A few years ago I worked at a ~50 person startup, where an informal poll revealed everyone on the engineering team to be in an age range of ~24-30. One day we interviewed an insanely qualified dude in his mid-50s. He’d worked with technologicies up and down our stack, their competitors, and their predecessors, and could speak at length to their relative strengths and weaknesses. Tons of open source contributions, mentorship experience galore, super nice - super nice, but also clearly nervous during a few rounds.
At the team standup afterward, pretty much everyone was an unreserved yes except the engineering manager who directly said he was concerned about the candidate’s age, and whether he would “fit in.” He wondered out loud whether we could reject the candidate on this basis. The CTO was at the meeting and immediately shut that line of questioning down, although none of us ever heard from that candidate again. Something I’ll never forget as I get older in this field.
Am 52. Served as IBM’s “corporate webmaster” in the 1990s (sort of like being CTO but without the cool executive hat). Corporate Webmaster was responsible for all technical operations of IBM’s corporate sites (from systems administration to application development), as well as theoretically responsible for all IBM web sites. As well as serve as the single point of contact inside IBM for anything “internet”.
Have been mostly unemployed since leaving IBM in 2001, other than a few short stints with NYC area startups.
To F100 corporate organizations I was too “internet” and claimed far too much experience than possible (circa 2002), to startups I was (and apparently am) too conservative, too corporate.
And yes, I tried the non–profit track. Every non–profit I interviewed with decided that I was clearly going to drop them as soon as I could reacquire a job in corporate America.
I’ve found other ways to make money instead of being employed by others.
I’m 45. I didn’t start aggressively job hopping until I was 35, before then I stayed at one job for almost 10 years. I haven’t once had a problem finding a job quickly. I was a generalist when I was 35 and started down the road of specializing in the Microsoft stack in 2008. I start pivoting in 2016 to more architect level roles but still staying hands on but with more cross platform languages (.Net Core, Node, Python), I also spent the last two years getting a lot of experience with AWS from a development/Devops/netops standpoint.
I’m slowly getting more into the front end $cool_kids stack with React, etc.
But, I don’t do the blind resume submittals to job boards and applicant tracking systems. I keep a very strong network of external recruiters, former managers, and former coworkers.
I have never studied leetCode, and won’t go near a job that’s more concerned with how well I’ve read over “Cracking the Code” instead of how well I can architect a system.
Can someone tell me where the older software engineers in the Bay Area have gone? I recently moved into the software industry (after years in the telecom industry), and the lack of older software engineers is disconcerting in a Soylent Green type of way.
I guess some have moved into management, and others have made enough money to retire, or they've moved somewhere with better value than the Bay Area. They're likely to avoid companies where everyone's in their twenties and the offices looks like frat houses. But even so, I'd expect to see many more gray-haired engineers around here than I do.
I'm 48, on the West Coast, and recently finished interviewing, receiving multiple offers.
I did 250 Leetcode problems, practiced System Design, and Behavioral. In the end, I found doing 250 Leetcode was probably overkill, but it definitely helped.
This will probably get me severely down-voted, and I do understand the antipathy toward having to Leetcode, but the way I see it is that I'm really lucky. I get to sit on my butt, do what I love, and I get paid really well to do it. If interviewing is extremely hard and I have to study, yet again, at 48 so be it. There are plenty of people in the world who are so less fortunate than I am.
If leetCode is what you have to do to compete in your market so be it. In the grand scheme of things, it would be hypocritical for me to criticize someone for spending hours upon hours on leetCode considering the amount of time I’ve spent on books about architecture, spent a year learning the ends and out of AWS, and the time I spent networking.
Not to mention the fact that I will spend the next two year learning front end frameworks and Docker ecosystem. I’m 45
I love this. I think evaluating/interviewing is hard, should be much more about experience and past projects but so what if the industry has got it wrong, so what you have to study a little to get the job? The world is what it is. I think criticizing this from a ‘we could do better as an industry’ perspective is productive but from a personal perspective — today — what is going to get you hired is playing the game as it is.
Love your attitude. I'm of the opinion that grinding through leetcode/hacker rank type exercises does improve your coding skills so I have no issue brushing up every time I'm on the market.
