No Country for Old Developers
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I dislike this typical response, because it comes close to blaming the victim, and indeed many people do blame the victims of ageism, attributing stereotypical attitudes to them. Imagine claiming "skills can beat racism" or "skills can beat sexism". No, nothing beats discrimination, because it was never based on the existence or absence of skills. Rather, prejudiced people take one look at you, see your gray hair, and make assumptions about you, and you can't beat your hair color any more than you can beat your skin color.
Well, you could try to dye your hair and get plastic surgery, but again that has nothing to do with skills.
Being older and from another generation changes the perception inherently. Can be good or bad it turns out, but it certainly requires human management skills and cannot be simply solved by "being better". That seems like an engineer's solution to the problem. If people were rational then things could be different, but from what I have seen people do not buy the most efficient and effective products, nor do they hire the most skilled and efficient people. They hire someone because they feel good about hiring them and they believe they will make their lives easier.
It assumes that everyone is lazying around basically.
Because of people are not lazying around, no, you can not just work twice as hard. Because you are already working hard, exactly as your competitors do. No people can't double their hard work every time they are treated unfairly. Not if they were actually working in the first place.
That goes for ageism, sexism, racism, whatever-ism we talk about.
Often, I suspect, it isn't even about making conscious assumptions. People just have positive and negative subconscious reactions to certain physical traits.
It's striking that you virtually never hear any discussion of "height discrimination", which I put in scare quotes because it barely seems to a recognized concept in the world of work (although it is somewhat recognized in the dating world). Yet there's lots of evidence that tall people have systematic advantages in life. They're seen as leaders, more likely to become CEOs, more like to be elected to political office, etc.
I don't want to victim blame. There is probably discrimination. But I think the older developers have some responsibility in defeating ageism.
I know a few SWEs who are older than me. They are already feeling the burnout of learning the new languages, frameworks, technologies every 3-4 years. Some of them are set in their ways thinking, "why would you need anything else other than C++/Java/etc.?" They grumble every time they are forced to learn something new. They have a point. After working in the industry for 15+ years, I empathize. But in this industry, that's unfortunately not the right attitude to have.
Another problem I see with older engineers is they are intimidated by the younger kids. I get it. When I interviewed some fresh grads, they seemed extremely talented and smart. I felt intimated by how much they knew. Some of the old guys lose confidence because of that. One old engineer who got laid off gave up looking for another job and faced early retirement. He told me he can't compete with the younger kids who already know all the new technologies and techniques.
Besides skills, I think it comes down to your attitude and how you relate to your younger co-workers. Being in my 40's, I still can relate to the kids. I try to bring a "young" energy. I'll see if I can keep this up into my 50's and maybe 60's.
Also an engineer in my mid-40's. This is key. You need to be the "cool" dad in the room, and someone people can go to for hard/difficult problems. You also have to stay relevant and keep your skills up to date. Talk about the great ramen place near your house, not how you had to solve Y2K problems with COBOL 20 years ago.
The worst case scenario is if you're a bootcamp grad at 40+, you're gonna have all the problems of ageism without any of the experience to counteract it.
Game theoretically speaking, if a tech worker is older it's best to know what younger workers do not. For instance, an older worker is a good deal more likely to be hired if s/he is able to write the firmware for ray tracing video card hardware than s/he is to be hired for knowing how to write web apps in "cool language of the week". In fact, I'd argue that most of the older tech workers in the situation of being discriminated against, are the workers who spent their careers learning "cool language of the week". A few of them may get lucky and get a job doing something that a 22 year old new college grad can do, but what's the likelihood? Should you bet your family's future on those odds? Even if you get the job, what's the pay likely to be like?
I feel like a lot of tech workers never ask themselves these questions. It's never too early to ask them either, in fact you should ask them early in your career. Getting too comfortable doing things everyone knows how to do will make you decidedly uncomfortable once you hit 35 or 40.
The problem set keeps evolving, and the tools we use to solve those problems keep evolving as well. Handwritten HTML -> vanilla JS -> jQuery -> Angular -> React, etc. It's not just the languages, it's major paradigm shifts in solving problems.
If you want to get out of that rat race, then jump on the management track and stay there. Even then, though, you need some familiarity with what your team will be working on.
You need to have a mentor like quality for their career growth yet still talk about the latest movies, technologies, games, memes, random geeky stuff, etc. to them
People who refuse to learn any new tech or tooling while on the job will find fewer and fewer positions. That's fair. The key thing is that there is a second group, that doesn't know the trendy technology and would be able to easily learn on the job but doesn't get hired because they didn't learn it on their own time. Failing to hire the second group is a problem.
