
Report: Ageism in the Tech Industry - lladnar
http://blog.indeed.com/2017/10/19/tech-ageism-report/
======
jakebasile
This is one of the many pernicious effects of the Standard Developer
Interview™. Despite the fact that older developers may have years of proven
experience at other companies, pretty much every interview goes in assuming
the interviewee is no better qualified than a random person picked off of the
street.

Focusing so heavily on computer science trivia questions favor those who
recently went to college, since those tidbits are so rarely needed at the drop
of a hat in industry those neurons wither away with more time away from
academia. Older developers know you can just look it up.

Take home quizzes and side projects require significant time investments.
People tend to have less free time as they get older due to family
obligations, changing priorities, and so on. People directly out of college
likely have less of these external time pressures and would have less of a
problem solving your so-clever little project that only takes 20 hours.

Until we, as an industry, get over the lie that hiring must be incredibly
accurate and therefore favor the so-called "false negative", we won't get rid
of this kind of discrimination and we'll continue to harm people simply
because they're older; not to mention losing out on potential co-workers with
a plethora of knowledge and experience.

It's bizarre to me that ageism exists. Other forms of discrimination can be
traced to othering someone because they are dissimilar to you. Every single
human will become an older person one day, barring early death. Perpetuating
this cycle is self defeating in the end.

~~~
vkou
> This is one of the many pernicious effects of the Standard Developer
> Interview™. Despite the fact that older developers may have years of proven
> experience at other companies, pretty much every interview goes in assuming
> the interviewee is no better qualified than a random person picked off of
> the street.

Many people who interview feel like random people off the street. You really
can't tell if the resume's completely bullshit until you ask them to sit down
and implement fizz-buzz.

> Focusing so heavily on computer science trivia questions favor those who
> recently went to college, since those tidbits are so rarely needed at the
> drop of a hat in industry those neurons wither away with more time away from
> academia. Older developers know you can just look it up.

Is this still a common practice? Neither Facebook, Google, nor Amazon trains
its interviewers to ask bullshit trivia questions to non-intern candidates (I
don't know if they train them to ask, or not ask those questions to intern
candidates.) I mean, it's entirely possible that particular interviewers at
those companies do, but I have skimmed through many, many interview
transcripts. None of them focused on bullshit trivia.

(Unless you feel that 'Is it possible to have a memory leak in a language like
Java or C#?' is bullshit trivia. I've had people who have spent five years
programming in those languages answer, with full conviction, 'No'. After some
more prodding, they sometimes say yes, if there was a bug in the garbage
collector.)

At this point, this feels like a meme that has been ten years out of date
(Because all it takes is one person having a bad interview experience to
revive it.)

~~~
jquery
It’s not a meme. I just interviewed at FB (3 onsites) and the one interview
that sunk me was a CS-algo question. I’ve never had to do that my entire
career and I even though I got the answer in the end, I was told afterwards
that my answer was too slow. The other tech interviews focused on real web dev
experience I destroyed. Still got rejected even though I answered every
question correctly, just not fast (or optimal?) enough. The recruiter said I
was a “great culture fit” afterwards so that wasn’t the issue. You wouldn’t
consider the question “trivia” because it was something you might do once or
twice in an entire web dev career. But it’s still a question that will favor
new grads who have been trained to pattern match algos and share questions
amongst each other.

So even if there’s not explicit bias against older devs there is implicit bias
by favoring quick whiteboard speed (memorization/practice) over the practiced
thoughtfulness of older devs. And a one-off interview focused heavily on algos
can sink anyone. It only takes one.

This isn’t limited to FB. The $Elite companies I got offers from are the ones
where I lucked through that one tricky interview by knowing it offhand.

