
Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry - _csoo
https://oldgeekjobs.com
======
tjic
I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world.

I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like
themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures
that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds.
From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as
one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places.

I live in NH, on a farm and work (mostly) remotely. I've got a network of
contacts, I get pinged w requests for contracting work, I do the job, I get
paid. No one asks me about my age (45) or judges me because of it.

Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so
I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots.

~~~
SadWebDeveloper
Problem with your solution is that you already now people, if you don't you
have to rely on websites like freelancer that pretty much are the same as
paid-to-win-the-bid in modern mobile video games and it's sad when people all
over the world bid really low those making the website effectively racist
regarding devs that to this for living instead of side jobs.

~~~
tjic
Also, the way to compete with someone who's charging $10/hr for crappy code is
to do what they can't or won't do:

* be an excellent communicator * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. * be a whole stack developer * manage "up". Think of things before your manager does, alert the manager to dangers and problems, give expert advice, avoid the problems. Managers love people who solve the total problem; they hate people who solve one very very narrow niche problem and then leave them (the manager) dealing with a leaky bag of shit. Saying "well, that wasn't in scope!" does not make them happier about holding the leaky bag.

I guarantee you that no one bidding $5/hr and working on a timezone 12 hours
away delivers this.

So, to recap:

1) work in a city when young 2) make contacts 3) be good at what you do 4)
manage up ; solve the REAL problem

Do that and you'll have lots of work and make good money.

~~~
jnbiche
> * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. *

I agree, and I hate it. What happened to the days when I could just be
productive? Now, I have to spend hours "working as a team" (ie, socializing)
on Slack. I hate it so much that I've dramatically cut down on the work I do.
It's not that I'm asocial, it's just that I don't want to be exchanging memes
when there's work to be done. I want to do the work, and do it well, so I can
spend time with my wife and kids. Work for work, socializing for after work.

Even with IRC, it didn't use to be like this. What happened?

For the record, I'm not talking about being responsive, or good
communications. That's critical. I've always responded to client emails within
2-3 hours (I break up my day into 3 email checks). But I find it impossible to
get much done with teams that expect me to hang out in Slack or Hipchat all
day long. But the younger kids love it. Maybe they code and chat at the same
time, I don't know. I can't do it.

Doesn't anyone just hire people to do a job anymore? Are even contractors
doomed to spending their days "meshing"?

~~~
autotune
Ask your manager to have a couple days out of the week where you can "go dark"
and focus on projects.

~~~
jnbiche
Yeah, I did that when I worked remotely as an employee for a company. They
didn't like it, particularly my boss's boss, and it definitely only served to
make the younger developers who quite literally live and socialize on Slack
more wary of me (because of course if you're not online, you're not really
working, right? Even if you're producing results.)

What I'm talking about now is working _as a contractor /freelancer_ for short-
term projects, like even as short as 3-4 week projects. Most of the good
freelance jobs expect you to be on Slack coordinating with their team in
Eastern European country X. It really didn't use to be like this, I used to be
able to make good money as a freelancer just coordinating with other
freelancers and the contracting company/individual a few times a day. And in
my opinion, it worked a lot better. Yeah, the irresponsible devs can't screw
around as much if someone's keeping tabs on Slack, but the productive ones are
significantly less productive this way. And why would you hire a remote
freelancer you didn't trust to do the work?

And jobs that are paid per job and not per hour aren't any better, in my
experience. Everyone has to be online, checking in, chatting, exchanging
memes.

Maybe I've just had a streak of bad luck this year, but it definitely seems to
be a significant trend.

I don't know, maybe I need to make a concerted effort just to work for small
businesses, and not start-ups or mid-sized companies.

------
johnwheeler
Hi Everybody,

I'm the creator of the site the down blog in the OP links to
[https://oldgeekjobs.com](https://oldgeekjobs.com). I developed it as an MVP
last night in one hour.

The blog looks like it's getting crushed under load, so here's the content of
the post:

Check out [https://oldgeekjobs.com/](https://oldgeekjobs.com/) if you’re over
30.

In the software development industry it’s hard to get hired when you get past
35 and are still “just a developer”. Employers look down on you because you’re
too smart, or they think you’re too stupid because you never wanted to be a
manager. Employers will use the excuse of “culture fit” to exclude you and get
you out of the hiring pool. You’re too smart to be tricked into working 60
hours a week for zero equity and zero bonuses. You’re too smart to be working
on a legacy code base that has low quality and will hurt your future career
prospects. Employers know that which is why they love to hire fresh faces out
of school and under 30s; give tech companies your young and naive to burn them
out and make them piles of cash. You’re experienced enough to avoid that
demoralizing burning out.

Check out [https://oldgeekjobs.com/](https://oldgeekjobs.com/) because there
may just be a job for you, a place where you won’t be discriminated against
just because you’re getting older and wiser.

