143 points by leonagano 3 days ago
Well, it's been a while since I touched this theme. 6 years ago, I launched a job board trying to fight ageism in tech (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097)
It did super well in terms of upvotes and comments but not $ speaking (made $0)
This seems to be a current problem but what's the solution?
> I think my seniority seems like a threat to some leaders.
Boy do I feel this one. I'm 20 years in now and holy shit are there are a lot of bad leaders out there. What they all have in common is that they don't want to be gainsaid. Most leaders are completely allergic to meaningful feedback, hardly any of them ever ask for it. A lot of people seem to feel that once they are "in charge" they have somehow become infallible.
It's too bad because like `softwaredoug I love developing young people, most of them are very hungry for mentorship. I find that most younger ICs are very willing to listen and learn, but the leadership sees it as a problem for some reason that they're not struggling on their own on basic shit. What a waste of time of money.
I think I agree, I used to see a lot of highly experienced older contractors who probably had FU money. They had far more experience than any of the leadership and were normally older and would not hold back. This was especially when working with Java/C++ but now even C# and JavaScript obviously have people with ~25yrs of experience working with people with <5 years who could really do with the support. I've seen people like this get dragged out of the building or just walk out and happily start somewhere else the next week due to demand.
To add to this I think it’s important for seniors to have a lot of humility, be open to new ideas, and not be one of these leaders!
Have a lot of skepticism towards our ego and question whether we’re acting on status or actually what’s best.
> Because my word carries weight and I tend to be less obsequious with little to lose in these interactions
This may well be the value of a senior IC. You will be neutral in most of the situations, so VPs will be more willing to trust you as they know you don't have a hidden organizational agenda.
yeah young business people dont want older engineers that can call them out around. they want other young clueless engineers to just build
I've had more trouble with other ICs rather than leaders.
It was a staff engineer role, very well paid. I was given a take home task for one interview. I did my research and looked into why they were hiring. I downloaded their app, read all the bad reviews on responsiveness, UI, and such. I built something in one hour that would solve the things they had trouble with over 4 years, as a kind of demo of what I could do if they took me.
When we had the actual interview, holy shit did they attack me. "Open your code on this file. Explain what is wrong with your code. I will not even give a hint otherwise you fail. You must tell me what is wrong with your code."
I did get them to explain the "correct answer" despite the pressure, and they were very reluctant to do so. I checked the code afterwards and even cross-checked it with AI and discovered that they were probably wrong lol.
It wasn't age. It wasn't racism, sexism, etc. It was a technical leader being challenged by the idea of someone else being technically better than them. Juniors can do work as fast as seniors; it's more that seniors are trusted to change culture for the better. If someone has trouble finding someone senior enough, most of the time it's because they refuse to let an outsider change the culture.
I did eventually get another job. Similar situation. Take home interview, vastly modernized code architecture than what the interviewer was used to. But in this case, the interviewer actually wanted to make products, get sales, make the customers happy, make money. So the incentives were aligned and they were happy to bring me in to set up policies and stuff.
This isn't just an issue for software engineers and I don't believe it's an issue just in tech, but is more widespread, although I don't have direct evidence of that. What I do know is that I've been on the job market for 16 months and while I've had many interviews and made it through several rounds for multiple positions, that final offer hasn't come yet. The cynic in me says it's because I'm older, white, male and straight. The optimist in me says someone better got the position. Who knows which is true, certainly not me.
I used to work with a guy that was known for dressing nice, very formal. Back in the 2000s, he would wear button-down shirts, slacks, nice shoes; he stood out for a software nerd. Anyway, when I saw him recently, he was dressed in jeans and flip-flops, wearing a t-shirt. I asked him what's with the casual attire. He just said, "Trying to keep my job." Being an older dude in this field as well, I know what he's talking about.
I call this "Wearing your uniform."
You need to look like you are a person who would be doing the job. You wouldn't hire a gardner with smooth hands, clean shoes, and no dirt under their nails would you?
Car mechanics, you can see it in their hands, and the way they act around cars.
Every profession has its tells, from what we wear, to our physical traits etc.
After a while, you know if someone adds up or not. But part of that is changing with the times. :)
Not an older person but I genuinely don't like wearing jeans and t shirts and I never have. t shirts make me feel like I'm trapped and jeans are stiff and unpleasant (and always feel shaped wrong.) Also wearing what are essentially corporate ads on my body just feels brain dead.
Shorts and a Hawaiian shirt are comfortable but I guess that's still not ok in the office even though everyone wants to pretend they don't care.
Whatever it's not like I'd accept a non-remote job these days anyway.
Khakis and outdoorsy button ups from the likes of Columbia, TNF, Patagonia, Uniqlo work. Also if a tshirt makes you feel trapped, it’s probably too small. There’s a W. Rast brand so soft and comfy I wear to bed.
Actual tech, nothing. Company politics and "being a culture fit", unfortunately in some companies it means a lot.
It has to do with the culture of the company you're working for.
Professional companies are stereotyped to suits and ties, and company attire is often part of company dress code.
Tech companies are stereotyped to kids and what they wear, and company dress code (if it exists) is often super-lax except for executives -- because the executives need to interact with Professional companies and look the part.
There's a lot of in-between, and it really depends on what company you work for and somewhat to what company you want to work for.
Ironically it DOES. Because part of your ability is your ability to convince others etc.
People think of ability as just technical, or just soft. It is mixing it all together that produces true strength.
If I wear a suit at the wrong time, it shows an inability to read the room, and in some firms may even have gotten my manager to ask if I was looking for a job!
So, understanding how to dress how you want to be seen is critical. I'm not saying it's high fashion time, but at least understand the audience, and the aura you want to put out.
As the parent comment said, he stood out for dressing nicely those years ago. Wearing jeans in the 2000s was not just tolerated or accepted, it was expected. I remember feeling wary of engineers who dressed up for interviews then, like they were trying too hard.
