If you expect to retire at 60 (likely 65 these days) and you start working at 20: 40 is smack dab in the middle of your career.
I think that notion gets lost when we talk about ageism in tech and then people talk about 40-somethings.
Several reasons for ageism sometimes missed. This from someone whose been discriminated against, who has hired, who now owns a company & who was also a recruiter.
__I don't agree with this__ just laying the reasons out for clarity sake:
- Hiring managers don't consider themselves ageist, but opt for younger employees whom they think make a better cultural fit. You can blame the 'work is my social life' culture that emerged in the 2000's and that persists today.
- Hiring managers don't want to be ageist, but they've had or heard of bad experiences where disgruntled or non-performing employees abuse the EEOC process for financial gain and retribution. Very well intentioned rules, designed to protect certain cohorts of employees, doing the exact opposite as is often the case with Gov regs.
- Hiring managers (usually fixated on 'new tech') who fear diminished learning, adoption or performance capacity in older employees.
- Money. The perception that older employees cost more in wages and benefits, without much thought to efficiency gains that accompanies gray hair.
I was age discriminated against by a well known SAAS provider, who used a 2014 interview process to extract a detailed roadmap and ideas for product growth from me, and then ghosted me. I've watched as they've (badly) implemented the specific of my roadmap the past few years, and I chuckle. 100% my fault for giving up too much value in the interview process, but it was tough time and I thought I really needed that job.
> Hiring managers don't want to be ageist, but
I classify this into the "I'm not a racist, but..." bucket.
> Hiring managers (usually fixated on 'new tech') who fear diminished learning, adoption or performance capacity in older employees
This is the textbook definition of what ageism is.
Conclusion? They are ageists, plain as that. They may not consider themselves to be, or want to be, but they still are, because ageist is as ageist does, and it matters jack what appearances they want to keep or what they think or who they perceive in a mirror.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/at-what-age-does-....
It didn't become like a job job until what, the mid 1960's? That's 60 years ago.
And the number of programmers is doubling every ~5 years. Of course it's front-loaded with young people! The people who have been doing this for the field's entire time of mass popularity (1980's onwards imo) haven't even had time to get proper old yet.
But also: The more experienced you are, the more your biggest value isn't in banging keys on the keyboard. A company would much rather leverage your thoughts and opinions and that may look a lot more like technical leadership than programming. Even though it's still engineering.
Only an asshole cares how old somebody is. Reminder also, ageism isn't just a bummer, it's illegal.
Most people aren't going to take legal action, but imo if you're discriminated against you have somewhat of an obligation to do so.
Another factor to consider is post-peak-comp. You may find yourself in roles when you are older that pay less than they used to. This may very well be fine because you no longer have a down payment or kids college to save for, and if you didn't keep upgrading homes.. your mortgage payments 10-20 years into owning should a smaller and smaller percent of your income. If you are no longer chasing comp, you have a broader selection of roles and can be more selective.
It's easy to blame ageism, and ageism is real. There are a lot of people who really resent older people and believe flat-out untrue myths about cognition, value of experience and work ethic. That said, every time a friend shares a beer with me and tells me the woes of trying to get a job when older, I hear this:
I can't get a job that pays me like I'm senior, but requires the skills of someone half my age.
The solution is to break out of that box, and either be ok with lower pay, or go for jobs that leverage the value of your experience.
> perhaps due to your own abilities and other special qualities
I'm sure if you looked at yourself, or maybe had someone look with you, that you'd find you have quite a bit to offer when it comes to ability, and especially special qualities. As you get older it's hard to understand what is special because you've seen a lot, and it all seems average.
Very few of them have been pushed out of the field. Yes many moved up, but the majority still code. The ones who had not moved into management are either retired (Over 65), retired early (Rich, big payday) or dead.
I am very much the “average programmer”, but I learned a long time ago how to focus on “adding business value”, talking to customers (internal and external), writing, presenting, explaining concepts to non-technical people and even once a decade ago talking to investors and potential acquirers when a startup I was working for when they wanted to talk to the “technical folks”
I focused on small companies before my current job where the director/CTO was looking for people who could demonstrate a history of being “smart and get things done”.
I avoided the leetCode grind by preparing for a couple of years to target the cloud consulting department of the two of the major cloud providers or if necessary one of their partners. I knew that a combination of software development, infrastructure, cloud, and soft skills would give me a competitive advantage.
Do you feel that they were beneficial in terms of making you a better developer, or did you simply learn a bunch of solutions to puzzles that have no bearing on real world development?
"offers for work" or "job offers"? "Traditional" w2 full time go-through-an-hr-dept organizations possibly have more of an ageist issue than other scenarios. Freelance/consulting seems to still offer more flexibility on the age front, but it's more of a gut sense from speaking with those in my network.
If the candidate says “I’m only taking this to avoid starving but will quit as soon as I find any other job”, then sure, don’t make the offer. If they don’t give any signs either way, assume they’ll stay for 18-48 months as is common and decide accordingly.
The older I get, the more I think it is not the company itself but middle-managers.
Managers with an authoritarian streak will have trouble handling experienced developers that objects to non-optimal designs and processes.
It is much easier for such a manager to handle young naïve developers that gladly accept to work 5 times as many hours as a good design needs.
Software don't work well with an "do as I say, no matter how stupid it is" approach. I think that is why Silicon Valley (and Europe) has much greater success writing software than asia/India.
An older, grizzled, battle-hardened engineer is one of a manager's best assets.
In hindsight, until the last two in 2016 and 2018 they were just journeyman CRUD jobs with the last two being hands on dev lead and de facto “cloud architect” respectively.
