
Why the Tech Industry Needs to Deal With Its Ageism Problem - slfisher
http://simplicity.laserfiche.com/content/why-tech-industry-needs-deal-its-ageism-problem
======
steven777400
This seems to come up a lot, and I agree that age discrimination is an issue.
However, there are some obvious reasons for it outside of the the "we think
older people are stupid" line. Younger people will often be willing to work
more, for less pay, in more marginal conditions. (Witness the discussion a
while back about whether ping pong tables and catered food was a perk or a red
flag)

Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern
platforms and are unlikely to "write FORTRAN in any language" (JS, Ruby, etc).

We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having
everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal
comprehension.

Finally, tech startups today are largely focused on the "exit": it's not about
building and maintaining a product in the long term. Older employees have the
planning, analysis, and maintenance experience to establish a product vision
for the next decade. But the startup founder (by and large) doesn't want to
think of a product over a decade; it's all about MVP, pivots, and fast exits.

Not that any of that is bad, it just doesn't fit well with the average older
employee.

I'll admit when hiring I have a little bit of the opposite bias. Very young
employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage?
we should rewrite it all in RoR and JS". Hey man, we're still maintaining
COBOL apps here, slow your roll. It's all about long term planning and
maintenance for us.

~~~
alextingle
You are talking rubbish.

> Younger people will often be willing to work more...

Younger people _have to_ work more, because they don't have enough experience
to work efficiently, yet.

> Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern
> platforms

So, 1 year of "shiny new tech" > 1 year of "shiny new tech" \+ 20 years of
other relevant experience? Riiiight.

> homogeneity is valuable to an early startup

Wow. Homogeneity is a killer for any team. The whole point of building a team
is to find people who can work together, and become more than the sum of their
parts. For that, you need people whose strengths cover for their team-mates'
weaknesses... the very opposite of homogeneity.

OK, it's not all rubbish. I agree with this...

> Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this
> legacy garbage? we should rewrite it all in RoR and JS

~~~
pmichaud
I don't think you're be fair at all. Young people don't work more because they
suck, they work more for a variety of reasons including: they aren't yet jaded
or burned out, they don't know how to pace themselves, they have fewer family
obligations, they are more excitable.

Second, no one has 20 years of relevant experience. Maybe computer science
fundamentals have stayed about the same, but it was 1993 20 years ago, and
what we do now looks nothing like what those of us who were around then were
doing. Further, all those years of experience could have, and often do,
entrench very bad habits. I've seen some atrocious code from people switching
from older workhorse languages to more modern ones, it's not pretty.

Finally, /the _data_ suggests/ homogeneity is valuable in early startups.
You're not wrong about needing a team with different strengths, but you also
need a team that really understands each other intuitively and agrees on
fundamental values and principles. There's too much friction otherwise.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
>no one has 20 years of relevant experience

I've been designing game APIs for 20+ years, actually. And that's what I'm
doing now as a contractor.

I'm still working in C++ like I was in 1993 as well. I first learned C++ in
1989, so that's also 20+ years experience.

>all those years of experience could have, and often do, entrench very bad
habits.

Working exclusively with languages like PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript can entrench
some pretty atrocious habits as well. I would put my "started with assembly
language and moved eventually to high level scripting languages" habits up
against a "started with JavaScript" programmer's habits any day.

>Finally, the data suggests homogeneity is valuable in early startups.

What data? I think compatibility between developers is important. But I'm
working on a project right now where the median developer age is about 25 (I'm
more than twice as old as some team members), and I'm making crazy fast
progress on my part of the project, keeping everyone happy. Beyond happy,
really; no one expected me to get as far as I have this quickly. And yet I'm
putting in 30 hours a week or so.

I think being awesome is valuable, on any project, startup or otherwise, and
that "fundamental values and principles" is a red flag indicating "OK working
tons of overtime", which is clearly not necessary if you have the awesome.

~~~
zanny
Just out of curiosity, as someone who has been using C++ a lot for two years
rather than 20, do you use a lot of the new C++11 features? I started in 03
and can't think to go back to no smart pointers, move semantics, threading
library, or > > template closing.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
I've been using boost smart pointers since long before they became part of the
C++11 standard. :)

I haven't been using most of the other C++11 features, primarily because they
aren't on all the platforms I'm targeting (yet!). But I will. They look very
tasty. :)

------
francoisdevlin
Personally, I think ageism in the industry is great. Let my competitors ignore
the large pool of experienced engineers out there, and hire some young kid who
is "cheaper". While he's fixing his design for the tenth time, I'll pay that
expense old dinosaur to do something boring, like get it right the first time.

