Ageism Haunts Some Tech Workers in the Race to Get Hired
wired.com
wired.com
I felt that I just cannot get excited anymore about some of the bullshit the company leadership is throwing around, and neither could I overlook the massive mistakes the companies are making based on my own interview questions. But I do understand that a very small minority of these companies will actually succeed regardless of the nonsense. Otherwise the venture capital logic does not work.
Also my pay expectations were higher than most junior employees, cause I have a mortgage, family, etc. and I can see how it might be hard to justify paying for my experience when you're building yet another standard webapp.
Luckily for me, I was able to find a spot with experienced leadership building something actually new.
Interviewers and executives are often younger than me. I never make the claim that I’ve seen this or that mistake being made before. If I need to inject something, I say “anyone read [that book on JAX]” or “happy to help setup a long-term Kanban for Kubernetes if we go that way”.
That sounds less like 'deployment' and more like 'mandatory overtime' at that point!
Easier said than done though.
Also, you tend to get a bit jaded - I basically ignore companies that are going 'to change the world!!!' :-P
I broke my own rule and went to a startup that actually seems to have a useful product, rather then just big dreams...
I guess it works, or the cost to do all that is low, otherwise so many places wouldn't do it.
The salary thing is annoying - for a while it seemed like most jobs were listing salaries because of CA/CO/MA requiring it. But it seems to be going back to the old "D.O.E" thing again :-/
Most of these companies are just special needs and don’t realize it.
The most common issue is they've long since let themselves go technically. They've been flexing the same 2 or 3 muscles for ages, and let everything else atrophy. They haven't been staying abreast of current changes, and by that I don't mean jumping on the latest fad but rather knowing that the fads exist. So it winds up being the case that they have few useful/transferable skills and their "wisdom" really isn't all that useful outside of the exact niche they'd found themselves in for decades.
And then another large chunk of them wind up being jerks. I've been this person myself. Whether it being standoffish, crapping over what the company is doing without a full understanding of why they're doing it, or even just clearly being defensive about ageism.
My point isn't to dump on older candidates. Again, I sometimes am one :) But as is often the case, plenty of older candidates refuse to look in the mirror.
I mean, that makes sense? I would be just as defensive about racism or sexism if the vibe came off in an interview.
>They haven't been staying abreast of current changes, and by that I don't mean jumping on the latest fad but rather knowing that the fads exist.
I guess it depends on the domain. Sure, I can see web moving fast and the someone who focused on at best JQuery may not be needed for a company on Vue or React or whatever. Other domains don't change as radically though, or the tools are usually not as hard to transfer to as some think. People can underestimate the fundamentals at times as they try to expect 10 years of Swift experience out of a candidate.
And much like I said the prior as a fellow greybeard, I'm saying this as someone who is much more cavalier than most people I've met about not expecting an exact set of skills. That said, I've noticed patterns of candidates who really struggle to catch up on their missing skills and this is one of them.
EDIT: to clarify a bit, the archetype I'm talking about are people who have pretty much turned off their brain and been on autopilot for 10, 20, or more years. It's not a problem if they're using a "dated" technology or whatever, it's a problem that they've been operating on rote muscle memory for ages. There are absolutely people who are using the dated technologies who don't fall into this trap.
I'm sure older people are more outspoken. I have to dance around to mention that documentation is inadequate. Someone with more experience and opportunities may be more blunt about it.
(Not to mention, you meet someone for an hour, what do you really know about them? You can evaluate them for a job, but why are we spinning yarns about their internal motivations?)
Yes, absolutely. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But when a younger candidate gets declined, they don't shake their fist and blame ageism.
Thing is if you’ve been around the block and have a decent understanding of fundamentals…it just doesn’t matter what the fad of the week is. It’s just noise. Old principles repackaged with different conventions.
Not sure why that has to be a red flag. It doesn’t mean people can’t learn. Just why bother spending personal investment on another fad?
This expectation is a serious problem in this industry.
In any case, I agree, fundamentals matter much more than superficial knowledge of fads.
Also I'm glad the OOP fad of the 90s and 00s seems to be finally dead. It felt almost religious. And it was frustrating to argue against the obvious issues.
