
Older IT Workers Left Out Despite Tech Talent Shortage - monsieurpng
https://www.wsj.com/articles/older-it-workers-left-out-despite-tech-talent-shortage-11574683200?mod=rsswn
======
rgbrenner
There's no shortage of talent. If there was a shortage we would see real
indicators of a shortage like increasing average salaries across the field,
training programs, etc.

Instead employers consistently use bullshit to filter, puzzles without any
relation to the job, etc in their hiring. That's a strong indicator that
there's no shortage. If employers are making up things to filter candidates,
then they have too many options.

If I had to guess, this is probably just more propaganda from the large tech
companies to get more people into the field and an increased visa cap, so they
can drive down wages.

~~~
h3throw
I don't understand people who say this. Have you ever tried to hire?

I'm 28yrs old and I make ~$400K/yr. That doesn't happen when there's some
major abundance of talent sitting around.

~~~
rgbrenner
I make quite a bit too... but the average developer doesnt.. average US
software dev salary is just $100k/year.

~~~
perl4ever
Pay scale for programmers at large organizations I'm aware of starts around
$55K and tops out around $100K. And non-profits or small businesses pay even
less.

I browse job ads on indeed frequently and see offerings in the $40-50K range
for IT positions in the NYC area.

What do people think that offshore employees of an American IT company are
paid? I haven't any definite figures for places I've worked, but I have gotten
the impression from Indian job ads that $10K/year is in the ballpark. Why
would a typical company pay more than five times that for US-based employees?

~~~
scarface74
I’m nowhere near the west coast - I’m on the opposite coast. In most major
cities in the US outside of the west coast your bog standard enterprise
developers make $110K - $170K. This also excludes NYC.

~~~
perl4ever
The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them...

...and they don't have to represent more than a fraction of what's out there.

Also, " _bog_ standard" is not something real Amurricans recognize.

~~~
scarface74
Well in the US, look at the top 20 cities for developers - a simple Google
search and then go to salary.com. That range is average.

As far “bog standard”, I’m referring to a CRUD developer doing “enterprise
software” that may never see the light of day outside of the company or your
yet another software as a service developer. They don’t spend all day worrying
about “computer science” and algorithms and they don’t spend time worrying
about the complexity of reversing a b-tree on a whiteboard.

~~~
perl4ever
Look at it this way, what I _think_ you're talking about requires roughly the
same level of talent as being a decent mechanic, electrician, or whatever, and
clients get billed about the same per hour, like $100-150. So, if we pretend
we don't have preconceptions, and with the knowledge that the programmers are
competing with people who are paid $5/hr, whereas my other examples aren't,
does it make sense that they would be paid much more than $50-100K on average?

~~~
scarface74
I’m replying to this statement.

 _Pay scale for programmers at large organizations I 'm aware of starts around
$55K and tops out around $100K. And non-profits or small businesses pay even
less._

That’s clearly not the case in the US for any of the top markets even if you
exclude the west coast and NYC. It’s easy to find average salaries in major US
cities.

Why are companies willing to pay more? Because they have to to even get your
bog standard CRUD developer. Outsourcing to other countries is either not an
option or come with its own share of issues.

~~~
perl4ever
I find it annoying when people think using words like "clearly" is debating.

Whenever you think you know what the average is, you should ask yourself
whether the population being averaged is remotely complete (or
representative), and whether the data points are remotely trustworthy.

And what do you mean by "outsourcing to other countries is...not an option"?
The largest and best known companies, including members of FAANG outsource
work to lesser known US companies that use offshore labor. There are plenty of
loopholes, even for things that you'd think would require US or EU citizens.

As a matter of fact, I do know firsthand about some jobs that _are_ restricted
to US citizens due to security requirements, so I have some specific data that
points to those starting upwards of $80K. That makes me more confident that my
estimate of the others is accurate.

~~~
scarface74
Well, as “annoying” as you might find it. I mentioned both the source
(salary.com) and the population (the top 20 cities in the US outside of the
west coast and NYC to not skew the numbers).

I’m using readily accessible sites that have publicly available numbers.

~~~
perl4ever
Salary.com is not a _source_ any more than wikipedia. I don't think that is
just pedantry; I'm not saying they're wrong or you're misrepresenting
anything, but you're just not addressing why you have your opinion in a way
that makes me think there is something I should read up on to change mine. Or
motivates me to search.

Do the top 20 cities in the US have most of the developers, or an unbiased
sample? If you haven't considered that, fine, but without some idea, I, again,
don't feel motivated to question my opinion.