~~~
kemiller
Last team I built, that was exactly how I hired. My team of 5, all 35+, could
run circles around your typical team of 20. Only downside was it was sometimes
hard to get them to try new things.

~~~
amorphid
Why would I want to try something new when Perl and MySQL running on Solaris
and Apache gets the job done so well? Just kidding :). As I get older, I do
find it easier to rationalize using the older, mature thing over a newer, less
tested thing.

------
peeters
In issues like this, it's important to interpret statistics correctly. For
instance, the article cites this:

>“Eight of the companies, the study said, had median employee age of 30 or
younger.” In comparison, the Times reported, the median age of the American
worker was 42.3 years old.

Ageism is not the only explanation for this discrepancy. The software industry
has _exploded_ in growth in the last twenty years. Most other industries have
not seen the same rate of growth. When a labor pool for an industry is
strained, it sends a signal to young people to pursue a career in that field.
As a result, the labor pool is filled by proportionally more young people.

Eventually the growth of an industry will cease. Then less young people will
pursue it as a career path, and the median age of laborers in that field will
rise.

~~~
VLM
The growth appears to have leveled off in the early 1980s except for the
momentary dotcom bubble more than a decade ago.

Google and the computinged wordpress blog claim the BLS reported 550K-ish
programmers in the mid 80s and about 500K now. We're in a long term decline
since 2005 and it looks like we might drop below 400K by the end of the
decade, but for the last 30 years its more or less been around 500K.

To quote the computinged blog "Getting reliable data on programmer employment
is surprisingly difficult."

Going into the field would have been a brilliant idea in 1975, but in 2013 its
kind of like becoming a UAW autoworker, its more like when are you going to be
downsized, not if.

------
thoughtsimple
I wonder if ageism is really that much of a problem. I'm 51 and still working
as a software developer but all of my contemporaries have moved on from
development to something else.

I've definitely experienced ageism but I suspect that it is rarely
institutionalized. Instead I think that people like me are relatively rare. I
have no real interest in management or another career--I like being a
developer. That means when I show up for a job interview, I don't exactly fit
in since it is likely that few of the candidates are my age or older.
Sometimes I can overcome this and other times I'm not really given a chance.

I mostly work as a contractor so I have frequent job changes and I haven't
found it to be that much of a problem. It is just another hurdle that has to
be overcome. The group I'm working in now, I'm the oldest developer by at
least 10 years.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Contracting is the way to go for the older crowd.

How else could I be making $125-$250/hour? No company is going to pay me
$250k-$400k in salary, and if they did, they'd expect to own me 24/7.

This way I get to work part time, have lots of time with my kids, and when I
_do_ work overtime, I get paid for the extra hours. So I know they aren't
asking it lightly.