How true is that about embedded though? I started out in that field for the first six years of my professional life, but it's been almost 15 years since then. I still know a lot more about it than the random dev who hasn't worked in it at all, but I kind of doubt I could be very intelligent about it without a bunch of catching up.
(Though obviously I agree that there are almost certainly faster changes in web dev.)
I doubt you'd need to catch up because of expired knowledge. Rather things you forgot or areas that you didn't deal with yet.
I think embedded can have a lot of depth if you get into certain details.
There's basically no framework churn like in webdev, though. C and C++ are still very much current.
Rust is becoming more of a contender, but still not common.
So it's interesting you say that. I worked extensively with C++ back then, and I did have occasion to do a few small C++ projects about 10 years ago, and C++ seems to have changed quite a bit. It was actually really impressive.
I'm not saying it would be very hard to learn the differences, but I definitely needed a primer back then of "here's how C++ has changed", because code really did look different in some ways.
C++2x is doing a lot of changes, but I haven't seen much of it in the embedded world yet. Mostly because C++17 is still considered new-ish in most safety-critical realms.
But say you have some C++<11 experience I think you would need a few weeks to get up to speed max.
This is just not true. Entire fields exist today that didn't exist or barely existed even a few years ago.
As an example, the field I've been working in for ~7 years is Data Engineering, and it was "relatively" new when I first started, or at least the modern way of doing it was. Since then, some specific technologies have become fairly commonplace, like Airflow and dbt.
Does this mean everyone should have experience with this tech? No, of course not. But does this mean that someone should know that the field exists and what's different about it compared to other kinds of stacks? For some people, absolutely it's important. A "senior" backend engineer who wants to solve an "ETL-pipeline to Data Warehouse" shaped project will hopefully know that there are standard modern tools in that area, and not just to try and do it with {insert their standard backend framework}.
Similarly, someone who hasn't "kept up with the times" in the world of frontends might not know much about SPAs. Are SPAs always the solution? No, there are now trends going back towards traditional server-only approaches. But there's a difference in knowing that they exist and what their place is and choosing a different approach thoughtfully, vs not knowing they are even a thing.
This is closer to what I was trying to get at regard skills. I don't give a flip if someone knows Airflow, or DBT, or whatever. Besides, both of them are transitioning to the rear view mirror anyways. However I have found that it can be a surprisingly difficult jump for people to shift to directed graph based, data workflow thinking - some backgrounds more than others (side note: FP background tends to have no problem w/ models like pipeline oriented development)
But the real issue is how many people just ossify over time. I don't necessarily care that they've been using the same Enterprise Java/XML/PHP/etc stack since the early Aughts. I care that they've turned off their brain in the process and have little to no knowledge of the world beyond it. I care that they haven't solved a hard problem in 15+ years, and instead have been making small, incremental changes all this time. I've been there myself, and it takes a lot of work to dig out of it.
The thing an ideal older candidate would bring to the table is the ability to say "Oh yes, I've seen this concept 15 times over again. Here are the general pros of the approach, and here are the general cons. This new flavor patches over cons 4, 5, and 6 at the cost of losing pro 8. But we need to be careful about cons 2 & 3". The poor older candidate will state firmly that they've seen this all before and nothing new is happening here. There's a big difference between the two.
> Besides, both of them are transitioning to the rear view mirror anyways.
I wonder why you say this? What do you think is replacing Airflow and dbt?
You say that, but…
I find I have huge problems with VIPER, and while I can't tell if it's me or the design pattern, I do notice that some developers seem to swear by it (others, including me, swear at it).
I have that clip of Principal Skinner asking himself "Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." playing inside my own mind.
I don't want to wake up one day and find I'm Skinner.
“…large chunk of them wind up being jerks.”
Attitude is a problem. Defensiveness.
Only a few of those companies from era that remain, and most of the people who stayed in that game ended up with a four page long CV with a dozen unknown or comically failed employers, with all sorts of inflated titles.
But there was this other set of companies that were obnoxiously boring, with middle aged engineers in goatees working sane hours in semi-private offices and cubicles with peers they'd been working besides for 10 and 20 and 30 years. They'd been around, they had a business model that was proven, and they had the institutional knowledge to sustain it.
