiter friend:

"You sound ancient. Delete the first 10 years of your work history and take the date off your CS degree."

Whaaaat? I was incredulous at first, but eventually did as he said.

It would seem he was right though. I started getting significantly more responses to applications and inquiries from recruiters on LinkedIn.

I Googled around looking for more rigorous data, and found that there seem to be a decent number of studies of various kinds that detect ageism in the tech job market. One report (https://www.visier.com/clarity/four-common-tech-ageism-myths...) says it debunks four myths about ageism in the tech job market, but even that one affirms that hiring practices in the tech sector discriminate unwisely against older workers.

So I guess we can tentatively conclude that, yeah, there's probably some ageism in the tech job market, and it will probably tend to affect most tech workers as they age.

My own experience tends to agree. I was in high demand through my thirties. That demand began to dry up in my forties. I'm 61 now.

I remain happliy employed as a consultant, but the people who employ me have shifted over time from mostly strangers to mostly people who already know me, or who know someone who has employed me before.

To put it another way, as I've aged, my employers are less and less likely to be strangers who hired me in a typical tech-industry hiring process, and more and more likely to be someone who has seen my work before, or who knows someone who has.

Maybe that suggests a workable strategy: take care to cultivate lasting constructive working relationships as you go. Look for people you work with well, and consciously choose to work with them, and to maintain friendly relations after each of you has moved on. Those relationships may become increasingly important to your work, especially if you begin to experience the ageism that many are reporting.

They explicitly searched more mature developers, because of several failed projects with large over spending the past years. Management had enough of it, and now wants a more experienced dev team.

And it works quit well I must say, code quality is very high and we make our deadlines. Our product is stable and atmosphere in the office is great actually. Not much stress here, because we don't spend months building some never to be used generic-multipurpose-framework and we don't jump into every new technology which comes around..

Not hiring experienced developers is a big mistake! :)

On top of that we have weak seniority ranks. Products and tools are not developed as good as they could be. Topics like security still show that honing products and skills are needed, but this is not happening when we don't build a layer of experts that still want to program and dig into these problems.

Excellence comes with experience and that is only developing over time with making the mistakes and fixing them.

I've found even a good amount of people at that age that were career switching(to development) and haven't had big issues entering the job market.

But of course, you have to be flexible. Move elsewhere, or where the jobs are. Your white hair doesn't matter as much as your attitude. If you feel entitled for good job positions just for the fact you wrote a library, I don't believe this can be positive. It isn't about your age. How long have you been looking for a job? Which city? Are you easy going?

I've moved to another country and city for a better job market and I'm willing to do over and over again. Can't make big commitments to where I live, me and my wife move, find new jobs and learn new languages and culture, that's just life. We can't buy a property and never feel at home really, but it isn't a hard life, to be honest.

Of course, we don't ever expect to make these american salaries, but we do have jobs. In America, it makes me think that a lot of management and business typey people who make decisions about hiring are very individualist folks that believe that one great person that works like a slave is better than a few average well-lived people, which is completely wrong.

Apart from that, I found the experience remarkably straightforward. But then, I haven't seen a tech recruitment market this hot since Y2K (in Berlin at least). It's a good time to switch jobs.

If a company cannot utilize my professional experience as ex owner of business, PM or design specialist in general, it means that they prioritize "cultural fit" criteria over real performance evaluation.

This is not a problem for me. I don't have expectations every business to be "mature enough" to know the value of effective professional work over "power of the young mind".

The idea that after "40" you are having "cognitive difficulties" or you are "out of fashion" comes from companies who exploit trough "overtime" or extreme performance prerequisite.

Working in this kind of environments is a suicide. Burnout is real and avoiding it is the only effective countermeasure.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28294734

Essentially I think this is hopefully a temporary effect of the doubling of programmers every five years for the past twenty plus years. I expect this to level out and thus shift the ratio in favour of older developers.

This feels like a category error.

1) Toys. If you want to be employable you have to learn to play with all the trendy toys. You need to demonstrate the ability to build a tech stack with these toys and solve some problem. Beyond that old people skills are largely irrelevant. By old people skills I mean the ability to communicate with precision in writing and a mastery of skills (not toys). Nobody cares if you can solve business problems using code. Toys are the new inverted binary tree.

2) When things go bad and layoffs come around the only things that matter are old people skills and critical needs positions. Prior performance won’t save you and neither will titles or seniority. If you are solid with the cool kid toys but never really mastered your craft you aren’t worth retaining under a shrinking budget because they know they can easily replace you when the economy/business recovers.

I'm 45 and I'm getting more and more concerned about my age. I love my job but I'll try to move to a manager position in a couple of years.

Its not just tech that has this problem; the rest of the world is getting there. I've seen hardware stores firing older people that know how to use what they sell; in exchange for young employees who'll work 4hr shifts at short notice.