~~~
morgante
Be careful to not discriminate against young people either. Assuming
developers in their 20s are naive and underpaid is just as insulting as
attitudes towards older developers.

This isn't necessarily an indictment of you. I'm just a little sick of people
stereotyping younger developers on Hacker News when the truth is that most of
us get great value for our time and are well aware of the choices we make.

~~~
whamlastxmas
This is the equivalent of someone making a job site for black people to get
jobs, and saying "be careful not to discriminate against whites!".

~~~
sjdchid
Except old people are objectively better off in the US.

It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having
equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only
everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.

~~~
mattdeboard
I mean we're not talking about Baby Boomers here, chief.

There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated
college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who
posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the
"millennial" cut off by 1 year).

Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I
promise you college and home-buying wasn't terribly different 15-20 years ago
than it is now. Still plenty of opportunity to go into incredible debt. And
hell, 2016's 45-year-old who bought his first house in, say, 2000, may just
have watched his home's value crash in 2006/2007.

So maybe just tone it down.

~~~
beachstartup
_> There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now._

i'm one of these, and i don't consider myself a millennial.

anyone who's legitimately used a rotary phone (or even just seen one in use)
in a non-ironic way should not be considered a millennial.

~~~
mattdeboard
Why?

~~~
mixmastamyk
Rotary phones are from the 70's and earlier.

~~~
serge2k
and people born in the 70s aren't millenials.

Really, the oldest are mid 30s, and I think even that is a stretch.

~~~
kodt
Yet rotary phones were still very common in the 80s, and my grandparents still
had one in the early 90s. So people born in the early 80s, which qualifies as
millennial, very likely used them.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Until 2000-something (and they might still have it) the Harwich MA public
library had a rotary phone that patrons could use to make calls. The typical
use case was middle schoolers who's parents forgot to pick them up (the middle
school ran a bus to the library) when the library was 30min from closing.

------
sAuronas
Old (40) geek here. I think I have two pennies-worth to share here. I came to
the industry at 38. I left real estate development when I couldn't overcome
the unemployment history gap in my resume, despite working for KB Home, Toll
Brothers and on the largest redevelopment project in Chicago history (Stateway
Gardens housing project to Park Boulevard). I was living in the Bay Area at
the time I made the transition (finally). I can tell you first hand - the
culture fit thing as a means to discriminate is real. I will say that I at
least had interviews. Interviewing felt good after not even getting an email
for - any - job applied for in real estate. I got a response for - every - job
applied for the in Bay (minus FB and Pandora, you guys suck).

After 6 months of interviews in the Bay, I gave up (due to cost) and decided
to try another market... less than 6 weeks and I had a job in Charlotte. I had
my first iOS role at a startup another 6 months after that. Even after the
startup coughed me up (thanks again Zomato), I was able to get another iOS job
in a month. I won't mention (any other) names but I can say that the culture
fit issue doesn't really exist outside the Bay.

And to any decision makers out there, you are making a mistake if you assume
someone like me can't fit on a team of 18-30 y/o. I fit in so well, in fact,
that almost all of my new connections on LinkedIn are these same 18-30 y/o. I
have made more friends with interns than I did when I was the age to intern.
And my 20 year-old friends have no fear in making fun of my age just as I have
no fear in making fun of theirs. We even talk sH$@! about race (oh yeah, I'm
also black).