At least right now I've had _no_ trouble finding gigs. Work's been finding me,
in fact. I have more options available than I can take. And between gigs, I
can work on personal projects, one of which may turn into a real business
someday. It's all good. :)

~~~
nostrademons
A number of big companies _do_ pay in the $250-400K range for experienced
computer programmers with a solid track record, and give them reasonable
hours.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
I have heard hints of this, but I have a number of other...quirks...that
prevent me from seeking this out. I like to be running my own business, for
instance; my next product is being funded by my current gigs. Take a job as an
employee and they expect you to stick around for a couple of years. I want my
next three projects to be released in that time frame.

------
pkteison
I'm 37. I'm willing to believe there is are two decent reasons for some
apparent ageism. I think #2 here is probably in the not-safe-to-share-in-
public category, but honest discussion requires embracing one of those every
now and then, so here goes:

a) When supply of well trained programmers is increased, it happens with 22
year olds, who are graduating from college. There is a 30+ year lag on those
folks becoming old programmers. To hire a 50 year old programmer, he would
either have had to graduate back in 1985 when there were a lot fewer people
studying programming, or else changed careers at some point. And a lot of
people don't change careers. There simply aren't as many older programmers
available because it's a new field as these things go.

b) I've wasted enough years on dead-end tech that I'm more cautious about what
I spend my time on now. Things I have become an expert in that are now useless
to me and probably not valued by an employer:

TCL, Oracle 8i and PL/SQL, Ada, Java 1.1/1.2, EJB, Java AWT & Swing, Struts,
Delphi, Flex, Paradox, Access + VBScript, ASP.NET 1.0, ODBC/OLE/ADO.NET, Linq
to SQL, Subversion/MKS Source Integrity/Rational Clearcase/Perforce,
differences between bash/ksh/csh scripting, awk+sed, perl, prototype.

And those are just the dead-ends that I regret exploring, because I think I
will never use them again and because I could have spent that time learning
something more useful. I know the time wasn't completely wasted, but time
spent on prototype would have been better spent on jquery, time spent on linq
to sql would have been better spent on nhibernate, etc. Reflecting on that
leads to a bit of analysis paralysis when looking at TodoMVC to pick which
next framework to invest time and effort in - will this be another flash in
the pan, is this nothing but Fire and Motion (1)? I expect many employers
would probably benefit more from a team of people who lack that perspective,
because they'll be giving up more of their evenings and weekends on things
that might pan out. I still do that, but a bit less these days, and I wait a
bit longer before I dive in. Some might value my caution, but they probably
aren't starting a bootstrapped or VC backed change-the-world-through-web-
programming moonshot business.

(1)
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html)

------
RogerL
I'm replying to this one only because it is on the top; I am not singling the
author out in any way.

This is all so foreign to me. I moved to SV 2 years ago, and I am 47. Y'all
are in such a bubble. Every day the recruitment ads state 'change the world -
join our social dog teeth brushing cloud service'. I'm only _very_ slightly
joking, merely to avoid calling out the actual companies and services. You
know what changes the world? Dialysis machines. Microprocessors. Crash
avoidance systems. Artificial hearts. More efficient aircraft. Factory
automation.

My point is that it takes experience and time to build something important and
large. You can't 'move fast and break things' if you are writing an accounting
package or code for a chemical reaction chamber. You don't 'pivot' into a new
$1B investment in new microprocessor.

Sure, if you are starting up the social dog teeth cleaning service you
probably don't need much more than a few 20 somethings willing to kludge
together 10 different half baked components (full stack developers!), and
there is no point to knocking that kind of environment - I'm sure it is very
cost effective. But I see this kind of thinking and lack of planning leaking
into other businesses and ideas. I look at job ads for very difficult
undertakings using the SV buzzwords of the day - pivot, agile, and so on, and
my neuron starts throbbing.

Moreover, I rather worry about all the people coming up in the bubble,
thinking it is bedrock reality. I may be wrong, but I suspect the world's
appetite for social X services is small. No, I don't suspect it, I know it.
Things like microprocessors, thermostats, smart Tvs, graphics cards, dialysis
machines, car entertainment systems, accounting packages, factory floor
software, and so much more are the engines of our economy. And I see so many
posters on HN that I would _never_ hire for a job that required engineering
and planning. They don't have the skills, they aren't learning the skills, and
when they are 30-35 all they will know how to do is 'program by magic' \-
change things until it works. Ya, no, you can't work on my flight computer.

This is probably just personal, but there is a very sour taste in my mouth
whenever I hear about 'pivots' and 'exits'. I get why they are important in
some HN type companies. But our world is truly built on products that require
forethought ('move fast, break things' \- new motto of Boeing? Not so much),
planning, solid engineering, and great technical skill. I wonder why so many
20 somethings pour their talents in lives in something that will be discarded
in a month when their myopic 'leader' goes chasing after the latest shiny
thing to catch his eye (which is, IMO, the usual reason for a 'pivot'). I
guess it pays well. I wish they were working on a better JIT, a lower wattage
cpu, or what have you. I wonder at their job prospects when they are 35, have
a family, don't have time to go back to school to learn calculus or what have
you, and didn't 'hit' and make fuck you money. And I wish founders would
actually do a market survey before launching the 5th dog teeth cleaning
service in the same tiny geographic area. So many postmortems on here are
truly head scratching. You didn't realize that this tiny pocket of under-
served market, which is of keen and relevant interest to dozens of companies
all around you, maybe, just maybe, has huge barriers to entry or scaling, and
that every other company already explored it and wrote it off as unprofitable?
Everyone but you is leaving money on the table? Hmmm.

Sorry, I am just having a 'wow, the silicon valley bubble sure is weird'
moment. And I'm old, and cranky. Get off my lawn. But seriously, be very, very
careful about taking the ideas and lessons from some tiny start up and trying
to apply it to anything outside of that very odd, self-referential world.

