
How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers - sbaltes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05847
======
woofie11
I've worked with two types of older engineers:

1) Ones who keep up their skills

2) Ones who don't

The former are a treasure trove of knowledge and skills, and provide
substantially more value than anyone junior ever could. Going through so many
computing eras gives a higher-level way of thinking about abstraction, or
understanding computer architectures. They've hand-tweaked assembly, C, Java,
and when they're now doing JavaScript or Python, they understand all the
layers of metal underneath. They've gone through flow charts, structured,
functional, object oriented, and all the variants there-of. They've written
high-speed algorithms to draw lines with pixels, to ray trace, and are now
coding GPGPUs.

The latter are liabilities, bringing in 1980-era best-practices. They're
working on some legacy BASIC or COBAL system from the seventies, and surprised
they can't find a new job when that's upgraded and they're downsized.

I've rarely seen #1 and #2 mix. They're very different crowds, and in very
different types of companies.

My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if
I'm doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years if I do
occasional deep dives. Basically, I dive headlong into whatever is the newest,
trendiest stack, and get a product out using that, deeply learning all the
deep things behind it too. That's what works for me. YMMV.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
_> My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up,
if I'm doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years _

And that's the problem with software engineering vs other white collar
careers. For example, my accountant friend is expected to be trained by their
employer in the latest accounting practices and law frameworks and does't
devote 1-3 months per year of their personal time on open source accounting
projects to learn the latest legal framework for fun, that would be crazy for
him. Same for my friends in architecture, dentistry and law. Their employers
pay them to learn and gather the expertise needed for their future in the
firm.

Whereas, as a software engineer, very few companies(at least in Germany from
my experience) will invest into their existing workforce to train them on the
job for the future language/framework they will plan to use and instead seek
to let them go once their expertise is no longer valuable and hire someone
already experienced in the needed stack then repeat the cycle several
years/decades down the road.

That's why here you're expected to transition to management as a career
progression, as IC roles are not really valued at old age unless you've
dedicated your free time to coding and I don't know about you guys, but I'd
prefer to spend my free time with my kids and exercising outdoors instead of
coding to make myself employable in the latest stack.

~~~
wittyreference
As a physician, I attend conferences, subscribe to online references, question
banks, various journals, take ongoing CME, repeat licensing exams, and spend
the equivalent of one workday a week reading those new materials, and try to
spend a couple hours refreshing myself on materials outside of my specialty.
This amounts to an extra un-reimbursed workday a week, and several thousand
dollars a year.

When I worked in a place that offered CME/conference reimbursement, it covered
about 1-2K a year, depending on budgeting issues. In my current place, and for
all independent or small practice physicians, that comes out of your own
pocket.

This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be worthy
of our patients’ trust.

I wouldn’t mind if it was at least partially reimbursed though. It’s an
enormous chunk of change, and not for my benefit.

~~~
vageli
> This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be
> worthy of our patients’ trust.

Keeping abreast of changes in the field and state of the art offer no benefits
and is done solely for patients' trust?

~~~
heymijo
Goodhart's Law

May be what OP is referring to.

I have seen it in teaching. Teachers need xx hours of training per year.
Training often satisfies that requirement but provides no significant benefits
in terms of pedagogical improvement or content knowledge.

Teachers that want to improve do so by other means. The training keeps us in
compliance.

~~~
pmiller2
I've known more than a few high school teachers who ended up with Masters or
PhD degrees kind of by default via continuing education courses. That would
seem to go against your "teachers that want to improve do so by other means"
idea, unless I'm confused about the nature of continuing education
requirements for teachers.

~~~
heymijo
My assertion is that continuing education credits, or advanced degrees are far
from a guarantee of improving a teacher's practice. Continuing education
suffers from "box checking." There are a number of reasons for this.

It is in no way a knock on teachers. They are caught up in a bad system and
are responding to systemic incentives.

If we apply an always/sometimes/never framework to my assertion, we can find
examples where teachers advanced their practice via continuing education. So
the teachers you know certainly could have advanced degrees, some even very
helpful in improving their practice.

My experience in K-12 as well as studying the history of education reform in
America since Sputnik was launched inform this assertion. It has been a
recurring theme for 60 years.

~~~
heymijo
Credentialism - I saw this word used today elsewhere and it sums up what I am
trying to say

------
henrik_w
My perspective, as an older developer (I'm 54):

\- I love coding, and I still code every day. I have no desire to move into
other roles (such as management).

