Age discrimination for older software engineers is real. It gets enforced in subtle ways. It is up or out culture at the end.
Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination. I wish companies also added age in the diversity reports, and if they did talk about why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering. If we wish to make engineering career to span several decades, we should all actively try to get o address this.
> "why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering"
No, there's a small percentage of older folks in software engineering. In almost any other engineering discipline, you'll find many older engineers who enjoy long careers, and whose perceived value often grows with age. That's because actual engineering principles change very slowly.
Most software jobs do not involve much engineering in the traditional sense; most of the effort is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week libraries and frameworks, information that will be often be outdated and useless in a few years.
I think a lot of companies don't realize the damage they do to themselves. I can understand the appeal to startup managers; to be blunt and a bit uncharitable, hire youngins' and you get cheaper people whom you can push around more and train up in your own particular pathologies, instead of dealing with imported ones.
But if the firm survives the startup phase, you really want anchors, both in technical and cultural dimensions. A certain type of tech-manager feels threatened by that, I think, so they jettison anyone who might be too independent.
Not to mention, experience matters. There are a few folks on my team who are the go-to folks, not because of their title, but because they tend to know the correct answer/are able to diagnose and fix your weird issue. Those people, without exception, are neither young nor managers.
"Sonny, that reminds me of the time I canceled a 3 month reporting project with two hour's worth of awk..."
I did a coding bootcamp with a bunch of folks. A few older guys like me, and mostly younger folks. We all had a great time working together (I wish we could have more) and we compared notes after interviews.
Older folks like me, got lots of "culture" questions that were so vague. I'd ask what they mean but they can't really explain what they were getting at. I'd just explain that I've worked with a lot of different people, mentored new employees, etc.
When we compared interview notes younger folks, never heard that phrase. Now that could be nothing, but it felt like something.
One guy from the camp actually had the HR person call him up and say they were concerned about his age. When he asked her what that meant, she couldn't explain exactly. He thought maybe she realized what she said and was embarrassed, he was annoyed so he asked later what they were concerned about "oh your age, you're older".... nope, she apparently didn't think anything was wrong with that.
Meanwhile I got my job eventually. I see folks come and go. Younger folks realizing they don't like the work and moving on (nothing wrong with that) others invited to move on. The president of the company says to me one day "You just seem to get a lot of these things, you can talk to customers, our sales guys, I like your communication.." and so on. Like yeah, because I've done other technical things before, have experience. Experience pays in a lot of ways.
I have hired a good number of "grey hairs" in my time. Usually they're lead engineer IC types. They typically have a couple kids, have great stories about software development in the 80s (one guy was at NeXT with Jobs!), and know everything about your favorite framework but don't think it's world-changing. They usually have a story about how they took 5 years doing something wild and non-software related.
These engineers, in my experience, have the greatest likelihood of being great hires. They require less management, understand getting results, and have a much easier time working with more kinds of people. They write code with an eye for maintenance, and are more likely to stick around for the long haul to maintain that code instead of job hopping for promotions and raises.
Bad managers can be reluctant to hire them or keep them because they can be intimidating to manage. They quite often have more experience than their managers, and are more inclined to challenge their ideas. Inexperienced software engineering managers I've met think they have to know more than than their team or they'll be a threat to their position. There are also the usual "soft concerns" that are very similar to the ones leveled against hiring women, such as being more likely to choose work/life balance.
I was lucky in that I worked with my first grey hair for several years before becoming a manager and taking them on, so we already had a working relationship. Without that, I imagine I would've fallen into the traps above.
This is one of the reasons I am now contracting. Most of my clients have never even seen my face and I don't have to get involved in company culture clashes or politics.
They have tried to push me out of the industry many times, I'm pushing 50 but my ability to learn new things rapidly has enabled me to hang on long past what some might consider my expiration date. To some extent the 21st century can seem like Logan's Run, really the Feds expect us to work until we're over 70 years old, but given tech is perhaps the only decent paying industry left the impact of age discrimination has a broad impact across a lot of areas including projected tax revenues.
Part of the reason age discrimination does not get the coverage is that age discrimination disproportionately affects white males. This is due to the fact that as you go back in time in the US, white males made up a higher percent of college graduates and professionals than they do now. One side effect of this is that age discrimination likely makes your diversity numbers better.