To that end, I'm 43 and last on the market a few months back, accepted an offer within a week of looking, had 3 pending final/onsites (including Amazon Seattle) and at least another half dozen in earlier stages that I shut down.
I do nothing to hide my age on my resume. Since turning 40 I've been on the market 3 times now, each time interviewing w/ 10-20 companies, and only once did I get the sense that agism was at play.
The leetcode angle at least makes interviews much more predictable and easier to prep for. The Google-style interview is well studied and documented by this point, like an SAT with an answer key you can study beforehand.
New graduates are even more out of touch. In what other industry can you graduate with a bachelors (or have no degree at all) and obtain a six figure job in return for a few weeks of studying?
Anecdote: My dad (finance/accounting guy) lost his job in his 40's and was never able to find another one.
Thankfully my mom makes enough for things to work out, and they own a piece of rental property, and my dad stashed away a lot of money for retirement while he worked (to the dismay of my mother).
Additionally, the company I work at is half (or more) people hired straight out of college which kinda makes me feel weird. It's a small company that has been around ~15 years or so, and I feel like their hiring practices would lead to their ass getting handed to them in court.
I like the people I work with, but something definitely feels wrong.
Employment is not an efficient market. Transaction costs are very high, bidding is not public, and utility is a non-linear function of more than just compensation.
Is this something exclusive to white collar jobs or is it mostly programming? Asking as my day job is in the skilled trade of engine mechanic.
If youre over 45 in a machine shop or in any trade (plumbing, electrical, automotive, HVAC, etc...) your biggest barrier to getting any job is picking up the phone when it rings. Johnson Control, Honeywell, heck even people like Nest and Ford are kicking down your door and offering you any money to join.
As a generalist developer nearing 40, I worry about this all the time. I have extensive and valuable experience in certain areas, including management, but I have started investigating other directions I can take my career and more focused specialities I can pursue to extend my shelf life, because it's seems pretty clear that it's not really viable to continue my current path.
One thing I'm a bit confused about is why doesn't salary bidding fix this?
For example if a 25 yr old coder is $X per year surely, even if you have terrible age discrimination, there must be some salary level, say $0.75*X where having the older worker is preferable?
Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market? Is it that people value youth so much they will pay a 3x markup for it or something?
If there's a large pool of super skilled people begging for work I don't quite understand why someone wouldn't want to leverage that. I get why maybe you pay older workers less if you discriminate, but to not hire them at all seems strange.
The assumption that there exists some price at which the older worker is preferable is assuming that all software workers have a positive contribution and the only task is to value and compensate it roughly in proportion.
My experience suggests that a fair chunk of the population of software developers are incapable of sustainably creating positive business value overall (even if they were paid nothing). If that model is the correct one, part of what you're paying for in a younger applicant is they might be good, whereas with an experienced yet unskilled applicant, they might already be the equivalent of a scratched-off lottery ticket that isn't a winner. (There's no price at which you would buy it.)
Note that I'm well into the age range where I would be discriminated against if age discrimination were rampant. I'm also not claiming that experienced workers are more likely than younger workers to have a negative value. I'm merely claiming that their value is more likely to be determined and less likely to change in the future.
A common objection is that they will leave as soon as they can find a 'better' (higher-paying) job. So not worth it to invest in them.
This sucks, but it definitely explains a lot of discrimination at the higher-end of the scale. The OP has a 71-year-old who couldn't find work. It must be very difficult for an employer to agree to hire this person, get them trained up on their specific business processes, only for them to have a serious health issue (and/or die) inside of a year. I get that this can happen to anyone, but the likelihood is of course greater the older you get.
Maybe employers could take out some kind of insurance on their employees, with the cost based on the actuarial tables and taken out of the employees' salaries (kind of what you suggest).
> Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market?
On one cost issue. Let's say you're in a city other than SEA, LA, SF, NYC and Boston. A 55 year old on a good insurance plan will often cost you anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 more per year in healthcare benefits versus a 20-25 year old. The cost of a 45 year old employee further increases with time due to that (over 10 years, from 45 to 55, an employee's health benefits cost can easily climb by an additional $5k-$6k per year). So if the salary in question is $90,000 (again, outside the elite tech cities), that bumps the cost of the employee considerably as they age. Some states - such as NY - have laws that alter this equation though. When an employee goes from eg 20 to 35 years old, there's a far more modest healthcare benefits cost increase (30%-40% increase would be more typical, starting from a lower base cost versus the 45 year old; from 40 to 55 the cost can easily double, from a higher starting point).