\- As for job security, I think it is harder to find a job as a manager than
as a developer, simply because there are many more positions for developers
than for managers

\- Family-wise, it is much easier at my age, because my children are getting
into their twenties now. Much more free time for me (including for work if I
want), compared to when they were younger and need lots more attention (and
being picked up from daycare)

\- As for learning - that's one of the attractions of being a developer. There
are always new things to take in, it never gets boring

\- On the other hand, even if some things in programming are fleeting (the
currently popular frameworks etc), there is a core of fundamental knowledge
that you gain over the course of your career that will always apply.

~~~
dudul
Question regarding your last 2 points: how do you reconcile the fact that
"there is always something to learn" with "I'm basically just learning a
library/framework that does the exact same thing but with different names in
the API"?

I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but after a few decades in the industry
it's kind of baffling how few novel ideas are in these new frameworks. There
is even a trend to go back to server side HTML and SOAP-like APIs. The tech
industry sometimes just looks like the fashion industry. But maybe I'm just
too cynical :)

~~~
arethuza
"SOAP-like APIs"

Do you mean things like Swagger?

[NB There have been few things I've hated more than SOAP]

~~~
dudul
No, as far as I understand Swagger it's just a tool to document your API. I'm
more thinking about some ways GraphQL is used/implemented.

------
fecak
I'm a former tech recruiter for startups and now a resume writer and career
consultant, and I've written for software engineers from 18 through their late
60's.

\- Older software engineers (40+) won't be discriminated against if they are
doing cool stuff and are doing different stuff than they were doing a few
years back. I've written this a thousand times before, but we often confuse
ageism for stagnation. If you've had the same job for 15 years working on the
same system and using the same languages, you aren't a victim of ageism as
much as you are being discriminated against because they don't think you'll be
able to learn new tricks.

\- On resumes, don't advertise your age if you're a bit older. We don't need
to list that internship, first job out of school, or graduation dates from
college. List 15-20 years of your career and leave the rest off. It isn't a
biography.

~~~
OldHand2018
> Older software engineers (40+) won't be discriminated against if they are
> doing cool stuff and are doing different stuff than they were doing a few
> years back.

But I don't do cool stuff. What I do is to keep a ~$25 million per year money
printing system from falling over while the youngsters are in year 7 of the 18
month project to replace it with super cool tech. Making money is so overrated
these days.

~~~
halbritt
You'd be surprised how little corporate bureaucracy values the act of "keeping
the lights on" for an existing and stable revenue stream. Obviously, keeping
the money hose going is good for the business, but it only gets recognized in
the case of failure. To put it simply, it doesn't create new value, which is
what corporate culture in the US is all about.

~~~
joshspankit
^this is a really underrated statement.

Coming from “sysadmin”/tech/keeper of the lights on: there is no win at the
bottom line. Keeping the lights on _always_ costs money, they always wish it
could cost less (except when inter-company bragging about having the new hot
tool), and when you’re doing your best possible job they will forget you
exist. If something happens on your watch they can just as easily assume you
have not been working at all.

One thing I’ve distilled from all this: _Always_ keep at least some focus on
how much your work costs vs how much value it’s providing.

------
cosmodisk
I'm 35, so kind of in the middle. Frankly speaking,I'd hate to work in a
company where an average age is 20 as much as where an average age is 60.
Sometimes I see job ads with things like ' youthful colleagues',which is
crazy. I want to work in an environment,where I can talk to someone in their
early 20s and gain from their perspective and understanding and also to
someone who's been round the block a few times and can tell off the bat that
the shit I came up with minutes ago is neither smart nor useful because X,Y,Z.
Putting all this aside, one thing to consider is that there are there are tons
of companies out there that do have reasonably easy operational
model,which,once streamlined, doesn't require senior people,or only very few.
And those companies are very happy to keep thr status quo by only employing
from certain demographics.

~~~
moksly
In my country there is an industry in setting up your software company to
simulate university life to attract the newly educated developers.

You’ll get cheap, extremely motivated employees, who spend almost all their
time at your company thanks to boardgame/role play/pizza nights and you get
them to keep up-to-date on techs by having them do weekly tech-workshops and
presentations.

They produce a lot of cheap code, sometimes the quality is decent, other tones
it isn’t, and their most talented developers tend to leave for “adult” jobs
after a few years, but overall it has been a very successful strategy.

~~~
ErikAugust
Is your country America?

~~~
adverbly
It sounds like America, except for the hiring for cheap bit... American
companies pay a lot more on avg for their devs than other countries.

~~~
scruple
But younger engineers can be had more cheaply than experienced engineers.
There is also a culture of having to prove yourself which often leads to
junior engineers taking positions with companies that are toxic and which
dramatically underpay them in order to get some years of experience. I think
in our pandemic world, there is also a problem where people who may want to
change jobs, due to poor working conditions, will stay put in fear of losing
their pay check. These things and more, I'm sure, all compound against all of
us, but I think can be felt more strongly at the lower end of the experience
range.

