
Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World - zzzeek
https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-world/
======
markbnj
> Team social events shouldn’t require physical prowess or alcoholic excess—so
> forget paintball and bar crawls.

As a 57 year-old backend engineer I would like to keep the bar crawls, thanks.

~~~
teddyh
None for me, please:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130808111450/http://ryanfunduk...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130808111450/http://ryanfunduk.com/culture-
of-exclusion/)

~~~
icebraining
That culture definitely has a problem, but it's unrelated to having some
social events, among many others and separate from the workplace or conference
area, where drinking is involved. Even if they're bar crawls.

------
jasonkester
A good way to age-proof yourself is to start your own business.

In the dozen years I've been running my SaaS products, despite being Old
during that entire timespan, nobody has ever so much as asked me my age. Let
alone discriminated against me because of it.

And I've been "Consulting While Over 30" for nearly 20 years now for
individual clients. None of which have ever held my lack-of-inexperience
against me.

Granted, I've done fine during my occasional forays back into traditional-ish
employment with respect to the whole "ageism in tech/you're never gonna work
again" thing. But if that ever did start to happen, I wouldn't worry about it
happening so much to the entrepreneurial side of my world.

~~~
cimmanom
Not everyone has an interest in or aptitude for the additional work needed to
run your own business - from marketing to account management to accounting.

------
motohagiography
Bias toward less experienced but highly technical staff seems to be an
artifact of the portfolio management style of the investors and board members.
Shotgun investments in a space mean shotgun incentives for managers, which
yield shotgun solutions from engineering teams, to whack-a-mole product market
fit problems - with randomized, exponential returns.

Profitable, revenue funded companies are more accommodating to the Olds
because things like discernment are rewarded. Mature companies (5+ years) that
act like startups are as Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, "dressing their best
decade." You can usually tell within 15 minutes of entering an office whether
it's a place of growth.

Young people are perfect for the former style because they can apply technical
know-how without any broader criticism about likelihood of success, strategy,
or sustainability. As an old, it can become more difficult to maintain the
cognitive dissonance required to thrive in these environments when you have a
mental horizon longer than 5 years.

I've worked with olds, and the successful ones recognize the story is no
longer about them. They recognize that young people are also like a portfolio
of long term investments, so they manage it prudently, and the best ones have
learned how to get short.

If you are still doing startups as an employee in your 40s, you are there for
the rush and because you love doing it. We should all admit that working for
early stage companies is a lifestyle, not a plan. There is nothing wrong with
experienced people. They aren't malformed and do not need correction. Some
might need more awareness of what they are involved in, but adopting a "fixer
upper," mentality is the beginning of death.

------
Aloha
I'm in the opposite of this situation, I'm among the 10% of the youngest
employees in the company, when around 60% of the company will be retiring
within a decade. We're also in one of those high cost housing markets, and
while I'm very well paid comparatively to others in my particular part of the
technology sector - its still not enough to buy a house, or settle down - but
they're somewhat unsympathetic when I talk about things like, working from
home, remote working, etc, I generally get a blank stare.

So, there is a corollary here, make sure that pay and benefits are attractive
to employees of all ages, not just one group.

~~~
afpx
If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t until I was 30 that my wife and I
had enough for a downpayment for a house. When I graduated, my salary was
$40k. And, 3-bedroom houses, in my economically-attractive, but not
extravagent, area were around $300k. Rent for a 2br was about $1000 / month,
so saving $60k took quite a few years. Of course, several co-workers had well-
off parents who bought them their first house (lucky them), but for many of
us, we just had to pay off debt, and save, and save, and be confident that it
would work out. It took a while, especially considering the two recessions,
and it felt like it would never get better. But, it eventually did. So,
although I don’t know your particular situation, I’m confident that people in
their 20s today will eventually prevail. The difference is that the younger
generation is enormous, and all of those people buying houses at the same time
puts demand pressure on prices. But, it will work out.

~~~
bla2
> it wasn’t until I was 30 that my wife and I had enough for a downpayment for
> a house.

Not sure if that's meant to evoke sympathy, but to me that sounds extremely
entitled. I'd be grateful if I had a house at 30.

Is it common for people around you to feel they deserve to own a house?

~~~
afpx
Entitled to a house? No - I grew up poor, man. My single mom of 4 made less
than $8,000 many years (Bet you didn’t know that, as recent as 25 years ago,
some Americans still didn’t have bathrooms and full electricity). No, in my
family, it was unusual to own a real house (as opposed to a mobile house). I
had no entitlement.