I've never encountered a skilled engineer that couldn't pick up a new language/framework/architecture/workflow/process relatively quickly.
In reality only one in ten can become "principal engineer". But it does not mean that the other nine does not have any skills and should not work in the field.
I have seen this sentiment many times and I'm cannot understand why so many people is blind to the fact that this attitude creates serious systematic problems and is inhuman (because some abstract efficiency takes precedence over well-being).
But there's an engineer in his 50's, who worked in his company for many years. He had intimate knowledge of its systems and domain. But his company got bought out, and the new owners decided they don't need that group anymore and lays off the entire group. Suddenly, his domain expertise is near-useless unless he can find another, similar position.
He interviews for other positions, but he is hit with questions he's not familiar with. He drones on about his old systems/architect like an old fogey who not up to date with the new, shiny stuff. He tries to study the new stuff, but he's tired, overwhelmed, burnt out, etc. His interviewers realizes he has a lot of experience and probably highly skilled, but his skills and experience aren't relevant enough to what their company is doing. They offer to hire him at a junior rate, or not hire him at all. Is this ageism, or is he not good enough?
The last paragraph is more commonly:
He/she applies to a position relevant to his/her skills, and makes the mistake of listing all is previous experience in the resume - No response. After a while, he downplays his resume - gets responses. In the interview he/she answers every question with great accuracy, but something just doesn't "click" to the interviewer (the interviewer is sure he/she is filtering on skill alone, but is very wrong about that)
The fact is, recruiters and interviewers hire people they like, people that are similar to them. If you're from the same place look similar and from a similar age it generally has a lot more weight than anything skill-related.
The result of this particular study was that: 1) the resumes with non-English sounding names had much fewer callbacks than the ones with English names. 2) the resumes with more education and experience got more callbacks than the results with less education and experience. 3) if you had a non-English name and a master's, you almost but not quite, had the same rate of callback as someone with a bachelor's and an English name.
I imagine some people see this and conclude that skills beat racism. But if the reality is that you have to get a PhD and a couple of years of extra experience under your belt to have the same chance of finding a job as an English Canadian who has newly graduated from good BSc, then this is not skills beating racism. The fact that some people have to do a lot of extra work for the same outcome is the epitome of discrimination.
Which is more practical and useful: Change people perception or skills ?
After age 40 I changed careers from a networking career to coding via a bootcamp. I was among a couple folks who were in my age group in the camp.
It was a great experience working with folks of all ages in the camp. I think mixing different ages, backgrounds, experience is valuable.
While finishing the camp I was working with another person who was my age and he got a call back from a recruiter after a phone interview. He put them on speaker and the recruiter proceeded to note that they didn't think he would be a 'culture fit'.
He was braver than I and asked what that meant.
"They think you're too old for the group, everyone is young here."
We were a bit shocked and just to be sure he heard her right he asked again:
"You're too old."
For some folks it doesn't even seem to occur to them that such discrimination is wrong.
I was a bit floored by the experience. Growing up I remember overhearing some teachers quietly chat to each other and realizing that they could be just as petty as any kids could be. From then on I really never thought much in terms of age. For whatever reason when I go to meetups younger devs don't seem to notice / are a bit surprised when they find out how old I am.
When I think back on my career(s) I realize how just one opportunity here or there can make a huge difference and having a place that is obviously closed to me based on age make it known was pretty shocking.
Nothing ever came of that event. While trying to just get your foot in the door he didn't want to do anything about it and I could hardly blame him.
Both of us were eventually hired elsewhere, and are doing well.
I used to work in academia as a professor and the occasional older students were always a joy to work with. And usually, they went along perfectly fine with the other students (at least with the more mature ones).
It's a shame that we have all these educational resources available but practically most people don't have access to it. I'd love to spend a couple of years learning a new field.
Discussions about 'pick your battles' and other similar ones were the most common.
Culture should be an emergent property of the group of people who were hired because they were able to do the job.
I realize that older developers are slightly uncommon, but maybe it's also because they get bored and think they have better career prospects elsewhere. Personnally, I still love to code and learn new things, as I've always had. I'm used to working with people younger/older than me and it has never been an issue either.
