Personally, I worry about this in our industry. I plan to save, invest, and diversify my income. That way I can get out of the sooner, rather than later. I don't want to end up being a 50+ year old who can no longer get a job.
So wouldn't the future be a little more forgiving when the number of 50-something engineers is quite a bit more than (presumably) what it is today?
I think the 55 year old interviewing for a dev job with the 28 year old CTO will have a much easier time 25-30 years from now than today. At that point I think you're fighting against culture-wide age bias rather than industry-specific age bias.
So just stay relevant? I'm 28, been coding for 19 years. What was relevant to learn when I was in middle and high school is completely useless now. All those endless hours spent learning how to make games in Pascal, irrelevant technologies. All those endless hours spent learning PHP3/4 and cobbling together websites and crude frameworks, irrelevant tech.
But on a higher level, all of that has proven useful. Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant.
Keep improving. Be an engineer, not just a coder.
The point of age bias isn't bias against people without relevant skills, its an actual bias against person of certain ages.
Our industry is ripe with stories of folks with extremely relevant skill sets not getting jobs after a certain age (50 seems to be common).
There is some (unintentional I'm sure) age bias even in the response of "stay relevant" as if the implication is that older devs don't do that as a matter of course while younger ones do.
I don't think the industry is nearly as ripe with unemployed and relevant 50+'ers as you might think. I know many over 50 (I'm mid 40s) that have never and will never have any difficulty finding jobs for the foreseeable future because they've stayed relevant.
The main thing I would avoid is long tenures at employers where you are not working with newer technologies, not producing tangible accomplishments, or not challenged to learn on a regular basis. If you've been at the same thing for many years, it's difficult to differentiate age bias from a bias against someone who hasn't learned much or kept up with the industry.
Older devs that work for (or consult to) employers that use newer tech have no choice but to stay relevant.
I think you bring up an important point - your average 50 year old developer is much more likely to have spent the last 10 years at the same company, working with the same technology, maybe even with the same title, than the 35 year old developer.
Most of my experience has been .Net web application development in the northeast/mid-Atlantic. I think it'd be damn near impossible for me to get a job writing Ruby or Go for a startup at this point unless I made it a goal (it's definitely not) and spent considerable effort in my spare time working on projects. I'm only 29.
If you're a 52 year old developer who has spent 22 years writing RPG reports for AS/400s and you get laid off, you're either going to end up in doing the exact same job for another company, or you're going to be retiring.
Now that even the youngest of the first dotcom engineers are probably hitting their 40s, it will be interesting to see whether ageism will still be a factor in hiring for the industry.
I'm not sure if this accounts for 0.1% or 99% of alleged "age bias" incidents but I agree with you: this is most definitely a bad thing for a developer to do to themselves.
I would be very, very skeptical of a prospective employee with a resume like that.
On the other hand, I'd think very highly of a prospective employee with a resume like that looked like that and had additional open-source or other programming projects they'd contributed to. I'd think, "This person loves to code, and has been pushing themselves to grow and diversify their skills despite being stuck in a daytime coding job that encourages no such thing..."
What do you think? What if anything would sway your opinion of somebody that has been maintaining a PHP4 app at BigHugeBoringCo for the last 10 years?
Career fluidity has only been a somewhat accepted industry trait for the past 10 or so years. I had clients circa 2005 that wouldn't look at a resume for any candidate that hadn't been at their current job for 7+ years, which eliminated everyone who had taken a chance on a startup during the first dotcom wave.
The generation of technologists that started work in the 80s and early 90s likely had pensions and other retirement benefits that made staying at their job an easier decision, and they were likely raised with different feelings towards employer/employee relationships. Flash forward to 15-20 years into their career, and the job market, the definition of marketability, and job search itself changed dramatically. It's easy to point to ageism, but that's not really it, because the ones that joined startups or moved around a bit aren't seeing that same level of stigmatization.
If someone is maintaining that PHP4 app at BigCo for 10+ years, I'd think that person would probably need to demonstrate that they've been paying attention to dev trends or they won't get looked at. If you're not getting challenging work at the job, you need to find it somewhere else.