I worry as I get older, even as I become a stronger developer, I will become
less and less able to marathon through these interviews. No wonder so many
older devs switch to management.

~~~
vkou
There's a world of difference between remember some bullshit trivia about how
to do fast matrix multiplication, that requires some esoteric algorithmic or
mathematical trick, and 'implement a data structure that does X'.

Yet, when blasting interviews, I have found that people tend to conflate the
two.

I agree that 60 minutes on a whiteboard or a laptop is not the best way to ask
someone to solve a coding problem. Homework is worse, though. Maybe 90 minutes
is a better time slot.

~~~
chrisco255
How is homework worse? Homework simulates an actual job assignment. There's no
better way to gauge a candidate's ability. You still couple with onsite after,
of course.

~~~
vkou
It's an asymmetrical waste of time. The company invests nothing into it, the
candidate invests 8-16 hours into it. This creates incentive to interview too
many people, causing candidates to have to interview at too many places,
wasting even more of their time.

At least in-person, both parties invest about as much time into the interview.

~~~
wincy
I interviewed somewhere recently, it went well, we talked about current
technology, talked about the projects I'm working on now, and then they sent
me an email asking me to do a project that would take me two days. I have a
two year old and a job I'm perfectly happy with right now, I'm not going to
spend my precious weekend hours writing code for free (unless maybe it was
open source or something like that).

~~~
chrisco255
Are y'all trying to say that an 8-16 hour homework assignment is too much to
bear for a new job? You're happy in your current job...great. But 8 hours for
a $10-$30K salary bump? I mean, worth it from a pure monetary standpoint, even
if it takes several attempts to attain one of those jobs.

~~~
jakebasile
The article is about age discrimination and my comment pointed out that older
developers may value their “off time” more, which biases take home tests
against those older devs.

~~~
chrisco255
Valuing your off time is great when you've got a steady job that you're happy
with. If you're looking for a new job, because you're unemployed or because
you're unhappy with your current job, you have to invest your off time into
that. Just like, in college I had to invest my off time into studying so I
could get good grades...Older folks that have kids and stuff may have less off
time, sure, but that's the way things go.

~~~
jakebasile
So you’re admitting that older people are disadvantaged by these types of
assignments that are not actually selective for coding capability, but
throwing up your hands and saying that’s just the way life is?

~~~
chrisco255
Yeah, I mean, folks with kids are at a professional disadvantage to folks
without kids...that's pretty well established. Kids bring all sorts of other
great benefits to life. But extra time is not one of them. And folks who
choose to spend their off time doing other activities rather than leveling up
their skills or applying to better jobs are going to remain that way.

------
austincheney
From my experience working with web businesses age is irrelevant to hiring,
but it strongly influences office culture. As a side note I am a front-end
developer which tends to skew extremely young, but I have been doing it for 20
years. I don't consider myself either a baby-boomer or a millennial.

In offices of extremely young teams without a lot of mentorship the big focus
is on abstractions and frameworks. The primary technology is JavaScript. I get
the feeling of people wanting to move really fast and build cool things, but
with huge limitations around their understanding of the technology.

In offices of much older developers the focus is more heavily directed towards
code design and architecture. Contrasting to the previous group the older
folks feel more confident they can build just about anything and don't mind
jumping into the technologies directly, however their focus tends to be more
narrow as though there are a set fixed few ways of doing things. This group
generally tends to treat web technologies with an utter disregard and prefers
to isolate themselves in Java.

Actual fullstack people are rare to either demographic but tend to have a
wider understanding of how things work outside their comfort zone.

~~~
le-mark
I agree, what I see in the midwest is that experienced, senior developers are
in hot demand. The only companies that skew young are the Big Dumb Corps with
horrible cultures (overtime, low pay, atrocious legacy code). There are a lot
of second or third tier universities graduating cs (or whatever) majors who
_don 't_ go to silicon valley. One company here, in particular, vacuums these
people up. Senior developers won't put up with that. Me and a lot of my peers
have done stints there, and consider ever going back to be a last resort.
Hence this particular company pays outlandish prices for contractors, even
flying people in from out of state, weekly.

~~~
logfromblammo
Is it Epic Systems? It sounds like Epic Systems.

I did a stint there, and going back isn't even a last resort. I'd rather move
to Elbonia and sell stolen credit card numbers.

