
Sucks to be an old engineer - ekm2
http://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/sucks-to-be-an-old-engineer/
======
MaggieL
It doesn't suck to be an old engineer. It sucks to be an engineer with
outdated skills.

I learned FORTRAN in 1968. I learned Scala in 2012.

I'll be 61 this week...and I just started a new job developing in Scala.

~~~
MetaCosm
One of the sharpest developers I have ever worked with -- was 63. He did only
mobile development and only would agree to work 30 hours a week. When I
pressed him on it, he explained that he liked to constantly be working on both
Android and iOS projects, 30 hours a week each, and that kept his backlog of
waiting clients happy.

EDIT: He completed the iOS application under budget with wonderful tests.

~~~
zerr
I really wonder at what rates one might work at these ages.

~~~
ihsw
At that age the rates are irrelevant compared to the health insurance
compensation. Most people at that age would be willing to take a pay cut in
exchange for generous health benefits and flexible hours.

~~~
jarek
I must have missed the part where MetaCosm stated his developer was buying
health insurance in an age-discriminating market.

~~~
MetaCosm
He was in the US (Arizona if I remember correctly), and had been incorporated
for a number of years... but I have no idea about his health care situation...
the joy of contractors, I don't have to care. I give him $180 an hour for X
hours, he gives me a wonderful product, everyone goes home happy.

~~~
rbanffy
> the joy of contractors, I don't have to care.

Not really. If the contractor gets sick, it's still your problem.

I care for my contractors and always make sure they are paid enough to afford
good medical care and a stable financial situation. It makes sense, even from
a deeply selfish point of view - the less time they spend worrying about such
things, the more they spend working.

~~~
MetaCosm
First of all, I don't think it is my responsibility to ensure contractors are
paid X, that is their responsibility, they set the rate. I decide if I think
their skills match their rate. I can't decide what is "good" medical care for
them, nor can I decide how much it costs (maybe he has a medical condition and
needs 20k a month just for insurance). I can't decide what a stable financial
situation is for someone either. The arrogance of someone who thinks they can
baffles me. I might think 200k is plenty, but I have no idea about what
contractor X consider "plenty" and to assume is simply projecting.

As for him being my problem. If a contractor can't work, you replace them,
depending on how the contract was setup, you might collect some insurance to
help get over the ugly transition.

~~~
rbanffy
Even if it's not your responsibility, it's your problem. Replacing a
contractor is not like replacing a cog in a machine.

As for deciding what's enough for a stable financial condition, I can't. What
you I do, as a manager is to pay attention for warning signs.

Years ago, I had a programmer, young and very bright, who kept entering lousy
freelance projects on the side. He was under great pressure because he had
financial problems. I didn't want to lose him, but burnout was already on the
horizon. When performance review time came, I enrolled him on a personal
finance course. Within six months, the freelance jobs went away, he started
coming in earlier and the already good quality of his work improved further.
He had more time to study, more time for his family and more attention for his
work.

------
cletus
This post is touching on two issues that are somewhat related but different:

1\. Finding ANY job when you're 60 is hard;

2\. Engineers (who are still engineers) at 40+ will often be passed over in
favour of twentysomethings.

Engineering is such a young industry that I'm not sure we've really faced (1)
yet (since the number of people who started engineering in the 70s is but a
drop in the ocean compared to the number in the workforce today). It'll be
interesting to see how the industry has evolved in 30 years.

(1) is a pretty strong driver for everyone having a long term plan to control
your own fate, which means working for yourself. That is, if you're not in
industry with inbuilt protections (eg teaching).

(2) is harder to pin down.

On the one hand, there is a certain (un)survivor bias in that many who started
as engineers in their 20s are managers or the like by their 40s. So are those
who remain in engineering a good sample?

Also, the older you get in general the more non-work priorities you have.
Family, for example. This can reduce the amount of time you spend on self-
improvement. This industry almost requires constant learning, reinvention and
skill acquisition. Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find
a job when what they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth?

It's often said that a good technical foundation and education means you can
pickup any language. This is true but picking up new skills is both a habit
and a skill, one that atrophies if left untapped (IMHO). It's also a question
of degree. Perl to Python? Not a big gap. Ada to Ruby? Well....

That all being said, there is age discrimination in this industry. I've
personally witnessed someone say "I prefer new grads so I can mold them".
That's fine and all but if you say that and don't hire a 50 year old
programmer that's a good basis for an age discrimination suit because, well,
it is age discrimination.

So yes, you either need to find a job that doesn't change (eg a plumber or a
teacher) or you need to constantly battle to maintain relevancy in a fast-
changing industry or you need to become master of your own fate.