But, I also grew up in a place where real houses cost $25-40k. So, I’m a way,
yes, I had some expectation that if I got a STEM degree, I’d be able to afford
a house. But, a $300k house? No - where I grew up, that wasn’t even a thing.

~~~
bla2
Thanks for sharing!

------
rmason
I think my advantage is that I've seen more engineering cycles. New problems
can sometimes be solved quicker by the hard fought for knowledge gained
solving older ones.

Mark Zuckerberg famously said young people were just smarter. In my generation
it was Abbie Hoffman who said not to trust anyone over thirty. They were both
wrong.

~~~
drdeadringer
What might be "right"?

~~~
dijit
Having a diverse set of perspectives on a problem.

Young turks full of energy, old cynical farts who have seen failure and can
pick out the signs.

------
ThJ
The tendency to promote people out of engineering and into management is
probably down to the bottom line. At some point, an engineer's economic worth
plateaus, and the only way to justify a bigger paycheck is to have him offload
the upper management. Managing people is extremely time consuming. Time spent
on managing people is time not spent on closing deals, maintaining business
relationships, securing investments, etc, so it becomes extremely important to
delegate.

~~~
nbm
Why not just hire a (hopefully) good people manager? It's hard to find good
managers, but it's also not entirely likely that your best IC engineer is
going to be a good manager naturally either. Whereas you know they're good at
what they're doing now.

If they're not going to find a way to be more worthwhile, just don't pay them
more. If they find a way to be more worthwhile (teaching, coaching, setting
standards, whatever), then pay them more.

~~~
3rdAccount
You need to know the domain in complex fields. In my area, the non engineers
have no clue what is going on and are almost dead weight. The high output
engineers now in management aren't always the best at managing people, but at
least they make good decisions and don't slow the rest of us down.

~~~
nbm
You probably don't need to force the _best_ engineers go into management to
achieve this - you just need someone with the necessary background and
experience - and from that larger pool you can choose the ones that want to do
management, and are more likely going to be good at it.

The managers I deal with day-to-day were all once ICs in the same role, but I
wouldn't put almost any of them in the same category as the strongest ICs we
have in technical skill. And they mostly don't make bad technical decisions -
because they mostly don't make any technical decisions - they defer to their
strong ICs.

~~~
FuckOffNeemo
For my own knowledge and perhaps others can understand your comment better,
what's an IC?

~~~
RhodesianHunter
Individual contributor

------
burlesona
Good article. It’s kind of scary to me that “old” in tech means 40.

~~~
abritinthebay
Only because as people get experience they end up in the “Engineering Manager”
role & such.

Plus there’s a GLUT of fresh grads joining each year.

~~~
intended
Your last line is the single point of failure for this whole issue.

The various systems, incentives, lies - ALL, arise from the growth paradigm.

That paradigm depends on more cheap, energetic fresh meat arriving out of
college/recruiters every year.

Fresh grads cost less, have relatively more energy, fewer ties, and probably
better cognition responses.

They lack experience, but that's a solvable problem.

The question to ask is this: Why WONT there be work place discrimination, when
younger, cheaper candidates show up every day?

System incentives are not in favor of growing old in tech.

And whats laughably worse about this is that humans are TERRIBLE at making out
correlation from causation:

people will eventually associate youth with tech work, so an OLD person doing
tech - will be tagged as an outlier and assessed on that.

(And Firms would NEVER admit that its just easier for them to ignore work
place equality issues in favor of "fit" and "cultural match")

~~~
kokey
This is also more of a US centric phenomenon, not only because of the
investment culture but because it's about the only developed country with a
strong young population. That said, as those of us with the experience has
witnessed before, these periods of growth focus comes in cycles and when the
phase ends the experience of being boring and risk-averse can actually be an
advantage for survival if it's combined with skill and experience.

------
DenisM
I wonder how prevalent the whole ageism thing is. It makes good articles
because half the engineers are afraid of it, but how widespread is this? Could
be just a dozen isolated cases that the media latches on?

~~~
drtr
Prevalent. I'm applying for jobs. Hot market. Both I and my peers are finding
it much harder than as fresh college grads. A lot of this is structural:
Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. interviews ask very easy big-O style
algorithmic questions and prioritize speed and accuracy.

A lot of us more experienced folk haven't done this in years. We can solve
more complex, multifaceted questions, but those aren't asked. It's about speed
with things from college. It's important we understand those, and we do, but
that crisp sharpness is no longer there.