That being said, I'm anxious that age becomes an issue along the road. There's also no denying that there is some sort of discrimination against older people. Simply look at the pictures on companies websites and presentation material, they clearly want to show how diverse they are except for older persons...
I'm just curious: older people working in big companies, have you ever discussed that with people in charge of promoting/ensuring diversity? I think there's a good point to make.
However, many of the interview tests themselves seem to discriminate for age (or at least, distance from college graduation as a function of time). Like another commenter here noted, its a collection of typically smaller, indirect biases against age that add up on a scale.
Also, being mid-forties isn't too bad as long as you aren't applying to a SV startup. I'd be curious what the result would have been if you were say, 57. Note: 57 is still 10 whole years from social security retirement age.
Thanks!
> However, many of the interview tests themselves seem to discriminate for age (or at least, distance from college graduation as a function of time)
This is correct. I would add that it also (and perhaps mostly) discriminates on your ability to find time to prepare for the interviews.
I don't have kids, and my job left me enough time for preparation. But I can see how it's not the case for a lot of people in their 30/40s.
I wonder if that is really the case or not.
There's also the fact that middle-aged developers raising families don't have time to blog and be "influencers" on social media.
That being said, ageism is definitely an issue in the industry. A lot of it has to do with so many companies having an "FTE" based approach to viewing things. Some moron with an MBA and no actual real-world skills sees a 55 year-old developer and thinks, "I can replace him with two new grads and still have money left over".
To what extent is the survey representative? Hard to say. I'd be interested to see other sources of data.
An even more subtle form of ageism is discrimination against certain technical/process habits that are correlated with when one entered the industry and therefore with age. For example, older engineers are more likely to believe in thinking through problems before starting to code, but in a "move fast" culture that's considered outdated. Older developers are likely to be more conservative when estimating technical difficulty or time to completion, which gets interpreted as unwillingness to commit (especially compared to younger developers who often wildly overcommit and suffer no consequence). Older workers are more likely to push back against corporate happy-talk because they've heard it all before and it never amounted to anything, but that can be interpreted as disloyalty or a "culture fit" problem.
Ageism is not one big obvious thing; it's a collection of small subtle things. Bit by bit by bit, these things nibble away at older workers' individual productivity and collaborative opportunities. Many overcome it. I did OK for myself in three years when I was 20+ years older than the median for the two groups I was in at a FAANG. But just because a problem is overcome doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Now, I should mention that I did switch a few years back to doing consulting/temporary positions, although sometimes these "temporary" positions last over a year. This means two things: 1) I buy my own healthcare insurance (I recommend using healthsherpa.com to help do that), so it could be that employers don't worry about my age because they don't have to pay for my insurance 2) I am forced into a position of having to learn new things every year, whether it's a new industry or a new library/framework or a new language or whatever. This means I cannot become unwilling to try new things.
I do think it's true that you need to not activate the "he's too old to do new things" alarm bells, by being very circumspect about criticizing new trends. But this is probably a healthy habit to cultivate anyway; give the new trend a chance, at least.
Also, there is a difference in the respect given to older programmers relative to other industries. In most fields (e.g. doctor, lawyer, banker, even engineer) as you get older, you become higher status and your opinions are given greater respect. In programming, your opinion is worth about what anyone else's is. So, if you think that after programming for decades your opinion ought to be given more weight than the 23 year old's, you're in the wrong industry. But, I think the best teams have both young and old programmers, and it's healthy to be in a team where young people are willing to speak up and disagree with you.
This is a bunch of hand-wavey garbage with no actual data backing it up. Some anonymous "surveys" and uncited statements of fact starting with "Chances are" or "in some cases."
> Even if you get offered a position you will likely be offered a lower wage if going for a junior job.
Yes, that's how it works. You get paid for the position. If you have the experience for a senior role, don't go for a junior job and expect a senior paycheck. If you don't have the experience and can only apply for a junior role, why should you get paid more? Your mortgage and kids' tuition is irrelevant to the value you're providing to the company.
> For a 50-year-old it may prove a struggle to make a career change pay off and could take several years to climb the ladder to reach a livable wage.
Isn't the common refrain to 20-somethings that they should just eat out less and live with roommates if they're not making enough money? If it's that easy then the 50-year-old should do it, too.
I've worked for small mom-and-pop companies and large public corporations. Every supposed example of "ageism" I've seen in real life is much more about attitude than age.