~~~
BoldBoldness
As someone from a liberal arts background who is taking steps to change
careers, it's comments like this that are making me want to go into computer
engineering rather than computer science. It'll be harder, but as someone
whose career suffered from the last recession I've become a bit more sensitive
to bubbles and the growing size of the labor pool in CS. I fear that in the
next decade being a programmer could become more akin to being a lawyer today.

I'm not trying to make an argument about whether what I say is true. I'm just
expressing a few musings.

~~~
erichmond
I do think web programming is going to be become commoditized in next 10 years
or so. Don't get me wrong, the salaries will still be livable, but for the
kind of websites the OP talks about, there's going to be more supply then
demand.

That said, I do think there will always be a need for people who are willing
to solve tough problems using methods and technologies that may not be cool,
but are effective.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Great point.

If you're specializing in webdev, it _cannot_ hurt to look beyond and make
contingency plans if this turns out to be true. You don't want to get laid off
unexpectedly and find yourself technically lacking. What I mean by this: find
a more specialized area and see if it's interesting. Could be mobile, machine
learning, compilers, etc. Don't be scared of systems programming -- it may
come back with a vengeance.

FWIW, webdev has smelled of commoditization and 'cheap' devs for a little bit
to me, and it's scary. Everyone gets screwed by this; especially as you get
older.

~~~
mahyarm
What kind of webdev are we talking about? Large backend services or a
wordpress website? Or even the Ghost [1] blogging platform? By mobile, do you
also include mobile web front ends then? Do you include Twitter & Facebook as
part of that kind of commoditized developer?

I'm an iOS developer and have been looking into webdev to spread out a bit.
Possibly something like clojure for a backend and node.js for quick simple
services.

[1] [http://ghost.org/features/](http://ghost.org/features/)

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Good question! I'm speaking mostly to the simple CRUD apps that startups often
concern themselves with. Complex backend services will be fine. My heuristic
is this: if a framework is giving you huge productivity advantages, there's
nothing stopping someone from figuring out how to GUI-ify/sugarcoat the parts
you write as a good disciple of this week's True Framework. After all, that's
what VB did: made it easy for non-devs to make a Windows GUI with a little bit
of code. It will happen to webdev, and it will happen to iOS
(usepropeller.com).

How do you counter this? Easy: specialize in something requiring hard-fought
knowledge. It could be great chops in UX, or deep domain knowledge. But I use
the word hard-fought intentionally: this is know-how that is not easily
digestable from a blog post.

Industry may require you to be skilled in certain frameworks, but it's not the
same at all as having strong, general programming skills you can apply
everywhere. Personally, I'm looking to Clojure for the infinite meta-
programmability, and resulting brain-refactoring that ensues.

It's about a lifetime of education, and always challenging yourself. That's
the real payoff. Industry will run in circles, convincing itself it is
innovating, while ignoring a lot of cool stuff done in the past. Dig into it,
learn, and write about it.

------
zeidrich
The problem isn't that young employees have qualities that make them more
appealing. That's just the reality of the situation.

The problem is when a candidate who has better qualities gets passed over for
a younger candidate based on prejudices based on the previous generalization.

Say you want a skilled programmer who is going to work for a certain wage and
put in an amount of overtime, and you pitch it to a fresh college grad, and a
35 year old who just got downsized out of a job; when the interview concludes,
it's obvious that they are both willing to take the wage you're offering, and
the 35 year old is far more knowledgeable.

If you take the kid because you think the older guy might not be as willing as
he claims to put in overtime, or because you think he might be too set in his
ways, or because he might be too old to match the cultural fit... That's a
problem.

People can hire young people because they're cheap. Especially startups, who
maybe can't afford to pay for experience. Likewise, someone with a mortgage
and kids might be less willing to look for a job with a risky business. So the
average age might drop in those kinds of businesses and that's OK.

The problem is when you see the effect and invent the cause. "More young
people are in successful startups, that means avoid old people if you want to
be successful".

Instead it could be just "frugal startups are more likely to succeed, so don't
spend too much on your labour" in which case given two candidates willing to
take the same wage, the one with the better skills should win, regardless of
age.

------
salmonellaeater
While I agree with the sentiment, the statistics quoted don't support the
author's thesis.

> The average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such
> as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40.

> Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25.

> The highest rate of entrepreneurship in America has shifted to the 55–64 age
> group, with people over 55 almost twice as likely to found successful
> companies than those between 20 and 34 – in fact, the 20-34 age bracket has
> the lowest rate of entrepreneurial activity.