This is known.

~~~
WalterBright
> Is it an example of ageism if someone who is 45 can't find a job when what
> they know is Ada, Cobol and Forth?

Um, I'm 54 and the languages of my 20's were C, C++, etc.

I also fairly regularly get calls from recruiters.

> So yes, you either need to find a job that doesn't change (eg a plumber or a
> teacher) or you need to constantly battle to maintain relevancy in a fast-
> changing industry or you need to become master of your own fate.

Or, you can be a driver of this change yourself by developing a modern,
advanced programming language.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Java is nearly 20 years old.

Do people really think if you're 45 you worked in Cobol?

~~~
nikatwork
I work in finance. We are teaching plenty of fresh-faced graduate recruit devs
COBOL.

~~~
rbanffy
For someone into retrocomputing (who even made a 327x-ish terminal font),
being paid to learn COBOL is weirdly interesting.

~~~
nikatwork
Most of the org's original COBOL programmers are retirement age. So there's
60yo greybeards teaching COBOL to 20yos.

It's a weird time to be a mainframer. If you are an experienced specialist you
can charge _insane_ hourly rates. At the same time, some bigger orgs have
started transitioning off the old stack because all the experts keep dying or
retiring.

At some point mainframe specialist skills will go from insanely valuable to
completely worthless.

------
DavidAdams
I think that this article, though terse and generalistic, addresses a valid
issue. However, I agree with many posters here in saying that it's not
exclusively age that hampers older engineers, but an ossified skillset. Anyone
who becomes entrenched in a nichey vocation then strikes out at 50+ to find
new employment is going to suffer. The tech world worships youth and forgives
hubris and foolishness, so it's especially unfertile ground.

That being said, as a serial startup founder, on a few occasions I've had
developers working for me in their late fifties and even sixties. I was, in
fact, in my mid to late twenties at the time, and I had great relationships
with these guys. They had kept their skills up and their experience enabled
them to sometimes do the work of ten people.

In my first company, I had a sixteen year old whiz kid who was possibly the
most gifted hacker I've ever worked with, and we later hired a portly,
bearded, late-fifties nudist Unix guy who balanced the youngster out quite
nicely.

I'm now working in a startup where of the eleven of us, nine of us are in our
forties, including three 40-something engineers. I've never worked with a
better crew. And our stack is about as cutting-edge as would be responsible in
a serious startup. Our VP of engineering literally helped invent Java at Sun,
but moved on to new things later on instead of getting stuck.

~~~
pvnick
>portly, bearded, late-fifties nudist Unix guy

You had me until "nudist." Dare I ask?

~~~
WalterBright
Hopefully he works remotely from home.

~~~
primelens
The other guy is sixteen - so he better work from home!

------
rayiner
This isn't really new, nor is it specific to software engineering. "Line
engineers" have always had a very hard time with employment as they age (not
that it doesn't happen). The usual ways to avoid this are (in order of risk):

1) Get your MBA and go into management; 2) Start or join a consultancy; 3)
Start a company.

My buddies in more traditional engineering fields (aerospace, chemical, etc)
are all in the process of setting themselves up with exit options (we're all
just around 30).

~~~
_delirium
Much of my family are in chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, and
similar engineering fields, and from what I can tell just about the opposite
is true. The companies would _much_ rather hire someone back out of retirement
as a consultant at 3x their previous salary, than train up someone younger.
They'll hire someone younger, but seemingly as a last resort. This seems
_most_ true in a few specific fields (e.g. metallurgy specialists), but also
true for more common things like process engineers.

~~~
vonmoltke
From my interactions with the O&G industry, primarily upstream, there is
growing concern that the knowledge base is too old and that they are not
getting enough young professionals into the pipeline to cover for the
engineers who will, in the next 10 - 15 years, simply be too old to work. It
is one of the big goals of the Society of Petroleum Engineers right now, and
has quite a bit of support from Halliburton and Chevron.

------
jrockway
So here's what the article says:

"I know two or more engineers around the age of 60 that graduated from MIT or
Stanford 35 years ago. Of those two or more, at least one has lost his job,
and at least one is afraid of losing his job."

Here's what the article doesn't say: what field these engineers are in,
whether or not they're good at their job, what company they work(ed) for, what
they work on, how up-to-date their knowledge is, etc.

Maybe there is age discrimination in the engineering field, but you certainly
can't infer that from this anecdote.

------
MetaCosm
"""When not even a Stanford or MIT engineering degree is good enough to keep
an engineer employed at 60, there is genuinely no market for engineers that
age. Plan accordingly."""

Wait, what I did 40 years ago won't guarantee my employment now?!? What is
this insanity, I thought once I got my degree in 1973 I was done with all this
"learning" nonsense. How can I be expected to just keep updating my skills?