~~~
scarface74
Do you have a more reputable source? Payscale.com shows similar numbers? Why
should anecdotal evidence be given more credence?

------
pacaro
I wonder about this, I don't dispute that there is an issue here, but I think
that this, and similar analyses, fails to take into account the change in the
size of the IT workforce over time. I'm currently 47, I started my first paid
developer role (job title "Analyst/Programmer"!) 25 years ago. The size of the
job market then was a fraction of the size that it is now. Inevitably there
are fewer older people in the workforce.

I'm much more interested in attempts to quantify age-related hiring
discrimination, something that I have been fortunate enough not to encounter
(yet), but that my brother (50) currently feels like he is running up against.

~~~
monoideism
Age discrimination is real, if for no other reason that the older you get, the
more likely you are to have had a major health issue.

Try getting hired after being out for 12 or more months after having a heart
attack, or cancer, or whatever. Even if you're medically cleared. From
personal experience, it can be difficult regardless of reputation.

Edit: And yes, I also tried the whole "took some time off to be with my
family" thing as well, and that turned potential employers off even more (had
one tell me, "we're not really interested in hiring people who aren't driven
to work every single workday" regarding my "time off"). Happily, I did find a
good company several years ago that pays well and offers a great environment,
but it took significantly longer than I had hoped.

~~~
sjg007
Group health insurance mitigates this... but if it is a major concern then
single payer is the way to go.

~~~
monoideism
How does health insurance mitigate against this, group or otherwise?

A better short-term disability policy would have helped me, but health
insurance wouldn't have helped me find a job.

~~~
monoideism
And just to be clear in my response: I had "good" health insurance (luckily,
but still ended up with many tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills).

But that didn't have anything to do with finding a job after I got better.

~~~
sjg007
I understand that you took time off to recover and yes short term disability
would have been ideal for that but that medical information should be private.
Was it simply accounting for the time off that you took?

~~~
monoideism
> Was it simply accounting for the time off that you took?

Yes, precisely. Even if you try to say something like "took time off for
family reasons" or "ran my own company and contracted for a year", they seem
to sense something's up. In fact, I think hiding the reason why I was off hurt
me more than it helped, because people tend to assume the worst (ie, "I can
tell this guy's hiding something, wonder what it was...maybe he was in
jail!").

In the end, I only got interviewed by those places I was honest to about being
out for medical reasons (and one of those places was where I ended up
working). And just getting that handful of interviews was fairly challenging,
given the supposed high demand for people like me (I have experience/expertise
in a high-demand area).

------
codingslave
As has been mentioned in here, the "Talent Shortage" was made up to get an
increase in H1B visa workers to drive down wages and get more for their money.
It has always been about flooding the developer job market.

Case in point are the interviews at many big tech companies that require
leetcode/algorithms interviews. Companies are ready to reject any candidate
that makes even a small mistake on one of their solutions, or misses the exact
optimal solution. If they really needed top talent and couldn't find it, they
wouldn't be so careless in their hiring rejections.

Another issue is also that its really difficult to quickly shift tech stacks
on a dime. As much as people like to claim it to be possible, even just
upgrading from Hadoop/MapReduce/Older big data technologies to Apache Spark is
a massive time investment. The paradigms are the same, the technology when
used in practice is different. Workers can see their whole knowledge base
become useless in the span of two years.

As an individual worker, if this happens three times in 8 years, I think
burnout would be expected. Anyone who is capable of constantly updating their
technology knowledge to a T is probably already CTO of a company somewhere.
Maintaining the ability to memorize and understand inane minutia over a few
decades span is rare, and is probably coupled with severe disabilities in
other areas of life.

------
avgDev
I feel as partially this happens because older people don't buy into the hype,
can read through BS, and won't slave away 70 hrs a week for the same wage.

Younger people are less experienced, have less opinions and in most case less
life lessons. Tech companies want to move fast and make money, not question
what is ethical.

~~~
kasey_junk
I’m getting way less opinionated as I get more experience.

~~~
allthecybers
I find this to be true. Some folks fresh out of school, feel like they need to
be constantly vocal to have influence and make a name for themselves. They
also can bring strong but untested opinions to the table without the
experimental data to back it up. Why do I relate this? Because I was guilty of
it myself when I was younger and just starting out.