~~~
le-mark
Close, cerner.

~~~
logfromblammo
I imagine GEMS and McKesson and Eclipsys and Meditech and Siemens are all so
similar that you need to look at your employee ID to remember who you're
working for.

Let this be a lesson for all those looking to disrupt a big, heavily
entrenched industry with lots of loose money sloshing around in it.

But be warned: it's more difficult than it looks.

------
excalibur
> In fact, 29% of our survey respondents say the average employee age at their
> company is between 31 and 35. Millennials, yes—albeit at the older end of
> that demographic. A further 17% say that their company’s average is between
> 20 and 30.

> By contrast, 3 in 10 (27%) respondents say that the average age of employees
> at their company is 36-40 years old, making them members of the younger end
> of Generation X. The over 40s (Gen X and Boomers alike) have to share the
> remaining 26%.

That's 56% of tech employees between 31 and 40. Xennials FTW!

------
baron816
I watched a talk by Bob Martin in which he claimed that the number software
engineers in the world doubles every 5 years. For a huge majority of those new
engineers, it's their first careers. Thus, almost half of the world's software
engineers should be between the ages of 22-27. So, tech companies are
dominated by the young not because they hate old people, but because there are
so many young people with technical skills and that number is growing rapidly.

~~~
throwanem
Doesn't he claim a lot of things? I mind me of his "unit tests and self-
discipline are all you ever need" philosophy toward software reliability, as
recently discussed here on HN.

------
larrywright
I am 45 years old, and work for a very large consultancy (I won't name them
here, but you can figure it out if you're curious). I don't actually work as a
consultant, but rather on a product.

One of the things I like about working here is that when I go to company
events, like the internal conference that I'm at this week, I see people at
all age levels. Plenty of young people, but also plenty of people my age or
older. And the people older than me aren't coasting until retirement - they're
mentoring, leading new initiatives, working on exciting projects. It gives me
hope that I'll be able to work on interesting things until I'm ready to
retire.

All this to say, there are plenty of companies that value age and experience,
but you might have to look outside of the startup scene.

------
expertentipp
Then come over to EU. Here not only one have to be young but as well cheap.
100k USD? Forget about it max we can do is 30-40k USD. Apart few exceptions in
Germany haven't seen a developer above 40 years old, rarely have seen one
above 35.

~~~
colinb
Come to Dublin. Where I work, we'd love to hire more experienced people. I'd
say around 15% of my colleagues are >40, with 3 or 4 > 50.

I don't think it is at all unusual to get paid significantly more than €40k..

~~~
sgift
> I don't think it is at all unusual to get paid significantly more than
> €40k..

It's neither in Germany. I have no idea where op gets their information. Sure,
compared to the US pay in Germany is lower, but 40k is not even remotely on
the high end for a developer.

~~~
expertentipp
I meant developing EU countries, in developed ones it's more like 60-80k USD,
but only in those with healthy economies like DE, NL, IE, etc.

------
jitix
I think it boils down to one thing: How enthusiastic an old engineer is about
technology in general and whether they are proactive on keeping themselves up
to date on the latest things (vs reactively learning something when a project
requires it).

I worked at a startup for the last 4.5 years which had a lot of older (40-50
yr) people (the founders were in their late 40s). I also interviewed a lot of
older people (both with positive and negative feedback). What I noticed is two
clear groups:

One set of older devs have been in the tech industry just because they needed
a job and have somehow kept up with the technologies in a reactive manner.
This set of people have mentality of "this is how we used to do this back in
19xx/20xx". It doesn't always work out.

The other set of people are genuinely interested in technology and proactively
seek new things, present papers, blog about stuff, and are always on the look
out for the next improvement and the next thing. This set of people tend to
learn from their own experiences and improve on things while providing
guidance to devs in their 20s/early 30s. This set of people never have trouble
finding jobs.

The bottom line is that the tech industry requires you to do continuous
learning and be enthusiastic about stuff. If you can't do that you'll have
trouble finding jobs when you're older.

Edit: I’m seeing the same pattern at my current job even though the percentage
of older devs is lower here.