~~~
cpeterso
Why does Google still care about people's undergraduate GPAs from 25 years
ago? When my friend interviewed at Google (they did hire him), the recruiter
wanted to know how many hours per week he worked (to pay his tuition) at
university 25 years ago to account for his "low" undergraduate GPA (3.0 -
3.5).

~~~
gems
What would happen if you didn't remember your gpa? It is shocking that they
would ask something like that though.

~~~
smcl
GPA seems to be an American thing. I graduated Uni in 2007 (in Scotland) and
I've never been asked mine.

~~~
SiVal
No, it's a Google thing. No American company has ever asked for my GPA, but
the Google HR person next door said that if I wanted to interview for a job at
Google, HR would demand my GPA (from decades ago!) and would not grant an
interview unless it was above some (secret) threshold. If their recruiters
reached out to me, HR would still require the GPA, but she said that the
interviewers might not care about it.

~~~
vonmoltke
What stage of interview? I have had two phone screens with Google recruiters,
and one actual phone interview. Nobody ever asked for my GPA, and my degree is
from a university most people here have probably never heard of (and is EE, to
boot).

------
Zigurd
The first book I co-authored on Android programming is already so obsolete it
is in O'Reilly's repository of free downloads - the back list of the back
list.

SICP, which, when it was published, summed up a lot of what I had learned as
an undergrad. Nobody reads it to write a mobile app. Since I read it, I had
jobs or book contracts that depended on knowledge of LISP machines, bit slice,
the original Macintosh OS, Windows telephony API, edge routers, core routers
trying to be edge routers, J2ME, Linux on ARM, and Android. Android will be
around another 10 years, maybe a bit more or less, and it too will be a museum
piece.

My shortest trajectory from zero to Noted Authority and back to zero was when
I had a book contract to write about Visual J++. Thank you, Sun's lawyers, for
that short trip.

All that said, if you don't know anything about project management tools,
estimating market size, or how to write, or critique, a cash flow and P&L
projection, your knowledge is going to be hard to package in a form that has
high value.

------
frostmatthew
I've never understood why for many professions age/experience is coveted but
engineers are assumed to have such a short shelf life. Nobody prefers a 30
year old lawyer or doctor over a more experienced one but an engineer of the
same age needs to start planning a career transition...where is the logic in
this?

~~~
timr
Doctors and lawyers gain skill as they get older because the problems and
solutions don't change quickly, and the fields have such depth that expertise
takes decades to acquire. We work in an industry where the state-of-the-art is
perpetually accessible to 20-somethings who haven't done anything, because the
technology gets blown up once a decade (or so). Even if you stay up to date,
why would anyone pay you a salary commensurate with your experience, when a
total noob can do the same work for half as much?

For example, it's pretty embarrassing that we're re-inventing databases
because today's generation of "experts" can't be bothered to understand SQL.
And don't get me started on how an entire generation of coders will be able to
work professionally without knowing how to manage memory. It isn't difficult
to find examples of youth and exuberance trumping wisdom in this field -- I've
already encountered working developers who are happy to tell me how
technologies invented in the early part of this decade are "totally outdated".

~~~
MetaCosm
I think we are reaching the golden age of the older developer. Companies are
learning how much more great developers are worth than poor ones. Retention
bonuses have gone crazy (getting a 3 year / 250k bonus package isn't even that
interesting).

The evergreen underpinnings, the basic knowledge of how to build systems
floats through languages and technologies.

~~~
timr
Agree with you about the value of older devs, but I wish I could say I saw
"the industry" paying for experience. The examples of ridiculous grants I know
about have all gone to people who are in their 20s and early 30s.

Granted, there's some selection bias going on: I don't see many 40-something
programmers in SOMA. That said: _I don't see many 40-something programmers in
SOMA._

~~~
MetaCosm
Rampant speculation, but while drinking me and some developer friends came up
with a theory on this. There was a sweet spot, a golden age if you will where
a lot of things came together for kids / young adults to drive them to be
developers. They are 25 to 40 now.

Computers became cheap enough to have at home. BBSs and then the Internet took
off. Computers were doing stuff -- but not common place yet. It was an odd
window during a technologies birth that I think got people hooked in a way
that is hard to emulate. Too early, you are on punch-cards and computers are
rare. Too late, and you have app stores and iphones and stuff just generally
works so it can be treated as a dumb tool. Sheer luck.

------
venomsnake
And engineer in his 60 will be worth his weight in gold just for knowing all
the ways a project can fail and all the unknown unknowns that can bite you in
the ass.

