Comment by jasonthorsness
Comment by jasonthorsness 3 days ago
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.