Several reasons for ageism sometimes missed. This from someone whose been discriminated against, who has hired, who now owns a company & who was also a recruiter.
__I don't agree with this__ just laying the reasons out for clarity sake:
- Hiring managers don't consider themselves ageist, but opt for younger employees whom they think make a better cultural fit. You can blame the 'work is my social life' culture that emerged in the 2000's and that persists today.
- Hiring managers don't want to be ageist, but they've had or heard of bad experiences where disgruntled or non-performing employees abuse the EEOC process for financial gain and retribution. Very well intentioned rules, designed to protect certain cohorts of employees, doing the exact opposite as is often the case with Gov regs.
- Hiring managers (usually fixated on 'new tech') who fear diminished learning, adoption or performance capacity in older employees.
- Money. The perception that older employees cost more in wages and benefits, without much thought to efficiency gains that accompanies gray hair.
I was age discriminated against by a well known SAAS provider, who used a 2014 interview process to extract a detailed roadmap and ideas for product growth from me, and then ghosted me. I've watched as they've (badly) implemented the specific of my roadmap the past few years, and I chuckle. 100% my fault for giving up too much value in the interview process, but it was tough time and I thought I really needed that job.
> Hiring managers don't consider themselves ageist, but
> Hiring managers don't want to be ageist, but
I classify this into the "I'm not a racist, but..." bucket.
> Hiring managers (usually fixated on 'new tech') who fear diminished learning, adoption or performance capacity in older employees
This is the textbook definition of what ageism is.
Conclusion? They are ageists, plain as that. They may not consider themselves to be, or want to be, but they still are, because ageist is as ageist does, and it matters jack what appearances they want to keep or what they think or who they perceive in a mirror.
I won't address "performance capacity" directly since it's too broad and vague, but it is plausible that there is diminished learning as we age. Think about learning new spoken languages. There's evidence to back the idea up in that context [0]. At the same time a 40 year old will likely have a higher proficiency at their language(s) than a 20 year old. This analogy exaggerates the idea (the trade-off) but I don't see why it wouldn't apply to programming languages as well. And this isn't ageism.
You're ignoring that most "new" language problems have significant overlap with things already experienced, and there's only a minor translation issue, rather than a learning new things from scratch issue.
A lot of programmers who are 35+ can struggle to find further opportunities as the more senior you are the less available those opportunities are and the more expensive you are. Lots of companies only want young people who are naive and have limited distractions outside of work. So, really, programming as a field is front loaded and the longer you stay in the business over 35 then the luckier you have been. But make sure you have an effective exit strategy to support yourself and your family when the boss doesn't like folk older than him.
I very much think this is limited to the startup / work fast and break things style of companies. Always work available for sr. people at large established companies, especially fortune 500. Specifically companies where tech is not the core business product, many of them are attempting to modernize their systems. They pay pretty well too; not Google / Amazon level but on a pure salary basis many probably pay comparable to Microsoft without the shares of course. They do have a good 401k match though. A good salary for 95% of tech people.
I am early 40's and have had no issue finding work and am currently interviewing others to come work with my group in a solution architect / tech lead style role and they are all my age. I have never interviewed for a job and not gotten an offer, regardless of age; with that said I'm not interviewing at startups or places I feel really wouldn't allow me a family life. I get the offers not because I'm incredible, I'm not, but because I know my lane and skill set and stick to it.
It was even easier for me to find work at smaller companies the older I got. There were always companies that really needed someone who could help them mature their processes, who they could put out in front of customers, who knew how to work with sales, who they could send off-site and talk to their customers tech departments (B2B) etc.
It got to the point where my “interviews” were more just sitting down with directors/CTOs and talking like adults about how I would help them solve their real world business problems. I haven’t done a coding interview in over a decade even though I have been hands on all that time - across five jobs
After some frustrating experiences applying and interviewing for jobs at the kind of startup-sized companies where I’ve spent my entire career, and fearing that my age might be a factor (I’m about to turn 40), I applied on a job at a Fortune 500 and had an offer a few days later.
The pay, benefits, and work/life balance are excellent, to the point that I have some regret over not exploring this avenue sooner.
Oh, and now I’m younger than most of my coworkers again. I don’t think ageism is a thing here.
The older I get, the more I think it is not the company itself but middle-managers.
Managers with an authoritarian streak will have trouble handling experienced developers that objects to non-optimal designs and processes.