So many articles speak as if any generation had the ability to set the standards of employment in the industry.

Management, and what our government allowed them to get away with plays a far larger role than individuals do in a decentralized economy that is tech.

It isn't like there is a plant we could picket, or even an assurance that our jobs would stay within our own country.

Many people who have entered tech today, never saw the massive waves of outsourcing, this seemingly has normalized now, they weren't around for the dot com bubble that burst.

Arguable the worlds strongest unions (automotive) got their asses handed to them, because it became much easier to move manufacture than ever before.

It wasn't developers that had any control or recourse when we got placed in the exempt bracket, and workloads sky rocketed.

I remember lots of people quitting because of it, but I also remember a flood of people on work visas coming into replace them (to be clear I don't fault those that came in on visas, but did prevent labor from having any sort of strength in numbers or ability to force policy change.)

We had a toxic environment forced on us, through the same vehicle that almost every shitty thing has, greed, our government had no idea how to handle when labor stopped having physical bounds, and they opened up the flood gates to let companies do what they want as long as they didn't leave.

Out of shape, unkempt, or unpersonable older folks have a lot of bias to overcome. I've seen the reactions myself as I've been one or more of these at times. It's not fair, but it's like dating and complaining women/men don't look at what a nice person you are, etc.

(after some discussion she was hired and everyone was happy)

The complexity, in my dumb ass opinion, is that humans tend to look for patterns and correlations when trying to understand things at scale.

e.g., experienced engineers view inexperienced engineers as being in a rush and inversely, inexperienced engineers view seasoned engineers as being slow or reluctant to change.

Regardless of why the above is generally true, it's not true for everyone.

Here's some simple rules of growing old:

1. Don't forget you were once that person. Given them a chance to have the same experiences 2. Remember, most likely you'll grow old one day so grow old mindfully 3. This industry has a cycle. New people come in, make mistakes, experienced people correct it. Repeat forever. 4. As you grow older, some people take on new responsibilities like family. This has a profound impact on your work and social life. 5. Stop being a dick to people young and old, inexperienced and experienced. Try to relate to the past and present the best you can.

Lastly, every old person you see, including the greats, were once happy, highly motivated, inexperienced and passionate people ready to prove themselves! Now they're just older and still have a lot of those traits within them, but it's not often shown to the world.

But doing anything else more historically understood as 'normal software' requires experience.

I consider anyone with < 2 years experience as an 'apprentice', who, without guidance will probably only cause damage.

After 5 years, you have someone who can competently do something in a specific area, but may not be particularly well rounded.

Looking back at my own career, writing embedded C++ fresh out of school, I can barely believe they let me do it. I don't think I would have hired me. I'm grateful.

There's enough thinking and experience required for most kinds of software the that the intense dynamism is probably overplayed. What you want is a team that consistently moves the ball forward, day by day, i.e. it's a marathon not a sprint.

It strains me to understand how Senior Devs would be undervalued on this context. I can see 22 year old founders having no intuition for this, but beyond that it's odd. My biggest worry with older Engineers would be that they'd be too expensive.

Things like web development is such a copy & paste factory that I equate that like working fast food. You get years of experience so become too expensive. They only want to hire more folk with limited experience cheaply. There's no call for too much experience as that is aged quickly when new techs come along.

Some larger companies have older folk there and it's easier to get into those type roles. In my experience their non-web related mostly where specialization is needed. I think there are roles for older folks when they move from the web centric factory roles.

All just my experience.

(Looks around furtively in case HR is within earshot) I prefer people who’ve already made mistakes on somebody else’s dime. Though a mix is good.

I’ve been hiring people for decades (yes, I’m an OF too) and this approach has worked out well whether I was 25 or 55 myself.

There is a problem with “we did it this way at company X so we really have to do it that way here too”. Better is “we did this at company X and i think what we learned that would make sense here is YY”. Newbies can’t say either; the older ones are more likely to say the second rather than the first, thanks to perspective.

Of course, I’m well aware I’m speaking purely im the context of a web app developer.

On the other hand, few (younger) people have got the sensibility/ability to befriend an older person in the workplace and learn from their experience. I have, and it's been valuable in getting the perspective.

If you're lucky, you too will get old in life, and be subject to the ills that you now see around you perpetrated on older people.

So after 20 years of writing governance documents, doing threat risk assessments and privacy impact assessments, occasionally writing SELinux policy, and some product management like work, I’m doing full stack development on the software product (node, React, ONgdb) and writing C, bash, and SELinux on the hardware product.

I also do customer needs analysis, custom development for them, and train them. And I do all of the demos.

Perhaps it’s my field, perhaps it’s a unique skill set (we ICAM/CDS people are rare), perhaps it’s personality (curious, enthusiastic, measured). I dunno.