The experience has been awesome for me as well as them (I believe). So, the
next time you have a chance to hire an old dev who just wants to be a
fu$!@E~!! DEV - just hire her.

~~~
nedsma
What a great story. Also, I believe that geek fellows here and HNers shouldn't
be concerned about switching jobs, as they're immersed in this industry all
over their heads. It's folks who do coding just for living and don't really
want to invest in new technologies, or have early stopped trying out new
things that might have more issues finding new prospects.

~~~
sAuronas
Thanks. I got into the industry with the expectation that I would launch a
startup. Yet, I starting really writing code and decided that I wanted to do
something really novel and killed my original real estate domain related
ideas. Once you learn to write code you realize how weak your ideas really
are. Since I love coding so much, I don't mind improving as a dev because
novelty and quality my ideas seem to be improving as well. My experience is
unusual but I encourage anyone I met to try it because you never know if
software development might change your life's trajectory.

~~~
jamiek88
How did younger started? Did you go back to school or use online resources
etc?

I'm really interested in hearing more of your story.

------
makecheck
I think that age is correlation, not causation.

What’s really happening is two things. First, companies typically don’t like
paying _people_ lots of money (even if they are great at blowing millions on
other mindless things). Second, these companies do not understand that their
unwillingness to hire expensive people is _causing_ months of bug-chasing and
monkey-patching in their products.

When your organization is under the impression that “a developer is a
developer”, new college grads willing to work for peanuts are very attractive.
It takes a good manager to understand that someone’s decades of experience or
advanced degree really is worth a lot more money, and not just in the long
run. Experienced people have seen more programming constructs in more
languages, they have encountered more examples of APIs in more libraries, they
have made more mistakes and learned from them, they are more likely to be able
to apply suitable algorithms and data formats to problems, and so on. Also,
having experienced people on staff actually gives your new developers somebody
to learn from.

~~~
danielvinson
This matches my experiences well. Many of the people I know who are devs in
the Bay Area that don't work at Google/FB aren't making more than $80k. The
companies pull in grads who couldn't quite make the top companies who don't
realize that they will never get a raise or promotion, and many of these
people stay for 5-6 years before they realize how hard they are getting
screwed.

These companies would NEVER hire an older, experienced developer because they
know they wouldn't be able to retain them.

Its worth noting that I work on a dev team where the average age is about 40
(I am 27). We have multiple members of the team nearing retirement. Having the
older guys around makes my job much easier and gives me resources that I
wouldn't have otherwise. We are able to keep these guys around because we work
on interesting projects, don't work more than 40 hours a week, and have a
great manager.

~~~
ryandrake
> These companies would NEVER hire an older, experienced developer because
> they know they wouldn't be able to retain them.

Not only that, but they don't have to retain them. . There is a large supply
of "~20 year olds who aren't quite Google material" lined up to take on those
$80K developer roles. The "churn and burn" strategy seems to be working for
these companies so why change?

------
abz10
I worked at Microsoft Redmond in 2009. They have a private uber like transport
system. Around once a week the driver would hand me their resume and ask that
I pass it on to my manager. It turns out that many of them had worked in the
industry and were trying to get back in. They had a lot of experience and big
important job titles etc. Mostly from the 2001 tech boom. That was my wake up
call. If I'm not careful someday I will be the one handing out resumes to
passengers.

So I focused on skills and went into contracting as soon as I could. Now the
reason I don't work for startups is that they keep trying to pay me with a
mystery box of stock options and I'm not buying it.

Another bonus about contracting, apart from the money and flexibility, is that
you get left out of company politics.

So tl;dr... Life doesn't owe you anything. And I recommend contracting as a
career / lifestyle choice.