However, as I've grown and gained experience I have become more pragmatic and
willing to let my good work speak for itself, reserving my more vocal moments
for the times I have most impact.

------
jmkd
I'm mid-40s, Xoogler, Program Manager, Startup founder & failer, UK-based. 130
applications since March, 4 interviews, no offers.

Previous blue-chip job history with 100% application success rate, through my
20s and 30s.

Have now left the industry due to what I and various recruitment professionals
had to conclude was age discrimination.

It exists.

~~~
cpeterso
I now omit my university dates on my resume and sometimes drop older jobs
LIFO. The tools and experience from those jobs is less relevant to my current
work anyway.

------
mpfundstein
Honestly, the best devs/CTOs I worked with are older than 45... I don’t get
why our industry is like this. Learn from the (old) masters... thats true for
art as well as for coding

------
Iv
> One problem is that some older IT workers who get too comfortable with their
> skills risk falling behind, especially in the era of artificial intelligence

I am 38, I am in the gap they point out, and I almost fell in it because for
too long I thought deep learning was a hype that would eventually die out. I
had to have a client force me to look into it to realize that half of my
skillset in computer vision became obsolete almost overnight, and the other
half is eroding quickly.

We think we know better than the youngsters and in several fields, that's
painfully obvious, but let's not be oblivious to the fact that tech still
evolves and that half of our job is catching up with it.

~~~
ecnahc515
Would you mind elaborating? As a young developer who wishes to remain a in the
engineering track long term, Id like to understand more about how you realized
your skill set was no longer “up to par”. I’m surprised computer vision is
becoming less relevant, is it because the techniques have shifted from known
algorithms that work to using machine learning to develop better algorithms
from training?

~~~
mikekchar
Not the OP, but this is incredibly common. I will say that if you wish to
continue working as a programmer for your entire career it is a mistake to
specialise in a particular technology. It doesn't matter what technology that
is. The more you specialise, the less versatile you appear to employers. It
just doesn't matter what you are working on. It could be a website, or it
could be a computer vision system. You use a handful of languages, frameworks,
techniques, etc and 10 years later these are no longer in vogue.

I think the most important thing to keep reminding yourself is that your
career will hopefully last 40-45 years! The pace change of technology is
increasing, rather than decreasing. If you think the flavour of the month JS
frameworks are hard to keep track of now, wait 10 years when there are 4 to 5
times as many programmers working and what's hot changes practically every
day.

You are not "safe" with any technology. Even ML techniques will change
completely an absurd number of times in the 45 years of your career. Your only
hope of staying employed as a programmer for the entire time is to build
yourself as someone who can pick up and work on _anything_ at the drop of a
hat. Similarly, you need a "story" that explains why you are worth more money
than a person with 2-3 years of experience that has specifically trained for
the flavour of the month that the company is using now. They will _happily_
chew up and spit out those young programmers and pick up new ones when they go
with the new technology. Why would they spend a premium on _you_? You need an
answer (and a good answer) for that question. (I was going to try to answer
that question for you, but it's probably better for you to figure it out for
yourself... Plus any answer I give is undoubtedly piss off a bunch of people
who will identify overmuch with the group I'm marketing myself as "better
than" ;-) )

~~~
streetcat1
Not so true. If any, technology only got less innovative, which is evidence
that the field is stagnating.

For example:

1) docker / container - an OS process (circa 1960). Basic OS design (os/360)
did not change in 50 years.

2) Computer architecture (Von Numan) did not change in 50 years.

3) Basic DS and alg (not ML), did not change in 50 years.

4) Programming lang (C based).

5) Database/SQL (50 years)

The only things changing today are (as you mentioned):

1) JS frameworks. but not so much as react won (probably vue js)

2) ML. Here again, most of the work is abstract by pytorch/tensorflow.

3) cloud-native app design. This is a major shift.

However, in parallel, there was a massive productivity boost due to free tools
/ cloud / open source. So today's programmer should be equal to a team of 10 ,
10 years ago, and a team of 20 , 20 years ago.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Sure, core concepts like vms are still around but the practicality and common
usage and comfort and ability to understand how they can be applied (like
containers) does change, and does affect your ability to get jobs, or at least
interview well.