I will beat someone younger on hard problems which also involve threading,
distributed systems, customer requirements, memory hierarchies, code
simplicity, testability, business requirements, math, etc. but those aren't
the interviews.

Even ML seem to be spot checks of trendy techniques rather than deeper
questions about mathematical maturity.

~~~
DenisM
If you spent 4 weeks drilling basic CS problems do you think you will pass the
interview? When I look into them I feel like I can pick it back up quickly.

On a tangent: which city are you looking in?

~~~
drtr
I am passing them now, after having gone through a few. I do still make stupid
mistakes more than I would have in my youth. Four weeks drilling would
definitely more than do it.

I think the bigger problem is none of the other skills I have seem to even
matter for Google/Amazon/Facebook hiring. I would rather practice those skills
and find niche openings which value people like me than do prep for a broken
process. Plus I have family, consulting, etc, so I don't want to just drill.
I'm not desperate. I could be wrong (no offers yet, but just started on sites
so don't expect any yet) but I think I have better options elsewhere.

If I weren't actively looking, I wouldn't even consider those types of jobs,
and this is the first time in my life actively looking. In other words, Google
has no chance of poaching someone like me. I think the word for that is
implicit bias or disparate impact.

Boston area.

~~~
DenisM
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply.

How do you and yours look for jobs? In other words, where would I need to
advertise to have you find me and apply?

Here I posted an ad for a principal engineer, and it drew zero responses [1].
What could I do differently to get attention of (someone like) you and your
friends?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055897)

~~~
drtr
When I read a post like yours, it reads like $100k salary, boring system,
small company, small total addressable market, so even if wildly successful,
not much upside. Boring tech too: Basically a classic database system.

My friends are mostly at Amazon, Google, or Facebook with incomes from $250k
up to over $1 million. The others are at startups solving big hard problems
with big dreams.

If there is no particular complexity, I'd outsource to India, Ukraine,
Pakistan, or similar. If there is, I'd describe the hard problem.

The minimal qualifications aren't a draw either. I want to work with smart
people. Microsoft stack reeks of low end employment.

Midwest, rural, Deep South, etc. beats Seattle too. Lower cost of living draws
many developers of the sort you want. Problem is a minimal living salary broke
$200k in Boston, SF, NY, etc. You don't want a low end job.

~~~
DenisM
That’s a lot of prejudice for someone who just a day earlier complained about
prejudice. :)))

Thanks for feedback!

------
yekepa
I think a mix is the best. I worked in different teams, but with teams where
the age were mixed I felt good and well thought out decisions was made.

Young devs are eager to learn and think older devs are in the way for new
tech. Older devs have more mature look on life and know more about
consequences of different decisions in the long run.

Ageism in a company makes it more shortsighted and plain out stupid. They make
more mistakes, lose customers more, and make decisions that they regret later.

~~~
gaius
_older devs are in the way for new tech._

Asking those awkward questions like “what problem, that we actually have, does
it solve?” And “will it still be around in 3 years? Won’t even _you_ be bored
of it in 6 months?”

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anoncoward111
As a salesman who is constantly told he is "too young" and is habitually
underpaid/fired, I can tell you that age discrimination is both real and
highly arbitrary.

If anybody out there can see the value in having an enthusiastic customer
advocate, rather than just another sales guy, please do reply :)

~~~
godzillabrennus
I know a lot of folks hiring. Happy to pass your resume around. Email me: Hn
(at) strapr (dot) com

Also check out Albert’s List on Facebook. There are a lot of non tech jobs
posted on there.

~~~
anoncoward111
Thanks so much for writing, I will email you shortly!

------
kulu2002
Good article. I fail to visualise this; tech-people between age group 25-40,
who are already at the peak of their career, like some are already CxOs,
others are VPs and higher positions in large orgs. What are these people gonna
do after say 25-30 years from now? I am sure there would be a high tech
professional life cycle something similar to tech product life-cycle. Though
this is very subjective phenomenon.

~~~
cimmanom
20 years at a CXO salary in a reasonably mature organization (not seed or
series A) is long enough to save up plenty to retire on.

------
b0rsuk
Make a bet and invest in a new, upcoming technology like Rust. If Rust takes
off big, you'll have a head start on teen programming wizards.

~~~
raesene9
This is true and also helps keep you fresh. Personally I got involved in
containers and container security 4 years ago and so even at my advanced age
(44) I'm involved in what is a pretty hot topic at the moment.

I also recognize that I need to keep investing in my technical development as
I go along.

------
timerol
Is there a good word for when a member of a group is biased against the group
that they're a part of?

