I'm in my 50s, and I used to say that I never saw age discrimination. Then a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed for an Internet company, and my age and experience was commented on by the majority of the interviewers. Which is fine, since most of the comments were positive (e.g., we need people with more experience because we have so many new graduates), but it was still a bit strange.
Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism.
As with all discrimination, the unnerving part is just not knowing. Was it really age discrimination? Or maybe I just looked like this guy's hated father or ex-boyfriend or something. Or maybe he's just a bad interviewer with low skills, and really didn't understand the stuff I was telling him (I usually sneak in a couple of technical questions for the interviewer and he blew those questions); that's hard to judge when there's no follow-up questions. Or maybe at the end of the day it was just money and the company didn't want to admit it. Who knows? I'll never know, and I suspect the company won't either.
Very interesting. I'm 25 and last year, I had a similar experience with two much older interviewers. I was getting pretty hostile vibes from one of them, and he at one point gave me a problem with many possible solutions, of which my whiteboard program would print one.
Then I was asked to modify it to print all possible solutions. When the second interviewer verified that it would work as expected, the other guy was like, "but you never used list comprehensions in that." -- I threw in a list comprehension to satisfy him (although at this point, I'd started questioning the worth of all this). Next, I was told that I'd used a (max 10 element) list for random access of items instead of a dict, and that "he'd never do that". At that point, I lost it and said some pretty blunt things to him. Of course, I was rejected.
I don't know about other countries, but big services companies in India have a lot of incompetent senior programmers who simply hate any kind of opposition to their authority, and you simply have to blow them to survive. I am fortunate to have never worked at one of these companies.
I am turning 40 in a year and almost everyone I work with is 15 years younger than I am. My opinion is that you have it all wrong. I don't think younger engineers are hostile to old age, but culture fit is important. It's not about your age but how you carry yourself. Until you're in your 70's you can probably afford to make an effort to understand the culture of 20 somethings. You can look to speakers at tech conferences and many are probably as old as you and I but don't have any problems fitting in with their younger peers.
You just have to be willing to adapt yourself to fit in with who you work with. If you aren't interested in making personal changes because you shouldn't think you need to just to earn a paycheck then well you're probably not a good culture fit. You need to make an effort. I enjoy the same things my peers do, we play the same games, we watch the same things and read the same websites. It's not fake with me. I'm not trying too hard. I'm just not getting stuck in old ways.
One part of the problem is that young programmers are given a sort of computing education without a historic context. The only historic perspective they get on anything is in their humanities courses, where it isn't about their profession.
In their core subjects they are given a cartoonish summary their history of their profession, with distorted dates, which leads them to believe garbage like that object oriented programming was invented in the 1990's, functional is totally new and so forth.
"Like, wow, you're in your 50's and you know about new stuff like inheritance over composition and singletons?"
Only those know better who actually dig into the literature and look at the actual dates, and are surprised how far back some concepts were not only known academically but deployed in production systems.
There is this axiom that, no matter what year it is, someone with gray hair knows mainly Fortran, and writes it in any other language. Be it 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, doesn't matter. Never mind that the 1985 person of whom that was actually true already died, and this is his son, if not grandson.
> keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.)
I hate to say it, but this kind of direction is also pushed frequently by inexperienced developers. It is also frequently made worse when they feel they have to prove their ability to developers with more experience.
Just the other night I was having a conversation with colleagues from a side project - one is the CTO (he made the position a stipulation of employment when the founder was starting this side project), the other the founder, and I was trying to convince them both why deep inheritance and "shaking the tree" with every code commit creates code maintenance problems down the road.
Unfortunately, the inheritance model was the CTO's design (after all, the data has very strict hierarchical relations, right?), and the only real answer I got to justify his plan was "so there's nothing technically wrong with it, your objection is purely fear based; keep tabs on that fear and let me know how it goes". I was concurrently scolded by the founder that "I'll never make deadlines, so you'll always have plenty of time to refactor the codebase". Needless to say, they decided that it was best for the development group to go forward with the deep inheritance hierarchy.
So yeah, the lack of experience definitely inhibits communication, particularly when you disagree with them based on your experience.
I can't say I'm surprised. I've done my fair share of interviews before I was 30 and while I never cares about age I had several colleagues who would come to grab my for my turn interviewing and comments like "old guy in room 1 is ready for you" always made me think they viewed them negatively.
Though bias is hard to shake. I'll admit I have some bias against PhD holders interviewing for engineering positions. Almost every single one I've ever interviewed couldn't even do very, very basic coding but could talk lots and lots of buzzwords so it kinda wore on me and it was hard to not go into an interview starting with a negative view if I knew they had a PhD.
I feel like I still gave everyone their fair shake but it was hard to shake that feeling.
Sounds like a similar experince to one I had where interviewer nr2 clearly had made made up their mind before walking into the room. So 30 mins into an interview that was going swimmingly - in comes sour face and contradicts everything I say. It wasn't a "strategy", it was just some $$$$ in a bad mood who didn't like my name? age? some other factor? I hope I can just roll with it next time but I got really pissed at the time as I knew I was suited to the job, but wasn't given a fair chance. It gets you down when you are 'between jobs'. Funnily enough, I now work in a different division of the same company and this person was brought in on a project I was on. I don't think I was remembered and thankfully I had recovered my professional composure so I didn't mention our first meeting.