Many of those companies are still around and many of them are still stocked up with middle aged engineers in goatees with short CV's spanning many years.
I think the proportions between these two company styles varies based on how how much money is being shoved into the industry, and I think it can be hard for an older engineer who dallied with the kids for too long to situate themselves at the more stable workplaces. They often don't really fit in with either culture.
This is a 2x'er; full neckbeard is 10x.
If we’re talking about FAANG tier or similar, then a junior FAANG engineer can be making as much as an enterprise company staff engineer with decades of experience about to retire in their 60s.
Even if we’re not talking about FAANG tier, interviewing around I’ve been given offers at tech companies that were up to 1.5x my enterprise senior SWE comp.
Work life balance is gamble either way. I’ve seen enterprise companies paying 150k working their employees on death marches, and tech companies paying 500k where everyone leaves at five.
A higher pay rate means the company is profitable enough to spread the profits around. It may not last forever, but it's good while it's there.
They probably just move laterally to another tech company with a decent pay bump. Not the worst outcome.
Like someone said, it's an open secret.
Curiously I was specifically thinking of people that worked in LM.
One worked there for decades, didn't want to manage people and they just kicked him to the curb.
hehe, how the world has changed
most of SV isn't cutting-edge tech. most SV devs are generalists.
Compensation of course isn't the best factor for determining cutting edge. Defense contractors for instance, can work on some truly novel tech but salaries in government has hard caps. But it is telling of something when the above scenario was true not too long ago.
And pay does not exactly line up with 'Value' produced (which itself is a nebulous concept)
I have been flat-out told that I should ask for less, because of my age. I have had recruiters hang up on me, as soon as they figured out my age.
I gave up, after a while, (but I am still producing quite a bit of code -just for free). I guess that is considered an optimal outcome, by today's tech industry, but I am quite aware that I have the skills and experience to make other people millions. I have never been particularly interested in scooping up large piles of dosh, myself. I just really enjoy the work.
There is a selection bias against CEOs who never establish a terminal phase :).
I don't think I saw substantially more than 10k in Seattle, or heard rumors of non-sales coworkers seeing much more than that. Inflation adjusted maybe twice that, still less than half of yours. But you might also make 3x what we made because goddamn are condos expensive down there.
ex. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eczachly_engineers-both-love-...
Which is to say, companies discriminating against the older workers are doing so to their own detriment, in my opinion.
Why are you being contrarian just for the sake of it?
Even as an experienced engineer the sheer amount of knowledge you get access to from a single prompt without having to read any tutorial or book can change a Junior into Senior very quickly.
I just hope it wont face the same issue google had:
- starting with good answers and evolving into mud
As an example, I asked claude.ai to generate an ansible playbook for patching a Docker cluster. It created one, something I'd expect a junior admin to be able to whip up pretty easily. Then I noticed something funky. The playbook was OS agnostic, just using some where clauses to handle debian, RHEL, etc. Nice stuff, but wrong. One of the tasks was to clean the cache after apply updates. The AI got apt correct (autoclean), but assumed incorrectly that yum had the same parameter. Just a small detail that would have shown up when the playbook was run, but when it can't handle the small details, why bother?
Sounds like a healthy tradeoff to me.
/s
For anyone not understanding the domain, AI is just a glorified stack overflow but with hallucinations.
Hallucinations can be fought but you need to suggest that you got the wrong answer and why. And that requires a deep understanding of the domain.
Honestly I’m really frightened that we collectively accept that AI is an acceptable source of truth and that it’s ok to make decisions from its output or worse, use it as a learning material.
We will also need less senior ppl, coz AI will be "good enough", most stuff we are faced with isn't really that complex.
It's a bit like working with a bad colleague who is very fast, but very arrogant. You can't trust what they say because they're wrong often enough to make costly mistakes common. But you can't fight them on every little thing, either. The only solution is to already be an expert, and ignore them when they're wrong.
I honestly believe AI -- if it has a dramatic impact at all -- will only reduce the value of junior employees.
My statement applies only to the experience of working with the things, and relates not at all to "formal education". If I have to learn the subject to debug what they're putting out, then the rate-limiting step of using them is...learning the subject. Same as it ever was.