------
DrBazza
Not quite 50. Still coding, still enjoying it.

As I've gotten older my time has gone from '20% think about it - 80% code it',
to '80% think about it - 20% code it'.

I currently work with a surprisingly well balanced spectrum of developers at
my current employer. The median age is in the early 30s, with probably a third
of us 40 and older out of 150 developers.

I'd say with some confidence, that the older developers in my company complete
as many "tasks" but write less code when doing it, with a lower defect rate.

~~~
enobrev
That 80/20 split (for younger me) is what taught me enough that I can now
think it all out ahead of time. When I just started around 20 years ago, it
was all new, it was all confusing, and all the answers were hidden behind
obscurity, gatekeeping, and strange social norms (no StackOverflow back then).
So I had to learn by brute force, smashing my face into every project for
somewhere around 100 hours a week.

Now I have some knowledge and perspective, even the ability to pick out the
fads and novelties from time to time. I can try new things on small projects
and I can go with tried and true for the big things and I tend to understand
which projects are better for which approach. I can visualize the data, the
models, the inputs and outputs, and think through the logic from beginning to
end, all within about 30-50 hours per week. That took lots of late nights and
a ton of trial and error.

There's a good place for the less experienced and more experienced on any well
balanced team, to be certain.

------
joeblau
I’m in my late 30’s and almost all of my good friends with a CS/BIT degree has
cycled into management. The interesting thing I’m noticing now is that they
all have ideas for projects but zero capacity to build anything because
they’ve lost their building muscles. They also seem reluctant to really want
to learn anything else which is antithetical to software engineering where a
new framework is out every day.

~~~
chosenbreed37
Does either camp have second thoughts about how their careers have progressed?
You've highlighted one or two downsides for those who've gone down (or should
I say 'up') the management route. Would you trade places with any of those
friends? Would either of them trade places with you? Do you have an 'exit'
plan out of software engineering or do you plan to stick with it to the very
end? I appreciate some of these are personal questions and you may not want to
discuss it but these are the perspectives that interest me.

~~~
scarface74
In 2008, I was 35 and had let my career, skills and salary stagnate. I had
been a company for almost a decade mostly writing a combination of C, C++,
Perl, and VB6 programs for backend processes. I finally woke up, did a career
reset and pivoted toward “enterprise development”.

Fast forward to 2016, I was married, with a step son who was a freshman, tired
of working on yet another software as a service CRUD app at my 3rd job since
2008 as an IC, and jumped on an opportunity to be a dev lead at a medium size
non software company.

I thought the next step was to either stay a hands on dev lead/ “architect”
and just muddle along for the next 20 years, go into management, or go the
r/cscareerquestions route and “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” and move
to the west coast.

Neither sounded appealing. Then management decided to “move to the cloud”. I
didn’t know anything about AWS at the time and saw how much the “consultants”
were making and that opened my eyes. If these old school netops folks could
pass one certification, click around in the console and make. $200K+ a year,
imagine what I could do if I knew AWS from the infrastructure and dev ops side
_and_ I knew how to develop and architect using all of the AWS fiddly bits.

It took three years and teo job changes in between, but I _really_ like
consulting. It’s the perfect combination of development, high level
architecture, customer engagement and you never know what you will be doing in
three months - or in what language.

~~~
electriclove
Thanks for sharing! Could you expand more on those 3 years in making that
transition? Do you work at a consulting company or did you start your own?

~~~
scarface74
The company I worked for as a dev lead was acquired by private equity and by
the time I had any knowledge about AWS the infrastructure gatekeepers and
consultants took over.

I started looking for a job and got lucky that another company was trying to
build an in house development department led by a new CTO. They had outsourced
all of the development before.

The new CTO was very forward looking and wanted to make the company “cloud
native” and improve the processes. He only had a high level understanding of
AWS as did I. He took a chance on me and I became both the de facto “cloud
architect” and the person he called when he wanted a customer facing project
done from the ground up without having to deal with the slow moving “scrum
process”.

I was quite happy at the company and would have stayed a couple of years
probably even knowing I could make more money somewhere else and then Covid
hit along with an across the board pay cut.

I was _still_ not really looking, a 10% pay cut at a time when we couldn’t
travel or really go out was an inconvenience but not earth shattering.

Then a recruiter contacted me for a software development position at Amazon. I
wasn’t willing to relocate or do the leetCode monkey dance but we talked a
little and then she forwarded my information to a recruiter on the AWS side.

I saw the interview process was basically a high level technical interview to
determine whether I knew the basics of AWS (I did) and all about the
Leadership Principles. I knew I could answer the “tell me about a time
when...” questions with the best of them _and_ the interview process was going
to be fully remote.

To keep a long story from getting longer - I work at Amazon as an AWS
Consultant from the comfort of my own home in the suburbs in a low cost of
living area.

