Where are all the older software developers? I've worked at a few FANG and similar-level finance companies, and the vast majority of developers are under 35. Are the older ones clustered in some other corner of the industry?
I've been out of work for 12 months now. Previously I passed every interview I went to (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) and had the luxury of choosing between multiple offers. I haven't got through an onsite loop with any of these recently, nor with a bunch of other companies. The only thing I believe is different is my age.
BTW, the me/them thing is reflection after the fact, not how I felt at the time.
If you couldn’t discriminate against someone younger, you couldn’t post that you wanted someone with a master degree and 10 years of experience.
> The New York State Human Rights Law covers employers with four or more employees. It protects persons 18 and over from age discrimination in employment
> An employer may not refuse to hire or promote an employee, and may not terminate an individual because of age, and must provide the same terms and conditions of employment irrespective of age, including salary.
https://dhr.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/age-discriminatio...
This is exactly how it works for most other hiring discrimination too. If a court finds an email titled "how we can use a college degree requirement to decrease the number of Hispanics at our company" you have a problem, but requiring a degree isn't itself illegal even though different races currently graduate from college at different rates in this country.
Anecdotal but I've seen >40 year old engineers thriving at non tech-hub software companies. There's plenty of interesting B2B companies that lurk in the suburbs or tier-2 or tier-3 cities.
A lot are managers.
Most never existed. It used to be a much smaller profession.
Some burned out and work in real estate.
One odd thing about this is that you'll rarely meet the rich & retired in your work life, by definition, so it's easy to underestimate how many they are. That said, I have no good way to count them either, and may well be overestimating.
You can usually find more in big corporations (cushy work life balance, healthcare and pension), in more traditional industries (defense, finance) and working as contractors or consultants (less corporate bullshit and HR barriers).
Last but not least. A non negligible amount of older workers are semi-retired. If you've worked 1980-2010 in NYC/LDN/SF you could have been doing quite well and acquired 2 homes at a fraction of what they are worth now.
Something I've heard discussed in CS education, and experienced myself to an extent (I'm a part-time adjunct faculty teaching Operating Systems), is how the more recent generations of students are, in-spite of the ubiquity of computing in their daily lives, purportedly entering programs "less computer literate" than previous generations. I don't believe "computer literacy" accurately captures the nature of the nascent deficiency - it's really about "_systems_ literacy".
I imagine what's happening to "systems" ownership is a lot like what happened to car ownership between the 1950s and the 1970s - people forgot how to fix them because they got more complex and needed less maintenance. I think for some of us older folks who experienced early home-computing, this isn't all that counter-intuitive of an analogy. In the old days, to play a computer game, it usually necessitated some amount of "tinkering around" under the hood of the "system" - possibly changing settings, maybe you needed to install more HW, maybe you had to manually fix some corner case overlooked by the errant programmer. I've heard that people who were young adults in the early-80s to late-90's were in a "sweet spot" for systems - people had easy access to them, but they also had to "repair" (modify, configure, augment, etc) them a lot.
Today, we're trying to fill-in the sweet spot with things like the RaspberryPi and the myriad of similar educationally-oriented embedded systems / home computers, but somehow I don't feel like most of those capture the "frustration" factor - they're well documented, and pretty regular.
So, while it may be hard to find people in their 50's who can create a multi-platform responsive app using whatever "cutting-edge stack" Medium is swooning over, it's been my experience that it's even harder to find someone in their 20's who can write a device driver, or even a halfway-decent C program.
I like the teams I work with, but if any systems company can match pay relative to CoL and is looking for experienced engineers who know how to understand systems from hardware to human, look me up.
Imagine this:
You took your university education a bit too seriously, entering the workforce after completing a PhD at age, say, 25, immediately after the 2008-crash.
That means you're too young to have been around in the 80s, inventing the world's first online banking or whatever. You were never part of the dot-com bonanza of the 90s. Your parents are probably still alive and you never got any inheritance. You command a medium-level income with your mediocre career, but having had to move to a tech hub (or a major city at least) has meant that you never got much of a chance for your income to turn into savings, due to not having had a chance to get on the real estate ladder and your income going to the landlord and taxman.
You're now 36 and starting to get worried if you'll be able to find another job in this industry if you should lose the one you have now.
Lucky you.
- most major cities not on the west coast you would be fine with a “medium level” by HN standards salary of low six figures.
- In most major cities not on the west coast or NYC, you can still buy a decent home making low six figures.
By the time I was 36, I had stayed at one job way too long, I was the stereotypical “expert beginner” and was just starting to job hop and my career trajectory from the time I was 35 until now 10 years later looks like that of someone just starting out and moving up for the last ten years.
No hint of age discrimination - only a couple of rejections in the course of five job changes - and since I always use recruiters, my resume has never gone down a black hole.
The last ten years I’ve been a regular old journeyman enterprise software/SAAS developer -> team lead -> architect/principal developer.
Many people still want PhDs for reasons having nothing to do with financial considerations.
Also: I'm writing from the POV of someone outside the United States, specifically from someone based in Europe.
The system in the U.S. is based on a squeezed/dying middle class. In large parts of Europe, middle class is all there is. With high taxes, wealth transfers from the rich to the poor, and many policies that have the effect of keeping people wealthy but cash-poor (mandatory social security of all kinds imaginable), and with super-high real estate prices in basically all areas that will make it possible to work in tech, the ability to get on the real estate ladder is now no longer a given, even for someone with a six-figure-usd-equivalent salary, which are actually much rarer in Europe, even in tech, than they are the U.S.
But, like you said, this is coming from my American perspective - the only one I know. Also, is the tech bro culture a thing in Europe?
But they were always peer groups of people situated below decision-making level. So there was never anyone who could actually decide things that might be bad for my career, leaving me to wonder whether me not being a bro was what it was about.