Having a stochastic parrot spit a stream of 20% nonsense at me doesn't make learning go faster -- it definitely does make work go faster if I'm already an expert, however.
I'm skeptical of the AI hype but I do believe there is value. Similar to self driving cars an AI assistant or teacher doesn't have to be right all the time, it only has to be right more often. Proper use of this tool will require skillbuilding like anything else.
Pick some domain that you know nothing about, and ask a transformer model to solve a known problem in the space. It will give you a reply. Is the reply correct? Assuming that you even know how to ask the right question to get a sensible answer (which itself requires expertise), assessing the quality of the answer certainly requires expertise that you don't have. So either you figure it out for yourself (as slow as learning from any other source), or you take it on blind faith.
If I had to wager on the area where I think these models are going to lead to big changes, it's reading and summarization, not generation. "Describe how node deletion in b-trees works in 500 words" is a heck of a lot more useful than asking a transformer to write code to implement node deletion in a b-tree.
These are very specific things that you can't get as efficiently elsewhere. Essentially, it's not so much about the language model outputting information that I can understand, but more about the language model being able to parse MY queries and respond with something that's kinda good-enough.
Say you're looking at a chunk of code you didn't write, and you want to know what function foo_man_chu() is doing. You could go straight to the documentation for that function, but in many cases it's interacting with a bunch of other systems that are documented elsewhere, and not referenced in that material. If you ask GPT to explain it to you, it pops out a (reliable enough) list of things to RTFM on. This takes what could be a couple hours deep-reading through stack / google and distills it down to like ten minutes.
This effect is magnified the less you know about the domain, if you do it right.
Multiply that by the amount of times you have to do this in the course of teaching yourself something and it adds up quite a bit. This may be what the parent is talking about.
At least in the current state of affairs.
Also it’s a technical view from someone who played/worked with AI for more than a year.
It may not be the opinion of upper management :) And upper management can survive a pretty long time after their own mess.
Not to derail the thread, but its really not that simple. People are subject to their own biases and knowledge gaps. Long form responses do not fix either of those issues though they might help with the latter. If it really upskilled everyone that cleanly its effect on roles would've happened by now. I've noticed a lot of people frankly do not have the natural "context length" needed to really take advantage of AI and there are those that are really benefitting from it, but they're in the smallest minority.
...It's that very google issue that convinces me the most important thing we can do is build towards locally runnable LLMs. There's no reason we can't eventually get to gpt4-or-better on consumer hardware, it's just going to take some time and research and we're gonna have to dodge the incessant ladder-pulls that the big dogs keep lobbying for ("AI is dangerous! Only we can be trusted(tm)!").
You can't enshittify an application I own, that's running on my hardware. Not with the current state of things, at least.
If it would be easy - everyone would be doing consunlting coz it pays way better and work-life balance is also better.
Sure it’s nice to have the choice to not work between engagements but again you’ll be back to finding the next one
I’m not sure if it’s the same way now, but I was highly impressed with my former coworkers’ caliber.
Ageism isn’t an inevitability, it’s a choice.
Apple's quality has been declining recently. I have been trying to get both SwiftUI and Core/CreateML into something I can ship, and keep slamming into walls.
No you see, that's precisely the problem. Going bad because of your age is a choice. Being descriminated against because of your age, which is what ageism is, is not a choice.
You disproving their assumption by showing you can code will only elicit extreme disgust from them.
I'm not sure what if means by "certain" applicants and employees, but my guess would be jobs where it's relevant, like physical labor, are excluded.
Retainers start at around $10k.
Pretty obvious what that was about.
So far for me working with young people has been lot of fun and learning on both sides.
It's very annoying, but most can be overcome if one's got time and patience.
What does this mean?
I've been asked for transcripts all the way to primary school. Ages 6 to 10.
I took that as an opportunity to even get those documents that I didn't have.
In my 40s I started getting turned down (for the first time ever!) for the weirdest reasons. "Wouldn't be able to handle working with uncooperative teams within the company." (Whaaa...? Dodged a bullet there.) "Not passionate about programming." (Did you not look at my resume? My books I wrote to give away?) Are these _really_ the reasons?