And with every 5 years adding adding another level of abstraction he can be
invaluable for hard to debug things that need knowledge what goes where under
the hood.

That was this guy - now in his late 50s who mentored me as a young whelp - I
have seen him open a dump with a hex editor (not dissembler) while tracking a
bug, saying - aha a pointer is not initializing correctly and fixing it. Will
hire him in a second given the chance.

------
ShabbyDoo
Whenever I read an article drawing conclusions about the world based on
interviews with those attending a school reunion, I consider the inherent
selection bias. If I'm an unemployed 60-something, I might consider a class
reunion to be a great networking opportunity. And, of course, my time has a
low opportunity cost. Conversely, am I willing to fly across the country for
the weekend if I'm working a lot and need to be in the office on Monday
morning? Also, those whose lives at age 60 aren't all that fulfilling
professionally or otherwise might be more likely to attend a reunion where the
could be reminded of better times. [I say this as someone excited to attend my
20 year high school reunion this summer.] A survey of Stanford engineering
graduates done by random selection would be much more interesting.

------
perlgeek
I've witnessed the exact opposite. My father stayed an engineer when most of
his peers became managers; many of them became unhappy over time, and quite a
few died from heart attacks before reaching 60.

OTOH my father, now in retirement, still occasionally works as a freelancer,
because he still enjoys the job, and his skill is in demand.

~~~
michaelochurch
_My father stayed an engineer when most of his peers became managers; many of
them became unhappy over time, and quite a few died from heart attacks before
reaching 60._

Yeah, I realized that I disliked management (the concept) when I realized that
managing is, in most cases, just as bad as being managed.

~~~
greenyoda
And unless you're the CEO, being a manager is _both_ managing _and_ being
managed at the same time.

~~~
michaelochurch
Right. The corporate system seems to be designed to make almost everyone
miserable so the people at the bottom want the jobs above them. The problem is
that it leads to pernicious and destructive internal competition, not
excellence.

My philosophy: mentoring, coordination, and very occasional police work
(against internal harassment and bad behavior) are the only valuable
contributions of management. The rest of it is useless and should go away.
It's outdated.

~~~
mattdeboard
You spend a lot of time -- "a lot" is a pretty big understatement based on
your online activity, blog etc. -- thinking and writing about how miserable
being employed at companies X and Y made you. I'm really curious why. I've
been miserable in a series of jobs before and the last thing I want to do is
go back and wallow in it.

~~~
michaelochurch
The problem with the career/work game is that when you get robbed (a) it's
considered to be your fault, and (b) you never get back the time lost.

If there were a way to pop back into the state one should be at, at one's age,
were it not for the robberies, then forgiveness would be possible. You'd just
recover and forget. But this is a game where if you get screwed, your
competition is out there getting better experience so you keep getting screwed
in the future, and soon enough you're 40 years old and still a nobody. Fuck
that.

Also, these problems that I'm attacking are huge problems. If I could, for one
example, start a process that made it socially unacceptable for a company to
run closed allocation and call itself a technology company, that'd easily add
$10+ trillion in value to the world economy. That's just a massive effect.
Obviously, one person can't cause that kind of change, but there's no reason
not to try to start the process.

~~~
mattdeboard
I don't really buy it, based on my personal experiences, which play out
exactly opposite of what you're saying here. I think you're wrong. It's been
very strange watching your evolution as an online persona.

------
pvnick
What have some of you more career-advanced HNers done to ensure yourselves
employment as you guys age? I'm looking for tips to take into consideration
through the years.

~~~
ianstallings
I've grown my leadership skills. As much as I'd love to just code and keep my
head down the simple reality is they expect me to step up and guide others. So
I study management and process more than I study the latest techniques. Part
of it bums me out but part of it is very exciting. I realize now at the latter
end of two decades in this career that the true "big" problems in software are
usually people or process related. If a project fails or succeeds depends much
more on who does the work and how it gets planned and executed than what
particular language or techniques you use.

So to sum it all up - I grow my leadership, management, and strategy skills.

~~~
mavelikara
Do you have any advice/pointers for someone who is looking to get started on
this path?

------
jlas
This article is incredibly terse and uninformative. Why are older engineers
having such a hard time? Are they keeping up with new technologies to remain
competitive? What kind of engineering are we even talking about?

~~~
kjackson2012
The problem of ageism is pretty well documented in engineering, especially
software engineering.

I'm in my 40s, and I've been programming my entire career. I'm trying to get
into management so as to extend my career into my 50s and 60s. The realities
are that I likely won't be able to compete against kids 1/2 to 1/3 my age in
the next 15 years, so I need to use my experience to my advantage.

It's too bad because I would rather just program.