Am I the only one who finds it crazy that at age 50+, ostensibly after working in the industry for at least a couple of decades, a candidate would be subjected to inane technical interviews and useless whiteboarding exercises?
I understand that folks have to do what they need to do to stay employed, so opting out isn't possible for everyone, but this is pure insanity.
Sometimes, you just run into jerks. Consider yourself lucky you didn't get the job; if an employee is allowed to be a jerk to candidates, that's a pretty good indicator that their management sucks. An interview is also an opportunity to represent your firm to a complete stranger, and even if you don't hire someone you want to be in a position where they might refer a friend, or provide positive feedback out on the 'net, or whatever.
> Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism.
Wait, you think the companies that have to move fast have the coddling environment?
You can look at this from a slightly different angle:
"...It is often said that “Youth is wasted on the young”. Based on my little spare time study, in this context, it seems truer than ever.
The youth have all the energy and time to spend, no obligations and no financial worries. But they have very little life experience and exposure to these hidden problems. So what they end up solving are the kind of problems primarily young people have. This certainly makes for some very amazing products, but I can’t help feeling a little disillusioned. The amount of time and energy that goes into fun, but ultimately useless ideas, rather than fixing some of these hidden problems is mind-numbing.
On the other hand, the older generations are exposed (aware or unaware) to a lot of these hidden problems. They have experience on how to solve them because they understand them. Yet by that time, most of them have to provide for a family, pay of their mortgage, tuition fees, healthcare, yearly vacations and the 3 cars. They also often lack the imagination on how to solve things in a new technological paradigm.
So I now realized that there is a potential goldmine of problems we simply don’t know of, because the people who are exposed to them aren’t connected with the people who have the opportunity and creativity and energy to solve them. Which begs the question:
Are the old and young generations wildly underutilizing each other as resources?
..."
To piggy-back of off this. The hidden problems aren't just extensions of old-age experience vs young-age experience (i.e. social-network vs hospice placement). It's often domain expertise vs none. There are so many older folks out there who have had decades of experience in one domain that none of us have even heard of, or are only, maybe, vaguely aware of. They are aware of that domain's problems, know most of the key players, etc.
My father is a Director-level exec at a Fortune 100 company, and I've talked to him, ad nauseam, about the problems he wishes the enterprise line-of-business crapware his company keeps purchasing would actually solve. I keep trying to convince him to strike out and do something, and have even offered to go in on something with him, but he's just too comfortable. He has more than enough money, and he's decided to retire early if he doesn't get the next promotion he's gunning for.
He was recently honored by the trade association of the domain he's an executive in (I guess there's no harm in saying it's logistics). I'm sure the contacts he has would send a startup hurtling into the stratosphere within a few years. How many people are like him out there, who are going to waste all their domain expertise on retirement or the next promotion?
I feel like someone needs to write a manifesto to the older and successful among us about how they owe it to themselves and the younger generation to disrupt the industries they've been leading for so long. These fat-cat, lazy ass, companies just get to skate by on pure inertia.
I suppose if you'd create a company that tried to exploit the comparative advantages of young and old staff, you'd face problems of leadership - who should run the show? The young, or the old?
But I think it could be worth trying out in Hackerspace context. I'm adding to my TODO list to try and encourage some 50+ people to hang out in our space; maybe they could contribute some important problems and good insights that the regular young crowd could tackle with the energy we have.
I think this is a key to experience. I spent a large part of my 20s diving into problems and totally screwing up the solution. I learned a ton from this.
On the flip side, maybe 50% of those problems don't exist anymore, because new technology or methodologies have solved them. Knowing how to use CVS or SVN doesn't really count for much in a world dominated by git.
I think that's where I value a deep understanding of CS and core engineering practices, regardless of age. Understanding pointers, how to debug, and the difference of the heap vs. the stack hasn't changed much over the years.
I can agree with this on so many levels. As a student in a somewhat challenged branch of it, I often feel like me and my fellow students are "wasting" time on merely explaining theories, when in reality, a lot of us are very eager to get our hands dirty with something real.
Universities have a limited amount of ressources which means that you're pretty much left alone to figure your entire study-plan out to yourself, including picking partners and/or cases for examns. While this is not at all impossible, I know for a fact that a lot of students around me are eager to participate in something that weighs a little heavier than their own interest in social media or gaming.
As an upper 40ish something who has been coding since I was 10, this one made my day. So very very true.... but it's amazing how many 20 somethings are to narrow in their thinking or too lacking in medium to long term vision on projects and just hack together a bunch of web found code to make a non extendable solution.
Then there are those who I call the 'google' generation, they just google the problem and proclaim the number one result as the solution without really understanding what and especially why the problem really is occurring.
Every generation has it's exceptions, but also each has their share of averages. Great article, nice way to start Monday morning.
I also developed before web framework proliferation and stackoverflow.