It is much easier for such a manager to handle young naïve developers that gladly accept to work 5 times as many hours as a good design needs.
Software don't work well with an "do as I say, no matter how stupid it is" approach. I think that is why Silicon Valley (and Europe) has much greater success writing software than asia/India.
I manage a couple of developers that are in their late 40s. It's great. I just say, "hey, can you handle this complex, ill-defined task?" and they get it done right, the first time. No real management necessary.
An older, grizzled, battle-hardened engineer is one of a manager's best assets.
I keep hearing this. I’m 48 and between the time I was 34 and 46, bumping around in your standard enterprise corp dev jobs, I found jobs relatively quickly - the shortest time was 4 days from starting to look to having a job (corp dev at the time a F10 non tech company), the longest being two weeks. Every time besides the first, I was juggling multiple opportunities and had three offers. I change jobs 5 times during that time period.
In hindsight, until the last two in 2016 and 2018 they were just journeyman CRUD jobs with the last two being hands on dev lead and de facto “cloud architect” respectively.
I just got my first job in $BigTech at 46 two years ago. It’s not officially a “software engineering job”. But for all intents and purposes I’m doing the same type of work I did at the last couple of jobs - gathering requirements, presentations, development, and a shit ton of yaml, HCL, PowerPoint slides, and diagrams.
I’m sure at 48, I could contact my network of former coworkers, managers, recruiters and someone would give me a job even if it were just a standard .Net journeyman developer again.
If you’re still randomly submitting your resume to an ATS trying to prove yourself to companies by reversing binary trees on whiteboards while juggling bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope, you’re doing it wrong at 40+ years old.
> If you’re still randomly submitting your resume to an ATS trying to prove yourself to companies by reversing binary trees on whiteboards while juggling bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope, you’re doing it wrong at 40+ years old.
I did that at 45 and landed an interesting job at FAANG (and I'm not the only one). I think it's a bit contradictory to think old programmers are still as capable and sharp as 25 years old, and at the same time insisting to be judged on different standards.
I didn’t randomly submit my resume to get into a FAANG at 45. When the recruiter reached out to me about an SWE position (that I wasn’t interested in). I kept talking to her and she directed me to a related remote job that I was interested in (cloud consulting - enterprise app dev/cloud architect).
> the recruiter reached out to me about an SWE position (that I wasn’t interested in)
Then it's your preference not to be a programmer. My point was that it's also possible to be a SWE for those who still dig programming at our age. But you have to play by the rules. That being said, I don't think I'll last in such a position until retirement.
I spend everyday “programming” doing the same type of work I did before joining - mostly back end APIs, ETL, occasional front end work if I have to etc.
I just knew I wouldn’t enjoy being a small part of a large team coming from small companies where I could work up and down the life cycle from pre-sales, to requirement gathering, to implementation, to DevOps [sic], UAT and training.
I’m still part of a huge organization in the grand scheme of things. But my projects range from me the sole tech person doing everything to my working with a team where I lead or implement one “work stream” depending on the size of the project.
I think the point may be that, yes still as capable etc., but also with a ton more life-cycle experience in real-world development. So for someone hiring that values that experience, maybe they ask a bit more about that, and do less whiteboard work to validate that you really did go to CS school.
With a string resume, a hiring manager might think "They probably know what a binary tree is because it they didn't, they would not have made it this far."
Actually, three jobs ago back in 2015, I had two interviews. The first hiring manager asked me to do a merge sort on the whiteboard. The second company’s new director told me what problems he was having and that they were on an acquisition spree and what their plans were. He asked me how I would go about helping them.
Both interviews were about half a day, I got offers from both the company that asked me to do a merge sort paid slightly more. I accepted the second job.
Real business folks have real world problems to solve. They don’t care whether you can reverse a binary tree.
As an aside, one of the more junior people that I would be leading asked me how I would parse addresses while the director was in the room. I said I wouldn’t. I would license third party CASS software and explained all of the corner cases and then went into my speech about a company shouldn’t concentrate “on anything that doesn’t make the beer taste better”
> Real business folks have real world problems to solve. They don’t care whether you can reverse a binary tree.
I suppose it's all about the role you're applying for. There are "real business" where engineers are hired to solve technical challenges. Being able to solve simple algorithmic problems is a legitimate prerequisite for this type of role.
It’s not the role you are applying for. I’ve seen plenty of times where interviews were DS&A and the work was yet another line of business CRUD app. The job I turned down definitely was.