If ten times as many people over 50 than people under 25 try to start
businesses, then the statistics strongly favor the under-25's. These
statistics don't mean anything unless you know the number of people in each
age group who start businesses.

> 75% have more than six years of industry experience and 50% have more than
> 10 years when they create their startup.

What does this even mean? Years worked is not the same as having useful
experience.

The article would be much stronger if it showed evidence that older workers
were more productive, more likely to succeed at starting a business, or were
in some other way undervalued by the current job market.

------
andyhmltn
Sadly enough, I've experienced this. At my last job, after requesting a pay
rise my boss just said no and followed up with 'well you should think yourself
lucky, your pay is pretty good for someone of your age.' I quit about 2 weeks
afterwards.

------
danso
Unfortunately, the list of companies with the oldest workers -- IBM, Oracle,
Dell, HP, among them -- would evoke eyerolls from most young hip tech workers
today. What's Apple's median age?

Of all the big young tech companies, I would think that Google would be the
one to benefit most from older, experienced employees (besides the group of
all-stars it already has, such as Norvig)...Google's business encroaches on a
lot of other domains, and domain knowledge is something that (usually) gets
better with age. Perhaps in 5 to 10 years, there will be a bigger group of 40+
yr old professionals with enough tech experience/savvy to be more obvious
assets to tech startups.

~~~
nailer
> I would think that Google would be the one to benefit most from older,
> experienced employees (besides the group of all-stars it already has, such
> as Norvig)

+1. Google and Microsoft do a great job in this regard. Not just hiring older
workers but getting _new_ stuff built by people with massive amounts of
experience.

\- Ken Thompson and Rob Pike (C/Unix fame) are bringing you Go.

\- Anders Hejlsberg (TurboPascal/Delphi) is bringing you TypeScript.

------
nknighthb
> _It seems the young engineers, growing up in an era of unlimited storage,
> didn’t know how to tackle the problem._

Starting off with some ageism and general cluelessness of your own doesn't
help. If they wanted a "young engineer" to generically optimize data storage,
I would be at least half-competent, and could give them the names of several
engineers far younger than 77 who would be excellent at such work in general.

What neither I nor virtually any other engineer, young or old, would know, and
what the engineer who helped build the thing would, is anything about the
specific equipment and code in use on Voyager. This is specialized knowledge,
just like a lot of the knowledge young 2013 NASA engineers have.

It is equally as beneficial to employ those engineers to modify the systems
they built as it was to employ Lawrence Zottarelli to modify the system he
built. Age is unrelated.

------
Hossenffefer
I think this problem will take care of itself. It is a numbers game.
Eventually all these twenty-somethings will be thirty-somethings; and with
that they will need the long term work relationships needed for raising
families and planning for pivot into the Golden Years. Statistically the vast
majority of them will have to work for money and I very much doubt that people
will just exit the game at 30. They will just have to adjust their
expectations.

~~~
gregrata
I have no doubt Zuckerberg will be changing his tune in the years to come.

"Young people are just smarter"

That has to be one of the most stupid things I've heard! :)

------
Pxtl
So, at last count of criticisms our industry is ageist, sexist, able-ist and
racist. Did I miss anything?

~~~
GrinningFool
If that's all you're taking away from these criticisms, then yes - you likely
are.

------
zdmc
I am surprised that so many of the comments seem to be ignoring the obvious:
more experience generally means higher wage in the tech industry. It's a money
issue.

I've personally worked with older programmers, and there has been little
noticeable difference in capabilities (and often added benefits of
organizational know-how). The issue is the pay.

Incidentally, it's the same reason why big companies are championing H1B visas
by saying "there aren't enough US nationals to fill the roles" (even though
the numbers don't bear the statement out): companies want to pay less for
somewhat equivalent skills. Who wouldn't?

------
ianstallings
I'm getting on the old side of the average, approaching 40. But in my
experience I've never seen a startup founder tell me that I or anyone else was
too old. Mainly because the industry really is a meritocracy and it's about
what a person can do _now_ , usually. Fortunately for me most juniors don't
know _all_ my tricks just yet.

I will say this though - I have to constantly step my game up to stay
relevant. At 50 I will be expected to not only know programming very well, but
the industry as a whole including analysis, planning, finances, management,
etc.

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
> I have to constantly step my game up to stay relevant

This doesn't strike me as the case in other skilled professions. A successful
middle aged CPA, MD, lawyer, or finance exec often has the option of more or
less coasting on accumulated relationships and prestige.

This idea that a skilled software engineer must always be training up on his
own dime and time is really kind of strange, in the bigger picture.