~~~
cunac
why you think you will not be able to compete? I am similar age and really
don't see age as issue if you can do the job. Even money is not something you
need to compromise

------
jiggy2011
The hard thing is "keeping your skills current".

Once you have been in a job for a while it can be easy to stagnate because you
end up spending most of your work time maintaining something that was written
in ASP.Net or PHP4 or whatever and it doesn't make business sense to do a
rewrite in something newer.

The alternatives are to job hop or to work somewhere that is constantly using
or evaluating new tech. Or to spend your own time learning new skills , which
you may have less of when you are older.

There's also the issue of deciding what to learn, since you can't
realistically learn everything.

I've been burned in the past by spending time looking into various
technologies that have never really gone anywhere. It's hard to make a bet
like "Will I be more employable in 10 years time by learning node.js or go?"

------
elhector
One of the best engineers I have worked with is on his 60's. When I worked
with him, the rest of the engineering team had an average age of 23 or so (me
being 32), but this guy could give everyone a run for their money. This is not
about age, but about staying current and sharp. Keep learning, and you won't
have this issue. Sure, a guy fresh out of school has a ton of energy and works
crazy hours, but as an Engineering Manager and Product Manager I knew that if
I needed something to be really done on time I could always trust the older
(and quite frankly way smarter) guy.

~~~
riggins
_This is not about age, but about staying current and sharp._

Yep. I don't know why these types of posts get so many comments. It seems
really obvious.

------
10098
This might be irrelevant to the overall discussion, but reading comments to
some other posts on this blog almost made my jaw drop.

"The reason why California is flooded with thriving Asians is because the
Golden State is a beta state, and all California cities are beta towns with a
beta White majority. Smart, talented, and hard driven good looking – alpha
Whites from different parts of the country leave for places in the Northeast,
especially NYC. "

lolwut

------
codex
TL;DR if you spend 35 years as an engineer, you'll still need to work for a
living, but if you spend 35 years as an entrepreneur or VC, you'll likely be
retired long before that. In other words, it's better to be at the top of the
pyramid than working for someone at the top.

~~~
mwfunk
Yeah, that's not true at all. Lots of people find success as an entrepreneur
but they're the exceptions, not the rule. I'm not saying that it's something
that people shouldn't attempt, and it certainly has a higher success rate than
attempting to be, say, a rock star or a professional athlete, but it is by
nature a high risk endeavor.

------
tibbon
Maybe its because I'm not old (30), but the sentiment of this post strikes me
as bullshit.

At _any_ age, if you've got something unique to offer and can contribute- you
can get hired. If you've let your skills lapse, or have become inflexible then
that's a different problem.

New immigrants I don't view as a problem at all, but rather an opportunity for
us to increase the size of the market overall. There's work enough for all, as
long as you've got something to contribute.

Maybe at one point 35 years ago simply having a degree from somewhere great
was enough. I don't see that today as being a thing that makes someone
immediately awesome.

Invest daily in your education. It doesn't stop when you're 22. Today, instead
of doing consulting- I'm learning about Google's Polymer framework/platform.

~~~
vacri
I'm 40, but I'm not about to tell a 55-year-old what it's like to try and find
employment as a 55-year-old. Just saying 'keep yourself current' is missing a
lot of the picture.

~~~
tibbon
I guess I'm looking at it from a hiring perspective. I don't care how old
someone is honestly. I just care what they can do and what they contribute to
the team. Having a bit of grey hair is probably an asset, since hopefully
they've been to this rodeo once or twice and have some good experiences that
we don't.

------
ctrager
One datapoint from Chicago: Got laid off at age 56 last year and had two
offers within two weeks. But I interviewed at several other places without
receiving an offer whereas in the past I almost always got an offer if I got
an interview (Google excepted). Here is some speculation about why my batting
average dropped. I do feel that age worked against me but I don't think it was
because of the companies having institutional biases against hiring older
people. Rather, I think it was just the mindsets of individual
20-something/30-something interviewers making individual decisions based on
what felt comfortable, based on the vibe feeling ok. Nobody here is doing
anything wrong.

------
yekko
There is active discrimination against older engineers. I should know, I'm on
many interview/screening rounds.

------
virtualwhys
My stepfather is in this situation, just turned 66 and has told me on several
occasions, shit, the writing's on the wall, can't compete with the young guns.

Of course, he's been in the business since the punch card days and has a huge
amount of experience to draw on; as such, he's miraculously (to me) been able
to land guaranteed 60 hour per week gigs (even though he likely only works 30
hours) at $125+ per hour.

