[throwaway6497]

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.

[freyir]

> "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is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week libraries and frameworks, information that will be often be outdated and useless in a few years.

[gambler]

>will be often be outdated and useless in a few years.

Often it's "useless now and outdated in a few years". It's amazing how much software today justifies its existence through a weird self-referential loop that isn't connected to solving any problems outside of itself. Complex tools to manage complexity and so on.

[markbnj]

I have no doubt there is some age discrimination, though I haven't experienced it personally. What I want to point out here is that there were a lot fewer of us in total when I first started (I'm 58 now). I find very few peers my own age now, but I also found very few peers my own age when I was 25. So just going by percentages may be misleading for a relatively young discipline.

[LoSboccacc]

> information that will be often be outdated and useless in a few years

but this is was HR believes, not the actual reality of software engineering nor of software development.

the concepts between persistence, object model mapping, handling user events, propagating user intent to business logic, share data between heterogeneous systems and present everything coherently to the user are not going to change so all the solutions are going to look and feel the same since stems from the same problems.

I mean for example chaining template for code reuse isn't something that only react ever did, I remember turbogear doing something very similar conceptually with how nesting widgets and widget having each their own template and dictionary of inputs that took from the model state directly and the lesson you learn on problem solving and code reuse do stay with you a long time, longer than any single framework.

[manfredo]

I'm always unsure about how to judge whether the lower percentages of older engineers I see is due to age discrimination or just a low percentage of older engineers period. Software developers are young in general. And interestingly the United States has the highest average age [1]. At my workplace I can count at least one "greybeard" on most teams. I don't get the sense that they are discriminated against because of their age. I've always enjoyed talking with them about how software development used to be back in the day. I remember talking to one guy that worked on a text editor back in the 80s that was backed by a mainframe. The terminal didn't have enough computing power to manage the whole document, so it only stored a few pages locally and swapped them in from the mainframe as the user scrolled to them. Things like bulk find-replace were done via an RPC. It's interesting how many parallels this has to modern client-server web-apps. I especially like to hear from people that programmed on punch cards - that's kind of stuff is fascinating to me.

I also wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is due to expectations of an ever-increasing salary. I remember one older co-worker that interviewed for a job, liked the company, and got an offer that he dismissed as "not much higher than entry level" and even called the offer insulting. My line of reasoning was that if he didn't have relevant domain experience why wouldn't get paid not much more than a new grad? It was still well into the 100-200k range - in the Bay Area but in a cheaper city (San Bruno I think). More than enough to save and live a comfortable life. I wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is more about being realistic about the fact that years of experience don't automatically translate into higher productivity, paying younger folk commensurate with their contribution - as opposed to other industries where it's entrenched that young people get paid less and older people get paid more.

Not saying age discrimination doesn't exist. I've seen job adverts that explicitly specified an age cap of 40 (despite this being blatantly illegal).

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-age-programme...

It's worth noting that surveying from Stack Overflow can mean significant selecting bias.

[4thaccount]

Yea. As a traditional engineer (non software) I shudder in horror at what y'all go through. My industry is all about what you know and there seems to be nearly infinite things to know. That knowledge takes years to accumulate, so a Senior Engineer with 10 years of experience almost always has an order of magnitude more value than a novice engineer. Although there are some seniors that I have no idea how they got promoted, it is generally rare.

[jacobsenscott]

Successful companies don't have this sort of framework churn. You see it in the startup world because companies are always starting up right when some new framework came out. But anything out of the MVP stage doesn't churn on frameworks, unless something went horribly wrong - like passing on experienced engineers.

[masonic]

  most of the effort is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week 

But that only applies to new and recent code bases.

The age purge is ongoing even for long-established, mature code bases and projects, e.g. IBM, HCL, etc.

[madrox]

Citations needed. You're basically saying "old people don't learn new things."

My experience has been very different from what you're suggesting. All the "older folks" I've worked with know everything about your favorite framework...they just don't care. After you've been through the cycle for 10 years or so you cease to be impressed.

[33degrees]

> 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[...]

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, keeping up with the latest tech is a lot of effort, but the majority of software development is using those tools to actually solve problems. And the principles used to solve those problems don't change all that much. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture came out almost 20 years ago but is still useful today.

[threatofrain]

Are the people who are old now part of the flavor of the week framework frenzy? Or were they before AJAX was a hot term?

[peanutz454]

Software engineering is a new field, and therefore has fewer oldies.

[mk926]

Yes

[_jal]

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..."

[scarface74]

Firms aren’t trying to survive the startup phase. That’s just it. A minuscule number of startups ever survive as an ongoing independent entity especially if they are venture backed. Their main goal is to get acquired. Look no further than YC funded companies. Only one has ever gone public.

I used to be idealistic about software development and architecture and wanted to do things “right”. When I realized that venture capital backed companies wanted me to just apply enough duck tape to get customers to survive until they got their next round of funding or got acquired, I stopped thinking long term.