I see most of these things as speed boosts. If you take the rose colored glasses off, in the old days - we simply worked slower on easier (though more interesting) problems. We didn't have to deal with so much damn integration and the mountain of spaghetti we've built!
The non extendable solution gets the job done as well. No need to worry about 'technical debt' when the vast majority of your projects never see scale. Moving faster is better.
When I see a developer wasting too much time on the above - not googling the solution, spending too much time overengineering, and not using the libraries available (not hacking together components)... well, I guess I'm disappointed.
In the old days, I did think more in your terms. I changed to fit the needs of the time.
I know a woman in her mid-60s who has been programming since the late 1960s. She's much more than an "experienced dev": she is a sage, a teacher, and a grand-master of the art of computer programming: a true engineer in the very core of her being. Yet she can't find steady employment. She believes that is because of age discrimination, and I cannot help but to agree with her.
Is she a badass engineer or is she a sage? I don't mean it to be offensive but I've worked with oldtymers that wanted to coach more than actually do. They have tremendous knowledge and experience but if they're advisors or extra managers, they aren't building; some companies need and can afford that and value it, a lot of startup type places see that as an extra cost.
Our industry has these polar ethos that are pretty deep: one group sees old product that has stood the test of time as an indicator of quality. Like "UNIX has been around over 40 years, it clearly did some things right." The other, and it's insanely popular right now, thinks that anything that is too old clearly has some damage and its no longer good technology, like the neovim crowd, "vim doesn't even use the newest C standards features.." Some times you have to believe that you're doing something different and everybody did it wrong before and that's while you'll succeed this time, that's how you take the risk and ignore the downsides. being old can be a detriment to that belief.
Don't know if this is the case in the US. But generally, mid-60s people are shied away from being hired because they will retire shortly. Investing in an employee that will be gone very soon is a thing few companies would do, and not unique to IT by any measure. The exception being when they have a need for her exact talent.
Looking at industries, I'm starting to feel that at the age of 50+ you can't really expect to pop up out of a blue with a nice CV and get hired. You have to keep in the flow - change projects, jump companies, build a network of people who know your skills and can recommend you when there are people needed for a new endeavour. It's probably not good, but it seems to me it works this way everywhere.
No one seems to talk about the elephant in the room: salary. Isn't a more experienced person going to cost more? Are you going to feel comfortable offering them a low salary (relative to their experience), because that's all you got to offer?
And the other way around, even if you would love to have an experienced developer, what do you do if for the same salary you can get an average developer (who will get the job done, because you already have experienced enough people to help), and another profile (sales for exemple)?
This is especially true at small companies, where there just isn't that much latitude to adjust the salary.
60+, programming for 44 years, triumphed over adversity more times than I can recall, wimpy looking nerd discounted by almost everyone I ever met. Hardly ever got the girl, got to be on the team, got the part, or got the job.
I'm a programmer because I can code, and at the end of the day, that's all that really matters.
You can hate on another person because they're too old or too ugly or too nerdy or too black or too female or too gay or too anything else, but the real beauty of our field is that success is binary and relatively easy to measure:
1. Can you build it?
2. Does what you build matter to someone else?
I've always considered rejection for any reason a self solving problem: if you're too stupid to accept me (whether you're in Silicon Valley or not), then I would have never wanted to work with you anyway. I'll find someone else who understands the value I produce and can provide the environment in which I can thrive.
Life is unfair, especially in Silicon Valley. It's not about the unfairness, it's about our response to the unfairness.
There has never been a better time and a better way to succeed than building software today. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're at, what you're like, what you have, or who you're with. 95% of the battle is what you can do. So go do it.
If you're in a minority group that suffers discrimination then that discrimination skews the balance away from being 95% what you can do to more like 50% what you can do and 50% what colour/gender/sexuality/age/etc you are. And a big chunk of the 50% that's discrimination is the fact that people outside of your minority grossly underestimate how much of an issue discrimination is.
If you see something that's unfair it's not especially reasonable to just ignore it with a "Life is unfair" line.
> Life is unfair, especially in Silicon Valley. It's not about the unfairness, it's about our response to the unfairness.
> There has never been a better time and a better way to succeed than building software today. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're at, what you're like, what you have, or who you're with. 95% of the battle is what you can do. So go do it.
Thank you very much for the golden words. I wanted to complain something here, but your words let me be confident again.
Funnily enough, working 80 hour weeks for stock isn't really much of a winner if you have a mortgage to pay and or mouths to feed. The ping pong table doesn't make up for it either.
A few comments here saying that salary is the elephant in the room, which is a valid point, but I think the biggest elephant is the insecurity which lurks in the heart of every entrepreneur.
Co-founder/C_O types in their early 20s are often intimidated by people 35 and older, especially when those people have a long record of working in tech and all the war stories to prove it. The thought of hiring such a person, even when they are superbly qualified for the job and amenable to the compensation package, makes young entrepreneurs a bit uncomfortable.
I think there are two specific fears that drive this feeling of discomfort. First is the fear that older employees might see right through the fact that they have no idea what they're doing and call them out on it.