K-rist, that is a skill in itself, landing high paying telecommute gigs and
putting in half the hours you're paid for, the f-er ;-)

------
JoeKM
Newton's First Law of Motion. Keep moving, stay moving. Keep eating healthy
and exercising, stay healthy and fit. Keep learning, stay sharp and
knowledgeable.

There are more life frictions as we age that dissuade us from continually
learning. If you realize this and work against it, there is no way someone
significantly younger than you can realistically be a better fit for a job.
They may have knowledge, but you'll have that and decades more experience and
wisdom.

------
ams6110
On the internet, nobody has to know how old you are. Or at least this was the
case, before people started posting every personal detail of themselves
online.

------
redschell
The blog's author, later in the comments section, doing a great impersonation
of my mother (sans the anti-immigrant bit):

 _All of the smartest Americans are going into more lucrative fields like
finance, medicine, and law. As much as you think the creme-of-the-crop
engineers are getting paid, they aren’t making as much as investment bankers,
and even the best computer programmers don’t make as much money as an average
surgeon.

The market is flooded with mediocre Indians willing to work cheap, and that’s
what every IT department wants, cheap labor._

It amazes me that people can still say things like this in post-crisis
America. As if finance, which is still reeling, isn't already flooded with
Indians and Asians with tech backgrounds, as if they aren't in law (horrifying
debt, anemic job market) and medicine (even more horrifying debt, massive
commitment) as well.

Hell, I wonder if the quote here, supposedly from the WSJ comments section, is
even real, or if he's just looking to rile people up.

Ageism in engineering, especially software engineering, is a real issue worthy
of vigorous debate, but I'd like to think there are better pieces we can argue
around than this dubious anecdote.

------
gavanwoolery
"Engineer" is a fairly vague term. Once you are 60, you have probably
"graduated" to a higher-level engineering job that involves more
consulting/management/planning and less gruntwork. If you still enjoy the
gruntwork aspect (I do, at times), more power to you. Either way, anyone
involved in a programming-related job should always keep themselves up to date
by getting their hands dirty once in a while.

------
onemorepassword
A 40 year old degree in _anything_ alone isn't good enough to stay employed in
any field. Except maybe teaching.

~~~
dyno12345
You make it sound like these people haven't been working in the field since
they got the degree

~~~
lobotryas
They may have been working, however there's zero guarantee that they have been
learning anything new or even spending hands-on time doing engineering work
(as opposed to shuttling between meetings).

I interview 2-3 candidates a week, including many people almost twice my age.
While these older engineers have impressive-sounding resumes (IBM, Sun/Oracle)
most struggle to code anything more complex than fizzubzz. In my case I make
it as easy as possible for the candidates by allowing them to use any IDE they
can install on my Macbook and encouraging them to search Google/StackOverflow
if they get stuck because I want them to be comfortable and actually complete
the task. Majority still end up with trouble implementing a simple
JUnit/Selenium automation test for a login page.

~~~
rimantas

      > Majority still end up with trouble implementing a simple
      > JUnit/Selenium automation test for a login page.
    

Somehow I doubt the result is different for younger ones.

------
qwerta
Age discrimination is sometimes even publicly announced. For example European
Space Agency has age limit for recruitment 55 years. This applies even to desk
based jobs such as administrative or software developement.

Extract from job description:

\- The European Space Agency is an equal opportunity employer

\- Contracts Officer in the Procurement Department, Directorate of
Procurement, Financial Operations and Legal Affairs

\- preparing requests for offers/invitations to tender;

\- dealing with administrative, contractual, legal and industrial problems
arising from the procurements concerned.

\- Under ESA Regulations, the age limit for recruitment is 55.

More at: <http://www.esa.int/hr/PDF/ESA-VN-ESTEC-2012-091,REV.1.pdf>

~~~
jiggy2011
That seems odd, I can't find anything explaining why such an age limit is in
place. I am assuming that there is some reason for it.

I know that the military often has an upper age limit due to fitness
requirements.

------
csomar
This article starts from a personal experience (with a really small social
circle) and generalize to everyone. Worse, it generalizes to "engineering"
which has wild and quite different fields.

If you have worked on Cobol or Fortran when you were 25 year-old, these things
don't exist anymore (or enough to employ these old developers).

Otherwise, just put yourself in the place of the recruiter. I guess, except
for special fields like Medicine, Law...; in most of the fields this ageism is
the same.

If you want to have a builder, would you prefer a 65, 20 or 30? Certainly,
you'll pick 30. He has more experience than 20 and way more energy than 65.

------
taude
No one's really mentioned that keep up to date or learn a new skill is great
advice...but it sucks when someone's tells you that you only have six months
with MongoDB and Node.Js, so we only want to pay you for a Junior position.
This is where the ageism comes into play, where a young 22 year old who
doesn't have the experience because of a new technology buzzword looks
attractive to the hiring manager. Seen this move a lot.