My general belief for interviews is to dress one step up from what you'd be wearing on a day-to-day basis at that job.
I wear shorts and a t-shirt (often a DEFCON or BSidesPDX shirt) usually, so I'd wear jeans and a solid color t-shirt or possibly a polo to an interview, though I haven't done an in-person interview for a job since 2016. For remote interviews, I'm in sweatpants and a polo.
In the early 2000s, I wasn't a tech worker yet, but I always assumed engineers were wearing khakis and a polo, so I would have shown up to an interview with black slacks and a button-up shirt, maybe even a tie.
We (Boomers) really don't get credit for the really tough problems we've solved with no cloud, no GPU, 8 bit CPUs and a meg of RAM. We did that when we were young and no one seems to appreciate what we've learned since then. I'm a TPM and there experience is everything if you are horizontal (i.e. silo busting).
A potential resource is this Podcast/Site: https://www.itgetslateearly.com/ I fast forward some as the host has a chip on her shoulder but her guests have nuggets. I really need to work out feeding the podcast to an AI Agent to extract those tasty bits!
I would rather work with "old" engineers rather than 25/30 year old "senior" engineers.
Places with older engineers means:
1. things are done properly
2. less to break
3. no need to be on call
4. excellent WLB (no grind n burnout culture)
5. excellent mentoring and learning opportunities
6. sniper / laser focus on business fundamentals / making money rather than making noise on the internet streets
None of these things are related to age or amount of experience. Someone with 20 years of mediocre experience will be mediocre, and they may also have a false sense of their own ability because they've managed to scrape by for so long.
Multiple issues. One of them is reluctance of younger hiring managers to hire older people. At 35 you don't necessarily see advantages that hiring 50 year old will bring you, as you don't have experience to be able to see that.
Not sure if there is a "solution" for that as a 35 yo hiring manager will probably have an easier time managing under-35 individual contributor comparing to a 50 yo one. Different perspectives, experiences, etc. So by hiring younger IC the manager makes a correct decision. Sucks for us older folks but that's life.
When the CEO is 28, it is the head where the fishrot starts.
In The Days of Old, the folks running the corporation were almost always in their 50s. They might have been prejudiced towards folks my age (60s), but they didn't have issues with hiring what are now considered "older" folks (40s and 50s), with the only issue being cost (they might be ageist, simply for cost reasons).
The prejudice from younger folks is cultural, not cost. They don't want people around that make them feel uncomfortable. Many younger folks at tech companies, these days, make boatloads of money. It's not about cost.
From where I stand, it looks like a lot of modern tech companies are establishing a "college, but being paid" culture. It seems that many modern tech companies resemble idealized college campuses, more than traditional professional production environments.
>When the CEO is 28, it is the head where the fishrot starts.
I had the misfortune of working for two "30 under 30 CEO" led companies. I was in my 40s at the time. Never again. I can relate to the "college, but being paid" description, but for me it was more like "high school, but being paid".
I agree that mismatch is cultural, and my point was that there might not be a solution because it might not necessarily be a problem. 50yo is MUCH LESS likely to work well with bunch of under-30 yo, esp, if the leadership is all in that age.
Is the company that much more likely to blow up and go out of business due to inexperience of the younger guys at the helm? Perhaps, but it's their company and that's how you gain experience in the first place. And IF it blows up in their face they'll learn (hopefully) and their 2nd, 3rd, 4th shots will be so much better.
50yo+ just need to stay away from these places to avoid becoming collateral damage. We don't have our entire lives ahead of us to make up for the lost time and wages. So not getting hired there is not really a problem.
Of course it leaves 50yo+ with fewer places to work and earn salary. Sucks, believe me, I know.
Good points. One of the reasons I stopped looking for work, is because the places that did stuff I wanted to do, didn't want me around. The places that would have hired me, didn't have stuff I wanted to do.
They didn't want me, because I'm who I am. In a couple of cases, they didn't even try to hide it.
I took it personal, because it was personal. That's the thing about cultural bigotry. It's an emotional, reptile-brain thing. Right back to the lungfish. Not even primate-level thinking.
But what's done, is done. In the aggregate, it ended up being all good for me. Nasty-tasting medicine, but it cured the ill. I don't really want to go back to the rodent rally. I'm having way too much fun, doing my own thing.
A couple of the places I looked at, are no longer viable concerns, and I seemed to have dodged a couple of bullets. Could I have saved them? Maybe, but I seriously doubt they would have listened to me.
You sound like me. I gave up looking for work, created my own CMS and had that basically in a ready state when ChatGPT4 came out, and I've turned my CMS into an AI integrated office suite. A family law firm needed tech support, so I made my "AI CMS" attorney friendly and started looking around at investors... everyone is insane. I've professionally been through a serious gauntlet in my prior career, where people start to fail to believe when I list the famous projects I have been a key part. I know serious hard work, and the investor class today is expecting no less than creating an institutionalized economic slavery engine. The professional institutional abuse expectation is ripe. None of this can stand, can last.
With the loss of zero interest financing, this industry is about to meet reality. Say good by to "campus" appearing work environments for the majority.
Thats why, me at 40`s, now am I working in a german auto industry where they still got more traditional views and p promote people with time inside the company.
Hip companies dont hire me, maybe some tech consultants, that would not be considered cool, like accenture or IBM.
A few years ago I was one of the first people in my country tomigrate my company android app to Kotlin, this helped me land in the app development team of a big bank in my country and I was by far the oldest dude. Everybody called me "uncle" there, very common to young people in my country to call older people that, because most where college kids.
That's why ageism is stupid - in my experience age is uncorrellated with technical chops and productivity, with people who actually know their stuff and care about the job they're doing coming from every possible age bracket.
One of the most productive guys and all around technical wizard I know is a father of 3 in his 40s.
I do know a few people straight out of college who are rather excellent devs, but the problem with a lot of them them is that they have inflated egos and don't take feedback at at all, and/or they move around a lot.