Second is the fear that older people will destroy the culture through their relative lack of enthusiasm and exuberance. In young founders' minds, it's better to hire someone who's been drinking legally for all of 18 months and who can be counted on to nod earnestly when you talk about "our mission" at the all-hands.
This is my biggest fear as I enter my 30s in a number of months. I've been programming professionally since I was 20 and for fun since 10 - I can't imagine having to do something else, it's what I was born to do. I'm still relatively young but I just got married and the long hours and complete commitment I used to wear as a badge of honor no longer seems appealing.
Am I going to be able to do this for the rest of my career? I honestly doubt it, but I have no idea what I would do instead. My father was a draftsman for years and made good money but the market for draftsmen completely dropped out and he spent the last fifteen years of his career unlocking doors at a school. I have such a strong desire to stay relevant but I can't spend nearly as much time studying as I used to even a year or two ago. Sigh.
While most of us are pointing fingers at the fast-changing nature of and innovation-craziness in the tech industry, I think the core reason may be quite the opposite.
It seems plausible that the tech industry, innovation-wise, is actually in a rut where companies are forced to cut costs and survive by hiring young people whom they have to pay less. The changes happening in the industry today are of a fickle and shallow kind, not fundamental and lasting. And in an evolution-like process the older amongst us, who are the only ones with enough experience to really innovate, are being driven out of the ecosystem and forced to disrupt an industry going stale.
It seems like ageism in tech is subject to a different dynamics compared to sexual or racial diversity.
With age comes more work experience and most SV companies (even the unicorns) usually don't need it. Most of them is driven by pretty trivial tech anyways. As soon as you start looking into technically challenging fields, you see more and more older people: Sebastian Thrun is in his late 40s, Guido van Rossum is almost 60. People like Doug Lea, Lars Bak, Martin Odersky, Fabrice Bellard, Matthew Dilon, Simon Peyton-Jones etc are all well beyond their 20s.
It makes perfect business sense. It's an overkill (and a recipe for disaster) to hire someone of that stature to build you a website. There's also nothing special about tech in this regard: if 90% of all legal work in the world could've been done by a paralegal, law firms would all be full of cheerful 20 somethings.
What I've noticed in tech is that the further you are from the [being polite] demographic core -- the better you need to be.
In the context of this discussion, there's room for you as an older employee, but the way it seems to work is you need to be really really good at your jobs. Because when you make the inevitable human mistakes, the number of years you've been at it is always brought up.
I have to wonder how much of that is discrimination and how much of that is salary mechanics.
More experienced people demand higher salaries. When I apply for a new job, I expect a higher salary than my old job, and I'll use my experience to justify it.
Typically, older people have more experience and thus ask for a salary to match. When you're asking for a high salary, companies generally want to know that you're good enough to justify that salary. Companies aren't going to put that kind of pressure on a fresh-out-of-college 22-year-old because such a person is going to be working for peanuts.
I cannot help but think that companies dislike older people because they don't put up with that much bullshit.
You can underpay a young (naive) person, make them work 12+ hours a day, if they get disgruntled pacify them with a nerf gun fight or catered lunch. Older people might not go for gimmicks and ask for appropriate working hours and reasonable vacation time etc. That puts off the corporate types.
I recently went through a job search and began writing off companies that were all 20-somethings who obviously didn't have a lot of interviewing skill. I would say bias against older interviewees is 100% politics. Many of these interviewers were not experienced. They knew they wanted to be top dog in their respective department,s and thought that it was in their best interest to keep experienced people out. It's not until they go through a few cycles of pain and disappointment do developers start to want to work with experienced people. It's not out of respect. It's because they now understand that they are only hurting themselves and want someone to relieve their workload. Mid-tier and experienced interviewers loved me. Early career people tried very hard to throw their best curve-balls, but I had already spent a week working problems. In the end, one company in particular, Facebook, simply just said that I answered correctly but answered too 'slowly.' I knew they had cracked when I heard that word.
Let's go the the very core of this: smart old people are massively more productive than fresher minds. They know the fundamentals and they know the tricks, they also know themselves and their needs. They can tell youngsters that you are wasting your time and they are right. Point is: youngsters need to waste their time in order to learn life, the trade and -in this environment- in order to get something really new out of their own evolving needs in an evolving world. A corollary is that domain-specific applied problems are probably better suited to older people but unpredictable ways are easier to come from fresher minds.
I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience.
For older people, who have experience building stuff,e.g-software developers who have done some development in their life- they are worth their weight in gold. BUT most older people I work or have worked with, they are not all developers. People like sysadmins,IT people, sharepoint admins, automation managers,DBAs,Managers some system architects etc- I have seen some common traits-
1) They have no enthusiasm for work. Work is not even secondary for them. Its the last thing
2) They either think they are doing hard work or act like they work hard. Exaggerate all issues or whatever work they did even if its just an installation
3) No passion for technology
4) Do not want to learn anything new
5) Don't care about above, because its time for their retirement and so they don't care what others think
Given this, if I were building a team, I would lean towards the younger crowd. Unless the older person has experience building stuff.
>I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience.