This is another serious issue that people frequently run into with the US healthcare system.
I know this is just personnel experience so don't take it for much but I had to share an office with a 70 year old "programmer" who made three times my salary. I know this because my supervisor got drunk on a business trip and told me the day after he fired the guy. He was constantly asking everyone how to do the simplest of tasks and complaining about being under payed and discriminated against because of his age and was extremely condescending to anyone who tried to help him. He never finished any assignment even after a year and a half. The led developer who has been coding for 15 years took over his last project and had to throw out all the code because it was basically just copied and pasted from stackover flow. I don't think this guy ever really knew how to code well and had got into the industry in a time where programmers where rare. Honestly, for what I've seen all the over 40 crowd in the industry moves into management positions.
Mid-40s, feel like I have been discriminated against based on age more than once. Not being one to fruitlessly blame my misfortune on things I can't change, I exited the rat race and started consulting. Doubled my already staggering pay working fewer hours, and from home. I realize this is not an easy thing to get up and running, but do at least consider finding your true value on the open market. The results could be surprising. The companies do need people who know what not to do, rather than just young-uns who do stupid things faster, with more energy.
I did this for 4 years and went back to full-time management. Even in NYC, I struggled as I (as a DevOps guy) never had the latest tech. If they needed AWS, I got AWS (experience and certs) but then they wanted Docker. Now Kubernetes. Despite years of programming experience in three languages, I still get whiteboarded. The point is, I was being treated like a full-time employee in consultant interviews. A few smaller clients I picked up were miniscule hours, we're talking 8 hours a month at most of work. Here on HN, these startup types wanted me to work for 50 pct less my rate.
I'd love to consult one day, but I haven't cracked that code. I have 18 years of systems automation, operations, and now management experience.
A friend of mine specialized in OSX USB drivers and did contract work for OEMS who make products for the Apple Macintosh. He used to work for Apple in the 1990s and did work on Mac System 7.5.4 with the team.
He recently killed himself, because he could not find clients and work due to ageism etc. He got sick as well and for a while was homeless. Once he got grey hair they didn't want to hire him anymore. He was 55.
I just don't understand the bias. I'm too young to have experienced age discrimination like this yet, but its obvious at least to me that the best developers and hell, leaders, that I've worked with were all a part of older generations. Is it a shortcoming in pay for all these people? I feel like being out of work for 3 years would definitely lower whatever standard of pay I had prior to becoming unemployed. I just do not get the disconnect
The reasons age discrimination happen are fairly complex (and I'm not ready to write all the ones I understand out), but to your point about the best in the field being part of the older generation, it is my anecdotal experience that top performers don't seem to have problems with employment as long as they can work (generally). My own mother was exceptional in her field, thought not so much as to be written about, and continued to get job offers out of the blue years after illness had robbed her of the ability to work or even speak, purely off reputation. Her friends and colleagues that I've spoken to have had similar experiences as they've retired having lead similarly successful careers.
Of course, by definition, most people aren't exceptional or even in the top 10% and our society unfairly (and unwisely) punishes them for getting older.
Older workers also cost more in insurance premiums, have more "life events" that pull them away from work and are potentially harder to sell on corporate environment.
I think part of the problem is "protected classes". I learned the other day that if you're over 40 you're a protected class for engineering in California.
If you're a protected class and you have a job, that's great! It will help you a lot. But the unintended consequence is that companies are more reluctant to hire someone in a protected class, because if they are legitimately bad at their job, they are harder to get rid of.
I still think we should have protected classes, but the protection needs to reach into hiring too. Maybe make companies have to submit written justification for not hiring someone in a protected class? I don't know I'm just spitballing here.