~~~
clifanatic
> you get left out of company politics

And if you work 80 hours a week, you get paid 2x as much.

~~~
driverdan
And if you work 10 hours a week, you get paid 25% as much.

This isn't a dig at freelancing / contracting. I did it for a while and it was
great. But you have to be realistic. Also, billing 80h per week would be near
impossible unless you had someone else managing your business for you.

------
ravenstine
It's too bad that many of us(in general, not on HN) are too lazy to judge a
person based on what they actually offer vs a number attributed to them.
People who are 50+ are perfectly capable at learning and writing good code,
and it really isn't hard to recognize someone with a sharp mind.

However, lots of people allow their minds and bodies to rot as they get older.
My parents, as much as I love them, are not very employable at this point(at
least not when compared to a younger candidate). They don't get much exercise
and spend a large chunk of the day sitting in front of the boob tube. They are
smart people, but their ability to learn new things has gone way down, and I
have noticed they are a little more gullible than they used to be. Meanwhile,
I have friends who are in their 50s and they have the energy, motivation, and
learning abilities of someone in their 20s.

I wonder if this has something to do with the exercise they get, and the lack
of TV watching. The calorie defecit from both those things probably slows
their aging a tad too. I think if you want to be programming at age 50, you
can easily add years, perhaps decades to your youthfulness by taking some
basic care of both body and mind. It may seem like an obvious statement, but
most people don't actually do this, and it shows in people my age who have the
habits of my parents while also drinking heavily and smoking way too much.
It's kind of spooky when I see people who were once youthful looking, in their
20s, quickly start to look like they are in their 40s because they don't
really take care of themselves beyond basic hygiene.

~~~
pc86
I never exercised or ate well, even as a child and adolescent. I look better
now at 30 than I ever did at 18 or 20 or 25.

Exercise and physical activity are supremely important.

~~~
biafra
Did you forget to mention that you do exercise now?

------
daxfohl
Half of a coder's value is understanding "unspoken" requirements. In other
words, "having experience in the industry". Or "domain-specific knowledge"

Back in the day, there were different industries to have experience in. Jet
engines, medical devices, etc. Beyond that, nothing had/needed/understood
software. For better or worse, it was a pinnacle.

These days "the industry" is "teens using snapchat". The further you are
removed from that, the less valuable you are as a coder.

There are still of course jet engines and medical devices to be built, but (as
a statement to our society?) those products and thus those skills are not as
valuable as advertising.

Even more sadly, this trend is just the start. The current 40's-ish coders
have their own industry experience to fall back on. The next generation of
coders that will have nothing but 15secOfFame-centric jobs will have nothing
to fall back on as younger 15msOfFame-centric things come in.

At some point we'll have to recognize coding as an NFL-style career. Get what
you can while you can; you'll be a car salesman soon enough. Granted NFL
players have 100x the pay plus public visibility that can help them after they
retire.

None of this matters because the Earth will be sand in 20 years anyway. (Sorry
I'm still digesting [http://xkcd.com/1732/](http://xkcd.com/1732/))

~~~
georgespencer
I kept looking for the /s tag but couldn't see it.

> Half of a coder's value is understanding "unspoken" requirements.

Certainly a great deal of what you pay for in a more senior engineer is that
ability to see around corners. I disagree entirely with your assessment that
this ability is anything narrower than domain-specific (i.e. it extends only
so far as 'an experienced software engineer' not so far as 'an experienced
photo sharing app engineer').

> The current 40's-ish coders have their own industry experience to fall back
> on. The next generation of coders that will have nothing but 15secOfFame-
> centric jobs will have nothing to fall back on as younger 15msOfFame-centric
> things come in.

To assert this with any credibility (the assertion: previous generations
software engineers can fall back into 'steady' jobs because they have
expertise in staple products; new generation won't be able to because they
don't) you have to have some sort of evidence. Plenty of junior and midweight
engineers hop from bank => startup and vice versa. Why would the same not be
true of senior engineers? If you specialise in cryptography does it matter
whether you're applying it for British Airways or Snapchat?

> At some point we'll have to recognize coding as an NFL-style career.

Why? What evidence supports this conclusion?

> Get what you can while you can; you'll be a car salesman soon enough.
> Granted NFL players have 100x the pay plus public visibility that can help
> them after they retire.

If you fail to keep your skills current then yes, you will have a short
career. I know many software engineers who are three decades into their
career. They're hard-working and enthusiastic. They keep their skills up to
date.