Yes, you are going to get a lot of flak. I'll start. Yes, it's your personal experience. Personal experience is where prejudice usually comes from. If you get beat up by 3 people in green tee shirts, you're going to cross the street to avoid people in green tee shirts. That's the way our brains are wired. It's natural. It's instinct.
It's also natural to pee on the sidewalk when we feel the urge. But we suppress that instinct because society functions better when we do. Similarly, society functions better when we suppress our natural prejudices while interviewing. We use our intellect to remind ourselves that there are people who don't fit the mold of our personal experience, and force ourselves to interview one person the same as anybody else.
And you keep doing it even after interviewing several people who do fit the pattern you've seen previously.
You should get flak for this. If you were building a team, you would be judging a person based on a group they belong to, not the person. You would also be doing something illegal (assuming you are in the US and the person is over 40).
My very favorite interview question ever, from when I was 41, posed by a fresh UCLA grad: "do you think a gentleman of your age can interact with programmers today?"
I have been brought in, as an independent contractor, at the tail end of enough projects to "salvage" them to have a somewhat cynical point of view on this.
In all of the worst cases the projects probably had no one over 25 working on them.
I'd figure eventually enough money will have been lost on such failed projects for tech companies to change their minds on this.
There seems to be some assumptions that companies prefer to hire younger people. I have yet to see that, myself (getting close to 50). When I was interviewing people, I was looking for older people with good transferable skills. We just couldn't find anyone. However, I think that there are some caveats.
When people are young, you tend to cut them some slack. You don't really know how they are going to turn out in a few years. You hire someone with the hope that they will improve quickly over the short term. When people are older, you have a track record to look at. Sometimes it is very obvious that they have had a hard time of it in their career.
The end result is not that people prefer younger people to older people, it's that they prefer unknown quantities to known, poorly performing quantities. If there is someone with an exceptionally good track record over a long period of time and who can do a good interview -- my experience is that they will be snapped up quickly.
I don't really buy the idea that length of employment is a serious issue either. Attrition in IT is huge and I never assume that anyone is going to last more than 2 or 3 years.
I think some, perhaps most of this effect is related to the growth of the industry. Far fewer 25 year olds started a career in coding in 1990 than 2015. Fewer 25 year old coders in 1990, fewer 50 year olds in 2015.
That dynamic has existed for a while. When Gates' & Wozniak's generation started coding it was an unusual pursuit. Age gaps became part of the demographics. Like everything else, being common translates into being normal.
Other than that, I think there is a little more attrition in coding. Experience is important, but current knowledge is too. SV startups are riskier, so more appealing more to younger people. They use new technology, so less of a comparative advantage for old skills.
I'm not saying discrimination doesn't exist, I'm just saying that demographics play a big role explaining the average age. Some of the discrimination that does exist likely comes from simple human pattern matching. That's not what a coder looks like. All the coders I know are 25-40.
[+] [-] DavidWoof|10 years ago|reply
Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism.
As with all discrimination, the unnerving part is just not knowing. Was it really age discrimination? Or maybe I just looked like this guy's hated father or ex-boyfriend or something. Or maybe he's just a bad interviewer with low skills, and really didn't understand the stuff I was telling him (I usually sneak in a couple of technical questions for the interviewer and he blew those questions); that's hard to judge when there's no follow-up questions. Or maybe at the end of the day it was just money and the company didn't want to admit it. Who knows? I'll never know, and I suspect the company won't either.
[+] [-] yati|10 years ago|reply
Then I was asked to modify it to print all possible solutions. When the second interviewer verified that it would work as expected, the other guy was like, "but you never used list comprehensions in that." -- I threw in a list comprehension to satisfy him (although at this point, I'd started questioning the worth of all this). Next, I was told that I'd used a (max 10 element) list for random access of items instead of a dict, and that "he'd never do that". At that point, I lost it and said some pretty blunt things to him. Of course, I was rejected.
I don't know about other countries, but big services companies in India have a lot of incompetent senior programmers who simply hate any kind of opposition to their authority, and you simply have to blow them to survive. I am fortunate to have never worked at one of these companies.
[+] [-] lemevi|10 years ago|reply
You just have to be willing to adapt yourself to fit in with who you work with. If you aren't interested in making personal changes because you shouldn't think you need to just to earn a paycheck then well you're probably not a good culture fit. You need to make an effort. I enjoy the same things my peers do, we play the same games, we watch the same things and read the same websites. It's not fake with me. I'm not trying too hard. I'm just not getting stuck in old ways.
[+] [-] kazinator|10 years ago|reply
In their core subjects they are given a cartoonish summary their history of their profession, with distorted dates, which leads them to believe garbage like that object oriented programming was invented in the 1990's, functional is totally new and so forth.
"Like, wow, you're in your 50's and you know about new stuff like inheritance over composition and singletons?"
Only those know better who actually dig into the literature and look at the actual dates, and are surprised how far back some concepts were not only known academically but deployed in production systems.
There is this axiom that, no matter what year it is, someone with gray hair knows mainly Fortran, and writes it in any other language. Be it 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, doesn't matter. Never mind that the 1985 person of whom that was actually true already died, and this is his son, if not grandson.