I'm also older, over 50, and I'm frustrated at all these people who are
similarly experienced and complain that companies don't recognize their
abilities. You have to update your skills and be able to talk about the
current stuff. You are foolish if you don't practice before an interview.
Before I switch jobs, I take it seriously and do something like 1 hour
practice every day for a month. I look at current software engineering topics
(I'm usually wasting time on hackernews so I'm up to date on the latest
gossip). You have to try, people!

~~~
streetcat1
Amen to that!

------
reaperducer
There was an interesting piece on the CBS Evening News, maybe this past
Friday, about how some companies are bringing in older (50+) workers to great
benefit. The only thing these people ask for is flexible schedules.

~~~
save_ferris
I think this is a huge part of the conversation that is being overlooked.
Younger workers are perhaps more willing to grind than more experienced devs.

I’d gladly take 20% pay cut to get Fridays off, but I’d get laughed out of my
current gig if I asked for that.

It seems like most gigs are full-time, usually with an on-call rotation, and
if those aren’t compatible with your schedule, good luck.

~~~
hinkley
But they _have_ to grind because they lack the experience to fall into those
traps in the first place.

------
noicebrewery
Why pay an older software engineer a high rate for a wealth of experience when
you can hire two graduates who won't make a 25 year old trust fund baby tech
bro feel inadequate

------
dboreham
Odd that nobody is writing articles about how airlines are hiring 25 year old
pilots or hospitals are recruiting 25 year old ansetheseologists. Their 55
year old colleagues stuck looking for gainful employment.

------
gleenn
> One problem is that some older IT workers who get too comfortable with their
> skills risk falling behind, especially in the era of artificial
> intelligence, said Michael Solomon, co-founder and managing partner at 10x
> Ascend, an advisory firm for senior technology job seekers.

Um, what? AI isn't taking any tech jobs. Maybe once we figure out how to have
the robots program themselves...

~~~
ecnahc515
I definitely read that differently than you. They’re just saying AI is a newer
field and that older people tend to have less experience here.

~~~
gleenn
The "era of Artificial Intelligence" doesn't seem like it's a new software
stack to learn when phrased like that to me, but to each their own.

------
colechristensen
When you job interview around the bay area one thing which is absolutely
striking is the diversity of the companies you visit. Sometimes it feels like
you're in different countries on opposite sides of the planet. There's no way
that is accidental, agism and racism is absolutely rampant, but not
necessarily along traditional lines.

~~~
masonic
I don't see true diversity. There is little ethnic diversity off the
white/asian axis and little age diversity beyond age 35. There isn't usually
much gender diversity in technical roles, either.

------
marcoseliziario
I am over 40 right now, and, frankly, I don't see too much of this problem
right now.

As you get older, you need to understand that you need to adapt. It's easier
to get in the trap of thinking that the old ways are better (and sometimes,
indeed they are), but it doesn't matter. You have to go with the flow.

Another important thing is that you shouldn't get too attached to
technologies. Move with the times, be aggressive with learning.

Appreciate new languages, new paradigms. Yes, it sucks when you spent hours
honing your skills with Hadoop and then one day you find out that all the cool
kids are doing spark. But, the thing is, the people that are doing spark now
are the people that were doing Hadoop yesterday, some of them even older than
you. It was you that got in the comfort zone and didn't see that the field was
evolving. While you were satisfied doing Hadoop, some people were thinking of
how the job could be done in a different way. And I am not telling here that
you should be doing open source, but you should have kept yourself on the
loop. It is not unfair, and it's not unique to our profession. there was a
time where lobotomy was the hot thing on psychiatry, people probably spent
hours honing their skills on it, and then, someday, science evolved and we
figured out that those skills were not only useless but also dangerous. Maybe
this happens way faster in our profession, but also it is a lot easier for us
to keep ourselves current on the state of the art than for a surgeon.

~~~
scarface74
I’m 45 and I share your experience - no age discrimination.

But, I did hear my manager (50+), who is very technical and often gets so sick
of the process to get things done, he will pull up an IDE and do a POC
himself, bemoan the fact that older developers are good for backend
development and architecture but not as good at modern front end development.

I’m not taking any chances. I’m moving more into cloud architecture but
hopefully I can stay more in the professional services/development/consulting
than the Visio creating/Project Management/Solutions Architect role.

But, I’m definitely not spending the energy keeping up with the latest
$cool_kids front end stack.