This comes up a lot. People are definitely biased towards young, white, males doing most of the coding because it is mostly young white males doing the coding. Part of this is simple demographics. Part of this is confirmation bias. And part of this is our education system and culture filtering out disproportionate amounts of women and non whites who for whatever reason never even get on the career-path for becoming an engineer. Some countries are much worse at this than others.
So the chance of encountering somebody over 40 in a project is about 2^4 or one in 16, assuming lots of people in their early 20s are outnumbering those in their forties. It jumps to 32 for people over 45, 64 for people in their early fifties. I know people who are still coding in their late sixties. I'm 44, and most people I deal with are below 30. Most of the people my age that I know or used to work are by and large still active in the field though a few of them have become managers. Also, seniority means they tend to be big earners and typically too expensive for small projects. Quite a few are doing very lucrative free lance gigs at premium rates, disappeared into big corporations in some senior role, etc.
"Age discrimination for older software engineers is real."
Can't say I've seen this in Ireland, I found that good experienced developers are highly valued. Do you think it's worse in places like SF than the rest of the USA ?
>Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination.
That's because the vocal parts for the "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" are mainly white well-off younger people.
Gender causes naturally draw them in. And through they are predominantly white, race causes make them appear as hip and invested in other cultures.
For them being old is not a reality. If it's anything, it's obscene. Why don't these old people just die?
That's the same reason those giving coverage to "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" also get a free pass on pissing on poor people (whether "white trash" or black/latinos/etc when they're not subjected to race-driven but poverty driven abuses).
One reason for a lower proportion of older programmers is that the field overall has grown dramatically, and many older programmers move to management, while new people entering the field tend to be younger.
While certainly age discrimination does exist, I'm 41 and I haven't experienced it yet. If anything, I've found that what I do is more in demand than ever, partially because there's been so much growth in the industry that there are proportionately very few people that have been around as long as I have. A big part of the reason you see so few gray hairs is that there just aren't that many of them to hire.
Not just for software engineers. Age discrimination is real. It exists for young people, but it also exists for the group at hand here: old people.
It is real in general and in the end of last century it has become severe because of our quickly shifting society (the "computer" and "networking" revolutions, among others)
It's really nasty. Imagine how bad the intersection of it must be, like the odds of getting laid off if you're old and black or old and female? I bet the odds approach 100%.
Some would say it's simply that cognitive decline due to aging makes older people less likely to be able to cut it as a programmer, especially given the higher rate of change in the field placing less emphasis on crystalized intelligence and more on adaptability compared to other fields.
I know I will be downvoted to hell by the young folks that don't know how things work, but the only way to fix the absurd power imbalance and worker hostile laws we have in the USA is through strong unions.
It is such an obvious thing that you can even spot when union-busting laws were passed in the trends for inflation adjusted wages.
Software engineers think they are irreplaceable and our current conditions will last forever but it's a lie.
Good news is it seems we have a new generation of politicians worried about it but we as workers have to do our part or we will progressively lose more and more of our hard earned "privilege" and make sure more can benefit from it.
I'm 51, and I'm downvoting mainly because the "the young folks that don't know how things work" is a sweeping age-related judgement. It's the same bad thing that this article is about.
I don't know if the suit has merit but I was pretty amazed at the stuff IBM wanted me to sign when I left. There is a saying that every clause in a contract tells a story, well there were a lot of stories in my separation agreement :-). Comparing it to the agreement I signed when I left Google it was clear that over its lifetime, IBM has been sued a lot. :-)
I'm usually down voted a lot on threads like these because I usually say that ageism is overblown (I'm 45). But when you have smoking guns like:
One in-house presentation showed that this posture meant doubling the proportion of workers receiving negative performance evaluations, so 3,000 employees could be laid off and replaced with “early professionals,” according to the suit...
IBM made presentations to its senior executives calling for IBM to evaluate its long-term employees more harshly, to use those negative evaluations to justify selecting long-term employees for lay-off, and to replace these employees with ‘EPs’— IBM management short-hand for ‘early professionals.'”
I'm 50 this year, and this stuff obviously concerns me. But if there's one thing that comes ringing through the story, it's that IBM has been very, very intentional in how they've gone about this. I'm quite certain they have their bases covered, and that they will prevail in court under current law.
That the laws should be changed is another matter altogether...