Was completely with you until the last paragraph. As the poster above me says, the more you regulate hiring, the more reluctant companies are to do so. You can look at the entire continent of Europe for a 500 million person example of this- sclerotic uber-regulated hiring markets with intense bureaucratic rules around who can be hired or fired, who can be laid off, under what circumstances, etc. The end result of this regulation is dramatically higher unemployment rates and companies that are terrified to hire FTEs because it's so hard to get rid of a bad one.
These days, holding all other factors constant, SV companies will generally hire {gay|female|trans|minority} candidates before {male|white|indian|asian}. So companies are apparently not at all concerned about hiring members of protected classes, rather they prefer to hire them.
Now, if you want to make the argument that older employees don't boost the companies D&I numbers, while at the same incurring the risk of a protected class, that's a subtly different argument....
It's well known that the harder the government makes it to fire someone, the equally harder it will be to get hired. It's just that people don't want to believe it.
This is why I gave up on ever having a "real job". This thread inspired me to take a look at a job board and the first thing I saw was a mobile developer job listed as "entry level". Scrolling down, the requirements are 5 years minimum mobile development experience. This is entry level now? Five years experience? By the time I have five years experience working at some kind of theoretical pre-entry level job and finally qualify for "entry level", I'll be old enough to be age discriminated against for being too old. If I could afford it, I'd go back to school to be an accountant or something, but since programming as all I know how to do and can afford to do, it's monetize "side projects" or die poor. And yes I know, working for someone else would make way more money, but that's like saying to an Uber driver "Hey bro, you'd make way more money with an NYC cab medallion". Like they don't know that? Of course, but that is not an option.
Odd that in an article about age based discrimination, they don't mention that there is also age based discrimination against young people, for example, getting into C level positions in the non-tech world.
When I used to be employed by other people, I specifically remember being told "we can't really promote you to director, you are too young". I wasn't inexperienced (I started working full time at 16). It wasn't that I hadn't earned it. It was because the old farts on the board wouldn't take me seriously.
> I wasn't inexperienced (I started working full time at 16). It wasn't that I hadn't earned it.
Above middle management, political calculus dominates meritocratic concerns (in the short term). This is true in any organisation because we’re primates. You won’t “earn” your way into senior management and you won’t help your case by informally complaining.
If you want a promotion you need leverage. Relationships with (potential) shareholders and creditors, a credible threat to decamp (and cause damage), et cetera. If you can’t threaten to leave you have no leverage. If your leaving wouldn’t cause the Board and senior management pain, you have no leverage. (If you have no leverage, that’s fine—get it.)
Speaking as someone who spent a lot of their career being young (and impatient).
>It wasn't that I hadn't earned it. It was because the old farts on the board wouldn't take me seriously.
Except getting them to take you seriously is part of your job in upper management. Age matters but your view of them as old farts makes me suspect you did nothing to gain their favor in other ways. As someone else said, those ways have little to do with job based merit.
Age discrimination against young people is temporary and is not causing any major (or even minor) social problems. One literally just has to wait a bit longer while being gainfully employed.
On the other hand, older people can't get jobs and their livelihood + potentially the livelihood of their families is at risk.
I'm in that age bracket myself, and have fortunately avoided most of the abuses described here.
Like the other posters are saying, the real problem is that learning how to develop good software (or any other technical product) takes time. This is an experience-based subject - art? craft? - and while I have seen many very talented younger engineers and developers, their lack of experience with a whole list of factors that don't involve slapping some code into an IDE, or what have you, usually means they end up being far less productive than people like to assume.
Bay Area culture has produced a lot of great things, but this stereotype has got to go.
I still require to work in a company where my manager/boss/CTO know much more than me. I'm almost 40. It's really hard to work for a 20-something guy who has almost no experience and is happily making all the mistakes he could read in books about.
Still, finding a job where my boss would know more is more and more problematic.
When I was 33 I was rejected by a recruiter with "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing teams. There must be something wrong with you, so I cannot pass your papers to the client."
Still, looking for a job is a very traumatic experience. The companies are looking for unicorns: young, cheap, without family (aka drinking in evenings, working on weekends), with lots of experience, and academic knowledge (which will never be used).
A couple of times I heard from guys, who would be my managers "oh, I'd love to have your experience"... the rest of the interviews went smoothly. In all the places I even didn't get to the step where they asked for the money requirements. They just didn't answer.