"But what about all my experience with I/O Completion Ports and multi-threaded
server development mastering mutexes and slinging semaphores!?

------
3327
___SLAPs OP in the face_ __come to your senses man! Old is wise harness your
skills to develop new ones. The dodo that can not fly shall go extinct no
matter what the profession.

------
mwfunk
I live in SV and am in my early 40s and can only comment on what I've seen
firsthand or heard about secondhand. Based on that, I don't really see ageism.
I work with people in their 20s, and I work with people in their 60s. It can
be harder to find a new job at comparable pay as you get older, but it has a
lot more to do with the following:

(1) Salary expectations. Somebody works at the same company for 20 years, gets
an annual raise that's above the rate of inflation, and has an expectation
that if they go someplace else, they're going to get as much or more money.

This might happen, but it's not guaranteed. I've worked at companies in other
industries where it was common for people to work at those companies for 30+
years, then retire. These companies have different notions as far as annual
raises and how generous the perqs and bonuses should be, because they expect
people to be around for a long time.

Tech companies tend to be a lot more generous, because there are much higher
turnover rates and they have to work harder to retain talent. The result is
that after 10 or 20 years at a tech company, you may become accustomed to
getting paid above your market value (I hope to have that problem someday :).
This isn't always the case, but it does happen.

(2) Lack of relevant technical minutiae. Everybody loves to say things like,
"it doesn't matter what you know, it's your capacity to learn!" Or, "my
knowledge of abstract CS concepts means I can pick up the technical minutiae
associated with a learning a new language/library/platform/etc. in no time!"
All of these things are true to an extent, and you're not going to get very
far without them. However, none of them have anything to do with actually
accomplishing anything- they're all just modifiers to your ability to learn
and adapt, prior to accomplishing anything.

Unfortunately, accomplishing anything requires technical minutiae. Some of it
is more widely applicable stuff like programming in a particular language or
using certain tools, but the stuff that makes you really really valuable to
your current employer is more likely to be the niche that you carve out for
yourself over the years. This means, knowledge of specific codebases, and
domain-specific knowledge, some of which might be from other disciplines like
math or finance or electrical engineering. When you go someplace new, your
niche knowledge is either going to be invaluable (yay!) or meaningless (bummer
:( ). Most of the time, it's the latter. So, again, this is a case where
through no fault of their own, someone has ended up getting paid a lot of
money for doing a great job, by acquiring lots of valuable skills that don't
mean much outside of that company and position.

(3) Burnout. Sometimes people just get sick of spending so much time around
computers after 20 or 30 years (or 5-10!). They lose their enthusiasm and
aren't as motivated to keep up to date. If you're burned out on your
profession, you will have a harder time finding new work, for any number of
reasons. It's unfortunate but it happens to everyone at some point or another,
maybe many times throughout their career. Some people find ways to renew their
interest and get out of this mindset, some don't. Older people are more
susceptible to this because they have more important things in their lives
(like family).

TLDR: don't get frustrated, try to see things from a prospective employer's
point of view in addition to your own POV, and keep your skills sharp and up
to date. Don't coast. Stay curious and make sure you're still having fun doing
what you do. If you're no longer curious or no longer enjoy it, see if you can
come at it from a different angle and rejuvenate your interest. If not, you'd
probably be happier taking a left turn in your career anyway, doing something
completely different.

------
aaron695
Any blog starting with a immigrates take our jobs implication is not really
something to note IMO.

But anyway if you're an engineer and can't retire by 60 then you've done
something wrong.

Just don't blow your money on stupid stuff.

And by retire at 60, that can mean anything, work for free for a charity, do a
simple start up, work part time.

~~~
bill1996
>"if you're an engineer and can't retire by 60 then you've >done something
wrong."

I used to think that too....when I was 30&40 something. Life has a funny way
of throwing a few curve balls at you that can drain your finances in short
order.

------
astrofinch
Here's his follow up post that responds to comments in this thread:
[http://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/follow-...](http://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/follow-
up-on-old-engineers/)

------
bdcravens
I've seen plenty of developers in their 30's unable to work because they were
a one-language pony, and that language was no longer needed in the
marketplace.

------
xtc
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out
and shoot them."

------
joejohnson
In what field of engineering is this person trying to find employment?

------
breakupapp
So what's a good backup plan as you age?

~~~
pvdm
Read Mr Money Moustache's blog. Live like a grad student even when you are
earning six figures.