Now 56, I foresee doing this for a few years more. The pace can be insane (hey, startup, or at least small consulting firm turning itself into a product company) but the work extraordinarily rewarding (when you ship a CDS product that has the experts asking “how did you do that?” it feels really good; when you show your clients an IRM that does things no one else does, ditto), and I work with really good friends (friends I’d never worked with before but knew from weekend activities (off-roading)).

It can happen. I just don’t know how rare it is. (Hey! I may be a unicorn!!! :-})

Although I do agree about workplace "environment" - the sooner being in a union is like having https, the better.

It would have to look a bit like: https://www.tuc.org.uk/unions/nuj

-- What is your goal?

If you don't know where you're going, the chances are your career trajectory could be plateauing, or even going backwards.

-- Are you progressing?

Pick a metric aligned with your goal and then measure yourself against it (e.g what you can measure, you can manage). Whether its specializing technically or moving vertically into management, its really important to keep moving in that direction, and to ensure that you are "compounding" your skills and successes along the way.

-- Are your skills transferable?

At all costs, ensure your skills are transferable. This will give you endless options and freedom to take breaks and move companies at will. NEVER allow yourself be the highly paid person on an obsolete project/system, not even for a year.

For all people complain today about the toxic cultures of old, maybe they say least had the advantage of people saying what they thought in plain terms, instead of dressing over them with sarcasm and hiding them in vagueness.

In a more relevant vein, I wonder how often too senior means too opinionated.

But that’s also kind of expected. As a senior developer, I can code faster and better than our junior devs but more importantly I can teach them to be better by reviewing their code. As I get older I am spending less time coding myself and more time reviewing others code.

A 40 year old developer is going to be telling stories of their first gig going through code printed out on paper reviewing it for a y2k bug… when I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of this years college graduates never heard of y2k.

If anything, my experience is that 60 is the new 40.

But in the general case the problem occurs because software development is seen by those in power as factory/production work. For most companies we are expensive factory workers. And factory workers rarely get hired past 35 and rarely survive past that age unless there is an union involved.

My experience is in an offshore market in South America. I guess in other countries the situation is different.

I believe it all comes down to pay. The experienced developer commands a higher salary than a 20 year old, rightfully so. But employers fail to see the added value they bring, just as they have trouble identifying the 10x programmers out there.

Agism isn't about younger developers somehow being better than older ones.

Agism is about taking advantage of younger workers.

Agism is about discrimination.

Agism is about money.

That's a very rosy view of a cutthroat industry. The only exceptions I can think of are well-established stars with a back catalogue of hits. If you're a singer looking for work, good luck if you look much over 35.

---

I searched for a developer job just before I turned 30, stayed with it for 10 years, and then searched for another when I turned 40.

My experience of ageism is that most companies hiring just don't have the budget to hire an experienced software developer. They'd rather hire a few more cheap (and inexperienced) developers than hire a few highly experienced, and expensive, software developers.

To me, this translated in a longer job search. Not unreasonably longer, as it took me about a month to find a job when I was almost 30, and three months right before I turned 40. (Worth noting, when I was 30 I lived in Silicon Valley, and it's much easier to find a developer job there compared to where I live now.)

But, I do want to point out something that most articles of ageism don't point out: Expectations of a 40+ year old developer are quite different compared to a 20-30 year old developer. The kind of handholding that a junior developer has, and mentorship that a junior developer has, is gone. It's also much harder to change stacks than when I was a junior developer, because no one wants to pay me big bucks to learn like a novice. Thus, it's hard to change stacks. (Not impossible, but I really like the job I have now.)

Another thing to point out: There are a lot of mediocre developers who get very comfortable with handholding in the early part of their career. I suspect these are the developers who really struggle in their 40s, because they can't meet the expectations of a senior developer.

>Do not send me email like this:

>>Hi Guido,

>>I came across your resume in a Google web search. You seem to have an awesome expertise on Python. I would be glad if you can reply my email and let me know your interest and availability. Our client immediately needs a PYTHON Developers at its location in ***, NJ. Below are the job details. If interested and available, kindly fwd me your updated resume along with the expected rate and the availability.

>I might reply like this:

>>I'm not interested and not available.

Guido van Rossum 2013-09-18T20:32:32.876Z

He was well over 50 at the time.

They might come handy.

Coincidentally, it may help that I am involved in an age gap relationship with a gorgeous, lovely woman in her early 20's. My Machiavellian plan is to drag her to any and all work and coworker gatherings to reinforce that I'm not a ye olde farten just yet. You can get more social currency by demonstrating you're in a relationship with someone and more so if they're attractive.

Is the experience generic (e.g. I'm a Python guru and Guido knows me on a first-name basis), or specific (e.g. I've spent 25 years writing Python and web interfaces for high speed factory sorting machines)?

The latter makes you highly employable. The former means you're just going to be an expensive pain in the ass.