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Comment by rtontic | Hacker News Reader

Ageism in tech is strange to me, like, we think old scientists, doctors and writers as better than their younger counterparts, but for some reason it's different in programming.

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Young people are generally more willing to work long hours and long shifts, and generally are less skilled at negotiating their salary. Companies see more value in someone who may be less skilled overall, but is more willing to devote themselves to the cause, so to speak. Older programmers tend to have families and other interesting hobbies, as well as more experience at the salary negotiation stage, so companies would oftentimes rather not bother with them.

I wonder how much ageism in tech would vanish if the overtime exemption was removed.

These are all stereotypes themselves.

Many people have children in their 20s. Maybe they even met their spouse in school. And younger people can be quite savvy in negotiating salary, even fresh college grads if they've received advice from more experienced folks. I'm astounded by the offers some of them receive.

I personally never had children, and I naturally sleep fewer hours per day now than when I was younger, so I have plenty of time to work.

Every individual is different.

Exceptions don't invalidate the generalities, and I specifically said "generally".

Do you have any evidence for these generalities?

The average age of first child has been increasing but is still relatively low at 26 for women and 31 for men. How many over 50 people have young children at home? Maybe they had children, but at a certain point those children leave the home. And even while at home, teenagers need much less supervision than babies. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2020/05/01/new-stud...

If children are the reason, it would be really strange and anti-empirical to discriminate against 50+ developers instead of discriminating against 30something developers. Statistically, the 30s are the prime child-having years.

> The average age of first child has been increasing but is still relatively low at 26 for women and 31 for men.

That's for the US as a whole. It seems to be higher in the cities one usually associates with tech.

The average age of first child for women in San Francisco and New York is 31-32 [1] [2].

I couldn't find the average for Seattle, but I did find that 57% of first time mothers in Seattle's county are 30+ in 2016, compared to around 33% nationwide. In San Francisco 76% of first time mothers are 30+. Boston, DC, Portland, and Denver also had majority 30+ first time mothers. [3]

Age of first time mothers tends to correlate well with education and wealth, which also tend to correlate well where tech companies are located. Women with college degrees on average are 7 years old than those without when they have their first child.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/women-sf-children-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...

[3] https://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/northwest/waiting-to-hav...

I suspect the high cost of living in those cities plays a role too. Try buying a house in SF to raise kids. :-)

But raising the average 5-7 years doesn't really substantially change the argument when we're talking about discriminating against people in their 50s and 60s, who mostly don't have babies or young children at all. It just makes no sense.

If anything, employers should be seeking out employees in their 50s and 60s, who are least likely of the age groups to have young children at home. If a primary reason for age discrimination is "having children", that is. But I don't believe this is true, and the whole having children thing is just an ex post facto excuse for discriminating against older people. An irrational prejudice can't be explained rationally.

Yeah I mentioned that younger people are less likely to have children, so they have more time to be devoted to work. I'm not sure why you are taking so much issue with what I said. Perhaps you misunderstood what I wrote.

> I mentioned that younger people are less likely to have children, so they have more time to be devoted to work. I'm not sure why you are taking so much issue with what I said.

Because it's false?

This submission is about so-called "greybeards", i.e., people over 50. They are more likely to have had children at some point in their lives (perhaps 20 years earlier!) but actually less likely to have young children at home that would interfere with work time.

A 25 year old developer is much more likely to have a baby than a 55 year old developer, correct?

They may not have younger children at home, but they still have children/families (I live in an area where extended families tend to stay together, so that might be what's causing the confusion here), and they are more likely to have other family commitments than younger people. I also included other reasons why tech companies tend to hire younger people, because I don't think children are the only reason. It's mainly because younger people are generally more willing to work longer hours for less pay, for a multitude of reasons which include less familial responsibilities and less leverage for salary and workload negotiations.

> I live in an area where extended families tend to stay together

That's nice, but I'm guessing it's not the San Francisco bay area or other areas where tech jobs are concentrated.

Anyway, doesn't an "extended" family include everyone of every age — by definition — and not just people over 50?

> so that might be what's causing the confusion here

Well, I for one am not confused.

That and the vision of the almighty hip tech startup with booch on tap, free GrubHub, a slide, nerf guns, and a stripper pole (to be ironic) doesn't include an old person in it.

Also some young people who are in tech seem to be both hypersensitive while also suffering from know-it-all syndrome. They don't like moments when their personal curtain is pulled back by people with experience. Well, that has been my experience with the few juniors I have worked with anyway.

I remember listening to an interview with PG many years ago. The one thing that still stands out, because it irked me no end, was PG and the interviewer laughing over the reason you hired younglings for the companies you invest in. Sure, the younglings weren't as good as elders, but they were naive enough to work longer hours for less pay and put up with more crap.

Lost a lot of respect that day.

Fresh young folks work more for less and have less “distractions” outside of work. Less opinions, more likely to fall in line. When you need bodies ageism makes perfect sense.

We responded along the same lines, but your response was much pithier. Thank you for reminding me to edit my jabbering.