~~~
electriclove
That's awesome, congrats! Thank you for sharing those details. Sounds like
something I'd like to do some day.

------
cryptica
I've come to the conclusion that tech is one of the least meritocratic
industries in our economy. As a result of this, many older workers who "didn't
make it" are deeply frustrated by the increasing gap between their ever
improving skills and their ever decreasing remuneration. This frustration with
the system is also what makes them undesirable to hire. They don't believe in
the meritocratic fiction so if you hire them, they may cause cultural problems
and dissonance inside the company (and they may come across as apathetic).

To make matters worse, those who succeeded have an incentive to strongly
believe that the tech industry is a perfect meritocracy, so they feel like
something must be wrong with these older people and this is why they still
have to work as developers and didn't progress in their careers.

The affront which reality may pose to their egos, causes employers to hire
inexperienced, starry-eyed developers on huge salaries who create chaos and
busy-work for themselves whilst yielding diminishing returns and barely
getting things done. But the monopolistic, winner-takes-it-all, easy money
situation of this industry allows employers in many sub-sectors to make these
terrible decisions whilst continuing to thrive and this allows them to
maintain and even reinforce their false ideologies about youth and
productivity in a vicious cycle of increasing mediocrity.

------
citizenpaul
My exp.

Older programmers need basically no hand-holding/guardrails. That alone can
make them much more valuable from a management perspective. Here is the
project get it done and its done.

Younger programmers sure they might work 16 hr days and weekends. However if
I'm having to check that hey are not running wild in left field for 2 hrs
everyday its a huge time hit to productivity and just increases the more of
them there are. I don't know that I'd want to work someplace that thinks butt
in seat is a measure of productivity.

To me a job that seems to be appealing to the younger crowd just means the job
will be a miserable no life balance grind. There are plenty of jobs out there
that just value nothing ever breaking that I'd rather work at then some flavor
of the week startup.

~~~
softfalcon
"Here is the project get it done and its done."

"...just value nothing every breaking..."

This is a huge deal and changes so much about how you work and communicate.

Having a no-nonsense view of stability and delivery of the product changes
everything.

\- use stable tools, don't chase the shiny

\- clearly documented architecture and deployment

\- frank communication about everything at all times

\- less ego, more product focus

------
Yizahi
I'm working in an outsourcing company on a project which makes use of all
kinds of engineers, not the homogeneous programmers working on the same stack
in the same language, but actually a lot of diverse tasks - some work on
analog hardware, some on digital hardware, some people specialize in
controllers A, others in B, some specialists in video, some "regular"
application programmers, and the list goes on. And most of engineers are in
two offices - one Ukraine, another in Israel.

So this very long preface was about age of our employees - despite working on
the exact same problems office in Ukraine almost never hires "older" engineers
of any specialization. By "older" I mean probably 50+, maybe even 45+. From
the same general space where I'm sitting the oldest I know for sure is 40
years old and he is not a recent hire, so he was hired when he just passed 30
years.

In the Israel on the other hand there are a lot of "older" engineers by share,
and they are getting hired being "older", hired because of their experience in
all kinds of domains we are working on.

Just wanted to share how this problem looks like in two different countries.

------
richieb
So, number of software developers doubles roughly about every 5 years. So if
you have been in the field for 5 years, half of the developers will be younger
than you, if you were in the field for 10 years, 3/4 will be younger than you.
You can do the rest of the math.

I've been working as a developer for 40+ years, so most other developers are
younger than me. Although, on my current team there are two people older than
me.

------
branweb
The article concludes with this:

    
    
      Against  this background,  we  argue  that  preserving  employability  cannot  and  should  not  solely be the burden of the developers themselves. Companies should take their share of responsibility, encourage practices  that  welcome  developers  of  any  age  and  curb  those  negatively  affecting  older  developers.
    

Ok I don't disagree. But how is such a conclusion justified by googling a "age
software developer" and seeing what pops up? Paper seems pretty thin.

~~~
toxik
Also it is not a refereed paper, why then write it in a format like this? Make
it clear when you publish opinion or position pieces, people.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I'm older.

I'm no slouch.

I can prove it, with a huge portfolio of stuff I was working on fifteen
minutes ago.

I stopped looking for work some time ago.

Let's just say that I have the skillset and chops that many startups would
kill for, but I don't have a...how do they say it, these days...gosh darn
it...I just can't keep up with the stuff they say...oh yeah.."cultural fit."
Yeah, that's it.