[jpindar]

We could start right here on HN by calling out those who use "grandma" to mean "person who can hardly even use a computer".

People who are now old enough to be grandparents INVENTED computers and the internet.

[Gibbon1]

I'm reminded of my dad, bought some surplus home security cams. They were surplus because they were discontinued on account of the firmware being shitty + spyware. Basic shlocked together embedded linux crap.

Found someone that had developed fixed firmware. Re-flashed them with that. Figured out how to get them to send a notification to his phone when the motion sensor goes off so he knows when the deer are eating his wife's plants.

My dad is 83.

[jaabe]

We do a lot of digitisation in the public sector of Denmark, in fact we’re world leaders in it along side Estonia.

Being an old social democracy we tend to build solutions to be inclusive. This means you can opt out of a range of our digitised options, and it also means we do extensive service design and benchmarking to make sure meaningful software gets to the citizens and that they know how to use it.

Almost every elderly citizen in my municipality is a digitally competent citizen. The ones who aren’t, often suffer from sicknesses like dementia or mental disabilities.

By contrast we have twenty year olds who don’t know how to install a program that isn’t part of “the App Store” or don’t know double clicking with a mouse is a thing.

In the tech part of it, we have old developers who’ve been through decades of soa vs microservices and a billion frameworks who can build solutions that require minimal maintenance. While some of our freshly educated engineers build things that can’t even last a year without needing major updates or refactoring because their hipster packages broke. We also have extremely talented youngsters and old engineers that can’t write a for loop, but in general, age is extremely valuable if you want to actually operate the software after you build it.

Ageism is simply put silly, unfortunately it isn’t just a thing in tech l. I see it in several areas, even in the public sector of a Scandinavian country. I’m not sure what we can do about it, but we need to do something.

[sbilstein]

Fact. As someone who runs a startup that targets grandparents, they know the internet well. I’ve even had a customer say “why do young people think we don’t know how to use the web? We invented the fucking thing!”

[52-6F-62]

Heheh. My grandmother literally was a programmer. Not a computer scientist by a mile but she wrote software as a Sr Analyst in the oil industry— I believe her lingua franca were FORTRAN and COBOL. She retired in the late 80s and was hired back for a few years in the 90s because even then they didn’t have enough people working in the language to draw from.

She passed away a few years ago now.

[skj]

My grandpa once fetched cigarettes for Von Neumann.

Which is to say, he basically invented the computer.

[kyrieeschaton]

Part of this is boomer performative incompetency at computers, which they do as a status/power move to demand humans serve them at various levels.

[smadurange]

I remember I was sitting at a coffee shop and a lady sat in front of me and we started chatting.

She would have been in her late 40s or early 50s. I thought she worked in banking or sales as many do around here. Turned out she was at IBM building early Unix systems. I was so impressed by our chat. She had left the industry at the time.

[Nasrudith]

Now I know plenty of competent and masterful tech pioneers but they are sort of the exception that proves the rule - it generally is or was their career or at least a hobby and it isn't expected for them to know it.

A young person from the first world who wasn't say a mennonite not knowing how to send an email attachment is seen as incompetent. An older person who doesn't is seen as not adapting to a changing world.

While stereotyping is grossly unfair on an individual level judging the group based on the right end of the bell curve isn't a good representation. It would be like judging the intellectual capabilities of all children by 12 year old college graduates. Sure they prove capability and not to dismiss them out of hand but certainly not universality - moving all elementary school students to high school wouldn't be too effective for most.

[Xavdidtheshadow]

Let me start by saying that I absolutely agree with you - it's a dumb insult now and always has been.

That said, anecdotally, my grandmother recently passed away having never used a computer in her life. Never sent an email, googled anything, or had a Facebook account. She was in her 90s and simply never had to use one. I often wondered what that life was like in 2019, but she had nothing to compare it to and thus couldn't really share. All that is to say, there really are both ends of the spectrum out there.

[newnewpdro]

Soon its meaning will be replaced with "person who knows how to type"

[iak8god]

This usage of "grandma" is sexist as well -- it's much more common than "grandpa".

[anticensor]

Grandma testing refers to one's own grandmother, not a random person.

[AlexB138]

I think, by and large, "calling out" is something we ought to be doing much less of.

[duxup]

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.

[Mandatum]

Honestly I think the best way to address this, is to call it out before it becomes an issue.

Tell them why you're still in an engineering role.

There is a reason, and some folks are just bad at their jobs, have no people skills or their skills stalled decades ago and they checked out.

Others, like yourself, are still interested in engineering and have no interest in management.

You're at an age where you will always be put on equal footing or above those you interview with BECAUSE of your age. Use it.

[madrox]

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.

[jimrhods23]

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.

[scarface74]

If I look back at my career, the stress has never come from the technical responsibility of producing software, it’s always the politics and red tape. I don’t do large companies. I realized that I’m just not a fit for them after working at what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech) company.