I'm looking for a remote job now. I even made a nicely stripped resume on one page. My normal has 3 pages. It's a very traumatic experience, especially that most of the remote companies require knowing almost only some new stuff, totally ignoring my 18 years of experience in everything else.
Btw... a surgeon of my age is usually not experienced enough to make surgeries on his/her own. A programmer of my age is usually a useless resource, which is happily replaced with someone just after the college.
All this makes me sad. The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
Is it just me or is there a way lower bar for evidence when it comes to age discrimination in tech on Hackernews compared to gender or race discrimination.
I’m not saying that it’s not a real phenomenon, but pretty much all the evidence I’ve seen is anecdotal or fairly weak.
While it’s true that a lot of older people are great programmers, I also think programming ability is only about 50% of what most people are looking for. The other 50% is about how well you work with others, and I have to say, when I read a lot of these anecdotes I can’t help but feel like some of people these people aren’t getting hired because they come off as stubborn assholes.
If 70 year olds really are less productive software engineers than single Red Bull-fueled 22 year olds (on average), and you thus end up hiring less 70 year olds, is that really discrimination? I get the article has stories from older people that seem to suggest they are well-qualified for the job and literally just their age number seems to lose them the job, which of course would be discriminatory.
But the law suits of companies based on statistical analyses of the number of older people in the company made it seem like a company can be sued for not having an expected distribution of ages but it’s not clear what assumptions are baked into these analyses (ie is it assumed a priori that all ages are equally productive). Certainly older people are more productive in certain contexts than others (eg I’ll take an older more experienced surgeon over the new junior attending any day, but I’ll bet on the young person in a football match or tasks that require a lot of cognitive flexibility).
> If 70 year olds really are less productive software engineers than single Red Bull-fueled 22 year olds (on average)
That's a really big "if", and seems to have no supporting evidence.
Let me turn this around into an only slightly less unsupported statement:
Youngsters in programming are desirable because most programming has become a shitty job where you need obedient people just slightly smarter than average but no smarter. Genuinely smart people are actually unwelcome in most programming jobs.
Programming now is mostly plumbing garbage data between crappy APIs that change every 6 months according to whim and fashion and you don't need smart people for that. In that environment, any knowledge you learn has a half-life of 3 months and you are solving the same problems over and over in different languages and APIs.
Or, alternatively, most VC money is chasing scalable "fad" social businesses, and having youngsters is useful because they are willing to expend enormous amount of money following fads while attempting to get laid. Again, knowledge half-life is under 3 months.
People making actual money and solving business problems seem to have no problems with hiring older people.
Along similar lines, we have a decent amount of senior (read "older") people at our company that are well paid. But, most of the work we do can be done by less experienced people who are much cheaper. That almost always means they are young. We don't discriminate based on age, but if you just looked at the ages of people that we mostly hire then that data would look like we're discriminating based on age when age is not part of the decision at all.
"(eg I’ll take an older more experienced surgeon over the new junior attending any day, but I’ll bet on the young person in a football match or tasks that require a lot of cognitive flexibility)"
You seem to be contradicting yourself there, why you would you think an older surgeon lacks cognitive flexibility?
this has to be viewed in the overall context of employment law and its purpose in society. we have anti discrimination laws not because the government is trying to give each and every corporation all the fuel it needs to become devilishly efficient. we have anti discrimination laws to increase equality and create a more even distribution of wealth and opportunity despite disadvantages imposed upon applicants by circumstance.
also, the government can be viewed as having an interest in keeping people employed in general so that they do not become dependent upon government for sustenance.
Head of HR once asked me what type of people we needed. I said we desperately needed older people. 20-year-old project managers don't have a clue. Company went under, he sells air-conditioning now.
[+] [-] jtr1|6 years ago|reply
At the team standup afterward, pretty much everyone was an unreserved yes except the engineering manager who directly said he was concerned about the candidate’s age, and whether he would “fit in.” He wondered out loud whether we could reject the candidate on this basis. The CTO was at the meeting and immediately shut that line of questioning down, although none of us ever heard from that candidate again. Something I’ll never forget as I get older in this field.