[+] [-] falcolas|10 years ago|reply
I hate to say it, but this kind of direction is also pushed frequently by inexperienced developers. It is also frequently made worse when they feel they have to prove their ability to developers with more experience.
Just the other night I was having a conversation with colleagues from a side project - one is the CTO (he made the position a stipulation of employment when the founder was starting this side project), the other the founder, and I was trying to convince them both why deep inheritance and "shaking the tree" with every code commit creates code maintenance problems down the road.
Unfortunately, the inheritance model was the CTO's design (after all, the data has very strict hierarchical relations, right?), and the only real answer I got to justify his plan was "so there's nothing technically wrong with it, your objection is purely fear based; keep tabs on that fear and let me know how it goes". I was concurrently scolded by the founder that "I'll never make deadlines, so you'll always have plenty of time to refactor the codebase". Needless to say, they decided that it was best for the development group to go forward with the deep inheritance hierarchy.
So yeah, the lack of experience definitely inhibits communication, particularly when you disagree with them based on your experience.
[+] [-] throwaway3453|10 years ago|reply
"I'm getting some hostile vibes. Have I upset you or am I mistaken?"
It'll either give the guy a reality check or speed things along. No sense in us wasting our time.
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|10 years ago|reply
Though bias is hard to shake. I'll admit I have some bias against PhD holders interviewing for engineering positions. Almost every single one I've ever interviewed couldn't even do very, very basic coding but could talk lots and lots of buzzwords so it kinda wore on me and it was hard to not go into an interview starting with a negative view if I knew they had a PhD.
I feel like I still gave everyone their fair shake but it was hard to shake that feeling.
[+] [-] kagamine|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|10 years ago|reply
I understand that folks have to do what they need to do to stay employed, so opting out isn't possible for everyone, but this is pure insanity.
[+] [-] S4M|10 years ago|reply
That's interesting, how do you ask technical questions to interviewers without being too direct? I am genuinely curious about it.
[+] [-] rcurry|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|10 years ago|reply
That says something about this site and its readership but very near nothing about systematic age discrimination in the industry.
[+] [-] rachelgli|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sre_ops|10 years ago|reply
Wait, you think the companies that have to move fast have the coddling environment?
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
"...It is often said that “Youth is wasted on the young”. Based on my little spare time study, in this context, it seems truer than ever.
The youth have all the energy and time to spend, no obligations and no financial worries. But they have very little life experience and exposure to these hidden problems. So what they end up solving are the kind of problems primarily young people have. This certainly makes for some very amazing products, but I can’t help feeling a little disillusioned. The amount of time and energy that goes into fun, but ultimately useless ideas, rather than fixing some of these hidden problems is mind-numbing.
On the other hand, the older generations are exposed (aware or unaware) to a lot of these hidden problems. They have experience on how to solve them because they understand them. Yet by that time, most of them have to provide for a family, pay of their mortgage, tuition fees, healthcare, yearly vacations and the 3 cars. They also often lack the imagination on how to solve things in a new technological paradigm.
So I now realized that there is a potential goldmine of problems we simply don’t know of, because the people who are exposed to them aren’t connected with the people who have the opportunity and creativity and energy to solve them. Which begs the question:
Are the old and young generations wildly underutilizing each other as resources? ..."
http://000fff.org/the-problem-with-problems
[+] [-] hacknat|10 years ago|reply
My father is a Director-level exec at a Fortune 100 company, and I've talked to him, ad nauseam, about the problems he wishes the enterprise line-of-business crapware his company keeps purchasing would actually solve. I keep trying to convince him to strike out and do something, and have even offered to go in on something with him, but he's just too comfortable. He has more than enough money, and he's decided to retire early if he doesn't get the next promotion he's gunning for.
He was recently honored by the trade association of the domain he's an executive in (I guess there's no harm in saying it's logistics). I'm sure the contacts he has would send a startup hurtling into the stratosphere within a few years. How many people are like him out there, who are going to waste all their domain expertise on retirement or the next promotion?
I feel like someone needs to write a manifesto to the older and successful among us about how they owe it to themselves and the younger generation to disrupt the industries they've been leading for so long. These fat-cat, lazy ass, companies just get to skate by on pure inertia.
[+] [-] vkjv|10 years ago|reply
> They also often lack the imagination on how to solve things in a new technological paradigm.
I think that they absolutely have the imagination, as well as the skill and experience, to solve these problems. What they lack is tolerance for risk.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
I suppose if you'd create a company that tried to exploit the comparative advantages of young and old staff, you'd face problems of leadership - who should run the show? The young, or the old?
But I think it could be worth trying out in Hackerspace context. I'm adding to my TODO list to try and encourage some 50+ people to hang out in our space; maybe they could contribute some important problems and good insights that the regular young crowd could tackle with the energy we have.
Thank you for sharing that quote.
[+] [-] wiremine|10 years ago|reply
I think this is a key to experience. I spent a large part of my 20s diving into problems and totally screwing up the solution. I learned a ton from this.
On the flip side, maybe 50% of those problems don't exist anymore, because new technology or methodologies have solved them. Knowing how to use CVS or SVN doesn't really count for much in a world dominated by git.