I just got my first job in $BigTech at 46 two years ago. It’s not officially a “software engineering job”. But for all intents and purposes I’m doing the same type of work I did at the last couple of jobs - gathering requirements, presentations, development, and a shit ton of yaml, HCL, PowerPoint slides, and diagrams.
I’m sure at 48, I could contact my network of former coworkers, managers, recruiters and someone would give me a job even if it were just a standard .Net journeyman developer again.
If you’re still randomly submitting your resume to an ATS trying to prove yourself to companies by reversing binary trees on whiteboards while juggling bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope, you’re doing it wrong at 40+ years old.
I did that at 45 and landed an interesting job at FAANG (and I'm not the only one). I think it's a bit contradictory to think old programmers are still as capable and sharp as 25 years old, and at the same time insisting to be judged on different standards.
Then it's your preference not to be a programmer. My point was that it's also possible to be a SWE for those who still dig programming at our age. But you have to play by the rules. That being said, I don't think I'll last in such a position until retirement.
I just knew I wouldn’t enjoy being a small part of a large team coming from small companies where I could work up and down the life cycle from pre-sales, to requirement gathering, to implementation, to DevOps [sic], UAT and training.
I’m still part of a huge organization in the grand scheme of things. But my projects range from me the sole tech person doing everything to my working with a team where I lead or implement one “work stream” depending on the size of the project.
With a string resume, a hiring manager might think "They probably know what a binary tree is because it they didn't, they would not have made it this far."
Both interviews were about half a day, I got offers from both the company that asked me to do a merge sort paid slightly more. I accepted the second job.
Real business folks have real world problems to solve. They don’t care whether you can reverse a binary tree.
As an aside, one of the more junior people that I would be leading asked me how I would parse addresses while the director was in the room. I said I wouldn’t. I would license third party CASS software and explained all of the corner cases and then went into my speech about a company shouldn’t concentrate “on anything that doesn’t make the beer taste better”
I suppose it's all about the role you're applying for. There are "real business" where engineers are hired to solve technical challenges. Being able to solve simple algorithmic problems is a legitimate prerequisite for this type of role.
And let’s not pretend that all developers at BigTech are solving “hard problems”. I do have access to code for one of the major cloud providers.
I’m not saying the jobs are simple just that the complexity is figuring out what to write, how to organize it, how to deploy it, etc.
And before the gatekeeping starts, I programmed in assembly on four processors as a hobby by the time I graduated in 1996 and my third job around 2007 was to maintain a complete proprietary tool chain (compiler, VM (language VM), IDE) for Windows mobile. I spent my first decade plus out of college bit twiddling in C.
You're obviously the kind of person I'd want to hire ;) Why would you mind writing some code in an interview? I don't ask anything that requires memorizing your data structures and algorithms textbook. All I'm looking for is people that can "think in code" which in the population of job seekers isn't as common as you'd think.
I’ve had one coding interview in 25 years between 8 jobs. That one was in 2012. They had a Visual Studio IDE with skeleton code abs failing unit test and I had to make the unit tests pass as a pair programming exercise. I thought that was a very practical type of coding interview that I copied when I had to filter a bunch of contractors when I was a dev lead.
But now, if I leave my job at BigTech as a “cloud architect specializing in application modernization” - basically enterprise app dev/DevOps [sic], training, etc., before I retire, it will be at some startup looking for a more strategic role, even though I would be hands on.
It’s automatically a red flag about the job that I prefer if I’m not being asked about strategy and given a coding interview.
I am early 40's and have had no issue finding work and am currently interviewing others to come work with my group in a solution architect / tech lead style role and they are all my age. I have never interviewed for a job and not gotten an offer, regardless of age; with that said I'm not interviewing at startups or places I feel really wouldn't allow me a family life. I get the offers not because I'm incredible, I'm not, but because I know my lane and skill set and stick to it.
It got to the point where my “interviews” were more just sitting down with directors/CTOs and talking like adults about how I would help them solve their real world business problems. I haven’t done a coding interview in over a decade even though I have been hands on all that time - across five jobs
After some frustrating experiences applying and interviewing for jobs at the kind of startup-sized companies where I’ve spent my entire career, and fearing that my age might be a factor (I’m about to turn 40), I applied on a job at a Fortune 500 and had an offer a few days later.
The pay, benefits, and work/life balance are excellent, to the point that I have some regret over not exploring this avenue sooner.
Oh, and now I’m younger than most of my coworkers again. I don’t think ageism is a thing here.
but those are still of small group, it's like a normal distribution, I read somewhere age wise there are only about 1.5% that are above 50s.
Of course you're not going to hire a woman if you could hire a man - they might get pregnant and be away from work for a long time.
Of course you're not going hire an older employee that knows their worth over a recent graduate that isn't familiar with the salary they should earn. You can rip them off much more easily.
People can be cunts but still act with some rational motivation. That's why we have protected categories, to make sure that that isn't a strategy worth pursuing.
that's the real problem, self and situational-awareness.
i like the points in this thread. perhaps aging is just a natural bad actor filter. options narrow as we wise up.
this is the one thing you said I disagree with, unless you mean dealing with it by eliminating it.
I can't speak in either instance at this time, but I'd like to think ageism isn't nearly as widespread as it seems when discussed on here when it comes to technology-based work. E.g., Small town in Nebraska with one or two software houses versus SF.
I think with software jobs paying what they do, retiring at 50 would be pretty easy.
Not all software engineers are paid ludicrous money though, and even in places that they are paid well the cost of living can be atrocious.