------
tabtab
I have to say a lot of technology "change" is fads. The New Thing takes over
before anybody seriously vets the new idea. Once something looks like "legacy-
ware", everyone gets scared of being obsolete and abandons it for the new
kidware on the block.

Experiments are nice, but making everyone in IT be a guinea pig is not
productive. Rapid change for the sake of change alone will probably "benefit"
younger workers on average. Fashion driven IT is probably not good for
organizations in general, not for just older workers, because they are paying
to throw out software and start over too often; but it seems nobody can stop
this Sisyphusian dance.

------
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1
As an older developer (55), two things:

1) I forget things. If some new piece of information comes in, after a few
days, my younger colleagues remember everything, and I don't.

2) I want to sleep after lunch. It's impossible to fight.

------
digitalsushi
This thesis makes a heavy case for plastic surgery to appear younger to keep a
tech job - Has anyone reading this ever even considered plastic surgery to get
a competitive advantage against ageism?

~~~
overcast
Simply dying your hair, and staying fit will go a long way in making someone
look much younger than they are.

~~~
grugagag
My wife in her late 30s stopped dying her hair since the pandemic started and
she's got a lot of gray hair, especially compared to me who i have none. She
remembers having it since she was 18 but kept on dying it afterwards. I find
her looking great with gray hair. I have to add that she is in a great shape
and that compensates for the gray hair.

~~~
overcast
I'm glad to hear that, but it doesn't really have any context to this article
where older developers are being subjected to ageism in the work place.

~~~
grugagag
If women are okay with gray hair so should men be. I don't think hiding the
gray hair does any good, the reasons for not hiring older people from what I
understand the preference for younger culture because they don't have
experience and are gullible and also the pay is lower. Dying one's hair ain't
gonna solve those requirements by the hiring companies. And in addition, some
people start graying as early as their 20s and never bother to dye it.

~~~
overcast
We're talking about physical perception, that's why people go out of their way
to get plastic surgery, braces, wear makeup, etc, to impress other people. You
can say how things should be, and what the ideal world should be. But the fact
remains, physical appearance helps immensely, whether that person is qualified
or not. Why do people put on a suit for a silly interview? Why can't I just
come in with flip flops and shorts? Yeh the world sucks, you play the game in
a way that gives yourself the best chance to win.

------
UncleOxidant
57 year old software dev here. It does definitely get tougher to find and keep
work as you get into your 50s. What I've found is that it's a lot easier to
get a job at a company that's run by people my age or older. I've been at a
few startups over the last several years where the CEOs or managers were
around 60. The interviews are a lot easier - kind of like interviews were back
in the 80s & 90s probably because those are the types of interviews they
remember as well. Being of a similar age they also tend to figure that if you
made it this far you're probably going to be a good worker. I've had way more
autonomy in those situations than I've had at other companies where I had
30-something-year-old managers. Maybe I'm falling into some reverse-ageism
here, but in my experience I'd rather work for someone closer to my own age or
even older. Problem is that there are getting to be fewer and fewer of these
options as people tend to retire in their 60s.

------
robotburrito
Also I think that a big problem is our health care system. I may be wrong on
this, but I imagine it costs a company more money to employ an older person
who may actually use their health insurance or have health problems.

Removing the burden of health care from companies would maybe solve a bunch of
these problems and allow companies to risk hiring older people.

~~~
pugworthy
I believe it would be completely illegal (in the US) to not hire someone
because you perceived them as a health expense risk.

~~~
randomdude402
That's probably accurate, but if 20 people apply for a position and one gets
hired, is it not accurate that nobody is scrutinizing some list of 19 reasons
why 19 people didn't get the position?

These kinds of things seem like there is no way to enforce them.

I don't even know if that's a thing, health insurance being more expensive for
companies with older employees or whatever, but just in general. "You can't
fail to hire such and such type of person because it's illegal," doesn't seem
to actually have much practical ability to influence a hiring process if it
wants strongly enough to not be influenced.

I haven't done any research on this and could be completely off base. Just
have the same thought when I see this mentioned in general and started typing
this time.

------
sys_64738
It's easier to lead younger developers as they're raw and don't have
experience to call out their management chain. That's something older
developers do as they've seen it all before and know how they latest trend
ends. Management generally hates that.

~~~
ludamad
On the flip side, more experienced developers (nevermind age) might have used
that experience to become set in their ways. Younger developers might be more
moldable

------
blickentwapft
What will you do for income when you’re too old to get a job in IT?

~~~
sys_64738
By then it's already too late. You should have an exit strategy when bringing
the money in in the early years. Most folk in their twenties don't realize
they're forty before they know it.