~~~
amyjess
If people have to "present papers" and "blog about stuff" just to keep a
steady paycheck, it's a sign the industry is broken.

~~~
jitix
The industry itself is only a few decades old.. it'll take some time before it
stabilizes to a point where you can largely do the same thing your entire
career.

Also everybody doesn't have to present papers, or speak in seminars, etc. but
most older developers who are sought after usually do.

~~~
Karrot_Kream
Because the person who writes a lot of blog posts is the person who spends a
lot of time marketing themselves but not actually getting shit done. If you
think a blog post is proof of knowledge, well wow, you'd be shocked at what
academia's peer review process is.

------
amyjess
Ageism is the one -ism _everybody_ suffers from.

It doesn't matter how privileged you are. You might think "hey, I'm a straight
cis white male, I'll never have to worry about discrimination!". And then 20
years later, you're middle-aged. Hello age discrimination!

~~~
alexanderstears
Dumb argument - straight cis white males are agrubly the ones who have to
worry about discrimination the most.

Why do you think we're seeing articles about ageism in tech? It's because
people do care about it. Look at all the ethical issues that don't get much
attention - H1Bs and social stratification in India for example.

------
brightsize
>Removing terms like “recent graduate” and “digital native” could help
encourage older professionals to apply for these positions.

Or, "you'll join a young team of developers ...", a type of phrasing that
makes it very clear who will be a "culture fit" and who probably won't.

Recently I came across a job ad from a SV startup company that contained the
text "We are looking to hire talented young developers for backend
development" . The message doesn't get much clearer than that.

------
indubitable
I think framing things as some sort of discrimination, "ageism" in this case,
constantly works to avoid actually approaching the question of why things are
the way they are by instead simply blaming prejudice or other unreasonable
issues. So for instance a few random issues, or perceived issues:

\- Older workers are genuinely more well qualified and are going to demand a
substantially higher salary than younger workers.

\- Younger workers are less likely to have family and other outside
commitments that may take priority over work related issues.

\- Younger workers may still see things like web technologies becoming
obsoleted every few years as an exciting and invigorating thing, anxious to
learn the next big thing (that will then be obsolete 3 years later).

\- Pair the above two to yield the fact that younger workers may be more
inclined to spend their own time pursuing interests that could improve their
perceived value as an employee.

\- Older workers have a better understanding of employee-employer
relationships and may be less inclined to accept unreasonable 'friendly
nudges' that can encourage younger workers to "give 110%" [without
corresponding compensation]

\- Older workers are going to have a better idea of what they're worth than
younger workers who will, almost invariably, dramatically lowball their worth.
This gets back to point #1, but also arises in things like contract
negotiations.

"Ageism" suggests people are discriminating against individuals because of
their age. Choosing to hire people who have certain characteristics, even when
those characteristics are less prevalent in older individuals, is in no way
discriminatory. And in framing it as ageism we ignore _why_ people may prefer
younger workers and the discussion of whether these reason are legitimate.

I half wish we had a way to completely remove any identity related
characteristic from the hiring process and end once and for all any
allegations of discrimination. Full on voice scrambling, audio only
discussion, and VR in lieu of on-site interviews. Only downside would be a
necessary restriction on certain topics that could implicitly reveal
identifying information. It'd be like the dating shows of the 90s. After you'd
made an offer that was accepted, the block would turn and you'd finally get
meet your new employee.