Imagine building up a guy who works like crazy with a huge body of knowledge, then he's out of the company the next year, and nobody knows what any of his code does.
I worked for a Japanese corporation, for the majority of my career.
They have "reverse ageism." There's some levels that you can't reach, until you are a certain age.
I worked with older people that would have a lot of folks around here, drooling. That company hired some of the best in the world.
The irony is working with inexperienced senior engineers has absolutely made me see the benefits of hiring someone who's 50, the person who can't see the issue is the less-technical management doing the hiring who thinks having a PhD is the highest form of experience anyone can have.
I'm an EM right in the age range you're talking about and I've got some very senior open roles on my team that I'm hiring for and you're spot on. I'm sure not every EM is like this, but for me, it's so true. I don't want to feel this way, but I can just feel myself start making excuses for why I shouldn't consider a candidate if their resume goes back to the 90s.
I've now got a checklist I create for myself to go through when reviewing resumes for the role. It includes a number of legitimate reasons it's okay to reject a candidate and I try to make myself pick one of them. I also have a thing under the rejection section that just says "Are you sure you're not rejecting this person because they're older than you?"
I realize how stupid it is to feel this way, but it's hard to un-train an emotional response.
I observed engineers at all ages at many levels and roles (manager vs. IC) at Microsoft. To the point of us having retirement parties. I am sure ageism is real but part of the meme of "no software engineers over 40" is just the population curve of developers making them less common. And probably there's something broken with the recruiting pipelines.
Yes. People don't take into account the growth in the number of developers over time. When the ageism discussion started, there was a huge growth in the developer market, which meant that a disproportionate number of devs were on the younger side of the spectrum. Now that we're a few decades into the conversation, that initial glut of devs are the greybeards. Thus it appears that there's more old people rolling around.
Is there ageism? I'm sure. As an old, I'm going to avoid companies that give off a younger, coder bro type vibe. Partially because I assume they're more likely to be ageist. But mostly because even if they *didn't* have an ageist viewpoint and hired me, I know it's just not where I personally want to be.
I would wager that it will get better soon. Once the LLM/Agent hype has died down and a few years of junior developers went down the drain untrained and unmentored, the demand for experienced seasoned developers will rise again.
This is not to dismiss LLMs entirely, but they always get touted as “they can do ABC, as long as an experienced dev reviews the output”. And with LLMs hindering the growth of juniors in one way or another, I can definitely see a market for “senior” developers down the road.
I'm looking forward to a nice part time side-hustle during retirement, cleaning up vibe-coded messes. In a few decades, we might have an industry full of 20-40 year old software engineers who don't know how computers work and don't know how to write or fix code beyond begging an LLM to do it and hoping it produces something that works.
Maybe I'll be wrong, and in 2050, there won't even be human software engineers anymore, but I'm not so sure that will be the case.
you see this in other engineering fields as well. Government, for example, is chock-full of people designing renewable energy policy who have never even seen a solar panel and barely know how one works. There are engineering companies where wind turbine designers have never climbed a wind turbine or seen one in operation.
This is how you get disasters like Ocean Gate where management would rather hire fresh college grads than listen to experienced hires point out mistakes.
I've seen this take on LLMs many times, and I don't share the certainty that LLMs hinder the growth of engineers using them.
Sure, if you want to use an LLM to produce code that works you need to have enough knowledge and experience to be able to review and, if necessary, request changes.
However, another (IMO, even more powerful) aspect of LLMs, is their utility as a learning tool. They excel at imparting knowledge about new concepts, because they act as a personalized teacher.
I find it doubtful that use of LLMs will result in less experienced and knowledgeable engineers in the future.
You sound like someone who has developed a good work ethic and is comfortable with struggle. Likely because you didn't grow up with a magic thinking box to ask for help at the first bit of mental friction.
Remember the first AI winter? I could also ask "excuse me?!" about the usage of LLMs.
Give the whole thing 5-10 years until the impact of juniors learning nothing and having the perseverance and attention span of about 10 minutes and the effects will show in the industry. Yes, LLMs + agents have value here and there, but remember on where they get that value from: they learn from the internet. And papers already show that if LLMs learn from their own output, the quality degrades quickly.
So, more code written by LLMs on Github equals subsequent generations for LLMs learn from subpar examples.
Furthermore, they mostly learn from "en vogue" languages because they have lots of examples. But I wouldn't trust an LLM with a 10 foot pole doing Lisp or Cobol or any RTOS related C code with safety requirements.
I wouldn't trust an LLM to write a proper GPU or CUDA driver. But if there's nobody around knowing how to do that, how do you expect future drivers to be implemented?
I don't think it's age. I think it's energy level and attitude.
I'm in my 50s and had no problems getting hired 3+ years ago at a FAANG as well as a handful of other companies. Granted it was a good hiring environment, but I also took 3 years off and I had to work hard to Leetcode back into shape.
I still have a lot of energy and it comes across in my interviews. I don't have an ego, I know that just because I have >30 years experience doesn't mean that I know more than my coworkers that are 30 years younger than me. I work hard and try to earn my paycheck every day and I'm not quibbling over lunch menus and complaining about the ingredients used at the cafeteria.
I think as long as you not only have the technical skills but can also sell yourself as a good teammate with matching energy, it shouldn't be a problem. I think younger folks respect people that can match their energy and motivation and don't want to be dragged down by know-it-alls or slow workers.
I am a software engineer in his 50s, with stints in big tech, big bank and fintech with domain expertise in payments, risk, performance engineering, and data. In addition I have led global teams of hundreds of engineers with outcomes that have transformed multiple Fortune 500. I have been unemployed for a year and a half with no light at the end of the tunnel. Most of my network of similarly older professionals and C level executives has either retired or suffering similarly. Thankfully I am rich and still getting deferred executive compensation checks from multiple Fortune 500 companies but I am bored and think I have more to offer. I am working on a couple things to allay my boredom, we shall see if something comes of it.
