It took seven years but over-40s fired by HP win $18M settlement
theregister.com
theregister.com
Imagine the crotchety (young) programmer you know. The guy who’s kind of a mild know-it-all, who gets disinvited from business meetings for being too abrupt, they guy you have to front with a good PM to talk to anyone external. Maybe a little autistic, perhaps undiagnosed; regardless, they seem to have trouble connecting and “getting” people.
Early CS - before it was well known that it would be a fast track to the upper middle class - was full of these people. Computers draws that personality type in. Limited interaction with others, working code wins, you can get lost in a math problem.
But we needed more programmers! And now, it’s well known that being a programmer is lucrative. So the younger generation is less full of people who really love computers and want to escape human interaction; they learned computers cause they’re smart, and want to make money. But they’re probably good with people too! Most people are.
Where does that leave the older generation? Over a certain age, you’re more likely to be the type that’s a bit hard to work with, swimming in a sea of graduates who have people skills now. And as you might expect, companies will pick the people with hard and soft skills given the choice. They don’t want to entertain the prickly guy who wants a math problem and a pizza slid under the door, if they have alternatives.
As the pool of devs widens, expect the age discrimination gap to narrow. Not go away, but narrow. People never really liked the no-social-skills aspect of CS nerdiness. They just tolerated it, for a time.
I have not found the over 40 engineers I've worked with to be like that.
I've always felt that the ageism in tech has more to do with the fact that older workers generally have families, more savings, and more experience at different jobs so they can't be manipulated into being overworked the same way young and single people can.
Keep the survivorship bias in mind. It would make sense within that per theory that the engineers in their 40s who have both hard skills are soft skills are the ones to be the most likely to stay employed. Which is why those ones you end up meeting would be more like that.
And that would also align with the fact that many former engineers ended up leaving the field (whether voluntary or not) by that time in their life.
Programming is significantly decreasing compensation, the market is full. Faang represents a small number of devs.
The reason they want young workers is because they're naive and will do bad things out of arrogance to the harms.
The thing is many of them quit tech in the years afterwards, they didn't enjoy playing with computers all day and went off to other jobs that paid well.
Many of the over-40s you are talking about are survivors of that group or went into computers during the slump right after.
Even today the same thing is still happening. Plenty of 30 year olds boring with tech and want to become lumberjacks or farmers.
Which might just entrench the situation.
As an over 40 the job search is grim
Online applying seems to be shooting the rez into the void
I have wondered whether the ageism thing is partially related to younger people being a lottery ticket in terms of talent+commitment level. The company might get lucky and hire someone who is way overpowered but currently under leveled because they have not yet had time to reach their terminal seniority level. This ends up being a great bargain for the company. Whereas with established people it’s a bit more you get what you pay for.
Because of the industry’s recent rapid growth wave, the approach experienced older developers take to the craft is often very different than what’s trendy among younger developers and teams where they dominate, and there’s easily a clash where both think the others’ approach is totally bonkers and a red flag.
Somebody seeking a job may know or believe they can adapt, but the hiring team just sees an outsider and assumes the outsider doesn’t know how to do things “right”.
This applies to skilled young developers trying to break into “old school” teams in defense/enterprise/industrial/etc as much as to older developers trying to keep up with youth-dominated FAANG and imitators, but it’s tolerated in the former but can get labelled as ageism in the latter.
I work in the UK in the silicon industry and there are a ton of old people.
On the hiring end, age discrimination is rampant.
I'm not sure how to show a transition on your CV - but emphasising the "ops" side of "devops" to claim experience will probably help.
That's not the worst of it.
It took seven years of effort to be awarded a $15k payout.
Cutting the lawyers out altogether, even the full $50k is still less than a single year's salary for the median household. It doesn't fix anything.