I think that's where I value a deep understanding of CS and core engineering practices, regardless of age. Understanding pointers, how to debug, and the difference of the heap vs. the stack hasn't changed much over the years.
[+] [-] MIKarlsen|10 years ago|reply
Universities have a limited amount of ressources which means that you're pretty much left alone to figure your entire study-plan out to yourself, including picking partners and/or cases for examns. While this is not at all impossible, I know for a fact that a lot of students around me are eager to participate in something that weighs a little heavier than their own interest in social media or gaming.
[+] [-] TimMeade|10 years ago|reply
Then there are those who I call the 'google' generation, they just google the problem and proclaim the number one result as the solution without really understanding what and especially why the problem really is occurring.
Every generation has it's exceptions, but also each has their share of averages. Great article, nice way to start Monday morning.
[+] [-] throwaway13337|10 years ago|reply
I see most of these things as speed boosts. If you take the rose colored glasses off, in the old days - we simply worked slower on easier (though more interesting) problems. We didn't have to deal with so much damn integration and the mountain of spaghetti we've built!
The non extendable solution gets the job done as well. No need to worry about 'technical debt' when the vast majority of your projects never see scale. Moving faster is better.
When I see a developer wasting too much time on the above - not googling the solution, spending too much time overengineering, and not using the libraries available (not hacking together components)... well, I guess I'm disappointed.
In the old days, I did think more in your terms. I changed to fit the needs of the time.
[+] [-] jfmercer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCondor|10 years ago|reply
Our industry has these polar ethos that are pretty deep: one group sees old product that has stood the test of time as an indicator of quality. Like "UNIX has been around over 40 years, it clearly did some things right." The other, and it's insanely popular right now, thinks that anything that is too old clearly has some damage and its no longer good technology, like the neovim crowd, "vim doesn't even use the newest C standards features.." Some times you have to believe that you're doing something different and everybody did it wrong before and that's while you'll succeed this time, that's how you take the risk and ignore the downsides. being old can be a detriment to that belief.
[+] [-] hjnilsson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brlewis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danellis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endtime|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fradow|10 years ago|reply
And the other way around, even if you would love to have an experienced developer, what do you do if for the same salary you can get an average developer (who will get the job done, because you already have experienced enough people to help), and another profile (sales for exemple)?
This is especially true at small companies, where there just isn't that much latitude to adjust the salary.
[+] [-] edw519|10 years ago|reply
I'm a programmer because I can code, and at the end of the day, that's all that really matters.
You can hate on another person because they're too old or too ugly or too nerdy or too black or too female or too gay or too anything else, but the real beauty of our field is that success is binary and relatively easy to measure:
I've always considered rejection for any reason a self solving problem: if you're too stupid to accept me (whether you're in Silicon Valley or not), then I would have never wanted to work with you anyway. I'll find someone else who understands the value I produce and can provide the environment in which I can thrive.Life is unfair, especially in Silicon Valley. It's not about the unfairness, it's about our response to the unfairness.
There has never been a better time and a better way to succeed than building software today. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're at, what you're like, what you have, or who you're with. 95% of the battle is what you can do. So go do it.
[+] [-] onion2k|10 years ago|reply
If you're in a minority group that suffers discrimination then that discrimination skews the balance away from being 95% what you can do to more like 50% what you can do and 50% what colour/gender/sexuality/age/etc you are. And a big chunk of the 50% that's discrimination is the fact that people outside of your minority grossly underestimate how much of an issue discrimination is.
If you see something that's unfair it's not especially reasonable to just ignore it with a "Life is unfair" line.
[+] [-] vinceyuan|10 years ago|reply
> There has never been a better time and a better way to succeed than building software today. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're at, what you're like, what you have, or who you're with. 95% of the battle is what you can do. So go do it.
Thank you very much for the golden words. I wanted to complain something here, but your words let me be confident again.
[+] [-] techterrier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leroy_masochist|10 years ago|reply
Co-founder/C_O types in their early 20s are often intimidated by people 35 and older, especially when those people have a long record of working in tech and all the war stories to prove it. The thought of hiring such a person, even when they are superbly qualified for the job and amenable to the compensation package, makes young entrepreneurs a bit uncomfortable.
I think there are two specific fears that drive this feeling of discomfort. First is the fear that older employees might see right through the fact that they have no idea what they're doing and call them out on it.
Second is the fear that older people will destroy the culture through their relative lack of enthusiasm and exuberance. In young founders' minds, it's better to hire someone who's been drinking legally for all of 18 months and who can be counted on to nod earnestly when you talk about "our mission" at the all-hands.
[+] [-] donatj|10 years ago|reply
Am I going to be able to do this for the rest of my career? I honestly doubt it, but I have no idea what I would do instead. My father was a draftsman for years and made good money but the market for draftsmen completely dropped out and he spent the last fifteen years of his career unlocking doors at a school. I have such a strong desire to stay relevant but I can't spend nearly as much time studying as I used to even a year or two ago. Sigh.
