Hacker News Reader

Comment by clnq | Hacker News Reader

Age discrimination is all over tech. But what's the argument for age discrimination after 40? What's the mindset that someone who is for this discrimination would have, no matter how immoral or unethical? Is there a defensible view that supports discrimination at all?

EDIT: Sorry for creating a downvote hole for some of you who respond. There are good responses immediately downvoted. It is important for us to understand the arguments behind these biases to effectively fight them. It is not productive to silence this discussion.

Thank you for those who responded seriously and helped me understand the situation better.

View on HN

I honestly think it's mostly a set of connected biases along the lines of:

a) "Progressivism", a bias towards thinking of "good tech" as the "novel/new tech". Or believing that success rides on quick adoption of new things, along with

b) A bias that believes that that the older you are the less likely that you have engaged with new novel tech.

c) A bias that believes that if you're still "just" an engineer and not management, there must be something wrong with you. Younger staff will accept "grey hairs" at the executive level but sometimes be bewildered by it at the individual contributor level.

d) A bias against more expensive talent generally.

e) A bias (among some) against talent that cannot be easily manipulated

f) A bias (among some) against people with children/families/mortgages/elderly parents, etc. that might "slow things down." (This one is maybe the trickiest because it can express itself in ways that are not at all intended to be malicious but end up with bad effects. E.g. organizing team offsites and gatherings which are hard for parents or committed spouses to engage with because of their obligations. And the older we get the more likely we are to have such obligations)

Most people who hold these biases hold them unconsciously. I personally look (or sometimes act) younger than I am, and get "surprise" from people when I tell them my age. Likely because they have bias about what that age should/could imply.

Age bias is mostly "correctable" in most decent human beings. Where it gets malicious is when it gets in the hands of management who have a cost focus.

Thank you for taking my question seriously. These are all illuminating points.

To continue on point e... I also think that older people tend to be more difficult to manipulate with long work hours, unreasonable deadlines, or incompetent management. With enough experience, we learn to recognise these things and we set some boundaries. Someone might dislike that and say that the more experienced people don't fit into the corporate hustle culture, without examining the reasons in-depth.

This is the sort of statement that isn't wrong, but which illustrates the echo chamber that is HN (or tech in general). There are plenty of industries and even more companies where "hustle culture" just isn't a thing, and management don't devolve into a default of employee abuse.

Also, besides growing a spine and looking out for #1 increasingly as they gain age & experience, most people also start realizing that their time is finite and they need to actively prioritize where to spend it. For many, this realization comes with relationships & children, something most white collar professionals don't experience until they've been working 7-10 years.

> a) "Progressivism", a bias towards thinking of "good tech" as the "novel/new tech". Or believing that success rides on quick adoption of new things, along with

So much this. However, "progressivism" is hopefully getting out of fashions as things have got worse due to cheapification the last 20 years, I feel.

Yeah. I’m over 40, and I expect a high salary due to my productivity and experience. You could replace me with 3 folks from around the world, and it’s arguably a reasonable business decision.

It's maybe only a "good" business decision if you have very short-termist thinking.

Yes, the institutional knowledge lost would cost more than the difference of that salary a year in most cases. But companies definitely do not value institutional knowledge as much as black-on-white figures on their financial statements.

Short-termist, but a lot of business decisions are very short-termist, so I think the argument is good. Someone might think that.

Unfortunately most companies, shareholders, and execs care about the stock performance the next quarter and that’s about it.

A neat compensation package for a CEO would be “What will the stock price be in a decade?” But you could never get a CEO to commit for a decade because they know like we all do that job hopping is how you make more money and get raises. The system is messed up all the way down.

https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-ceo-life-cycle

> For instance, when we asked CEOs about the ideal tenure for the role, many mentioned the widely touted seven-year average. When we surveyed directors, they said that CEOs generally should leave the job after 9.5 years—a point at which, many believe, performance typically plateaus. Why these expectations? No one has a compelling or evidence-based answer. They are simply conventional wisdom.

The graph in that linked article is particularly telling as it shows performance increases all come after ten years.

Do CEO's really job hop though? I am looking at top tech companies and they seem to have been there for a long time and none of them are job hoppers.

Yes in large tech outside of FAANG. But that is only half the story. A lot of decision-making often falls on vice presidents, presidents, or heads assigned to subsidiaries or projects. They job hop a lot, more often than every 7 years in my experience.

Phil Harrison is a known FAANG example, but in smaller companies, there are tons of Harrisons. Stephen Elop is a FAANG-adjacent example, having been the CEO of Nokia in its downfall and now job-hopping quite a lot.

As a completely unrelated side-note, I love this quote from Elop's Wikipedia page:

> In his first speech at a Telstra conference in September 2016, Elop cited Nokia as an example of a "great" company that can self-assess and "transform" when necessary, referencing its success as a networks equipment supplier. He said that Telstra was also needing a necessary transformation to become more of a technology company. Elop was dismissed from Telstra as part of its restructuring on 31 July 2018.