[+] [-] epc|6 years ago|reply
Have been mostly unemployed since leaving IBM in 2001, other than a few short stints with NYC area startups.
To F100 corporate organizations I was too “internet” and claimed far too much experience than possible (circa 2002), to startups I was (and apparently am) too conservative, too corporate.
And yes, I tried the non–profit track. Every non–profit I interviewed with decided that I was clearly going to drop them as soon as I could reacquire a job in corporate America.
I’ve found other ways to make money instead of being employed by others.
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
I’m slowly getting more into the front end $cool_kids stack with React, etc.
But, I don’t do the blind resume submittals to job boards and applicant tracking systems. I keep a very strong network of external recruiters, former managers, and former coworkers.
I have never studied leetCode, and won’t go near a job that’s more concerned with how well I’ve read over “Cracking the Code” instead of how well I can architect a system.
[+] [-] freyr|6 years ago|reply
I guess some have moved into management, and others have made enough money to retire, or they've moved somewhere with better value than the Bay Area. They're likely to avoid companies where everyone's in their twenties and the offices looks like frat houses. But even so, I'd expect to see many more gray-haired engineers around here than I do.
[+] [-] mykowebhn|6 years ago|reply
I did 250 Leetcode problems, practiced System Design, and Behavioral. In the end, I found doing 250 Leetcode was probably overkill, but it definitely helped.
This will probably get me severely down-voted, and I do understand the antipathy toward having to Leetcode, but the way I see it is that I'm really lucky. I get to sit on my butt, do what I love, and I get paid really well to do it. If interviewing is extremely hard and I have to study, yet again, at 48 so be it. There are plenty of people in the world who are so less fortunate than I am.
[Edit] s/250 Leetcode/250 Leetcode problems/
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
Not to mention the fact that I will spend the next two year learning front end frameworks and Docker ecosystem. I’m 45
[+] [-] wellpast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandall10|6 years ago|reply
To that end, I'm 43 and last on the market a few months back, accepted an offer within a week of looking, had 3 pending final/onsites (including Amazon Seattle) and at least another half dozen in earlier stages that I shut down.
I do nothing to hide my age on my resume. Since turning 40 I've been on the market 3 times now, each time interviewing w/ 10-20 companies, and only once did I get the sense that agism was at play.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] o10449366|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emit_time|6 years ago|reply
Thankfully my mom makes enough for things to work out, and they own a piece of rental property, and my dad stashed away a lot of money for retirement while he worked (to the dismay of my mother).
Additionally, the company I work at is half (or more) people hired straight out of college which kinda makes me feel weird. It's a small company that has been around ~15 years or so, and I feel like their hiring practices would lead to their ass getting handed to them in court.
I like the people I work with, but something definitely feels wrong.
[+] [-] andrewprock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimbius|6 years ago|reply
If youre over 45 in a machine shop or in any trade (plumbing, electrical, automotive, HVAC, etc...) your biggest barrier to getting any job is picking up the phone when it rings. Johnson Control, Honeywell, heck even people like Nest and Ford are kicking down your door and offering you any money to join.
[+] [-] StaticRedux|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drchewbacca|6 years ago|reply
For example if a 25 yr old coder is $X per year surely, even if you have terrible age discrimination, there must be some salary level, say $0.75*X where having the older worker is preferable?
Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market? Is it that people value youth so much they will pay a 3x markup for it or something?
If there's a large pool of super skilled people begging for work I don't quite understand why someone wouldn't want to leverage that. I get why maybe you pay older workers less if you discriminate, but to not hire them at all seems strange.
[+] [-] sokoloff|6 years ago|reply
My experience suggests that a fair chunk of the population of software developers are incapable of sustainably creating positive business value overall (even if they were paid nothing). If that model is the correct one, part of what you're paying for in a younger applicant is they might be good, whereas with an experienced yet unskilled applicant, they might already be the equivalent of a scratched-off lottery ticket that isn't a winner. (There's no price at which you would buy it.)
Note that I'm well into the age range where I would be discriminated against if age discrimination were rampant. I'm also not claiming that experienced workers are more likely than younger workers to have a negative value. I'm merely claiming that their value is more likely to be determined and less likely to change in the future.