An adjacent point: having read The 100 Year Life, it's clear to me that in 20
years our job market will be different to the one we see today. Salary will
likely be heavily decoupled from age and closely linked to merit. As older
people get healthier relative to previous generations, they will be able to
work productively for longer. It's therefore both more necessary for them to
keep current and invest in themselves in order to maintain income parity, but
also more possible for them to do so (because instead of having hip operations
at 60, they can attend J2EE2: No This Time We Mean It, It's Going To Be Huge
summer camp).

~~~
daxfohl
> Why? What evidence supports this conclusion?

Because in the deluge of this style of post on HN lately, the most common
counter has been "well we elders know the game so much better". Sounds exactly
like sports. Yes you can pick up new skills and what-not, but "the game" has
changed and the kids at a very fundamental level "get it" and you don't.

> having read The 100 Year Life

Okay....

> it's clear to me that in 20 years our job market will be different to the
> one we see today. Salary will likely be heavily decoupled from age and
> closely linked to merit.

Exactly. But merit at _what_? Old-school coders are the best there are. But
they're getting kicked out because they're the best at stuff that nobody cares
about. You know, algorithms and correct coding and what-not.

Ultimately, salary is going to be linked to how much you make the company.
It's already happening / happened. There's no point to your book. If you "get"
the latest social media craze and can figure out the best way to incorporate
it, you're way more valuable than someone who knows 100 programming languages,
wrote ten, and can solve the entirety of Project Euler in an hour.

Okay maybe the Euler guy might be worth something. (the /s you're wanting).
But, given most of us, even if we're above average, _aren 't_ that guy, what
does that leave? It leaves an NFL-style career. At 1/100 the salary.

Anyway I have two kids. I love programming. I'm good at it. I'm 40. I will
steer them away from that as a profession. It's an NFL-style career.

Addendum:

> Ultimately, salary is going to be linked to how much you make the company.
> It's already happening / happened.

And don't get me wrong, this is a good thing. I guess. Anyway, fits in with
the ideal of social Darwinism, and capitalism in general. Which, I guess is as
good a thing as any, and likely unavoidable regardless. Nonetheless, it has to
be taken for what it is, which is a pretty awesome career thru your early 30's
followed by a never-ending gray cloud. Which is great if that's what you want.
However if you're expecting a long-term career like I'd assume most are, you
really need to plan out your career path in more detail. Most people going
into CS don't recognize that, and it really needs to be made more plain.

~~~
pc86
> _Old-school coders are the best there are._

Looking at all the programmers I've worked with I see zero correlation between
age in skill. None in either direction.

You assertion that programming is an NFL-style career is one devoid of any
merit of substance. There is no time clock on a programmer's career the way
there is in any professional sport.

~~~
alttab
He's saying it's highly paid and skewed to the young. Statistically, thus
isn't false.

It also gives those who fit the profile to think about the bigger picture,
which can't hurt.

But I'm a manager now so feel free to ignore my advice.

------
SadWebDeveloper
The sad part is that when you reach that age (31 here) is you start looking at
the "new trend" (ex Angular, React and NodeJS) as unnecesary and the "new
devs" that doesn't have any experience on making and maintaining long term
projects (> 5 years) look at this as the holy grail technology and if you
aren't using that technlogy it means you aren't as efficent as the "new guys"
so you either migrate to management (which sucks), change industries or became
a private just another entrepenur.

~~~
throwanem
I'm considerably older than that, and would argue from experience that the
mistake is in regarding _everything_ new as just another fad.

Often it's good to wait a while and see how things play out with a new
technology before deciding whether to invest in it. But you don't want to fall
into the bad habit of making such evaluations on prejudice, rather than merit.

~~~
bphogan
Exactly. Use your experience to judge a technology on merit. Does this solve a
pain point in a new and interesting way, or is it the same approach in a
different language?

------
alex-yo
Well, a funny thing, I'm not old, I'm just 37. In my country I need to work
for the next 30 years to retire.

However companies don't want to talk with me about getting a job regardless my
14 year of commercial experience. Sometimes I hear during an interview "oh,
you did so many things, I wish I could have the same experience". And then I
don't get this job.

And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point where they ask me
for the money.

I'm thinking about starting my own company with my own products. This will be
much harder, but it's better to have this kind of job than none.

And I just stopped replying to the job adverts with "young team".