------
michaelochurch
I see our age discrimination problem as the fundamental sign of us being a
defeated tribe. Ageism is one of those horrible traits of management culture
(i.e. if you have a younger boss, you're a loser) that we wouldn't face if we
had kept our tribal integrity (because "bosses" would be coordinators and
mentors, not hierarchical superiors, making age irrelevant.)

 _Good_ programmers aren't ageist. We look up to the gray-haired badasses.
(Ok, old bad programmers are annoying, but so are young bad programmers.)
Ageism is a managerland prejudice. What the fuck is that shit doing in our
industry?

Most of us are intellectual whores: massively overqualified for the work we're
assigned to do, but hired because it makes the boss feel important to be able
to say things like, "I have four Ivy Leaguers working for me" even when the
work could be done by one script-kiddie. Meanwhile, the work that could
actually use our talents is hard to find, because our society is in such a
depraved state that social media gets VC-megabucks but cancer research gets
peanuts.

It's perverted. When you're young, it's hard as hell to get a good job but
getting _a_ job is easy. But that's exactly when you care about getting the
good jobs that will build your career. When you're old and have actual use for
the crappy jobs (you need to sustain an income) you can't get them; and if you
were sidetracked by taking too many crappy jobs (and that's not hard to have
happen) you're not qualified for the good ones either.

~~~
vonmoltke
> Meanwhile, the work that could actually use our talents is hard to find,
> because our society is in such a depraved state that social media gets VC-
> megabucks but cancer research gets peanuts.

Not only that, but social media will hire the college dropout with an
impressive Github portfolio while the cancer research institute will shitcan
any resume that doesn't have an MS or PhD on it.

~~~
michaelochurch
It's really disturbing to realize what has happened to the sciences. The death
of the scientific/academic job market is why us smart people hate "business
douches" so much; the fuckers shut down all the R&D. Those assholes struck
first.

(To be fair, plenty of businesspeople do more good for the world than bad and
aren't douches. It's the shitty ones that have no better ideas than to cut
costs recklessly. The problem is that no one shuts them down.)

In the 1970s, there were Bachelor-level science jobs. There was an
expectation, of course, that most people would go back for graduate degrees;
but it gave people a chance to spend a few years in the field and figure out
what they wanted to do with their lives before committing to a graduate
program.

Those Bachelor-level science jobs still exist. The problem is that they're all
filled by PhDs.

Even most of this Silicon Valley "innovation" in social media isn't half as
interesting as the stuff marketers did in the _Mad Men_ era. M&A replacing R&D
is one of the worst social developments around.

Who's going to bring back Real Technology? Someone will see the value in doing
so, I hope.

------
andyl
I'm not buying it. I'm about to turn 50 - doing better work than ever and more
in demand. The tools today are so good compared to 5-10 years ago. Now I have
these awesome tools, and understand sales/marketing/management/finance.

ps - could I get a job as a developer? probably not. but there are other
(better) alternatives.

~~~
300bps
I turn 41 next month and have been a developer for the two decades that I have
been in IT. A 50 year old up to date on the latest tools seems to be the rare
exception. The rule at my current employer seems to be after hitting 50-55
that they really have their eye set on retirement. Learning a new skillset has
such low dividends that they don't believe it is worthwhile. They show up to
work right on time at 8 am, they spend an hour getting their coffee, perhaps
breakfast from the cafeteria, chatting with coworkers, etc. Then they stare at
a mainframe screen full of Cobol code for an hour or two, take a 90 minute
lunch, attend a few meetings in between staring at mainframe Cobol code and
then leave at 5 on the dot.

They spend two weeks on changes like, "Modify program P90182 to set value 82
instead of value 81 in field CONVEXITY", dutifully put in their change request
documents and then move on to the next change honestly believing they're
earning their inflated salary.

~~~
vacri
Your stories of your 50-year-old colleagues match those of 18-19-year olds
I've worked with in several different industries, except for the 'show up on
time' thing. The only people I've ever seen expend more active effort to avoid
doing work than the work itself actually required were people in this age
group.

------
bengrunfeld
If you think being an old engineer is tough, try being a new one.

~~~
acchow
Can you elaborate on this? I am a fairly new developer and haven't found it
particularly difficult.

~~~
bengrunfeld
It's easy if you have 4 years of school to soak up knowledge. But if your
family can't afford to pay your school fees, you end up working somewhere
full-time. So you have to study nights. Except you fall in love and get
married to a wonderful woman, but then she wants to spend those nights with
you. So then you end up not sleeping and begging her to get a night-job so
that you can learn how to install arch linux on a virtual machine. Becoming a
software engineer when you have life commitments is tough, and you end up
reading programming language books on your iPhone every time you go to take a
crap. Believe me, it's hard.