> I wouldn’t want to work in a place where management is close to my age
> without a gold-plated guarantee they share the “Let’s try it and see”
> outlook of younger companies.

------
WalterBright
The correct term is "Auld". "Old" is demeaning and insensitive.

~~~
Angostura
The preferred nomenclature is "wrinkly"

~~~
jjgreen
In the UK, we have "twerly" (derived from the free bus trips available to
pensioners, but only after 10am, hence "Am I too early?")

~~~
Angostura
Excellent - I'm in the UK, but haven't heard that one. Not that far from a bus
pass myself

------
Cacti
It's not complicated: the costs of software development are almost entirely in
labor. As long as that remains true, older people will be at a severe
disadvantage simply because they cost 2-5 times as much as a new hire. Once
Moore's Law slows down (or whatever we want to call the current golden age
we're seemingly still in), this will change, but until then you're just
fighting against exponential growth.

~~~
ggg9990
Why does an older person cost more? Either they produce more, or they’re
overpaid. The first type is definitely worth finding and paying... I’ve seen
companies built solely by 22-year old script kiddies and usually the stack
can’t scale. At that point, you’re in a trickier spot because a 40-year-old
who can inject some good sense at the beginning of a project is a lot more
abundant than a 40-year-old who can lead a turnaround effort on a fucked up
stack while keeping the company and stack operational for existing customers.

~~~
adventured
> Why does an older person cost more?

Let's take an example case where two engineers are working in a second tier
city earning $85,000 per year in salary. One is 25 years old, one is 53 years
old. The company covers the entire cost of the employee health insurance. The
health insurance for the 53 year old will cost a minimum of 2x what it does
for the 25 year old. The cost of health insurance begins to aggressively
increase after roughly 38-40. By the time the 53 year old employee reaches
60-63 years old, the insurance cost is now 3x that of the 25 year old.

The 53 year old will solidly cost an extra $6,000 to $10,000 in health
insurance on top of that $85,000 salary, versus the 25 year old. The 60 year
old might cost $12,000 to $18,000 more in health insurance.

All of these figures are minimums, the numbers get much worse if you have a
nice health plan.

If you're in a second tier city paying your engineers $85k, $15,000 _per year_
in extra cost buys a ridiculous amount of training to improve the 20 something
engineers.

If you have 20 engineers, over ten years the cost of employing all 55-63 year
olds, versus all 20-30 year olds, could easily be a minimum _extra_ of $3
million in just health insurance costs (with a total salary over ten years of
$17 million). The more likely cost is far higher.

~~~
old325656
You make a great case for why _health insurance_ shouldn't be a part of
compensation. A single-payer healthcare system is long overdue in the US, and
might actually make age discrimination less likely.

------
norswap
It's refreshing to see a positive (but nuanced) take for once.

------
butterfi
wow, I'm not sure how good the article is, but my browser threw a hairball
trying to load that page. Rarely do I see a page fail as hard as this one did.
Has Wired just collapsed under the weight of ad trafic nonsense?

~~~
qubax
Not just wired. Almost every news site. Ad block, update your host file, etc.
Ever since forbes had viruses/malware for ads a few years ago, I don't visit a
news site without protection.

~~~
incompatible
I'm using an adblocker, all I get is a brief flash of something and then a
blank page. Maybe I'm too old for Wired now.

~~~
icebraining
Loads fine for me with uBlock Origin enabled (and blocking 28 URLs).

~~~
incompatible
It's working now for me too, I suppose they fixed something, or it was just
overloaded.

------
crispyambulance
WTF: "an Old"

Is that supposed to be "millennial" lingo?

~~~
rdiddly
Somebody's trying to fit in and say what they heard somebody else say. Thence
are these things born and propagated.

This one takes an adjective and makes it a noun. Sounds more like 1950s lingo
(a black, a white, a gay etc.) but with the illusion of freshness with its
being applied to old people for the first time. Call me a rude, but it's a
sucky. At least "old person" acknowledges they're a person.

------
SQL2219
"young people are just smarter"

Mark Zuckerberg

~~~
bigiain
Also Zuckerburg:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks

So "young people are just smarter", and "anyone at Harvard is a dumb fuck"...

~~~
gcbw2
I think you are replying to an ironic post to begin with. Doubt that quote was
to prove a point, but to highlight the problem.

~~~
bigiain
Sure - I still find it amusing tho - totally worth the downvotes...

~~~
dang
It's not worth defacing the community with, though, so please don't.