~~~
ianstallings
I never looked at it that way but one could draw analogies to things like new
techniques in medicine. Such as a new robotic operating mechanism or new ways
to treat people. On the other hand CPAs seem to have had their work set in
stone since people used tables and numbers, I feel for those guys. Lawyers
probably have so much research to do I doubt they ever really stop learning
(albeit it's charged to the client) .

But learning is probably what keeps me from getting bored. I will say though,
if I have to learn _another_ JS framework I'm going to === my eyes out.

------
jdminhbg
This is awful. What does the list of out-of-context statistics about
entrepreneurship have to do with hiring tech workers? Who is the "Tech
Industry" and how are "they" going to deal with an ageism problem defined by
the article as simply statistically skewing young?

------
BigChiefSmokem
The sweetest thing to see is an old master working alongside a young buck in
tandem. You get the best of both worlds.

Anyone who is on either side of that equation is fooling themselves on the
reality of engineering and team dynamics.

------
ihsw
It's not an ageism problem, it's a loyalty and perception problem. Old people
by their nature cling to institutions of loyalty and start-ups are definitely
not known for staying around for +3 years.

Furthermore start-ups also implicitly prefer "just good enough" in order to
get your company up and flying enough to quickly accrue investor interest,
whereas stability forms the bottom-line of our elder engineers -- and stable
systems require far more time than some investors are comfortable with.

Even worse, there is the management aspect. Older people have very different
management styles, and throwing caution to the wind is definitely not among
their managerial toolset. If your company has older people in positions of
power then it definitely scares vast swaths of people away -- from eager
investors looking to turn a quick buck and energetic young engineers looking
to for autonomy to work without anyone second-guessing their decisions.

Finally, the saying "old is gold" applies quite well, however that gold needs
regular polish to remain shining.

~~~
VLM
"Old people by their nature cling to institutions of loyalty"

You're a little out of date. That applies to the gold watch retirement crowd
from WWII and "Mad Men" era and all that. None of those guys are under 80. The
kind of people who think "talking pictures" on celluloid is high tech.

We are talking about (former) kids who listened to Nirvana on CDs while Kurt
Cobain was still alive, not listened to Gunsmoke on the vacuum tube radio
during the great depression LOL.

~~~
gregrata
THANK YOU. I was going to point this out. Waaay out of date :)

------
carsongross
The reality for older developer is that you are going to have to:

1) Move to management to continue advancing

2) Find one of the very few large to midsize companies that has a long-term
developer career track comparable to their executive track

3) Start you own thing and exploit the fact that you are more productive than
younger developers, and _control the purse strings_

Large and even mid-size and event ostensibly tech companies still, for the
most part, view developers as an R&D cost center. They look at cheap
development resources, either young kids or foreign, and think "For the price
of 1 developer, I could have 10!"