[+] [-] tatx|10 years ago|reply
It seems plausible that the tech industry, innovation-wise, is actually in a rut where companies are forced to cut costs and survive by hiring young people whom they have to pay less. The changes happening in the industry today are of a fickle and shallow kind, not fundamental and lasting. And in an evolution-like process the older amongst us, who are the only ones with enough experience to really innovate, are being driven out of the ecosystem and forced to disrupt an industry going stale.
[+] [-] smikhanov|10 years ago|reply
With age comes more work experience and most SV companies (even the unicorns) usually don't need it. Most of them is driven by pretty trivial tech anyways. As soon as you start looking into technically challenging fields, you see more and more older people: Sebastian Thrun is in his late 40s, Guido van Rossum is almost 60. People like Doug Lea, Lars Bak, Martin Odersky, Fabrice Bellard, Matthew Dilon, Simon Peyton-Jones etc are all well beyond their 20s.
It makes perfect business sense. It's an overkill (and a recipe for disaster) to hire someone of that stature to build you a website. There's also nothing special about tech in this regard: if 90% of all legal work in the world could've been done by a paralegal, law firms would all be full of cheerful 20 somethings.
[+] [-] rongenre|10 years ago|reply
In the context of this discussion, there's room for you as an older employee, but the way it seems to work is you need to be really really good at your jobs. Because when you make the inevitable human mistakes, the number of years you've been at it is always brought up.
[+] [-] amyjess|10 years ago|reply
More experienced people demand higher salaries. When I apply for a new job, I expect a higher salary than my old job, and I'll use my experience to justify it.
Typically, older people have more experience and thus ask for a salary to match. When you're asking for a high salary, companies generally want to know that you're good enough to justify that salary. Companies aren't going to put that kind of pressure on a fresh-out-of-college 22-year-old because such a person is going to be working for peanuts.
[+] [-] littletimmy|10 years ago|reply
You can underpay a young (naive) person, make them work 12+ hours a day, if they get disgruntled pacify them with a nerf gun fight or catered lunch. Older people might not go for gimmicks and ask for appropriate working hours and reasonable vacation time etc. That puts off the corporate types.
[+] [-] codeonfire|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrNuke|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tamaatar|10 years ago|reply
For older people, who have experience building stuff,e.g-software developers who have done some development in their life- they are worth their weight in gold. BUT most older people I work or have worked with, they are not all developers. People like sysadmins,IT people, sharepoint admins, automation managers,DBAs,Managers some system architects etc- I have seen some common traits- 1) They have no enthusiasm for work. Work is not even secondary for them. Its the last thing
2) They either think they are doing hard work or act like they work hard. Exaggerate all issues or whatever work they did even if its just an installation
3) No passion for technology 4) Do not want to learn anything new 5) Don't care about above, because its time for their retirement and so they don't care what others think
Given this, if I were building a team, I would lean towards the younger crowd. Unless the older person has experience building stuff.
[+] [-] brlewis|10 years ago|reply
Yes, you are going to get a lot of flak. I'll start. Yes, it's your personal experience. Personal experience is where prejudice usually comes from. If you get beat up by 3 people in green tee shirts, you're going to cross the street to avoid people in green tee shirts. That's the way our brains are wired. It's natural. It's instinct.
It's also natural to pee on the sidewalk when we feel the urge. But we suppress that instinct because society functions better when we do. Similarly, society functions better when we suppress our natural prejudices while interviewing. We use our intellect to remind ourselves that there are people who don't fit the mold of our personal experience, and force ourselves to interview one person the same as anybody else.
And you keep doing it even after interviewing several people who do fit the pattern you've seen previously.
[+] [-] harmegido|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] felixgallo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datashovel|10 years ago|reply
In all of the worst cases the projects probably had no one over 25 working on them.
I'd figure eventually enough money will have been lost on such failed projects for tech companies to change their minds on this.
[+] [-] mikekchar|10 years ago|reply
When people are young, you tend to cut them some slack. You don't really know how they are going to turn out in a few years. You hire someone with the hope that they will improve quickly over the short term. When people are older, you have a track record to look at. Sometimes it is very obvious that they have had a hard time of it in their career.
The end result is not that people prefer younger people to older people, it's that they prefer unknown quantities to known, poorly performing quantities. If there is someone with an exceptionally good track record over a long period of time and who can do a good interview -- my experience is that they will be snapped up quickly.
I don't really buy the idea that length of employment is a serious issue either. Attrition in IT is huge and I never assume that anyone is going to last more than 2 or 3 years.
[+] [-] netcan|10 years ago|reply
That dynamic has existed for a while. When Gates' & Wozniak's generation started coding it was an unusual pursuit. Age gaps became part of the demographics. Like everything else, being common translates into being normal.
Other than that, I think there is a little more attrition in coding. Experience is important, but current knowledge is too. SV startups are riskier, so more appealing more to younger people. They use new technology, so less of a comparative advantage for old skills.
I'm not saying discrimination doesn't exist, I'm just saying that demographics play a big role explaining the average age. Some of the discrimination that does exist likely comes from simple human pattern matching. That's not what a coder looks like. All the coders I know are 25-40.
If I'm right, time will fix this.