~~~
marxama
No joke, I'm 31, only 2-3 years ago the companies were all over me, I would
get offers right and left. Now, not so much, I've noticed a pretty huge
difference.

~~~
pacomerh
So you're saying you post your age in your profile?. This has no correlation

~~~
marxama
I usually mention it in my cover letter. I wouldn't want to work in a place
that discriminates based on age (or on any other factors, for that matter)

------
mattkevan
The person who wrote this is 37.

Imagine how much harder it is for a Guy I know. He's in his early 60s and has
been looking for a job for over six months. Every interview he's had goes
really well until they realise he's not 23. Then it's all 'Err, we want
someone less technical.' Or 'Err, you're too technical for the role.'

This is someone with over 40 years industry experience, from designing and
building mainframes to working on cutting-edge image processing, to managing
teams of engineers and more.

Incidentally, if anyone knows of a role which may be suitable for someone like
him he'd be really interested.

~~~
martinshen
Interested. Can you shoot me an intro at Martin@smartcar.com ?

~~~
mattkevan
Thanks for your reply! I've just sent you an email.

------
eranation
Could be just me but it seems to me that for some jobs (Architects, tech
leads) in enterprise-ish industries (Big data / Java / Spring / Cloud) they
look (at least from job posting) for ridiculous years of experience. I for one
(nearing my 40's) didn't see any problem landing any job (non SF area, mostly
Java/Scala/Spring and Spark/Hadoop on AWS). I get tons of LinkedIn recruiter
spam, and it's easy to tell my age from my work/education history.

I did feel really a bad vibe interviewing for a couple of SF based startups,
got rejected once for being "to enterprisy, won't fit our startup culture". I
think it was because I mentioned using an IDE, God forbid.

So it might be a big issue in some cultures / areas. I don't see it in the
Enterprise world at least.

~~~
clifanatic
> they look (at least from job posting) for ridiculous years of experience

Yeah, they want 20 years of experience. But they still won't hire anybody over
25. Start young, kids!

~~~
AstralStorm
Actually we did, but nobody is hiring for C64 Basic and assembly anymore.

~~~
clifanatic
Right, I forgot: 20 years of experience with Angular.js.

------
arca_vorago
Honestly, I feel like ageism as an industry social thing doesn't properly
reveal the details behind why businesses make the decision to get rid of or
stay away from the greybeards.

In reality, greybeards are harder to manage, command higher salaries, and
don't put up will bullshit. Basically, managers want a young pliant fool
willing to spend three years putting in 60-70 hours a week before he realize
he is fucking himself over.

So in this case, I would argue ageism in the industry is mostly about money
and business-culture, not techno or geek-culture.

One lesson I learned early in life was to listen to the old timers, It applies
here as well, we spurn the oldies at our peril, for they learned lessons we
have forgotten and are trying to resolve.

------
ArtDev
When you are young you can get by as "just a developer". Luckily, for most of
us, you end up honing into a specific technology given enough time.

Employers are willing to go great lengths to find the right kind of
experience. Combine this with 100% remote jobs and you don't need to worry
about getting old in this industry.

------
rdtsc
If your company doesn't have older geeks or is explicitly excluding them in
the hiring process, it is missing out. Having worked in an environment with
engineers of all ages, I learned a lot from older experience engineers.

Over the years they've seen and accumulated a lot of experience related to how
systems work, how code works, domain knowledge. You'll never get that if you
hire only college kids.

Someone I worked with just retired last year. He was perhaps not like the
famous (infamous now) 10x programmer, but he was easily a 5x programmer.
Because he learned how to learn better, he was also faster at picking up new
technologies as well.

Also startups and many companies simply don't want to pay market rate for what
an experienced engineer would demand. Also mature people are not as easy to
bully and push around. It is harder to force them to work till 8pm every day.

------
bungie4
Coding a long day in and day out at 55 yrs old, I've been at it for 30+ years.
Maintain and upgrade 911/Alarm/PERS/Telematics systems.

Self taught. I've never taken a computer course in any school. I do it because
I love it.

------
jknoepfler
As someone who entered the industry at ~32 and was immediately hired into
Amazon to work on a team in AWS where I am around the median age, I find this
conversation peculiar. The job I worked myself through a second college degree
with was on small software team that was all older than myself. I went on a
round of interviews recently and got an offer from all of them... I definitely
don't feel like I'm going to expire in 5 years.

Then again, I won't be an "SDE II" or whatever I am now in 5 years, I'll have
started a business, gone into consulting, or gone back to school for a Ph.D
(pick 2?). So I don't know.

I have yet to hear anyone I've worked with say something ageist or fearful
about age at work. Everyone is very cheerful about their careers.

And to be clear, I'm very, very blunt with management and co-workers about
work-life balance. I work 35-40 hours a week when things are slow and step it
up when things get hot two or three times a year. I think it's irresponsible
to work more hours (it stunts growth, limits productivity, and makes me
unhappy).

I don't think that ageism isn't a problem, I guess I just haven't seen it.
Then again I've always been sort of disgusted by gaggles of squirming kids, so
I've probably self-selected where I've tried to find work. Why in the hell
would anyone want to move to SV in their 40's+? That's like going to a college
party to make friends or find a romantic partner in your 40's... the prospects
are much greener and more attractive elsewhere.

This whole conversation strikes me as very odd.