As an engineer also in his 50s, I can relate, based on one concept: "wanting to work" versus "needing to work". I'm definitely not rich, but I could probably retire if I wanted to. I just don't want to. I want to work; I enjoy it. Many of my friends have retired, and they all seem bored to me. However, many/most people need to work to pay the rent, put kids through college, etc. I never really grasped this concept when I was younger, because, back then, it was all need to work.
I feel like I'm a better employee now, because I feel like I can be more honest. If a manager says something stupid, I feel totally comfortable checking them on it. When I was younger that wasn't the case. I was always nervous about retribution. However, there's a flip-side to this: a lot of managers don't like to be checked. Also, there's exploitability. When I was younger, I never said no to any proposed work, regardless of how it impacted my "personal time". Now, my attitude is, "Work this weekend? Nope. Get a junior to do that. I'm going surfing this weekend." LOL
Have a good friend, a 68yo guy, with grown-up kids (as in having their own families, houses, careers, etc), just happily hacking away in SQL, Python, building dashboards in PowerBI, learning AWS and bunch of other stuff, as a consultant. He says he'd be bored out of his mind just sitting at home.
Who says you can't have role models in your 50s? :)
One of the _many_ reasons job statistics of all kinds is completely useless. According to these numbers you (and I as I was looking for a job for 1.5 years myself recently) are happily retired (according to analysis of employment figures that I read from time to time). Hence, "nobody wants to work" and all that.
If I were to start another company, I'd try to hire only 40+ people.
- I've found junior engineers super resistant to new tech. Very rigid thinking, there is only way way to do something bc that's all they've ever learned, very religious about tech stacks, crazy strong opinions based on crazy limited experience - lack of work ethic, no call, no show, procrastinating right up until the deadline and then expecting code reviews, merges/releases to work on their schedule -tendency to fuck around and play games etc all day (see above) -limited experience with people from different backgrounds, culture etc.
Older people have families, hobbies outside of work etc.
So they want to get in, get it done, go home. This usually leads to stuff getting done at a steady cadence.
This is a bit sarcastic of course, seeing other ridiculous comments about older engineers.
There's something to be said about people who just want to get their work done in reasonable time with reasonable quality and not chase every new fad like like a dog with ADHD in a squirrel habitat.
Ageism is looking a one tree in a forest of extremely similar problems. We have a othering at scale issue in the species. It's fundamental. It needs to be recognized as an issue of, a problem with self determinism itself, the othering of those we are not intimate is a serious species-wise issue. There is another science here, waiting for formalization.
Yes, I think othering at scale is the root of most of our societal ills. It was likely a useful heuristic when we were sparsely spread out tribal creatures, similar to always assuming the rustling in the bush was a tiger and not just the wind.
In a tightly woven, interdependent system like modern civilization, it is placing a huge strain on us structurally as well as psychologically. Add to this it is an easy exploit for power ala “my leadership is great, <out group> over there is your problem”, combined with mass media platforms and the whole thing is cracking at the edges.
How do we mitigate this though? It seems to take a massive concerted effort for a person to overcome those implicit biases. I was speaking with a family member the other day who is clearly primed by media in their country to assume that all current structural ills are caused by immigrants, and when probed about people of that same group that were actually in her life, she said “Well, Mr. so and so that works at the school is just a lovely decent hardworking man.” But she couldn’t take the leap that there are statistically more Mr. so and so’s in the group than the “bad ones” she was hearing about in the news. I’ve seen this pattern across all of business and politics.
Don’t even get me started on the whole “culture fit” hiring standards.
There is a multi-level dynamic at play, that I suspect has at it's roots the widespread lack of understanding of effective communications.
We are all alone, if not for communications.
It is bias in communications, knowledge of the various forms of bias, their methods, and countermeasures that enable individuals and groups to move past argument and towards shared understandings. With shared understanding naturally causes shared compromise and solutions. Without shared understanding, situations degenerate to stalemate, war, welfare states, and economic slave states.
Individual self conversation, recognition of it, it's biases and countermeasures lay a foundation for a rational individual. The lack of formal and public recognition of self conversation itself is hurdle one. Once that is recognized, a foundation for a rational public can be considered.
Then communicating with others inter-personally, with peers, spouses, coworkers, managers, authorities and strangers. Pairs, small groups, larger groups, and audience dynamics: these all have biases, which are often magnifications of the same bias at a self conversation level. New bias forms are here too, and they must also be recognized, understood, and countermeasures established. This is all nothing but communicating, but doing so effectively, causing understanding in others, and gaining understanding from those less communication-ally skilled.
Now let's take these biases and add in mass media, social media, and all the network effects they bring to the communication situation. Strangely enough, yet again the countermeasures that operate at lower levels continue to function here - except now we're dealing with the public. countermeasures now require public education.
I think by spreading knowledge of interpersonal and self conversation biases, their countermeasures immediate and positive effect lay the foundation for widespread respect of effective communications. After all, the lack of it often only needs to be pointed out for people to consider the ease of adopting knowledge about and the countermeasures that enable more success communicating, which directly correlates to actual success. And that is with everything a person does, because this perspective begins with one's self conversation, reducing the bias there, first. That generates a more rational person, more aware, more active. Push this to network effects, and now we're talking societal change. It's a plan to impress secondary considerations on the general public, because that's the primary countermeasure in communication issues: consider further.
I am a senior architect with plenty of years behind me, and I can say that as an IC some senior managers love me and some hate me. I will say there is a skew here and sometimes i think the dogs think it’s a turf war. I provide advice and guidance, advisory and technical leadership and it is interesting how sometimes these aren’t received well and the receiver will do what they want. Which makes it interesting because I give advice and then they don’t actually want it.
I’m also older and stand up for myself. This is not without its own troubles.
I am however thinking about what the next 20 years are gonna look like career, location and opportunity wise as I can see some challenges ahead where I live
I think most of the ostensible age discrimination is explained by the tech industry's massive growth over the past 50 years (means more young people are hired than old people because they have the skills).