~~~
marcoseliziario
Funnily enough, I love React. Maybe because I am old enough to have worked
with Borland's Delphi in the past. The feeling I have is that React and UI
frameworks put programmers with no design background back in the User
Interface game. Because, for the love of God, I hate CSS with a passion. I
enjoy doing side projects not only for the money, but also because of the good
feeling of owning the whole stack of the product.

~~~
scarface74
I know everyone has different priorities and lives, but I have a strict rule
against side projects. Between spending time with my family and friends,
exercise, keeping up with technology, etc. I don’t have time. If I can’t keep
abreast of technology at work, it’s time to change jobs. I will stay late and
work on side low priority work related projects to learn new to me
technologies.

Also, I purposefully work for small companies that are in alignment with the
technologies I want to learn or be in. Another benefit to working for small
companies after you have the reputation, you can really make a lot of choices
when it comes to the _how_ and you get to do as much of the stack as you want.

------
sys_64738
There are a whole slew of issues related to this. Managers often feel that
older employees don't take them as seriously as younger people. Younger folk
are less likely to have seen it 'all' like older workers. There's also the age
dynamic of an org. Some companies hire young because of the culture of 'work
hard play hard' where younger folk buy-in but older folks skip it and go home
to their families. Older people are more experienced and more expensive in
general. Younger people are also more likely to be willing to work to burn out
as they've not done it before and managers know that.

My two pronged approach to getting older in the workforce is to make sure
there are people older than me at my work place, and have an exit strategy for
when the jobs dry up completely.

------
throwawaybungie
This is a tough one— a lot of hiring & “diversity & inclusion” initiatives
very rarely discuss age

Is that others’ experience?

~~~
sethammons
Age has been explicitly called out in every D&I initiative I've been party to,
just not as loudly as some other segments, namely gender, sexual orientation,
and race. But definitely mentioned.

------
robotburrito
I'm 38 and a relatively new dev with ~3 years of experience in a wide variety
of tech. Live here in SF and have been doing the whole job hunt thing.

This article stresses me out and makes me feel like if I don't get my next
good job in a year or so I am basically locked out of a career...

I hope this is not true!

~~~
scarface74
Honestly, while I don’t see much discrimination for older devs in general. If
your experience doesn’t match what you “should” have for your age, it might be
different.

------
fossuser
If this is a real thing then it's something I'd want to take advantage of if I
started a start up.

American age discrimination laws only protect people over 40 from
discrimination, they don't protect people under 40 from being discriminated
against.

This means you could advertise roles only for people over 40. If these people
are being excluded for age and not for real reasons like ability then they are
undervalued by the market.

It'd be interesting to have roles that are explicitly only for people 40+. I'd
want to do this and pair them with younger kids out of college who are just
learning how to be effective SWEs as part of the role.

Seems like a big potential hiring advantage if the ageism is a real thing.

~~~
monoideism
> American age discrimination laws only protect people over 40 from
> discrimination, they don't protect people under 40 from being discriminated
> against.

Are you sure about that? Do any lawyers want to weigh in?

Explicitly hiring only 40+ for any given role seems like it would be a lawsuit
magnet.

~~~
fossuser
"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination
against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the
age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from
age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity
to favor an older worker over a younger one, even if both workers are age 40
or older."

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

~~~
monoideism
Thank you, interesting. I found some other documents (by employment lawyers)
online that support what you're saying:
[https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2009/10/23/can-employers-
disc...](https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2009/10/23/can-employers-discriminate-
against-younger-workers/)

------
keyle
Youngsters are more malleable to whatever theocratic management scheme you
want to shoehorn in. Oldie don't buy in the cult driven bend-over management
schemes used in many places.

In short, they outwit their own positions.

------
kundiis
Management can hire 2 fresh grads, roughly same cost as 1 senior candidate.
There are companies where headcount is important for managers to become and
grow their org. In addition, fresh grads usually have exposure to latest stuff
and are eager to make their way in, work 60+ hrs, have fresh perspective, can
crack academic style company interviews. Overall good for the company for less
money.

~~~
sys_64738
The counter to this is those fresh ideas are built on their limited knowledge
of some buzzwords connected to a framework in python which is only in alpha
quality. The number of kids who think new is better because they used it on
their final year team project so must apply it to production servers is scary.
It needs older, experienced workers to say the magic word: No.

------
hanoz
Interesting to read that "the largest gap occurs among workers ages 35 to 44”.
This is the first wave of internet professionals, the people who built the web
as we know it. Above that age range and you're getting into old school IT
territory, and below you've got the new wave of web developers with different
ideas who might regard the old guard as being stuck in their ways.