When you need something done quickly and properly first time, hiring someone who has seen same the same half-assed ideas "reinvented" over and over for the last 30+ years and who won't try to sell them to you as the New Shiny makes much more sense. Unless you are into square wheels, of course.

Most of the time experience and healthy cynicism is the cheapest option.

Absolutely agree. There’s an aspect of technology investments that you can’t really see payoff with less than a decade of experience. I know early in my career I didn’t really understand how technology choices were really investments

If you only care to "move fast and break things" with the sole goal of getting acquired, none of that matters.

> Fresh young folks work more for less

I've actually found that not always true. In order to acquire talent, the very large corporation I work for has been hiring younger developers at higher wage levels to compete.

On the other hand mathematicians are generally thought to peak early with their best work in their 20s and 30s (although like programmers there are certainly many cases that go against this "rule"). I think the idea is that mathematics and programming are supposed to benefit from creative vision uninfluenced by previous works whereas science and medicine are supposed to benefit more from experience.

Among mathematicians this is widely regarded as an old wives’ tale, there are ample examples of older mathematicians doing their best work outside that age range.

If you don't see the massive structural difference between the practice of pure mathematics and the practice of software, that means you misunderstand both software development and mathematics.

Programming and mathematics are many things. Sure, it might be hard to see how maintaining a web site has has do with mathematics, but if you need to design a novel algorithm it is worth actually working out the proofs to show that it works (and if you want to publish it in a journal that is often essential).

Computer science is a branch of math, but programming is not. People frequently confuse the two. The difference between using mathematical constructs to inform your engineering and discovering new mathematical constructs is fundamental and the practices do not intersect much at all.

We also expect these people to wear format outfits, lab coats, etc., while we "expect" techies to show up at the office wearing a graphic t-shirt and khaki shorts while juggling a latte and the latest laptop.

I wonder if the uniform might be an important variable in blurring the age-gap.

There's also the fact that standards are changing so quickly, new hires often bring useful information to companies while existing employees are often (stereotypically) set in their ways. In fields such as medicine, new hires are almost a liability.

It might be because in tech your knowledge of tools becomes worthless as soon as a new tools and ecosystems become fashionable, which happens quite a lot.

Not worthless... you can typically judge when a new tool has useful features, things to verify carefully before using or things that are likely a bad idea.

Tool advocates/salesmen may not like you though.

The greybeard reaction to this is to pick a specialty, stack, and domain with less churn than the messier ones. Constantly treading water to stay afloat is exhausting and a waste.

Yup! Perl has kept me gainfully employed for 35 years and I'm still working - about to retire though (to spend some time dog and side-projects).

Perl is getting to be like COBOL - lots of lines out there still doing useful things but they aren't cranking out new Perl programmers like they used to. Lucrative if you can find the gig.

That said, I met a millennial COBOL programmer a couple years ago.

If you don't expect to be learning new stuff every day throughout your entire career, you are in the wrong line of business.

But it's not new stuff, mostly. It's just the same old stuff in a new package.

Aren't you contradicting yourself?

Why? It takes time to master new ecosystems, even if what they offer is a complete duplicate of what already existed.

Yes, indeed that's true. But they get upset if you tell them that their genius new idea is just an old idea they didn't know about ;-)

That's precisely why it's not really that big a deal to learn the new stuff. If you know the fundamentals, learning the new tech is fine. It can be a little daunting at first but once you familiarise yourself with the new jargon and what value the practical differences bring you can apply your knowlege very productively.

No. Learning a new ecosystem is far more work and takes far more time than (so to speak) learning a few keywords of a new language.

I think that may be true if you focus on breadth rather than depth.

I work mostly on Windows, so maybe my case is special, but I'm still using knowledge about 8086 machine language I learned 40 years ago when I'm looking at a memory dump from a crash report today.

I occasionally dip into web-based stuff and although the top layers are different, underneath is usually HTTP / TCP / UDP / IP. What I learned with Ethereal in 1998 is still pretty useful today.

Truly new stuff doesn't come around that often. Maybe it's the difference between thinking about fashion and clothing.

I think the timeless skills you mentioned are much more useful for debugging, troubleshooting, and maybe overall architecture though. I couldn't for the live of me create a React app (because I stopped doing frontend long ago) but I can absolutely help with any of the networking, HTTP, or lower level stuff even if I'm just involved with the backend.

Yes, and if only 5% of work is architecture and advanced troubleshooting, while 95% of the work is plumbing in the language-du-jour then you see where the problem is.

For scientists there absolutely is ageism. A 40 year old postdoc is going to raise a lot of flags. Old scientists are expected to be in professorship positions, where most of the work is management and big picture rather than boots on the ground.

The analogy for ageism in programming is that after a while, one is expected to go beyond writing code and into more high level strategy, design, and mentorship.

there was an article that stated that almost all software is written by jr professionals because as you improve your skills you just working more with people that writing programs, so I suppose that the reasoning of this is that companies knows this and unless you are in the small set of really tech oriented companies it doesn't really matter whats your skill level is.

Do we, like I don't think so. math you peak at 20 most likely he same in programming and science.

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