[+] [-] rabidrat|6 years ago|reply
This sucks, but it definitely explains a lot of discrimination at the higher-end of the scale. The OP has a 71-year-old who couldn't find work. It must be very difficult for an employer to agree to hire this person, get them trained up on their specific business processes, only for them to have a serious health issue (and/or die) inside of a year. I get that this can happen to anyone, but the likelihood is of course greater the older you get. Maybe employers could take out some kind of insurance on their employees, with the cost based on the actuarial tables and taken out of the employees' salaries (kind of what you suggest).
[+] [-] adventured|6 years ago|reply
On one cost issue. Let's say you're in a city other than SEA, LA, SF, NYC and Boston. A 55 year old on a good insurance plan will often cost you anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 more per year in healthcare benefits versus a 20-25 year old. The cost of a 45 year old employee further increases with time due to that (over 10 years, from 45 to 55, an employee's health benefits cost can easily climb by an additional $5k-$6k per year). So if the salary in question is $90,000 (again, outside the elite tech cities), that bumps the cost of the employee considerably as they age. Some states - such as NY - have laws that alter this equation though. When an employee goes from eg 20 to 35 years old, there's a far more modest healthcare benefits cost increase (30%-40% increase would be more typical, starting from a lower base cost versus the 45 year old; from 40 to 55 the cost can easily double, from a higher starting point).
This is another serious issue that people frequently run into with the US healthcare system.
[+] [-] jswizzy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mancerayder|6 years ago|reply
I'd love to consult one day, but I haven't cracked that code. I have 18 years of systems automation, operations, and now management experience.
Something isn't good enough.
[+] [-] RickSanchez2600|6 years ago|reply
He recently killed himself, because he could not find clients and work due to ageism etc. He got sick as well and for a while was homeless. Once he got grey hair they didn't want to hire him anymore. He was 55.
[+] [-] Ancalagon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hermitian909|6 years ago|reply
Of course, by definition, most people aren't exceptional or even in the top 10% and our society unfairly (and unwisely) punishes them for getting older.
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|6 years ago|reply
Younger workers = less experience = lower pay.
Older workers also cost more in insurance premiums, have more "life events" that pull them away from work and are potentially harder to sell on corporate environment.
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
If you're a protected class and you have a job, that's great! It will help you a lot. But the unintended consequence is that companies are more reluctant to hire someone in a protected class, because if they are legitimately bad at their job, they are harder to get rid of.
I still think we should have protected classes, but the protection needs to reach into hiring too. Maybe make companies have to submit written justification for not hiring someone in a protected class? I don't know I'm just spitballing here.
[+] [-] hash872|6 years ago|reply
Hiring needs to be less regulated, not more so
[+] [-] donjigweed|6 years ago|reply
Now, if you want to make the argument that older employees don't boost the companies D&I numbers, while at the same incurring the risk of a protected class, that's a subtly different argument....
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bachmeier|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] povertyworld|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4ntonius8lock|6 years ago|reply
When I used to be employed by other people, I specifically remember being told "we can't really promote you to director, you are too young". I wasn't inexperienced (I started working full time at 16). It wasn't that I hadn't earned it. It was because the old farts on the board wouldn't take me seriously.
Discrimination sucks.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|6 years ago|reply
Above middle management, political calculus dominates meritocratic concerns (in the short term). This is true in any organisation because we’re primates. You won’t “earn” your way into senior management and you won’t help your case by informally complaining.
If you want a promotion you need leverage. Relationships with (potential) shareholders and creditors, a credible threat to decamp (and cause damage), et cetera. If you can’t threaten to leave you have no leverage. If your leaving wouldn’t cause the Board and senior management pain, you have no leverage. (If you have no leverage, that’s fine—get it.)
Speaking as someone who spent a lot of their career being young (and impatient).
[+] [-] solidsnack9000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcinzm|6 years ago|reply
Except getting them to take you seriously is part of your job in upper management. Age matters but your view of them as old farts makes me suspect you did nothing to gain their favor in other ways. As someone else said, those ways have little to do with job based merit.