> Training and promotion opportunities may not go your way if you’re older. They may be offered to younger staff
Again with the hand-wavey "may not go your way...may be offered," but I don't accept the premise anyway. In my experience training is allocated based on how enthusiastically someone wants to get training, and how willing they are to follow-up and ask about funding, getting time on the work schedule, etc. If your attitude is "I know everything I need to know to get my job done," the company is unlikely to go out of their way to spend thousands on training you.
I've seen the "f you, I know everything I need to" attitude from 27 year old jerks, and I've seen 60-something programmers tearing through the framework du jour without any trouble. It has nothing to do with stagnation and everything to do with willingness to learn, willingness to listen, willing to do something new, and whether or not you think everyone has something they could teach you.
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The truth is that the difference between 30 years and 5 years of experience in a particular field can be as big as between 1 and 5. I just want to ask, does anyone in the industry really care about this fact? Does it matter to any company out there? Have you ever seen a job posting that has say 20+ years of experience as a minimum?
As someone with 30+ years in the industry I'm constantly worried that nobody really really needs a coder with so much under their belt anymore. That nobody sees the value in a smaller codebase with fewer bugs and more minimalist and robust architectural solutions.
Dear industry (apart from some maybe very specific niches such as OS kernels, compilers and such), do you really care about the old experienced devs?
C++ and COBOL are ancient enough but niche.
If we look at tools/frameworks, the story is even worse because they were obviously created later (plus some time to gain traction).
I think the industry will slow down and stabilize over the next 20 years. It will be fragmented in different area of expertise, but there won't be another 10 new languages or another internet revolution.
Similarly, companies do not typically hire for those positions through public job postings.
I've been in the business for over 20 years and have always gotten my jobs from public postings or recruiters reaching out, who inevitably point me to the public posting as part of the process. I'm unaware of these other Secret Squirrel channels for getting jobs, despite people always telling me they totally definitely exist!
The issue with getting decent reviews and salary bumps is that eventually you’re making more money than many people are willing to take on.
I’m 57 and working with a lot of people my age. We’ve hired a lot of older people.
But there is one thing though that can make switching jobs more difficult for senior developers, and that is the salary. Chances are that when you're older you are supporting kids, a house, or you just have become used to a higher standard of living. So you will probably look for a higher salary in a new job and yes, that limits your opportunities.
Now, I don't have kids so you might go "hey you've got so much free time" - I'm also a 36yo engineer with 10+ years of experience. Most of the positions I take nowadays allow me AMPLE time (as in months) to do research and learn new systems before deploying them to production. I almost never study or work at home these days. A LOT less than in my 20s when I worked in startups.
I just went through a few months of interviewing, what did every company want out of me at this "age" (experience)? They wanted a strong desire to mentor and cultivate teams. I've worked with a lot of older engineers who aren't happy to do this, and that's a huge problem and something majorly wrong and undesirable in tech.
FWIW I will not ever consider the 30s or 40s old. I am working with a lot more 23-25yo developers now and feel like half of my skillset is bridging communication between zoomers and gen-x bosses. They love learning and its incredibly rewarding helping them grow their careers - something that I never got help with when I started in the toxic tech world of ~2008.
I'm a lead/staff IC, not a manager, fwiw.
Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay).
Gave up on interviewing for startups and medium companies. Get a job in a top tier company or starve to death. (Top tier is mostly finance in London because FAANG don't have big offices here).
I could submit a 3 page resume with all of my sysadmin, etc jobs on it but then I would definitely be aging myself, even worse because my career actually started when I was 16 (I only mention this in casual interviews). If I started back then it'd probably look like I was 42+ on paper but at that point it's kind of more of a "why is this person listing irrelevant skills from 2005?"
Unfortunately I think that's the expectation with CVs? The ones I've seen look like they're describing the persons entire life to me.
I had to cut out positions very early on in my career because there were way too many to fit. I did some short contracting back in the days, imagine 5 jobs over less than 5 years.
Also removed all the dates for degrees and all the locations. (London recruiters have a bad habit to ignore experience outside London).
This isn't ageism. People do leave jobs they're underqualified for at a much higher rate. And if the salary band for a given job is £50-75k and you require £85k then why would they interview?
Sure, an employee might leave to Google for the money... if only Google had an office in London and they could get an interview and pass. It's not like it's going to invariably happen over the next 6 months. It's far fetched from the company to assume that.
In the meantime the candidate is out of a job because companies refuse to hire them (I don't know if that's ageism but that's certainly something) and the company gets no work done because it's understaffed.