As well as overproduction of CS grads in the last 10/15 years. Much like law grads a generation earlier. Wonder who's next, MDs perhaps?..
Just wondering, was the issue not enough job hunters using the site or was the issue that not enough companies wanted to post listings. If the latter, I would guess that lots of people in tech recognize the problem, but not many companies (sincerely) want to do anything about it for all the reasons people here will give: worries about salary expectations, worries about availability to work long hours, less experienced people feeling uncomfortable managing more experienced people.
Even more. The two primary reasons I believe it harder to find tech jobs when you're older are
1) Your salary demands exceed the budgeted amount for the position
2) You probably aren't willing to work insane hours any more
Even if your skill set vastly exceeds that of a wet-behind-the-ears engineer and can work at a far higher level, be more productive, and produce higher quality work, it's almost impossible to make that apparent when interviewing, especially when those doing the interviews are much younger.
> 1) Your salary demands exceed the budgeted amount for the position
I've thought about this a lot lately. This is true for the obvious reasons, but it's more true than it seems.
As an older, experienced dev I sometimes flirt with the idea of aiming for a mid-level developer job where I can just cruise. I'd expect the paycheck to be proportionately smaller than where I'm at now, but that's fine.
But there's no way this would actually work out. Red flags would be raised all over the place at most companies like this. For one, it'd be viewed as a red flag that I'm cool taking that huge paycut. And then of course no one appreciates being told that you want to come in, get a week's worth of work done in a day, and then clock out.
In my sub-field (embedded systems), I don't see it. There are companies that see the value of 40 years of experience. (And there are plenty that don't...)
But the vibe I'm hearing lately is that junior engineers can't get jobs, because AI. I don't know if that reflects the reality (I haven't been trying to find a job as a junior in quite a while), but people are complaining about that these days.
I did a lot of microcontroller and FPGA stuff in college a decade ago (and most of the stuff like Verilog and Cortex chips or RTOSes weren't exactly new then), but since then have drifted away from the field - I tried to get back into it as a hobby, and checked out what's new, and it seems to me that surprisingly has changed.
It likely still exists but the economy for software dev is so bad as to not be a major factor.
In other words, it’s not ageism when one can’t even get an interview in the first place. Assuming you’ve kept your resume concise and removed education dates, etc. Which I have for the last twenty years or so, since the turn of the century! cough
get work done, look younger and slice off the first 5 years of your experience because it is "not relevant". I look about 10-12 years younger so I am able to slip under the radar but it makes me wonder how my peers who look visibly their age fare? The job market is london, sector: Hedge funds, asset mangement tech etc.
Your application and resume will go through multiple systems and viewed and assessed by 3 to 5 people before anybody can even see your (presumably younger) face.
In the resume, you can remove your experience prior to certain date (which is recommended anyways as it makes your resume shorter and very few employers care what you did 15 years ago), but you do have to list your education and most ATS systems require graduation dates.
Even if you do manage to omit the dates, if you were senior developer or architect in the very the first position from 12 years ago that you have on your resume, the recruiter/hiring manager will be able to put 2 and 2 together.
All the advice I've heard from the career/job search/whatever coaches/advisors was to not try to hide your age but use it your advantage. Trying to hide your age doesn't just make you looking silly, it might create an impression that you're hiding something more serious.
But yeah, looking younger and healthier definitely doesn't hurt, not just in job search but in life in general.
I do, but if they're being ageist, it means less because I didn't finish my degree until I was 32 because I wasted the first 9 years of my adult life before starting college.
The real threat to a senior IC, in my own experience, is losing their edge, especially in a large company. As they grow more senior, they will spend more time in meetings, writing more docs, aligning more teams, drawing more boxes, tossing around more terms, defining more product features, and talking to more customers. As time goes by, they gain more institutional knowledge and getting better at company dynamics. They know which VPs to trust. They know which squeaky wheels to oil, and which buttons to push. They do everything better, except designing or implementing a challenging system.
That is, the senior ICs start to resemble a strong product manager, or an effective director without a team. These are all good - until the company suddenly no longer needs them. Maybe their team has become a cost center. Maybe the project gets into maintenance mode. Or maybe the product has been so stable that the company does not even need more alignment. At that time, the ICs will find that all the institutional knowledge and so-called "leadership" is not that transferrable. And when they go out and interview for a new job, they find that they can't even sketch a solid design.
Sadly, I don't have a solution. There are exceptions. I guess it's natural that a senior engineer will gain breadth but also get distracted as they age. What they need is a different kind of depth. They can still be of value to a younger team if they are like a hard-science professor who depends on their PhD students to write papers, yet they can still advise the students as no one else. In industry, my role models are people like Michael Stonebreaker, who can still shape the architectures of modern databases in his 80s. Wernher von Braun of Saturn V rockets, who could come up with new rockets like no one else. Or Kelly Johnson of U-2, who could direct and unblock his engineers with ease. Or Marc Brooker of Amazon, who seems able to go deep into both database and distributed systems to keep coming up with amazing systems. But then, I'm not sure how many people can be talented as those engineers.
Or maybe another way is to get domain expertise, like how payment works, how insurance works, how accounting works, and etc?
I worked for a month at a place where the median age was 27. I'm 38. I felt tired by their wasted energy. They'd fight over tiny details, have arguments about things that don't matter. Hearing Devs with 3 years working experience tell me they can architect anything fatigued me. They talked about their crazy architecture like it was going to change it all. I left in a month, but I'd have left in a week if I didn't need the money.
The resistance I most often see is that companies are often hesitant to interview older candidates based on their assumptions around expected salary. This completely agnostic as to their actual fit for the role.
I've always been willing to start with zero compensation or benefits until <milestone> to demonstrate my value and build trust.
It is rare that a company will take you up on that offer though. It really highlights what the money is actually about and how tribal "professional" "business" can be.
