Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

I just got a SWE job offer at a FAANG and I'm in my mid-forties. I took the exact same interviews as anybody else. They've also been contacted me regularly for the last three years. My age isn't written on my resume, but they can easily infer I'm in my forties. My guess is that recruiters don't care as long as they think you have a chance passing the coding interviews.

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.

Congrats (seriously)!

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.

> Congrats (seriously)!

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 realize that older developers are slightly uncommon,

I wonder if that is really the case or not.

This probably is true. The industry has been growing quickly for decades so there will naturally be far more people with ten years' experience than thirty years', say. Most people who enter the industry are young, so you would expect the demographic to skew young.

I think it’s a perception. I’m a youngster in my business unit (500 engineers) at a spry 39.

It is not. I think the idea comes from the fact that people have this idea of "developers" as people who work for startups or FAANG companies. Most developers work in unsexy industries and in boring places. Insurance companies in Indiana, a hospital Utah, an manufacturing plant outside of Houston, etc.

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".

FWIW here's some data from the 2020 Stack Overflow developer survey: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro...

To what extent is the survey representative? Hard to say. I'd be interested to see other sources of data.

I also wonder what the median age is for different technologies. I'd assume that developers are younger in frontend/mobile apps than in backend or C++ enterprise software.

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