> companies refuse to hire them (I don't know if that's ageism but that's certainly something)
What is it then? Nobody is owed a job as a human right, and companies are under no obligation to hire a specific person.
But I regularly see "I want to reboot my career" mixed into the conversation and I wonder if the industry just doesn't value the decades of generalized experience a veteran brings to a rebooted career.
And if they don't value that, why not focus on the hungry 22 year olds who are easier to fool into focusing on work rather than life or family?
I think this is truly boneheaded, but that wouldn't surprise me...
It's far easier to convince a young person without a family nor passion in life to work for 12 hours a day for little money rather than experienced people.
It's also far easier to sell hyped, useless technological solutions to young, non-experienced people who don't understand the problem to solve.
I say this as a young developer who took too much time to recover from the marketing hype maintained by money seeking vendors.
However a mid 30s dev friend of mine this year juggled 3 companies into getting him a nice salary and told me "Yeah, nobody takes you seriously until you're 30".
Yeah
Spoken like a naive individual without much in the way of life experience. Keep taking the pills, Mark.
Onto more positive points, whilst I have no doubt that ageism exists in our industry, there are also companies with a more enlightened view of age and experience.
I tend to prefer hiring people with more experience, in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, when I can. I particularly like those who've worked for a variety of different companies during their careers (avoids institutionalisation).
Some of the benefits of more experienced staff:
- Tend to take a more rounded view of what they're working on, and find it easier to see different perspectives
- Related to this they seem better able to focus on delivering business and customer value
- Again, related: less interested in tech for tech's sake, and less prone to chasing fads
- Further, related: less idealistic, more pragmatic
- Better social skills; easier to get along with
- Less emotional: more mature and settled
- Better able to manage stress and work/life balance
- Lower sense of entitlement
- Have often picked up mentoring and coaching skills that can help develop others
Of course, there are always exceptions for both experienced and inexperienced staff (and we're very fortunate/have been very careful about our less experienced hires), but these are benefits I've often observed.
As I've already implied, we hire people at all levels of experience (with the exception, so far, of fresh grads), but having a good number of experienced staff is I think one of the great strengths of our team, and I view our senior staff as our greatest asset. They're very good, for example, at helping to develop less experienced team members, or wrangling difficult and sensitive issues.
(Note that I haven't talked much about technical skills here. Partly this is because we work with a deliberately boring stack - I want us to build great, cutting edge products with solid, reliable, boring tech, not be constantly hindered from building by the problems of the bleeding edge. Mostly it's because, having had to pick up different languages and technologies over the years, and having worked with plenty of developers who've done the same, I don't generally regard specific tech skills as that important. We use SQL Server, for example. But if you've worked with any relational database for any decent length of time during your career you'll get on fine with it, regardless of whether that's Postgres, Oracle, or even MySQL or SQLite. Likewise it's not that hard to learn to query MongoDB or ElasticSearch, although the latter is a bit nuts, even though the syntax is different to SQL. It's not different enough to get in a tizzy about, and I really wish recruiters would wise up to this. Some have, most haven't, in my experience.)
At the advanced age of 36 he should be replaced by someone younger, stat!
> I particularly like those who've worked for a variety of different companies during their careers
I hope you see how these are two very conflicting ideals. Are you assuming that other companies will train your staff for you?
Hmm... you are talking it out of context...
"Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying: “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” "
b/c it crystallizes, for all time and for all to see, how wrong Mark Zuckerberg can be.
"we only get people with less than 6 years experience for this position"
(My inside referrer got the response, as a job applicant I got not reponse)
Really I think prejudices operate all the time in all sorts of ways. I say that not to be dismissive — I think all forms of them are a problem — but I think some of them rise to a certain level of societal awareness because of the numbers of people affected.
This looks like ageism on the surface but in reality it's the economics of plain old capitalism at work with Moore's Law accelerated the pace of automation.
This prejudice happens to be true.
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-the-age-you-reach-peak-...
I'm an older software developer, and I do not have the same ability to learn new things as I did when I was young. I do have more experience and, with it, a better sense of what matters and what doesn't, so I waste less time on the stuff that doesn't.
That is, however, a more subjective attribute and, thus, I don't blame large companies for not being able to evaluate it. They are inherently volume-based and thus focused on more obvious and measurable attributes that directly (though imperfectly) map to developer productivity.
As the kids say: it is what it is. If you want to make increasing amounts of money for a long time, become a banker or a doctor. I like writing code.