That would honestly be an extreme red flag for me if I was considering hiring you. As an older engineer myself, I would never roll the dice like that — my contributions in this industry are public and I have the network to show for it. My time is worth something to me, even if it’s not worth anything to anyone else, and the older I get the more that’s true.
Yeah ageism is a huge issue, even in early 30s, working as a regular programmer is met with suspicion and looked down upon.
Not only that, young engineers will be build whatever without questioning the value, business people prefer this. They dont want an engineer raising product questions
also, it is true that technology moves quickly, startups dont need experts in tech thats no longer bleeding edge. large old school companies still do, so the number of companies that are viable employers decreases
Feels a bit cynical. Raising questions is incredibly valuable for a company as long as it is done in a positive manner. It’s what they tell us is the main benefit to DEI, and you can tell whether they are serious if they include older folks in their program or not.
its valuable for the company, not for the line managers/product managers
A successful business accrues to everyone, as long as you’re not obsessed with taking absolute credit. I’ve only worked with one or two such dysfunctional folks in my entire career.
There's a much bigger cohort of aging programmers than there was even 10 years ago, so a lot more of them are the best programmers available.
Ageism is a cultural issue. Some cultures venerate older people, some shun them. So it will vary. There isn't one "tech" culture. If you're talking about tech companies in the United States dominated by white males, ageism has been (and afaik, continues to be) a cultural norm.
Changing a culture's norms is incredibly difficult. The only way I've heard about it happening is through massive pressure, from either a large social group vocally pushing against an issue (with consequences), or a large industry spending millions of dollars to advertise something (diamonds, washing machines) and exploiting some other cultural bias to do so. Cultural norms can also change temporarily (we all worked remote during a pandemic and productivity went up, but after that it would seem our productivity went down? and women became industrial workers during WW2, but after that apparently they weren't good enough?).
So even if the norm did change temporarily, you need continued pressure to make it stick. I have not heard of any massive cultural pressure to end ageism, so I would not expect it to end.
Yup, and it's rooted in reality too. Older folks might have more wisdom, but MOST, not all of them are slower, it takes them longer to figure out things, learn new things, they are more closed minded. I say this as an older folk clocking 50, I was very open minded to hiring older folks as a younger person and have done many, and I have been burned the most by older folks that interview great, can talk the talk but can't back it up with walk. Now, I'm not saying ALL, just MOST. ... this unfortunately will always be a problem, I'm seeing it now with LLMs, most older folks are very closed minded about it, and younger folks are embracing it. Tomorrow they will be shocked when no one wants to hire them. Such is life.
If you're older, keep your skills up to date, be chill, be open minded, and keep hope alive.
I chase my tail a lot less (with failed refactorings) these days. Can’t help but be much faster than when I did. Tortoise vs. hare.
I think the challenge is that software is rarely baked in these days, if they can find themselves in a slow moving enterprise environment, most will be fine, but if they are in a "modern" day shop that's always chasing the new shiny framework and library then it's a struggle.
If folks are telling you that’s dumb, maybe they’re on to something. Or if company has money to burn it could be fun.
I started working in IT in the 90s and I would say "yes" but I realize my observations do not carry scientific rigor. It would require knowing the thoughts and practices of millions of people. Such is the curse of social science.
I do not think most people think of themselves as being "ageist", but it manifests in their actions. Usually a department will be filled with a group of young people, and in the interview process, someone will say, "I do not think this person would be a good culture fit". But they do not realize that they just do not want an old person because they seem different then what is already in the team.
I also have a hunch, that "leet code tests", in the hiring process has a hidden agenda of weeding out "older people". Those kind of tests are usually on knowledge one might have learned in a college course and subsequently forgot about. Or, if you are juggling a family, you may not have time to go do all day knowledge crunch study to get the algorithms into your head.
Companies do not want to come right out and say "we do not want to hire old people", but they selfishly want the most value for their buck. They want to drive down wages and extract value. What is more valuable to a company? A middle aged programmer who has to go home at 5pm to help take care of the kids? Or do they get more value out of a young person just out of college who has something to prove?
I have seen perfectly reasonable people pass over hiring older people because they do not want to hire someone who might know more than they do, or someone who might push back on decisions. They want someone young who will just do what they say.
As a society, I do not think we address such issues well.
Yes, when 50 years old applies as a senior engineer, 25 years old senior engineers get uncomfortable. You might not notice it in any public conversation, but there is still a resistance:
* will they be on-call?
* can they work long hours?
* how do I delegate to them?
* are they going to resist new tech?Recently, I've had a co-worker be "okay" with alerts in the middle of the night. I refused because I have to drive my child to school at 7.30am.
If your kids school is more important than your job is, that only means your job is extremely unimportant. Like my job.
Your kid is better off not going to school for a day, or arriving late. They're not doing anything important in school.
Depending on company, maybe they need to hire people to do important things and have responsibility for important things. Somebody who would prioritize things like driving their kids to school over that is a no-hire. They should work a job which is less important, like I myself do.
I think one seriously broken thing is that every company seems convinced their work is important, and scales their sense of how important work items are relative to the company as a whole. Orgs and teams do the same.
You can be on a team that runs a service that's a small part of the overall company product offering, which may be a convenience rather than mission-critical to its clients, who themselves may be doing something BS, and that team may still want you to wake up at 3AM when something alerts. Making a blanket statement that just because a job wants you to wake up at 3AM means it must be important (nevermind more important than family responsibility) places way too much trust in the judgement of employers.
I'm sorry you think this way. The entire human foundation is based upon passed knowledge by means of reading and writing. I feel it's essential. Schooling is one way to do this, and also a means of learning and practicing social skills.
As far as being on-call goes, there are many different ways to be a part of support without a brute-force approach. For example, create a more robust QA process. Another is to create actionable alerts. There are many ways workers can work peacefully and meet director goals.
Missing one day of school in your life because your mother or father had something very important to take care of will not have any impact on your education. And the people who pretend that this is the case are just the kind of dishonest people that you don't want to hire. Hackers can down vote me as much as they please, that's not going to change how businesses think about hiring.