On the surface, allowing recent hires to be exempt from performance-based layoff programs isn't particularly unethical, as they may still be ramping up. It certainly seems like there's substance here, though, beyond just "think like a millennial" or "give recent hires a chance" rhetoric. Will be interesting to follow. It's essential to our entire industry that lawsuits like this draw lines in the sand - we're all in danger as we age if big tech can get away with age discrimination.
It's generally very difficult to get younger STEM people on board with this. They often believe themselves to be different or just straight up better than their predecessors. For them, it doesn't matter because they're clearing not going to be ousted, or are so short sighted that they believe it won't matter if/when it happens to them.
I am 63 and I'm having an amazing career right now. I am levels and levels above where I ever thought I'd be. It's too stimulating to retire. I've always been attracted to the hardest problems I could find and that paid off, but it took a long time. I don't know how people do that quickly, unless it's partly luck. I'm not Ivy League so I had to earn every opportunity.
Never trust anyone who attempts to get you to waive your right to collective action, or attempts to force you in to binding arbitration. This is especially true when it comes to employment.
There is never any benefit for you, and it means that they will, one day, try to screw you.
There was a direct benefit to waiving their rights:
> Employees were offered severance worth a month’s salary, continuing health and life insurance coverage for a period depending on time with the firm, free career counseling, and up to $2,500 for skills training
I worked on a team that had a lot of amazing talent (many members of the team had 20+ years of experience in the field). Got a new manager who wanted to reduce cost and bring in "new ideas". Funny thing was: those experienced engineers had been promoting many of those new ideas for quite a while to no avail. End result was the green team that was brought in ended up taking way too long to redo everything and missed the market opportunity. They also missed the boat on the new ideas, confusing different techniques and tech for new product features that would be useful for customers. The whole thing died.
I think the appropriate market response is to start pricing this behavior into our salary asks as younger engineers.
Rather than assuming a long career with increasing pay, point to cases like this in salary negotiations. Your highest income generating years maybe be 30-40.
IBM is in a bind. They were so behind for so many years that anyone talented left. The ones who stayed were around were there because of tenure, not talent. What do you do when your best employees are gone and your best days are past? Share buybacks, overmarketing, and aggressive pursuit of license audits. But none of those require a large senior employee base. So they took the most aggressive policy possible while still plausibly remaining inside the law.
I’m in my late 20s and I’ve already learned not to trust our society/economy to ensure that I’ll have a stable financial future. You need to have a plan and be doubly hedged against shittiness. Keep costs low. Save and invest. Job hop as much as necessary to boost your income. Try to build a business that can generate wealth (but don’t depend on that outcome).
Above all trust no one to care for you. Not your government. Not a company offering options. Not even FAANG. Be ruthless and look out for yourself and those you love first and foremost. No one else will.
Companies shouldn’t be allowed to force arbitration on protected classes. Employees shouldn’t even be allowed to sign over that right. If IBM is found innocent, the laws need to change.
"let's fire all the people who will actually do the horrifically boring work our company actually does that makes a lot of money so that young people who would never work here can replace them!". brilliant!!!
I think the hard truth here is that there will always be clever ways to get around anti-age discrimination laws and companies will always optimize to pay employees less even if they project a culture antithetical to that.
I wonder what the graph would look like at i.e. FANG in terms of average age per employee over time. My understanding is that they've been hiring undergrads very aggressively in the past few years such that the trend would be similar to more brazen companies such as IBM in terms of declining age of employees. It's happening everywhere in very subtle ways. LPT: don't get old? \s.
Age discrimination in technology is alive and well, flourishing under the veils of "over qualified" and "culture fit" and "no experience with the xyz product".
I have had many great phone interviews. On site, in the presence of hiring decision makers, while I look like a typical white corporate employee, the gray hairs blending in with brown are visible enough for the comments such as, "this role may not be challenging enough for you", and the end result is being over qualified. Not too old for them, just too qualified. Makes everyone feel better.
If and when I need surgery, I hope my surgeon is overqualified!
But thecreal focus is on tools. "Do you have x years experience with the xyz software product?"
I spent at least a decade of my career evaluating new technology...And implementing some of it. A tool is a tool. But what is the process? What is the purpose of the tool?
A person says they have 5 years experience with a Milwaukee hammer. That's what the job req says is required.
This person gets hired because the person with 7 years weilding a Craftsman hammer doesn't have the Milwaukee hammer experience. But what is the purpose?