Now they have 2^10 problems.

~~~
buckbova
In nearly every profession there is a ceiling for the doers. There is a
position in a senior/lead/architect role and a pay rate you hit within
companies that you can't exceed besides some annual 1% raise.

Those who are still motivated to move up must go in to management or strike
out on their own. Chances are if you have reached this point the trappings of
your previous success has made the latter choice a risky undertaking.

------
blueblob
In general I, at age 26, agree that experience gained with age can provide a
strong benefit in terms of code organization, management, interpersonal
relations, and many other factors. I think it's a gross misrepresentation,
however, to say:

 _... Suzanne Dodd, had to coax another 77-year-old engineer, Lawrence
Zottarelli, out of retirement to modify the old technology so it could store
more data. It seems the young engineers, growing up in an era of unlimited
storage, didn’t know how to tackle the problem._

Last time I checked we still don't have unlimited storage... and Is this
really because the young engineers didn't know how to tackle the problem, or
because the code was poorly documented and written in a way that would be
confusing to anyone who was not the original engineer? Programming styles have
changed; people used to have to use their memory very efficiently and
therefore had tricks to use it more efficiently that aren't as popular now
(sacrificed for readability/maintainability), that doesn't mean that young
people can't learn those tricks, just that they haven't had to.

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badman_ting
The funny thing about the efforts to increase diversity among developers is
that it's just increasing the inputs of the ageism meat grinder we're all
headed into. So everyone besides white males gets to have a harder time
joining the profession, only to get chewed up and spat out like the rest of
us. Lucky them. (OK, I admit that's actually not funny at all)

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jamespitts
Experience, skills with the newer technologies, "cultural fit" (in the true,
organizational meaning of the concept): I see these as objective measures.
They are important.

What cannot be overlooked though is the emotional aspect of interviewing. It
leads to all sorts of biases, and in a subtle way drives racist and ageist
hiring practices. I think that "comfort level" with the applicant is a
particularly hazardous feeling as it can be confused with cultural fit. If not
checked, hiring people within our comfort zone produces a homogenous work
environment and an insular organization.

I often find myself thinking more clearly about candidates when I actively
counter the "this person is not in my tribe" notion that I believe is behind
"comfort level". After all, we are not a fraternity or sorority hiring to make
friends.

It comes down to being professional and objective, and being mature enough to
hire and work with people outside of our generation or culture.

------
johngalt
A low average age isn't an indicator of ageism by default. It would make sense
that people of different ages would be interested in different types of
employers. Consider the following job characteristics:

1\. Business travel is a plus to the young crowd and a minus to the older.

2\. Legacy technology is a plus to the older crowd and a minus to the younger.

3\. Large vs small teams. A younger group will have more generalists, and
older group more specialists. A younger team will be small with minimal layers
in the way. An older team will need a larger group to support the
specialization gained over the years of experience.

Picture a large company that designs motherboards. No travel, established
technology, large teams of specialists. Now envision a distributed team of <10
working on some new document classification web app on AWS. I'd wager that a
completely different age group would be found in each circumstance. Not
necessarily due to ageism.

------
buckbova
Some of my experience on hiring "older" engineers (I currently have over 10
years experience in software eng/dev):

1\. They have a family with responsibilities, sick kids, and dance recitals,
etc.

The bad:

Leads to, less professional growth outside of work, more personal days, more
sick days, more personal phone calls during work.

The good:

Once comfortable, they rarely leave the job unless forced out.

2\. They attempt to solve every problem with the same set of solutions. Few
attempt to find new technologies or try different things.

The bad:

The implementation may not be the best one available that will set up the
business for future success.

The good:

Solutions are generally predictable.

3\. Lack of motivation to prove themselves.

The bad:

The project deadlines are just met. They do just what's asked of them and not
more.

The good:

Deadlines are met. They don't try to tackle mroe than they are capable of by
expanding the problem domain.

~~~
gregrata
20+ years here.

While I'm sure there are some 40-something's that are like the above, I don't
know of many - most people I work with are 35-45, are very hard working,
innovative, highly motivated, always learning new things, and work a lot.

Lots of younger people I work with party a lot (and are hung over lots),
distracted constantly, aren't at all loyal, are constantly distracted by the
shiny new toys, and super arrogant

(and YES, I am purposely using a bad stereotype, just like a lot of the posts
here are in the other direction. One thing experience has taught me is to NOT
stereotype based on meaningless things like sex, race, or age - look at what
someone can do - passion, drive creativity, intelligence, etc. If you base
your decisions on foolish stereotypes, in either direction, you are just
limiting yourself and your company)

------
PaulHoule
I think many workplaces have an idealized picture of what kind of person is a
programmer, manager and so forth.

I worked at one place where boomer IT staff were happy. One guy told me, "It's
great, I just plan to coast a few more years to retirement."

Gen X and younger people were miserable at this place. One guy who was 27 was
fed up with not being taken seriously so he (1) started an MBA program (which
the employer had to support at least partially) and (2) deliberately gained
weight, and (3) went to a hair salon and had them do a fancy tint job on his
hair with aluminum foil and stuff so he'd get grey highlights.

------
lettergram
I know personally, I intend to create a company after I get experience from
industry. I am a 21 year old college student, so that means ill be somewhere
between 28-35 when I start a company. At which point I will probably higher
younger for cheaper. Perhaps that is part of the reason those companies have
such younger workers. Most Programmers either do consulting, start their own
business, burnout, or change career paths by 30 based on the 20 or so I talked
to.

I could be totally off, but from what I know and have seen this seems to be
the trends.

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sgw1138
Throwaway account. I recently had an interview with a start up from the latest
YC batch. First words out of the founder's mouth, after hello: "So, how old
are you?"

For a moment, I was speechless.