And now we're reaching the core of the "ageism" discussion. Every person will have some things that they consider more important than work; their health for example. But as people get older, the more things get added to that list, because they are more established in life. But do you want to hire a person which considers everything more important than their job? Something which businesses value highly is when people are reliable. If the boss can rely on that a certain employee can be counted on to take care of things, that means that the boss can also work to 100% of his potential where they are needed.
A good run company will make sure to hire enough people, or in other ways make sure that emergency situations don't become something frequent. But we can never get away from the fact that the earth spins around the sun, meaning everything in the economy experiences the ebb and flow of seasonal demand. Even Hank Hill has to take care of propane emergencies at times.
>As far as being on-call goes, there are many different ways to be a part of support without a brute-force approach. For example, create a more robust QA process. Another is to create actionable alerts. There are many ways workers can work peacefully and meet director goals.
I completely agree with this.
> Your kid is better off not going to school for a day, or arriving late. They're not doing anything important in school.
Not sure, if you are serious.
Maybe we should become slaves of corporations? Should we divorce maybe with our partners because sometimes we go dining and on-call is more important than me having a dinner with my partner?
Isn't it usually the other way around? The less important you are to the company, the more rigid your hours are. If you actually matter to the company, you probably get flexible hours and the ability to take leave on a short notice, as they stand to lose more if you quit.
This is basically ageism. It's not accurate and should be coached out. Flip the question for a 25 year old:
* Will they be on on-call or out partying with their friends? * Are they committed to the work or will they hop to another company once trained? * Are they able to work within our codebase or just jump to the next hot thing?
These types of questions are ridiculous for both sides.
> should be coached out
No, it won't work. Biologically, 25 years old without a family responsibilities will not get it anyway.
If you are 25 years old, single and your friends are similar to you, what would you do? Most I know are working 12-14 hour/day, because they eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work.
Worth noting that this basically doesn't work long term, and is much easier to maintain if it's different work (a job and a new enterprise).
You'll notice that you become less efficient over time. I recommend taking a long weekend and coming back and keeping to 8 hours. It's a great discipline if you want to go further in your career.
As the fifties version of myself, I won’t need to be on-call or work long hours because I did it right the first time.
Reply to below:
Of course. But if you plan ahead properly, it will be extremely rare. To the point where it isn’t economical to have people on call. Because the downtime was caused by a meteor or maybe AWS.
If it is truly mission critical, have a night shift.
How much experience does it take to be "senior" in that case? Has the 25 y-o engineer been working for 10 years or are they just diluting the "senior" term?
Ageism is a huge problem, especially for some groups. If you have a disability, you might be stuck at non-terminal levels. This causes the hiring managers to question why someone with over 10 years experience, greying hair, and good creds (masters, multiple certs, etc) is applying for a mid-level role. There must be something wrong if you're not a senior. Well, yeah, that's kind of the definition of a disability.
IMO, it depends. I’ve worked with hundreds of startups over the last 20 years. The most significant trend I’ve seen is cultural cohesion. Some startups have a young, energetic culture. Some have an experienced, veteran culture. Some have a quirky, trendy culture.
But overall many companies seem to value and attract more of the same culture they already have in place. So to a degree, I’d say yes ageism exists in certain companies that don’t value experience as highly as other qualities.
> I’ve worked with hundreds of startups over the last 20 years.
That's averaging 5 startups every year. How can you get good experience, or even truly understand a business, if you're averaging just around two months at a company or multiple companies in the same period?
He said "worked with" not "worked at." Likely as a contractor. And if so it's not uncommon for some projects to be very short while others might take 10-20% of your time for 2-3 years. Plenty of time to gather domain knowledge especially if clients are clustered in the same industry.
There is still a problem that engineering is often seen as a "young persons field", and once you get some experience you will then move to management. Nothing wrong with management - we do need it, and a lot of what we have is really bad (if engineers make good engineers is debatable...), but that means there are less older engineers around which will skew data.
When the 20 something 'senior' engineers and 'consultants' don't know how to test network connectivity by using openssl, telnet and ping, you don't won't to work there. It's more like a day care than college or high school ;)
How can a 20 something with very little experience actually consult? Based on what experience?
Had a misfortune of working with 28-30 yo "management consultants" who "taught" best practices to 40-50yo experts in their fields (I'm talking specialists with 15-20-30 years of experience). That was... bizarre.
There is all kinds of ‘isms in tech. Pretty much the only people who don’t have to worry are young straight white males.
I suspect before ageism disappears it will first swing the other way where older tech workers snub young people entering the industry writing them off as vibecoders who don’t know anything and are easily replaced with an AI.
some say "wisdom comes with age".
Though I don't completely agree but won't completely ignore.
I see this applies to tech as well.
When you start as junior you tinker with boilerplate code. everything seems magical. As you grow learn and becomes wiser, things what seemed magical before become logical
After 10 years, surface level saturates. You will start to dig deeper. Things will again start to become magical and then slowly fades into logical.
Then you go deeper and again process repeats.
More deeper you go, you will find the luxury to shake the surface level toys. Some innovation happens at surface level, but you are deep down still going.
There is not end line. You retire when you want to stop. Your choice!
But much more still to be explored! Humanity continues!
In short, As you grow, go deeper, become wiser, shake the status quo, innovate, repeat. Surface level people will Go gaga. But you don't react because you are still going deeper...
It isn't really a solvable problem as long as there is no standardized/regulated tech industry. Companies want coders who will fit into the "culture" – work whatever hours they need to, be on call 24x7, chase the newest fads, accept fantasy money, "move fast and break things" etc. There is an unlimited stream of new grads who will happily accept all this. Older people meanwhile don't have the patience or have other responsibilities in life.
Go into companies and industries where this culture isn't the norm, however, and you'll find teams full of 40-50+ year old software engineers. Defense, aerospace, government, construction, medical tech, research labs, education.