~~~
biocomputation
>> I don't think that ageism isn't a problem, I guess I just haven't seen it.

It can be difficult to see it for what it is because its most common form is
as a bias, which can be very difficult to discern, even within ourselves. (
Daniel Kahneman and many others have done amazing work about unconscious /
barely conscious biases ). I never saw it when I was younger because I didn't
think about it; I didn't even know that it was something I should be thinking
about.

I'm somewhat ashamed to admit, but I've felt it myself. I remember when I was
still very young, maybe 20 years ago, we had a "much older" guy join my team
at work. At first, I felt a pretty strong internal resistance to working with
him, never mind that he was brilliant and deeply experienced... he didn't even
play videogames! But he was funny too, and he taught me a hell of a lot. He
managed to give me advice that really helped my career, plus he knew tons
about money and credit and investments.

It took me quite a few years to realize that the 'internal resistance' I felt
was solely due to his age. It's a good thing my Mom taught me to respect my
elders. Those lessons have served me well.

~~~
jknoepfler
Your post is illustrative of a more general point, which is that in my limited
experience, the devs I've worked with have been consistently more self aware
and open to self criticism than the mean, and have on the whole been lovely
human beings. It's a very welcoming culture. I'm sort of dreading the day I
stumble into the snake pit of ageist, sexist bro-holes that supposedly makes
up startup culture, but something tells me no one needs to...

------
gavanwoolery
This is a good start (in fact I debated doing something similar after seeing
all the recent articles on ageism).

But I think more than this, people need to understand why experience counts.
Here is my opinion on the matter:

You can hire somebody young and they will probably be willing to work longer
than an older person and probably get the job done sufficiently well, at a
cheaper rate.

For many one-shot jobs, this is fine. But if you want to build something at
scale, and have it be maintainable, and reduce your long term technical debt,
you should get someone who has fought these battles before and understands the
best way to take them on.

I'm speaking from the same experience that many others will: when we look at
our younger selves, we realize how little we knew about organizing and
maintaining a large project. Even as I age, I realize the me of just 3 years
ago was relatively naive with regard to certain high-level tasks.

So, its not just about the hours you put in, how fast you can do competitive
coding, and so forth. It is about the more nebulous parts of coding, the
larger scope, the organization of a complex system. There is only one way to
learn these things, the hard way: lots of time, lots of scars, etc.

------
enrmarc
Last time I read about age discrimination in software development, 40 (years)
was the number. Now it seems it's 30. In 5 years I suspect that anyone above
25 will be considered "too old" for this profession.

Not so crazy if you think about it: right now, 30-year-old people have about 8
years of experience (assuming a 4-year degree) and, as this post suggests, are
being discriminated. Now, imagine an 18-year-old guy that study a year (code
camps?) to become a software developer and after that starts to work as one.
At 25 he would have 6 years of real world experience (let's assume this guy
likes the profession so he taught himself while working, in order to compare
both developers). Who has more chance to be hired (under the assumption that
age discrimination is still a thing in 2021)? 2 more years of experience
doesn't seem too much and a 25-year-old guy seems to be more suitable to be
tricked into working 60 hours a week for less money.

Update: grammar fix.

------
inputcoffee
Sometimes I suspect we go from being too young and inexperienced to being too
old and over-qualified without going through the Goldilocks sweet spot in
between.

------
inestyne
Building from scratch since the early 80s. I'm going to go out on a limb here
and say that i've never really looked at my industry as a young man's sport.
Young and dumb get chewed up and spit out on the first funding down-turn,