~~~
MangoCoffee
agree. max your 401k and buy Index fund if you can. plan your retirement early
or save up your money and moved to developing country like Thailand, Taiwan or
any safer developing countries with low cost of living and just enjoy your
life.

my plan is retired at around 50s in Asia and just travel around Asia and do
some freelance works.

~~~
bananaface
I would hate to move halfway around the world for retirement if I had kids.

~~~
MangoCoffee
by the time that i'm in my 50s. i hope my kids are out of the house. its not
for everyone.

------
sandoooo
So, how does this square with all those ads asking for 5+ years of industry
experience in their very specific stack?

~~~
finnthehuman
5 years of X just says that the job market can sustain some number of requests
for candidates that don’t require as much ramp-up time once hired. It doesn’t
mean the candidates will be old, in fact looking for highly specialized tech
stacks rather than experience in the business domain of the product is a sign
of someone looking to hire young.

------
agentultra
I've worked with two types of engineers:

1) Those who believe in age stereotypes 2) Those who don't

There isn't some cliff you fall off of and become, "too old." That is one of
the central lies of ageism. You're suddenly too old to be cool, you're too old
to learn new things, you're too old to start something new, you're too old,
too old, too old.

So get it in now, while you're young! Work hard, put your head down because
once you're over that cliff it's done! You'll be too old to be a programmer
anymore! You'll be stuck in your ways, a crufty old fossil, someone who only
shows up and doesn't learn anything new.

I'm getting older. I'm picking up skateboarding. In recent years I've learned
how to formally verify systems using model checkers and theorem provers. I've
picked up on category theory and abstract algebra. I started streaming my side
project to learn how to implement a database from scratch in Haskell.

You'd think that I should either go into management or find another career.
This is a young person's game! You have to keep up with all the new
technology! Old people can't keep up!

The lambda calculus turned 84 this year. Binary trees have not changed much.
There was a paper released eight years ago that showed us how to implement co-
ordination free operations on B+-Trees. Hooray.

The real innovation still happens in small steps at the periphery.

Ageism makes us believe that our best years are short and fleeting. That all
of our work will be behind us for the majority of our lives. To talk about
expertise as a deficiency and experience as useless.

Your best years may yet be ahead of you.

------
toonies555
I think some older devs would rather leave the corporate world because they
can do better work and be happier on their own projects or freelancing.

------
wonderwonder
One thing that older engineers often have that younger don't is family
commitments. I am in my 40's with all the things that come along with that,
wife, kids, expectation of personal time, etc. With Covid hitting, my
productivity has plunged. I have young kids at home that I have to tutor, my
wife is working from home as well so constantly getting distracted by her work
calls. Kids stress both of us out, dogs barking etc. Its almost impossible to
get any deep work done. I work with a bunch of either younger people without
families or people my age that are childless. They have not been affected at
all. Employers very often want someone that will live to work for the company,
many of the middle aged engineers cannot / will not do that.

------
thrownaway954
Just remember everyone... a majority of the people who respond to surveys like
these are people who are unemployed right or have a gripe with how their life
is. very rarely do you get the person who is doing good and happy responding
to surveys.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
On the flip side, I've seen really good developers be passed up due to the
classic code-word: "too expensive"

~~~
ChrisRR
But quite often that is valid. Any job can only pay as much as the job is
worth.

If a more experienced developer who demands a higher salary is taking on work
which can be carried out by a less experienced and therefore cheaper
developer, it's to be expected that they wouldn't pay for the more expensive
developer.

Just because someone is a world class michelin star chef, you're still only
going to pay them mcdonalds wages for flipping burgers

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
Right, but if you give someone the bracket, they say they're fine with it,
they interview well and then HR says "it's too expensive" and you're billing
yourself as a youthful fancy startup... then reading between the lines is a
skill.

------
0xfffafaCrash
While it's certainly not the case everywhere, the truth is that a lot of
software development needs out there aren't terribly challenging to get to a
"good enough" state from a business value perspective. This is exacerbated by
the hyper-specialization of shallow roles where companies are basically
looking for technologists. Once upon a time people used to hire software
developers expecting them to figure out how to solve problems across almost
all software layers and to take their time doing it. Now many positions are
for churning out work with a specific library or framework in a specific
language. It doesn't take a long time for there to be diminishing returns in
terms of the worth of each extra year of experience when someone's role is to
work as a "React developer" or something like that especially if someone else
is responsible for making the designs and another person for setting up the
backend or if the bulk of the software can effectively be outsourced by
leaning on open source tech.