Your experience would be incredibly valuable.
However are you sure you want to take the cut in prestige/pay?
In the medtech space there's a huge need for project mangers, etc wish medical experience. So knowing how to code and how to query databases along with all that medical knowledge would be a super power.
However, I can't imagine you'd be happy as a junior engineer churning out react code but maybe?
I can take a pay cut definitely. I am a hobby programmer writing simple programs for my own use in Python but I have signed up for a university Python course to get better. I was thinking of getting involved in an open-source project but where do I find them? Very grateful for any help!
Are you just starting to learn? If so I think your chances of getting paid work will be slim.
I started programming on a zx80 and trs-80 clone at 11 years old, and have devoured new languages, methodologies, tricks and tips, computer science breakthroughs, and so-on throughout my career, but still do not have work currently.
Honestly, pursue it as a hobby but don't try to make a career out of it. This is the worst hiring environment I've seen since the dotcom bust, and there are tens of thousands of fresh CS grads that are unemployed.
If you want to go to school because you're interested, then that's cool. But to think you can make a living out of it when you're 30 years older than the tens of thousands of kids that you're competing against... I really don't think it's worth it unless you want to form your own startup that is medical-related.
definitely go for it, it's a great way to get recognition. However, it's a terrible way to learn because getting a mentor to teach you how to make changes will be very tough. But if you can, it's great because it's real work and real code changes.
Job boards aren't the problem. The problems begin and end within the boundaries of companies. ATS, recruiter, hiring manager, 6 30-60 minute interviews. Those things are the problem.
If I had the money I could go hire a half dozen solid software engineers and at least 2 solid DevOps/SRE types today. I'm betting people in other fields could do the same.
And yet, good people remain unemployed and scared.
Everybody want their company to be a google where you are willing to waste that mauch time to get hired.
In the end, HR hiring team fails to recruit because in makes the process to expensive for candidates, and the CEOS hire more HR recruitment becasue they think the problem is the lack of people to hire. HR needs to justify the salary, and makes hiring more a pain in the ass, feeding the vicious cycle.
I miss the times where HR only responsabily was to process salary payment.
I think we as humans will always have ageism or other biases.
Good point, like asking if racism or sexism still exists. Gets more publicity every year but fundamentally we are still a tribal species.
A lot of it involves masking and blending in by the candidate
You can easily find an older person ranting against the idea of using full stack javascript, unaware of the V8 changes while still having some valid criticisms
But then wonder if their rejection is ageism, instead of the rant
just one example
I think the general resistance from older devs comes from the velocity of software in the past decade. I just connected with a former manager I worked with at IT services from my university and we talked about how crazy tech has moved since my time working there. I had the privilege of working on the data center before the university moved to AWS. The entire backend was written in pure C, running on BSD. We had monitoring scripts written in Perl before getting a contract with Splunk. My manager worked on the design of the distributed file system for the university, and is still an active contributor to the distro. It wasn't the greatest system, but it sure was cool. I'd be a little salty too if some MBA came in and said, "we're moving to AWS, Okta, Workday, and Splunk. And oh by the way, we have to rewrite the system in node.js, and these interns are going to do it. Have fun!"
> he velocity of software in the past decade
Enterprise software is going nowhere but sideways for 2 decades already.
But yes, the velocity of new bullshit with dubious value that is consistently getting add on top of each other is just amazing.
By the way, I still haven't seen any single project get value out of SaaS auth (both auths) systems. Why the hell people use them?
Also, I had to check: "The key to driving your business forward? One powerful AI platform that keeps your most important assets on track, every decision on point, and your fleet of AI agents at peak performance. That’s Workday."
Well, people here still didn't manage to make LLMs do anything useful. That's despite a strong push from the top to use them, and many very smart people. They did manage to design a very promising tool that uses LLM in a way that uses its strengths and add a lot of value (that seems to be completely unparalleled - and we just invited the entire economic sector for a talk), but didn't manage to make it work well yet. So, our fleet of AI agents at peak performance...
I can provide more than just one example to back up any prejudice you can think of.
Treating a person as part of a group is the problem.
And when you are trying to isolate one person out of many, like for a job hire, it's not easy to avoid mass-filtering to speed it up.
> Treating a person as part of a group is the problem.
Yes, but it's efficient and effective in a large number of cases.
Those with no programming experience is a group. Those who just graduated a CS program is a group. Fresh bootcamp grads are a group. People with 5+ years of experience with your tech stack are a group.
Is there someone with no programming experience who would turn out to be great? Of course; none of us were born with programming experience, but most people are practical enough to not bat an eye when we use past experience as a proxy to quickly pre-filter the possible candidate pool.
Exactly true. But being hairless apes, we tend to overrely on our ability to group. "Smells like ___, must be bad at finding bananas in modern C++ product development process."
Where ___ is: "no formal education", the accuracy is possibly over 50%.
Where ___ is: "Dutch", the accuracy is below 50%
>I launched a job board [...]
Weird, it says there your wife did.
Thanks for the explanation.
I know it doesn't matter to the topic at had, but I actually went on and read all about your project, and that caught my attention. :)
I experience it differently. As an IC that’s relatively respected it my field, I think my seniority seems like a threat to some leaders. Because my word carries weight and I tend to be less obsequious with little to lose in these interactions. I have less of a problem to saying “the emperor has no clothes”. Younger ICs don’t have this luxury. They go along despite their reservations and often feel they don’t know better. Older ICs suffer fools much less (life is short, and older ICs have a well calibrated BS detector. Some bad leader don’t like that!).
I have no problem interacting with younger ICs and even embrace my Dad-ness and Dad humor. I like mentoring and growing others, and I think it’s important to advocate for less experienced to get the lionsshare of the glory and attention.
For hiring, I just am not open about my age and mostly interact with people virtually. I don’t have my early irrelevant jobs and don’t show my graduation dates. So I haven’t seen it as a problem.