And you do notice it when everyone interviewing you is under 30. Not that being under 30 is bad, but a diverse workplace is a plus in my mind.
A friend of mine started dyeing his hair and landed a job soon thereafter, after over a year of looking. If I were going on the hunt again, I'd definitely do that. My face looks younger than it is. But what a bullshit thing to have to do. (I can hear all the women here saying, "oh you poor thing how will you survive". Yes, yes, I know. It's bullshit all around.)
Now I'm in academia for semi-retirement, which is what I really love anyway, where experience has value that remains undiminished by age. :)
This is obviously not the general case for discrimination, often it flies in the face of good measurements. Do you mean in this particular case, that because we don't have good metrics for developers, discrimination easily slips in?
After a couple of decades in industry, I've formed so many professional relationships that it's hard for me to imagine that I might have any real trouble finding another job if I lost my current one. I mean, I guess I could be delusional and find it to be really tough at some point, but it hasn't happened so far. People I've worked with have gone on to start their own companies or have risen to senior director roles. In fact for the job before the one I have now a senior director practically yanked me out of my previous company and shoved me into his current company.
I don't think about recruiters sticking their noses up at me because of my age or buzzwords on my resume and such at all. If I want in somewhere, I just email someone I've worked with previously and ask if they think there might be something at their current company for me. It usually doesn't take long for their hiring manager to be asking me for an intro meeting. Only then does a recruiter get involved, and they're not screening me. They're setting up an interview loop. Often with people hand-picked by the hiring manager.
Look, I know ageism is real and it does happen and has a real impact on people. But on the other hand, if you've been working for 20+ years in industry and have generally left a good impression on your co-workers, how can you not have contacts sprinkled around in your industry who can give you a leg up on the job-finding process?
I can answer that because I see that situation coming. I just can't be bothered talking to people if I can avoid it. At this moment I have one manager who manages I think 3 people. He gives me problems to solve. I don't talk to anyone else in a company that hires 300+ people. When I leave I won't have any contacts sprinkled around, just my manager. That's how.
In industry with just enough experience to be useful but not enough wisdom to avoid being exploited.
Who wants to hire someone with kids, a mortgage and a life outside of work?
I have C code older than some of the young dev coworkers I've had. I have software running on embedded devices in the field (in gas stations, for example) thats older than some of them too.
- Moe Szyslak
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If you hire a bad junior you are few thousend in back.
If you hire a bad senior you are tens of thousends in back.
Noone wants to make bad decisions, so we use stereotypes we know to prefilter. Its not very pragmatic but lets be honest as engineers we know world is not pragmatic.
(1) Be yourself (2) Provide value (3) Take on some of the boring stuff that adds to business continuity
Number 3 is not sexy, but good management notices.
You'd fully deserve that violin played for you later on in your career.
You might say most of my comment was just a bunch of assertions, but they were assertions about my own perception of my own experience. I think you have a higher burden to elaborate when you're making assertions about someone else's experience, especially when it contradicts what they allege.
* I have experienced what software development was like 25yrs ago, when it also took a lot longer to gain seniority and responsibility.
* I started my career in a different engineering field. I saw a very different age<->seniority progression than the quick one in software. In fact that was why I switched to tech even if software was slower back then than now.
The combination of both those was the basis for claiming that young software devs have been in an extraordinarily privileged position in recent years. Do you have any idea what it's like outside software?
You're going to have to make a better case that young software engineers these days experience ageism at a similar level to other professions or time periods. It is now an industry that skews young and quickly discards age. You'd also need to distinguish between lack of experience and just being young to claim it's ageism.
And the age groups you were deriding were the ones that broke down those barriers for younger devs in the first place. Did you consider they would've experienced worse and sought to change it?
Your non specific comment seemed like an extremely self centered view of the wider industry that lacked perspective and contradicted a near universally understood situation. You were the one making the extraordinary claim that needed backup.
Your incredibly broad generalisation got a necessarily broad reply which you're now complaining about just being an empty assertion. You did nothing to elaborate about your experience was - what did you expect? Maybe if you'd been more specific about what you've faced you would've got different answers.
You didn't really read that part through before posting, did you?
Facing that again when at your most experienced and valuable makes a lot less sense.