~~~
skybrian
That range is too young for "people who built the web." A 44-year-old was 20
in 1995 (just after Netscape came out), so probably still in school, and a
35-year-old was 11.

~~~
hanoz
I knew I was going to get picked up on that. I mean brought the web out of
academia and made it the universally recognised platform it is today.

------
rinchik
Are they really being left out though? I understand the notion of ageism, and
not at all saying it doesn't happen in software development, the point is,
what if there are other factors also in play here? What if this "trend" is
just a natural phenomenon?

Software Development is one of the most aggressive industries that are out
there. Tech evolves daily with major trends shifting monthly. It's extremely
hard to keep up!

And it's extremely easy to become "part of the road" if you don't invest
heavily in your professional development by studying the "steamroller". What
if older software developers are just the road, modern tech "steamroller" is
rolling over? There are quite a few percent of the bright and knowledgeable
older software engineers, but what about the "average" ones? Ones who got
tired, have families and just don't want to be bothered with making themselves
uncomfortable by trying to "keep up"? What about those who were sitting
comfortably a decade with the oldest tech you can imagine that was "current"
in early 2000, and now wind has changed? It seems logical to assume that a job
search for those is gonna be tough!

Also about bootcamps, Erik Meijer makes an interesting point about "amateurs
in our industry", that people who live, sleep, and breath code for 20+ years
should be able to comfortably retire near 40, meaning this problem we are
discussing here should never be a problem to begin with.

------
ThrowMeAwayOkay
I just want to say: read these threads if you value your software career.
There is golden advice from those who’ve seen it. Done it.

------
altmind
There is no IT talent shortage. IT companies circulate this myth to get access
to work visas and broaden the workforce market, optimizing the salary budget.
The universities reaffirm that to get more applicants.

------
jakebasile
Maybe there really isn't a shortage of tech talent, and that narrative has
been pushed by companies in an effort to encourage more people to enter the
industry with the promise of easily finding jobs that pay well in order to
increase the supply with younger, less expensive workers who are more easily
exploited for long hours and poor conditions? It stands to reason that more
senior devs would be the ones shafted by this scheme.

Maybe I should get my tinfoil hat checked out, but every time I see a giant
tech company with one of those "everyone can learn to code!" pushes, all I see
are executives hoping to play the long game and reduce the cost of engineering
talent.

~~~
mattmar96
Tech talent shortage is real. We can't find anyone worth interviewing right
now, as a 5 person startup. (And no, we aren't age discriminating)

~~~
fiblye
Maybe try interviewing a few people who you think "aren't worth interviewing."
It could be that your standards are unreasonably high and you're dismissing
plenty of capable people.

And lets be honest, looking at most job postings, most people have absolute
ridiculous expectations of candidates. Most things you can and should be able
to train to some extent on the job.

~~~
robertfw
I just saw a job posting that was looking for someone with 3+ years of
experience, and the list of required skills would have taken easily double
that working flat out to acquire

~~~
rumanator
> and the list of required skills would have taken easily double that working
> flat out to acquire

You're reading too much into those requirements. Nice-to-haves are not must-
haves. I've been involved in hiring processes for a front-end position that
listed non-trivial experience with React and among the half dozen candidates
who applied the company even considered a high-schools dropout who only had to
show a 50-hour HTML online course.

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nine_zeros
There is definitely ageism but thats because younger unqualified employees are
asked to evaluate older candidates.

Younger employees (especially single ones) are usually subconsciously also
looking for buddies to have fun with. Which eliminates a lot of older people
who just want to work and go home.

Further, younger employees also expect older candidates to be some super
goddamn geniuses. Even if they are, the interview process never looks for that
genius. Also, not all old candidates are genius and its hard for young kids to
acknowledge because they just dont know any better.

On the other hand, old farts sometimes think too much of themselves. Also,
some older candidates just dont want to relocate. Which reduces options A LOT.
Very few old candidates want to relocate from rural Indiana to SF bay area.

The jobs exist, the talent shortage exists. But the demand isn't meeting
supply and when it does, the evaluators are usually incompetent.