Not dealing with corporate politics by either working for a small company as a salaried employee or working for any company as a contractor is the only way that I’m going to be able to keep doing this for another two decades.

[cutler]

How do you manage to never show your face? Do you mean sub-contracting where someone else does the work and interfaces with clients?

[burtonator]

I with mental disorders would get more attention.

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]

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.

[koffiezet]

> but my ability to learn new things rapidly

This is one of the issues in my experience, you might be in the minority there. I'm pushing 40 and notice I have a lot more interest in new technology and stacks than many of my colleagues (I've always been like that) - but the 'more experienced' they get, the harder it becomes to convince them of the advantages of new approaches, and disadvantages of their 'proven' way of working, especially seasoned developers.

They are also usually in more senior or team leader positions, which means they are very influential or can call the shots. I've seen months wasted on projects that could be just as well written in Python in a few days by a single developer, just because the 'senior dev' had something against interpreted languages and the only option for him was C++. As much as I liked the guy personally, and respected his skillset, he seriously limited technological progress within that company - which was a huge part of the reason I quit there and became freelance. Ever since - I've seen quite a few very similar situations.

Young people will jump into things without looking - which is not good, but saying no to them and blocking off their stupid ideas is a lot easier than saying no to a guy with 30 years of experience...

[all_blue_chucks]

"If he hasn't made it to management / principal engineer by that age he must be a slow learner and therefore not [company] material"

[JustSomeNobody]

I taught myself to code on a C=64. I took a detour in life and was in management of a completely non tech related industry while putting myself through an engineering degree. I've been programming professionally for some time now. Through it all, all I have ever wanted to do was program. Why is it so bad that that is all I still want to do that at 47? Especially when I'm damned good at it!?

[aphexairlines]

I've sat on hiring loops where this happened -- candidates were not hired because their current level was not high enough given their years of experience.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

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.

[SolaceQuantum]

I'm really confused here, anecdotally I see age-discrimination concerns about the same rate as female-representation concerns in my engineering-related social media (HN). But I'm open to being incorrect as I'm only a human; do you have any statistical media analysis to verify the lack of coverage?

[C1sc0cat]

Age is part of diversity as well

[novaRom]

Interesting observation.

[colllectorof]

Age discrimination affects everyone. But older people tend to vote conservative, so left-leaning media has no interest in engaging with that group and right-leaning media is more interested in the "corporations are always good" meta-narrative. It's not politically opportune.

[jillesvangurp]

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.

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]

Age discrimination for older workers everywhere is real.

[godzillabrennus]

Not in medicine and there are some legal roles and financial roles where it’s beneficial.

[therockhead]

"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 ?

[Angostura]

I'm in my 50s, so I hope you take this the right way - is it actually age discrimination, or is it higher salary discrimination?

[coldtea]

>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).

[jacobolus]

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.

But median age for programmers is ~40.

[sys_64738]

Those youngsters will age too and be over 40 someday.

[leereeves]

> median age for programmers is ~40.

That's encouraging, but a bit difficult to believe. What's your source?

[cameldrv]

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.

[profalseidol]

Yet the bigger issue is allowing only a handful of hands make these decisions while we give them the lionshare of our blood and sweat.

[Fnoord]

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)

[kevingadd]

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%.

[scarface74]

I’m Black and have a disability that only allows me to type with one hand. I can tell you with almost 100% certainty that I haven’t been discriminated against.

How do I know? My success rate from applying for a job to not getting rejected (ie I take myself out of the running after I get an offer) is close to 100% over the past 20 years. I also don’t blindly submit my resume without an internal referral or through an external recruiter.

Software development is very egalitarian.

I could say the same about age but no one can tell my age yet. I go to interviews clean shaven and most non Blacks can’t tell my age without any outward signs like grey hair or a receding hairline.

[PorterDuff]

Hard to say.

Me = 35+ years in harness. Black coworkers in that time = 0 Female coworkers in that time = 3

[dx87]

It depends on what kind of work they're doing. If they're doing government contracting, they'll probably never get fired because they fill so many "diversity checkboxes" that their company will want to keep them on just for help winning contracts.

[jimmaswell]

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.

[diego_moita]

> Some would say it's [...] cognitive decline due to aging

And I say that this assumption without evidence is a textbook example of a prejudice.

Therefore, those "some" are bigots but the good news is they'll stop being it in a few decades, when they'll become the target of this very same bigotry.

[Analemma_]

And those who say that would be full of shit. We have doctors, lawyers, judges, scientists, etc. all remaining productive and employable late in life, and those fields also see change that you have to stay on top of. The ageism in programming is a desire to avoid workers who have experience to see through the “work 100-hour weeks and you’ll get rich!” propaganda, and this explanation is nothing but a fig leaf.

[onlydeadheroes]

It's ok, you can have all the JS development to yourselves.