[+] [-] blub|6 years ago|reply
On the other hand, older people can't get jobs and their livelihood + potentially the livelihood of their families is at risk.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] zebraflask|6 years ago|reply
Like the other posters are saying, the real problem is that learning how to develop good software (or any other technical product) takes time. This is an experience-based subject - art? craft? - and while I have seen many very talented younger engineers and developers, their lack of experience with a whole list of factors that don't involve slapping some code into an IDE, or what have you, usually means they end up being far less productive than people like to assume.
Bay Area culture has produced a lot of great things, but this stereotype has got to go.
[+] [-] pleasecalllater|6 years ago|reply
Still, finding a job where my boss would know more is more and more problematic.
When I was 33 I was rejected by a recruiter with "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing teams. There must be something wrong with you, so I cannot pass your papers to the client."
Still, looking for a job is a very traumatic experience. The companies are looking for unicorns: young, cheap, without family (aka drinking in evenings, working on weekends), with lots of experience, and academic knowledge (which will never be used).
A couple of times I heard from guys, who would be my managers "oh, I'd love to have your experience"... the rest of the interviews went smoothly. In all the places I even didn't get to the step where they asked for the money requirements. They just didn't answer.
I'm looking for a remote job now. I even made a nicely stripped resume on one page. My normal has 3 pages. It's a very traumatic experience, especially that most of the remote companies require knowing almost only some new stuff, totally ignoring my 18 years of experience in everything else.
Btw... a surgeon of my age is usually not experienced enough to make surgeries on his/her own. A programmer of my age is usually a useless resource, which is happily replaced with someone just after the college.
All this makes me sad. The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?
[+] [-] Bukhmanizer|6 years ago|reply
I’m not saying that it’s not a real phenomenon, but pretty much all the evidence I’ve seen is anecdotal or fairly weak.
While it’s true that a lot of older people are great programmers, I also think programming ability is only about 50% of what most people are looking for. The other 50% is about how well you work with others, and I have to say, when I read a lot of these anecdotes I can’t help but feel like some of people these people aren’t getting hired because they come off as stubborn assholes.
[+] [-] outlace|6 years ago|reply
But the law suits of companies based on statistical analyses of the number of older people in the company made it seem like a company can be sued for not having an expected distribution of ages but it’s not clear what assumptions are baked into these analyses (ie is it assumed a priori that all ages are equally productive). Certainly older people are more productive in certain contexts than others (eg I’ll take an older more experienced surgeon over the new junior attending any day, but I’ll bet on the young person in a football match or tasks that require a lot of cognitive flexibility).
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
That's a really big "if", and seems to have no supporting evidence.
Let me turn this around into an only slightly less unsupported statement:
Youngsters in programming are desirable because most programming has become a shitty job where you need obedient people just slightly smarter than average but no smarter. Genuinely smart people are actually unwelcome in most programming jobs.
Programming now is mostly plumbing garbage data between crappy APIs that change every 6 months according to whim and fashion and you don't need smart people for that. In that environment, any knowledge you learn has a half-life of 3 months and you are solving the same problems over and over in different languages and APIs.
Or, alternatively, most VC money is chasing scalable "fad" social businesses, and having youngsters is useful because they are willing to expend enormous amount of money following fads while attempting to get laid. Again, knowledge half-life is under 3 months.
People making actual money and solving business problems seem to have no problems with hiring older people.
[+] [-] bonestamp2|6 years ago|reply
Along similar lines, we have a decent amount of senior (read "older") people at our company that are well paid. But, most of the work we do can be done by less experienced people who are much cheaper. That almost always means they are young. We don't discriminate based on age, but if you just looked at the ages of people that we mostly hire then that data would look like we're discriminating based on age when age is not part of the decision at all.
[+] [-] xd|6 years ago|reply
You seem to be contradicting yourself there, why you would you think an older surgeon lacks cognitive flexibility?
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] HillaryBriss|6 years ago|reply
also, the government can be viewed as having an interest in keeping people employed in general so that they do not become dependent upon government for sustenance.
[+] [-] hsudheh|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] forinti|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JudgeWapner|6 years ago|reply
maybe the company should have had policies that gave their managers more clues?
> he sells air-conditioning now.
probably makes more (and accomplishes more) than many engineers, especially ones at vapor-ware startups.