We're dealing with extensive loss of localized institutional knowledge in my workplace. The specific area I work in has one technically astute resource with experience dating back further than six years. There are other resources with that time-frame--but their knowledge is limited.

This has been compounding the normal, expected resource churn.

It's a qualitative stance, but a Big Brain with 10 years in an established area is worth more than three "fast brains" with 1 year of local, institutional knowledge.

I might take the "fast brains" (especially if they have limited commitments) if we were in a different situation such as starting up.

I find it amusing when I hear people make statements assessing short durations like 6 years to be significant. Six years in many industries is enough to reach mid-tier level expertise, but it is absolutely not mastery level. I'm making this comment from the perspective of someone who cultivate an engineering management role in high-tech manufacturing over the course of 15 years (where I was reporting direct to C-level when I left, with a team of close to 150 around the world) before joining a FAANG, where I had the rug pulled out from under me (new leadership killed my team in the first six months and I had to find a new role or be on the street, and the new role was unlike anything I'd ever done before). I spent 8 years starting a new career before being summarily dumped in the RIFs of this winter/spring, and have subsequently begun a third career at a different company.

The experience builds, and my experience is that the sweet spot is frequently hiring people in their 40s who have ~20 years of practical experience in the domain or a related area, and who know how to avoid a lot of the pitfalls fresher employees might encounter while also creating a lot of shortcuts by virtue of their experience & networks. It was interesting: over the course of my career, the teams I was managing had ever-increasing average ages, ranging from mid-20s when I was leading my first team of developers to late-40s over the last few years in big tech. Different functions (business vs technical), but while I appreciate the enthusiasm so many new grads demonstrate, the self-sufficiency + competency of mid-career folks is worth its weight in gold.

One argument (though, very cynical) for getting rid of 40+ yo people in tech: they cannot be so easily manipulated into blindly following company directives, and they are more likely to actually push back against bs rules/guidelines, whereas young people either don't know better, or they are more agreeable.

I think the way you've phrased your question will invite negative responses.

Perhaps a better way would be "I'd like to understand why age discrimination exists in tech. What motivates companies to do this?"

My earlier words weren't liked and got downvotes fast. But, we need to look at all sides of tough topics to really understand them. This includes the best reasons people give for discrimination, even if they go against what's moral, ethical, or legal. We can only substantially argue against these views if we first understand them.

Even though age discrimination is very often illegal and probably always (maybe depends on the culture) unjust, there might be some sense to it from a managers point of view. For example, people with more experience often demand higher salaries. This is something we can't overlook when we're trying to reason about the ageism bias. And we can't really combat it substantially and directly if we ignore the strongest arguments for it — steel-manning is a very powerful tool in changing minds.

I probably could have phrased it better.

> “I think the way you've phrased your question will invite negative responses.”

And?

If you see nuance, and rephrasing the OP can help make your response on point, then please share. Otherwise I find this browbeating and condescending. You’re just telling us how you want to hear the argument framed. Geez.

Perhaps the tone and context were not clear.

> And?

A set of negative responses tends to make the quality of Internet discussions deteriorate. I thought there was an interesting discussion to be had, so suggested an alternative phrasing.

Neuroplasticity is supposedly on a constant decline after childhood. Also processing speed, working memory, long-term memory. Offset by increased experience, of course.

That can be somewhat fixed.

Not if your employer does drug tests though...

While true that neuroplasticity is probably declining after reaching age of 20-21 (?), that doesn't mean much. People can learn new things during their lifetime. It's not like when you have a 21-year old, they are learning at the speed of light, whereas a 40-year old takes ages to learn the same tech.

Old people are more expensive. That’s it.

They are also less likely to cave into pressure to work long hours. Or to buy into silly kool-aid movements.

They will also push back on your plan to replace the existing system with a microservice data-lake using event sourcing with Kafka, using a service-mesh on a Kubernetes cluster on the distributed cloud. Either because they haven't kept up with the latest tech, or because they have the experience to tell beforehand that your vanity project may sound cooler but increases complexity for no real technical advantage.

The above post should not be down voted. Although as others mentioned, it could have been phrased differently, it was clear the post was about understanding the reasons behind age discrimination, not about endorsing or justifying it.

Getting rid of expensive employees.

No I think it is more due to implied seniority due to age. The older the engineer the less BS he eats from management.

I dunno, my real life experience shows the most insistence on agile/scrum bullshit coming from older engineers. SDETs specifically.

Is it really that value/price becomes worse with age or the companies are just being short-sighted?

Age is an undeniable factor when it comes to learning new things[1], whether any of us like it or not.

Ultimately, the question to you as an employee is whether you can do the work demanded of you. While it would be nice for everyone to be judged on an individual basis, I can understand there needs to be some level of generalization to maintain a certain level of efficiency within an organization.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595846

You are providing a case of airline pilot training. It's hard to believe a experienced and high quality software engineer with 20 year of experiences, will not learn a new programming language faster and better, than a freshly graduated 22 year old child :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com