Factors like flexibility in work hour expectations and compensation favor
younger developers who tend to have fewer responsibilities outside of work but
have enough specialized skills to get the grunt work done and are able to put
in the hours to make up for their lack of experience. Generally younger
developers are not as well suited for making lots of bigger architectural
decisions since they don't have the experience to really grasp longterm
consequences of different approaches, but in terms of numbers, you need fewer
people making those decisions than those doing the grunt work and young people
with just a few years of experience often seem to do the grunt work about as
well as anyone.

This wouldn't be such a big problem for older software developers if there
wasn't a pay expectation gap or if they were as likely to be flexible about
hours. Rightly or wrongly, however, people expect higher compensation for
their experience, even if much of that experience isn't actually producing
that much more business value given the sort of work that they are actually
stuck doing. The world definitely has a place for the John Carmacks, but it's
really not that large a percentage of jobs where they can make the most of the
value they have to offer.

------
rsynnott
I do wonder if there's some conflation of age and institutionalisation; as
someone in mid 30s who knows plenty of people in the industry a decade or so
older, I'm just not seeing the "life ends at 40" thing that many commenters
seem to imply.

However, someone who's worked for 20 years at the same place (especially if
it's a place where things are done A Certain Way, and anything else is heresy)
may well have trouble moving job. And such people will of necessity be older.
I suspect that a lot of the perceived problems for older people moving jobs
are really more about institutionalised people moving jobs.

------
njacobs5074
Also an older dev (56) and I agree with other's comments that learning the
myriad FE frameworks feels like chasing my tail.

I've carved out a role where I work primarily on the back-end of my company's
platform, about 50% coding, about 25% mentoring/coaching, and the rest is
working with our product managers and business users to develop new
functionality.

I feel valued and feel like I'm making an important contribution to the
company.

But I am concerned that one of these days I'll no longer have the cognitive
muscle to do all of this.

~~~
dencodev
Young 30s here and I already feel like I don't have the muscle for it.

------
silentwanderer
As an 18 year old, I’ve learned so much in the past few years about developing
good software it’s mind-boggling. I can’t imagine what 10, 15, 20 years of
experience would look like.

~~~
nhumrich
The returns diminish over time.

What you learn over those years is incredibly helpful, as it takes a lot of
breadth/depth and time. But the rate at which you learn things goes down.
Similar to learning a foreign language. At first you are learning new words
everyday. At some point, you know all the common words, so learning new words
is impossible at the same rate as before.

------
codr7
I'm 43, with 20 years of solid experience in most major languages out there,
from backend to frontend.

I guess the virus is partly to blame, but I'm having a REALLY hard time
finding work right now; and I'm applying all over Europe with a focus on
Amsterdam & Copenhagen, remote or otherwise.

~~~
mhitza
I suggest switching to consultancy/freelance work. The interview process
nowadays in Europe is just a time waster.

Before switching to consultancy, I've wasted almost half a year applying to
various jobs. Multiple rounds of interviews, coding challenges, specialized
resumes and everything in between. Average response time from recruiters was 2
days to 1 week.

Took me less than two weeks to get my first client as an independent
contractor on a highly competitive freelance platform.

Also, don't hesitate to sign up with recruitment agencies. I was quite pleased
with the quality of forwarded jobs from recruitment agencies.

~~~
unnouinceput
Name of that highly competitive freelance platform?

~~~
mhitza
I was referring to Upwork, but if you've got the will to go through an
intensive interview process take a look at TopTal as well.

~~~
unnouinceput
I do Upwork since 2008. And toptal is a BS actually

------
ArtWomb
Real world IT services seem to be dominated by middle aged persons. Accenture,
Dell EMC, HPE, RedHat, etc. Particularly integration roles in gov, health,
banks. It takes decades to build contacts. And most folks seem to know each
other from way back and have similar war stories ;)

------
lapcatsoftware
The cognitive dissonance of the tech industry is that many companies do in
fact value their longtime employees, but they won't hire any new employees of
the same age.