~~~
wu_tang_chris
This for me was the most thought provoking comment on this entire thread. It
tends to be the case that when accusations of prejudice are lightly thrown
around, slowing down, thinking reasonably, and giving our fellow humans a
cursory benefit of the doubt casts a totally different light on the issue.
That said:

> I half wish we had a way to completely remove any identity related
> characteristic from the hiring process and end once and for all any
> allegations of discrimination. Full on voice scrambling, audio only
> discussion, and VR in lieu of on-site interviews.

I feel like I could figure out their age and race just from vernacular. Plus
that would be ridiculous. I don't want to hire someone who I don't want around
the office.

------
NTDF9
There are 2 kinds of old people:

1\. Old battle hardened veterans who can just jump in and clean the floor. The
desire more battles and will confront problems head on

2\. Folks who are in the industry for a long time and are productive as a
consequence of experience and not because they desire to be there

There are folks intersecting the two sets above. But more often than not,
folks in 2 are folks with families, mortgages and other commitments making
them risk/battle averse. That kills their hireability.

The reasonably confident, smart old folks are the ones who just walk into
companies and bash the young interviewers right away (I experienced this as
the young interviewer myself).

Young engineers fit the above categories too but they get the benefit of doubt
and get hired for potential. Older folks don't seem to have that luxury.

~~~
analog31
3\. Folks who understand business, and know a crappy deal or a hopeless cause
when we see one. I believe this is the majority of the so called "risk
averse."

I'm 53, and consider myself to be in the first and third categories: I'm
certainly willing to jump in and produce, and I'm not afraid of hard problems,
but I can see when someone's trying to lure me with empty promises, or who is
taking unnecessary business risks.

We also respect you enough to have a frank conversation with you, which could
be unnerving if you're accustomed to interviewing people who have been trained
to tell you what they think you want to hear.

~~~
NTDF9
3\. Folks who understand business, and know a crappy deal or a hopeless cause
when we see one. I believe this is the majority of the so called "risk
averse."

You are number 1 in the categories I defined in my original post.

Risk averse people are people who cannot move out of their language, area of
expertise etc.

~~~
analog31
I hate to think about it, but answering questions about things like risk
aversion may be akin to the coding interview, where they could be studied and
memorized. The flip side is that with business experience, the older candidate
could make an educated guess about how likely it actually is, that they will
have to work outside of their existing skill set. So, objectively assessing
the risk is sometimes an alternative to simply avoiding it without knowing if
the risk is real.

------
kelukelugames
1) I've witnessed ageism.

2) I've worked with old timers who do nothing and get paid a ton. I still
can't figure out what they do all all day. I think they go on 10 coffee breaks
and browse the web.

I suspect the latter is a stereotype that motivates the former.

~~~
mythrwy
"I still can't figure out what they do all all day."

Could be not much of value, but could also be that you just haven't figured it
out.

I've seen two kind of older employees. 1) Those that have the experience to
know which problems are worth solving and how to solve these problems with
minimal effort and disruption and 2) Those that have simply grown lazy and
complacent while developing the workplace skills to keep their position.

Younger me had a hard time telling the difference and figured it was just lazy
all around.

~~~
kelukelugames
There are people whose value I don't understand. There are people who are on
reddit and coffee breaks constantly. They produce no output. Others complain
about them too.

------
whipoodle
It's incredibly irresponsible to see this and think "not my problem". This is
the one form of discrimination that eventually comes for us all, unless you
get rich or die first. And yet, does it come up in discussions of diversity
and inclusion? Rarely, and if it does, pretty much just as an aside. I've
never seen a company that had goals to hire people in certain age brackets, or
even bothered to offer an age breakdown of recent hires, as they do with race
and gender.

~~~
mythrwy
I wonder what the industry will look like at the time ageism really starts
affecting the early 20 somethings.

If we are still doing JavaScript frameworks and Webpack in 20 years I'll be a
bit surprised. In which case it might be a double whammy. Ageism and a
significant start over.