And let’s not pretend that all developers at BigTech are solving “hard problems”. I do have access to code for one of the major cloud providers.
I interview a lot of people and I ask all of them to write code (standard for our company). There's plenty of people that can talk about all sorts of stuff but can't code. Who do you hire to write software? Also do you want to work somewhere where software engineers can't write software? Do you want to work somewhere where the people doing the planning can't write software?
I keep hearing this like there are millions of experience developers that have spent an entire career fooling company after company without being able to code well enough to do your typical line of business CRUD app and let’s not fool ourselves. That’s all most of the 2.7 million developers are doing as far as coding.
I’m not saying the jobs are simple just that the complexity is figuring out what to write, how to organize it, how to deploy it, etc.
And before the gatekeeping starts, I programmed in assembly on four processors as a hobby by the time I graduated in 1996 and my third job around 2007 was to maintain a complete proprietary tool chain (compiler, VM (language VM), IDE) for Windows mobile. I spent my first decade plus out of college bit twiddling in C.
We do a lot of stuff that's not one line CRUD. I've no interest in people that can only do that. And let's not fool ourselves, even in orgs where they do the most vanilla stick blocks together software work there's a few people that do most of the work and lots of others that do very little. The other part of this is that there aren't that many good people looking for a job, most of them have one most of the time and when they switch it's usually through their network of connections.
You're obviously the kind of person I'd want to hire ;) Why would you mind writing some code in an interview? I don't ask anything that requires memorizing your data structures and algorithms textbook. All I'm looking for is people that can "think in code" which in the population of job seekers isn't as common as you'd think.
Don’t get me wrong. Back when I was C bit twiddling from 1999-2008, we had nothing but a compiler and no libraries besides the ones we wrote since our code had to compile across x86 PCs and a couple of mainframes. I had to implement most of the data structures myself.
I’ve had one coding interview in 25 years between 8 jobs. That one was in 2012. They had a Visual Studio IDE with skeleton code abs failing unit test and I had to make the unit tests pass as a pair programming exercise. I thought that was a very practical type of coding interview that I copied when I had to filter a bunch of contractors when I was a dev lead.
But now, if I leave my job at BigTech as a “cloud architect specializing in application modernization” - basically enterprise app dev/DevOps [sic], training, etc., before I retire, it will be at some startup looking for a more strategic role, even though I would be hands on.
It’s automatically a red flag about the job that I prefer if I’m not being asked about strategy and given a coding interview.
We do both but writing some code is a requirement. After you do that we talk (with the more senior people) about their approaches to solving bigger problems.
Big part of why programming is front loaded is that it's an incredibly new field. The entire field hasn't existed for more than 70 years. And that was if you count "Niche academic field that a few dozen mathematicians knew about" as the start.
It didn't become like a job job until what, the mid 1960's? That's 60 years ago.
And the number of programmers is doubling every ~5 years. Of course it's front-loaded with young people! The people who have been doing this for the field's entire time of mass popularity (1980's onwards imo) haven't even had time to get proper old yet.
But also: The more experienced you are, the more your biggest value isn't in banging keys on the keyboard. A company would much rather leverage your thoughts and opinions and that may look a lot more like technical leadership than programming. Even though it's still engineering.
Hmmm as a 53 year old programmer I've had the exact opposite experience. Because of the large diversity of my skills I have more offers for work than ever before.
Not the person you are replying to. But I did it by focusing on learning soft skills and project management skills - even though I am not a project manager.
I focused on small companies before my current job where the director/CTO was looking for people who could demonstrate a history of being “smart and get things done”.
I avoided the leetCode grind by preparing for a couple of years to target the cloud consulting department of the two of the major cloud providers or if necessary one of their partners. I knew that a combination of software development, infrastructure, cloud, and soft skills would give me a competitive advantage.
I studied my ass off! I did 300 LC questions and could finish LC mediums pretty easily and I found that most companies concentrated on easy and medium.
So honest question. I presume you spent months on those LC questions.
Do you feel that they were beneficial in terms of making you a better developer, or did you simply learn a bunch of solutions to puzzles that have no bearing on real world development?
You’re the odd one out, perhaps due to your own abilities and other special qualities. For the average programmer ageism applies though. And the largest majority of devs is in the average region
I think it depends on your adaptability.
I know few devs over 50, but the ones I do are like the dev you reply to - they are some of the most adaptable, T shaped skills. Deep domain knowledge & experience in a couple areas and broad experience in many techs.