You can be old in tech, as long as you were hired when you were young.

~~~
lapcatsoftware
The main problem that "older" workers have is just getting in the door.

Once they get in the door, they can often prove themselves, but they just
aren't given the same chances as younger workers.

------
godelmachine
My father is 58.

He works as an independent ERP Consultant.

Last week, he enrolled for a 6 month boot camp on web technologies with an
elite engineering school near his home.

He’s my inspiration to keep learning to remain relevant in Industry 4.0

------
cwbrandsma
They list documents stating 30 year old developers as old ... are you kidding
me? At 30, developers are just starting to understand the job (like all of the
non-coding skills).

------
game_the0ry
Question - why is it that experience / age / wisdom is an asset in other
professional trades [1], but it is seen s as a liability in tech?

I have a couple of theoretical answers.

One, perception of tech workers being semi-skilled labor (like low level
clerical work) lending it to being managed with "cost center" economics.
Middle managers from baby boomer and gen x grew up with idea that tech can
easily be "off-shored." The perception is that tech work is a necessary cost,
not a strategic element of pretty much all businesses. However, the next
generation of middle managers that grew up not knowing what life was like with
out the internet will recognize how important tech is to the business and will
shift the corporate attitude towards tech work.[2]

Two (this one will be a lot more upsetting), tech workers were introverted and
passive, which makes them easier to take advantage of by middle managers who
are not afraid to bully them around.[3] So when tech workers get laid off
after age 40, rather than fight and adapt, they blame ageism and go quietly
into the night. However, the next generation of tech workers seems to be a lot
more assertive in their comp and career expectations. I know I am.

Three, a combination of the above.

Fourth, none of the above and I am full of $hit. In which case, I am
interested in others' thoughts.

[1] Law, medicine, finance, accounting, etc

[2] A quick story on how corporate culture can change between generations.
When IBM was first trying to sell their PCs to businesses, none of them were
buying. So they hired a consulting company to figure out why. The consultants
came back and said to IBM that the problem with their PCs not selling was an
actuarial problem, not with their strategy - the younger people at those
companies were excited about new tech, but the decision makers (many of whom
were much older) did not see the value of new tech. Consultants told IBM to
wait until the decision makers retired. The rest is history.

[3] I have seen this play out, where tech workers are too intimidated to push
back against poor business decisions, like over-optimistic delivery deadlines.

~~~
MangoCoffee
>Question - why is it that experience / age / wisdom is an asset in other
professional trades [1], but it is seen s as a liability in tech?

Silicon Valley (software) Culture.

tech (software) company want cheap labors and believed youth can overcome any
difficulties. its deep rooted in Silicon Valley culture. From 19 yrs old Bill
Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel...etc.

While on the hardware side, most of engineers/founders are much older because
hardware is more unforgiving than software.

------
scott31
The "paper" seems to be of low quality for arxiv, not even has two column
layout.

~~~
dickiedyce
... and the methodology seems poor too. I had a sideline in magazine
journalism for a while... I'd be interested in the correlation between article
bias (pro / anti) versus age of writer (or target readership)

------
jolmg
It's a shame that this paper uses a URL shortening service intermediary for
its links. Eventually, those links will become useless at discretion of that
service and you can't even use them in the WaybackMachine either when that
happens. Not only because those URLs are unremarkable on their own (I doubt
the bitly links are present elsewhere on the web so the WaybackMachine would
be triggered into archiving them), but also because I doubt the WaybackMachine
would scan PDFs for links.

I leave record of the URL redirections here:

[https://bit.ly/2RKJW6S](https://bit.ly/2RKJW6S)

-> [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/22/google-pa...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/22/google-pays-11m-to-jobseekers-who-alleged-age-discrimination)

[https://bit.ly/2RIit5L](https://bit.ly/2RIit5L)

-> [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/boomers-30/201710/yo...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/boomers-30/201710/young-people-are-just-smarter)

[https://bit.ly/2yfZGYN](https://bit.ly/2yfZGYN)

-> [https://www.quora.com/Is-30-years-old-too-old-to-learn-compu...](https://www.quora.com/Is-30-years-old-too-old-to-learn-computer-programming)

[https://bit.ly/2K7tolx](https://bit.ly/2K7tolx)

-> [https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ageing/](https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ageing/)

[https://bit.ly/2z19eXW](https://bit.ly/2z19eXW)

-> [https://empirical-software.engineering/assets/data/google-se...](https://empirical-software.engineering/assets/data/google-search-results_us-en_2019-08-02_annotated.csv)

[https://bit.ly/2XEuWez](https://bit.ly/2XEuWez)

-> [https://github.com/sbaltes/api-retriever](https://github.com/sbaltes/api-retriever)

[https://bit.ly/3agASwY](https://bit.ly/3agASwY)

-> [https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm](https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm)

-> [https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm)

-> [http://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination](http://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination)

-> [https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination](https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination)

[https://bit.ly/2Bcuc7y](https://bit.ly/2Bcuc7y)

-> [https://www.zhihu.com/question/55618811](https://www.zhihu.com/question/55618811)

~~~
waynesoftware
Thank you for posting these. Some other links of potential interest:

[https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-
tech-...](https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-world/)

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-leaders-greyglers-
navi...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-leaders-greyglers-navigating-
our-way-bigger-better-tracy-wilk/)

[https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Work-Making-Modern-
Elder/dp/05...](https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Work-Making-Modern-
Elder/dp/0525572902)

These are from [https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/tmrg-
gitl...](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/tmrg-gitlab-
generational-understanding/)