In the end, the 5 year Milwaukee experience person gets the job but still can't hammer in a nail without bending the nail. And places nails with no regard for rhe building code.
Experience is not about the tool, but that is not what today's HR hiring/vetting process is about.
ISAM, VTAM, DB2, Paradox, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, nosql, hadoop... tools. Third Normal Form? Data dictionary? Index optimization? Processes not addressed by a specific tool. Similarly, does memory management enhancements make the C coding language that much different?
But I digress.
Hire the experience with the process, not necessarily with a tool. Especially the "flavour of the year" tools.
I don't know the merits of this particular suit, but I'd say everyone working at the company, or considering it, should see how it plays out.
There's a bit of a general rule that applies to a lot of situations, and can be phrased many ways. One way is: someone who is mean to others, but nice to you, will be mean to you.
[+] [-] throwaway6497|7 years ago|reply
Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination. I wish companies also added age in the diversity reports, and if they did talk about why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering. If we wish to make engineering career to span several decades, we should all actively try to get o address this.
[+] [-] freyir|7 years ago|reply
No, there's a small percentage of older folks in software engineering. In almost any other engineering discipline, you'll find many older engineers who enjoy long careers, and whose perceived value often grows with age. That's because actual engineering principles change very slowly.
Most software jobs do not involve much engineering in the traditional sense; most of the effort is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week libraries and frameworks, information that will be often be outdated and useless in a few years.
[+] [-] _jal|7 years ago|reply
But if the firm survives the startup phase, you really want anchors, both in technical and cultural dimensions. A certain type of tech-manager feels threatened by that, I think, so they jettison anyone who might be too independent.
Not to mention, experience matters. There are a few folks on my team who are the go-to folks, not because of their title, but because they tend to know the correct answer/are able to diagnose and fix your weird issue. Those people, without exception, are neither young nor managers.
"Sonny, that reminds me of the time I canceled a 3 month reporting project with two hour's worth of awk..."
[+] [-] jpindar|7 years ago|reply
People who are now old enough to be grandparents INVENTED computers and the internet.
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
Older folks like me, got lots of "culture" questions that were so vague. I'd ask what they mean but they can't really explain what they were getting at. I'd just explain that I've worked with a lot of different people, mentored new employees, etc.
When we compared interview notes younger folks, never heard that phrase. Now that could be nothing, but it felt like something.
One guy from the camp actually had the HR person call him up and say they were concerned about his age. When he asked her what that meant, she couldn't explain exactly. He thought maybe she realized what she said and was embarrassed, he was annoyed so he asked later what they were concerned about "oh your age, you're older".... nope, she apparently didn't think anything was wrong with that.
Meanwhile I got my job eventually. I see folks come and go. Younger folks realizing they don't like the work and moving on (nothing wrong with that) others invited to move on. The president of the company says to me one day "You just seem to get a lot of these things, you can talk to customers, our sales guys, I like your communication.." and so on. Like yeah, because I've done other technical things before, have experience. Experience pays in a lot of ways.
[+] [-] madrox|7 years ago|reply
These engineers, in my experience, have the greatest likelihood of being great hires. They require less management, understand getting results, and have a much easier time working with more kinds of people. They write code with an eye for maintenance, and are more likely to stick around for the long haul to maintain that code instead of job hopping for promotions and raises.
Bad managers can be reluctant to hire them or keep them because they can be intimidating to manage. They quite often have more experience than their managers, and are more inclined to challenge their ideas. Inexperienced software engineering managers I've met think they have to know more than than their team or they'll be a threat to their position. There are also the usual "soft concerns" that are very similar to the ones leveled against hiring women, such as being more likely to choose work/life balance.
I was lucky in that I worked with my first grey hair for several years before becoming a manager and taking them on, so we already had a working relationship. Without that, I imagine I would've fallen into the traps above.
[+] [-] jimrhods23|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
ADHD, PTSD, dyslexia, social anxiety disorder, etc.
Just because someone is white and male doesn't mean they're not struggling or discriminated against.