Another factor to consider is post-peak-comp. You may find yourself in roles when you are older that pay less than they used to. This may very well be fine because you no longer have a down payment or kids college to save for, and if you didn't keep upgrading homes.. your mortgage payments 10-20 years into owning should a smaller and smaller percent of your income. If you are no longer chasing comp, you have a broader selection of roles and can be more selective.
That just isn't true in my case. I started my career in the late 90s and was the young kid at the office. So on my network is full of older developers.
Very few of them have been pushed out of the field. Yes many moved up, but the majority still code. The ones who had not moved into management are either retired (Over 65), retired early (Rich, big payday) or dead.
> For the average programmer ageism applies though
It's easy to blame ageism, and ageism is real. There are a lot of people who really resent older people and believe flat-out untrue myths about cognition, value of experience and work ethic. That said, every time a friend shares a beer with me and tells me the woes of trying to get a job when older, I hear this:
I can't get a job that pays me like I'm senior, but requires the skills of someone half my age.
The solution is to break out of that box, and either be ok with lower pay, or go for jobs that leverage the value of your experience.
> perhaps due to your own abilities and other special qualities
I'm sure if you looked at yourself, or maybe had someone look with you, that you'd find you have quite a bit to offer when it comes to ability, and especially special qualities. As you get older it's hard to understand what is special because you've seen a lot, and it all seems average.
So the question becomes “why would a 50 year old be an average programmer?”
I am very much the “average programmer”, but I learned a long time ago how to focus on “adding business value”, talking to customers (internal and external), writing, presenting, explaining concepts to non-technical people and even once a decade ago talking to investors and potential acquirers when a startup I was working for when they wanted to talk to the “technical folks”
I keep hearing about ageism, but never encountered it. At 54, I've just landed my last job a year or two ago and age wasn't an issue. As in all things tech, I think if you have the skills that are in demand, good jobs are not too hard to find.
> Because of the large diversity of my skills I have more offers for work than ever before.
"offers for work" or "job offers"? "Traditional" w2 full time go-through-an-hr-dept organizations possibly have more of an ageist issue than other scenarios. Freelance/consulting seems to still offer more flexibility on the age front, but it's more of a gut sense from speaking with those in my network.
I find the “I won’t take less than $X or else I’ll stay unemployed” to be kind of weird as a career planning strategy. If there is an under-supply of senior talent, everyone accepts and expects that the clearing salary for those roles will go up. Yet, if there’s an over-supply, many people seem unable to extrapolate from the previous.
Many hiring teams will look at an experienced person as “too experienced” and won’t even offer the job to an otherwise good candidate. They justify it by saying things like “this position is too junior for them and they’ll just leave when they get bored/find a better position”, etc.
That’s another apparent sub-optimization. “We’ve been looking for a while and we’d rather keep looking than make a level-Y offer to this good candidate.”
If the candidate says “I’m only taking this to avoid starving but will quit as soon as I find any other job”, then sure, don’t make the offer. If they don’t give any signs either way, assume they’ll stay for 18-48 months as is common and decide accordingly.
I'm better now than I ever have been. I was trash in my Jr years. Being discriminated against due to age would be a grievous error on the part of any potential employer.
I agree with you, but imagine being a discriminatory, but rational asshole.
Of course you're not going to hire a woman if you could hire a man - they might get pregnant and be away from work for a long time.
Of course you're not going hire an older employee that knows their worth over a recent graduate that isn't familiar with the salary they should earn. You can rip them off much more easily.
People can be cunts but still act with some rational motivation. That's why we have protected categories, to make sure that that isn't a strategy worth pursuing.
A lot of software companies don't care about having good programmers, they want people to do their bidding and be as cheap as possible. Younger people are nicer to look at too.
Such an important point. At so many places, effectively producing good software is low down on the priority list. In which case, a lot of the "rational actor" analysis around hiring totally misses the point.
Is this ageism implied for SV and like companies, or all of them in general (implied US-based anyway)?
I can't speak in either instance at this time, but I'd like to think ageism isn't nearly as widespread as it seems when discussed on here when it comes to technology-based work. E.g., Small town in Nebraska with one or two software houses versus SF.
If you expect to retire at 60 (likely 65 these days) and you start working at 20: 40 is smack dab in the middle of your career.
I think that notion gets lost when we talk about ageism in tech and then people talk about 40-somethings.