Not sure if it was just social awkwardness and shyness that made our young
founder jump to that question. But in what universe is that ever an
appropriate question in a job interview?

(I'm in my early thirties.)

~~~
gregrata
That founder should be very careful, if he doesn't want his company mired in a
bunch of lawsuits:
[http://jobsearch.about.com/od/interviewsnetworking/a/illegal...](http://jobsearch.about.com/od/interviewsnetworking/a/illegalinterv.htm)

(not suggestion people should just start suing, but this is up there with not
wanting to hire someone because of the color of her skin).

------
ChikkaChiChi
The bigger concern is that a prospective employee must show a willingness to
adapt and evolve from a technological aspect, as opposed to feeling that
whatever they already know is "good enough"

An unwillingness to train does exist in the more seasoned veteran demographic;
but it's just as bad when you get young developer that is a evangelical about
their particular niche.

------
gregrata
A good read on age and genius:
[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius_pr.html](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius_pr.html)

------
hawkharris
Great closing line: "Avoid ageism. It isn’t rocket science. Even when it is."

~~~
herbig
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I thought the closing line was
terrible. It's a very complicated issue, and not something you can just say to
avoid.

~~~
hsmyers
So you are suggesting that discrimination on skin color is complicated? That
discrimination based on prospect is older the the person conducting the
interview is not something you can just say avoid? That a woman wouldn't fit
into your macho 'Brogrammer' culture? I'd go on but you seem to be a fan of
very short sighted thinking.

Check that. I would like to suggest that wisdom from the prehistoric days of
programming seems to fit best here: 'Use the right tool(individual) for the
task' Nothing else is relevant. The only subject worthy of discussion in an
interview is can they do the job. If the answer is yes then you can solve
'other' problems after they become a problem...

~~~
DanBC
People have unconscious biases. Merely telling them to avoid those biases is
unhelpful. Giving them ideas how to avoid those biases is more helpful.

"Have someone screening applications. That person also removes anything that
identifies protected characteristics" is one tip. (In the UK those are age,
disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil union, pregnancy and
maternity, race, religion, sex, and sexuality. In the US they are race,
colour, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexuality, pregnancy,
citizenship[1], familial status, disability, veteran status, and genetic
information.)

------
cpprototypes
Experience matters a lot in software development. For example, after many
years as a software developer this is one of the valuable lessons I've
learned:

Outside data is ALWAYS dirty.

There is no clean data. And part of the value of experience is knowing how to
handle this. For example, assume I get a very large data set from a third
party that is crucial to my project. Unfortunately, all the fields are
strings. Years of experience have taught me the following ways to deal with
this:

1) Implement a lot of logic and validation into the program itself or as a
pre-process step. This is a lot of work, requires a lot of domain knowledge,
you may still miss a few edge cases, it will force the deadline to be pushed
back, and increase the budget. However, those are the disadvantages. The
advantages are that this could become a competitive advantage. Maybe no one
else knows or has tried to clean up this data before. Identifying and doing
this work can lead to a whole new business. A classic example of this is GIS
data. GIS data is very very dirty. Street, St, St., Highway, Hwy, Freeway,
Fwy, all typical examples of how dirty the data is. Companies like Navteq are
based on their ability to clean up GIS data. Apple's Map app was a disaster
because Google is so good at and has years of experience cleaning up GIS data.

2) Push back on the third party to clean up their data. Doing this takes some
finesse and social/business skills. You can't just say, the data is hard to
handle. That sounds like whining and laziness. Your manager can't do anything
to help you if that's all you have. Instead one tactic is to make a schema
(this is what WSDL and XML Schemas were invented for) and tell the third party
that their data must conform. Then it becomes their problem. They might push
back, but now your manager has something to fight with. But if they agree to
conform and the schema is bad, then it will become your fault (the third party
will just say, hey it conforms to your schema so that's your problem). So you
better make sure the schema is good (experience helps here). And it may
require meetings with the third party's technical team to compromise or figure
out what a good schema is (which requires social/business skills and
experience).

3) Identifying these problems early. If these data issues are not considered
or found early, they will lead to big issues later. This is why senior
developers get their work done fast and go home early. They don't make
mistakes like using floats for currency or assuming a string is always a
certain format. Junior developers make those kinds of mistakes and spend 80
hour weeks fixing it in the code, rewriting unit tests, and running scripts
against the database to carefully migrate the data. They may seem more
"productive" but they created the work (like the broken windows fallacy).