[+] [-] shams93|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] all_blue_chucks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|7 years ago|reply
Uncle Bob has a nice article explaining that the number of programmers doubles every five years: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
So the chance of encountering somebody over 40 in a project is about 2^4 or one in 16, assuming lots of people in their early 20s are outnumbering those in their forties. It jumps to 32 for people over 45, 64 for people in their early fifties. I know people who are still coding in their late sixties. I'm 44, and most people I deal with are below 30. Most of the people my age that I know or used to work are by and large still active in the field though a few of them have become managers. Also, seniority means they tend to be big earners and typically too expensive for small projects. Quite a few are doing very lucrative free lance gigs at premium rates, disappeared into big corporations in some senior role, etc.
[+] [-] willart4food|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therockhead|7 years ago|reply
Can't say I've seen this in Ireland, I found that good experienced developers are highly valued. Do you think it's worse in places like SF than the rest of the USA ?
[+] [-] Angostura|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
That's because the vocal parts for the "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" are mainly white well-off younger people.
Gender causes naturally draw them in. And through they are predominantly white, race causes make them appear as hip and invested in other cultures.
For them being old is not a reality. If it's anything, it's obscene. Why don't these old people just die?
That's the same reason those giving coverage to "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" also get a free pass on pissing on poor people (whether "white trash" or black/latinos/etc when they're not subjected to race-driven but poverty driven abuses).
[+] [-] jacobolus|7 years ago|reply
But median age for programmers is ~40.
[+] [-] cameldrv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] profalseidol|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fnoord|7 years ago|reply
It is real in general and in the end of last century it has become severe because of our quickly shifting society (the "computer" and "networking" revolutions, among others)
[+] [-] kevingadd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmaswell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckydata|7 years ago|reply
It is such an obvious thing that you can even spot when union-busting laws were passed in the trends for inflation adjusted wages.
Software engineers think they are irreplaceable and our current conditions will last forever but it's a lie.
Good news is it seems we have a new generation of politicians worried about it but we as workers have to do our part or we will progressively lose more and more of our hard earned "privilege" and make sure more can benefit from it.
[+] [-] brlewis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface74|7 years ago|reply
One in-house presentation showed that this posture meant doubling the proportion of workers receiving negative performance evaluations, so 3,000 employees could be laid off and replaced with “early professionals,” according to the suit...
IBM made presentations to its senior executives calling for IBM to evaluate its long-term employees more harshly, to use those negative evaluations to justify selecting long-term employees for lay-off, and to replace these employees with ‘EPs’— IBM management short-hand for ‘early professionals.'”
It's pretty obvious.
[+] [-] shereadsthenews|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|7 years ago|reply
That the laws should be changed is another matter altogether...
[+] [-] inlined|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btown|7 years ago|reply
On the surface, allowing recent hires to be exempt from performance-based layoff programs isn't particularly unethical, as they may still be ramping up. It certainly seems like there's substance here, though, beyond just "think like a millennial" or "give recent hires a chance" rhetoric. Will be interesting to follow. It's essential to our entire industry that lawsuits like this draw lines in the sand - we're all in danger as we age if big tech can get away with age discrimination.
[+] [-] around_here|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cleandreams|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] around_here|7 years ago|reply
There is never any benefit for you, and it means that they will, one day, try to screw you.
[+] [-] m4x|7 years ago|reply
> Employees were offered severance worth a month’s salary, continuing health and life insurance coverage for a period depending on time with the firm, free career counseling, and up to $2,500 for skills training
[+] [-] ilaksh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomohawk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asfarley|7 years ago|reply
Rather than assuming a long career with increasing pay, point to cases like this in salary negotiations. Your highest income generating years maybe be 30-40.
[+] [-] mathattack|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallflower|7 years ago|reply
“64 and unemployed: One man’s struggle to be taken seriously as a job applicant”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022000
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition...
[+] [-] sp527|7 years ago|reply
Above all trust no one to care for you. Not your government. Not a company offering options. Not even FAANG. Be ruthless and look out for yourself and those you love first and foremost. No one else will.
[+] [-] jmpman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a-dub|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lame88|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yborg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben_jones|7 years ago|reply
I wonder what the graph would look like at i.e. FANG in terms of average age per employee over time. My understanding is that they've been hiring undergrads very aggressively in the past few years such that the trend would be similar to more brazen companies such as IBM in terms of declining age of employees. It's happening everywhere in very subtle ways. LPT: don't get old? \s.
[+] [-] jamjribm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bxg1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PorterDuff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|7 years ago|reply
There's a bit of a general rule that applies to a lot of situations, and can be phrased many ways. One way is: someone who is mean to others, but nice to you, will be mean to you.