I started offering resume and career consulting services to job seekers over a year ago, and a large percentage of my clients are people in this boat who need to reinvent and market themselves to appeal to today's employers. It can be scary to look for jobs today if you haven't looked in 10 years.
Maybe it's bias. But I know for myself that the older I get, the less time I have to spend on staying relevant. Mobile revolution? Never bothered to learn. Super fancy new JavaScript? Took me years to start looking into. Go? Ugh, don't wanna. Etc.
Ten years ago I was chomping at the bit to jump on any new technology that started showing signs of promise. Nowadays I focus on just solving people's business problems and printing money. Tech is a tool, not a goal.
This already makes my resume look a lot less shiny to keyword matching recruiters. The fact that I'm old/cynical enough to say "expected value of options is 0" makes me all but unemployable.
Take two doctors. Both learned all their knowledge going through med school. Neither did anything else to stay relevant. One graduated 5 years ago, the other 25 years. Which is likely to have more relevant knowledge? Is it because they stayed relevant? No. It is because everyone has some learning period (be it through college or not), and on average older workers had that period longer ago than younger workers, so the relevancy bonus has decreased more.
The longer since you had a significant learning period (the longer since you graduated school), the more you have to work to stay relevant. This isn't tied to age, only correlated because it is rarer for a younger person to have had their learning period (graduated) longer ago.
However, there is more than one learning curve involved. Knowing Ruby or Objective C is only part of the story you also want someone that understands non technical pitfalls.
n the United States, many states require CME for medical professionals to maintain their licenses. For example, Arizona requires an average of 40 hours of CME every two years.[4] For a complete list of requirements by state, see State Medical Licensure Requirements and Statistics, 2006. Within the United States, CME for physicians is regulated by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA).
One thing that older people (50+) have impressed upon me is that learning gets harder as you age. It's not just that your body and mind become tired more easily. In general, if a 20-year-old and a 50-year-old spend the same amount of time studying something, the 20-year-old will do better on a quiz. At least, that's what older people tell me. I'm your age, so I haven't experienced this firsthand.
If at some point your rate of learning becomes slower than the rate at which relevant technologies change, it's not possible to stay relevant. Your deep understanding won't do you nearly as much good if you only know languages and frameworks from 15 years ago.
The real problem is that while the 50 year old has already had 30 years more learning than the 20 year old, the 50 year old probably doesn't know who the Kardashians are. How can you not know who the Kardashians are? What's wrong with you?
My exact experience.
I know it's just a throw-away example, but I'd like to point out "Keeping up with the Kardashians" has been on TV continuously since 2007. The more prominent Kardasihan sisters themselves are all 34-36 years old.
I don't think anyone in their 50s really would have a hard time relating to someone in their mid-30s, nor be completely flummoxed by a TV show that's been available for 10 years.
More to the point--pop culture is popular culture and seeps its way through all age groups. A better example would be a music artist that's popular only with teenagers or some niche group. I couldn't name a single artist popular with teens/tweens now.
You understand that you are unaware of the younger generation's pop culture (pop music is as much part of pop culture as TV is), but you don't understand how people of my generation can be unaware of your generation's pop culture.
I'd posit that generations can't have their own unique 'pop culture'. If it's only popular to people born within 10 years of you, then it's not popular. By my measure a lot of 'pop artists' aren't really popular because even appealing to 100% of tweens in the USA, really means you've captured 3% of the total general population.
I used to think like you.
But I'm 51 now. I've discovered that I was wrong.
The younger the technical interviewer, the less interested they are in my experience. I'm guessing that the less experience they have, the less value they see in experience. I suspect I was the same way 25 years ago.
I now understand why good developers go on to be lousy managers. They get old and get pushed out of development. Mid-level management is all that's available to them.
Fortunately I still have a job in an older development group. I still have some value, for now.
When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
- Oscar Wilde
I've seen clear bias in our industry. Though I'm in my 30's. I've seen people in my age group clearly discriminate against older programmers.
Save, invest, prepare for your retirement and be safe instead of betting your life on a unforgiving younger generation.
Better. Why just stop there. Avoid the need to do something to make a living. Save, invest and plan for your retirement.
Once you've done that, you could on any day 'enjoy' programming just for fun.