which is about to happen again. They go out chasing shiney things, abused by
ivy-leagues, and since they never had it to begin with, they don't come back.
Seen it more that a few times so i'm not worried a bit.

So if your old and wise and still working congratulations! Maybe look back, if
you can remember that far, and realize you've bern employed this entire time
doing something you'd do for free if they didn't pay you.

Damm I love my job!

p.s. Remember the golden rule: Wait for critical mass, hijack, then do the
same thing you did last time.

:)

------
GrumpyNl
Started coding 35 years ago. Started some great companies in VRS(40 employees
), later internet(30 employees). Never left coding. Said goodbye to it all and
became a freelance programmer. Love what i'm doing and i will still be coding
in the future.

------
bikamonki
If I compare my me-now with my me-20-something I would definitely hire my me-
now. I am now very productive b/c I've developed high focus, I make less
mistakes, I've committed to a stack that solves most problems, I reuse my own
code, I can see the big picture b/c I started coding in the mid 90's and I've
developed the people/comm skills to actually understand what is required and
translate that to code.

Experience matters a lot. I would also choose experience when selecting a
doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, etc.

We have a saying in Spanish: más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo ;)

------
nedsma
The ageism trend isn't supposed to live on. The average developer in the US
([http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#age-...](http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#age-country)) is 32. To young devs/execs employing someone who
isn't close to their age range, may seem as not being the right culture fit.
However, there are/there will be so many older developers, companies founded
by older folks who will not shy away from their same age peers.

------
bphogan
One thing that may help is for those with experience to do a lot more teaching
and mentoring. A lot of the evangelism of new technology is done by younger,
hungry people looking to advance their careers. The more experienced devs
sound like complainers.

The people I respect and aspire to be are those who are currently in their
late 40s or 50s talking about Elm and Elixir. They were the ones in their 30s
and 40s telling me Ruby was it. They were right, because they used their
experience.

------
SixSigma
Meanwhile in another thread [1]

California Today: San Diego Struggles to Keep Its Young Tech Talent [2]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12506131](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12506131)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/us/california-today-
techie...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/us/california-today-techies-san-
diego-bay-area.html)

------
whybroke
I wish companies would post a spread of their developer ages on their careers
page so we would know which ones not to waste time with. Because mere lip
service about hiring solely on merit, even if the hirer somehow believes they
are, really just wastes everyone's time.

------
damaru
But don't ageism always happened to be reverse? I still roll my eyes when a
early 20's try to sells me idea of marketing - and although you can have a lot
of good ideas at that age, you still don't have life and work experience that
is needed to go trough massive amount of stress or unknown situations. I think
it's fine that kids who run new business don't want old folks in there. It's a
bit of a return of the balance. If you're too old to get hired, how about
starting a new business with other oldies?

~~~
serge2k
> I still roll my eyes when a early 20's try to sells me idea of marketing

Why should I hire someone who would treat other employees this way?

------
Grangar
The sword cuts both ways. Meanwhile I'm 23, working in a webdeveloper job (not
in the US, mind you) and housing is completely inaccessible to me. It seems
like real estate owners value age over anything. I've been looking for 4
months now, been to 20 apartments, almost every time they chose someone else
because they were older...

Both sides of the age spectrum have their merits. It sounds idiotic to me to
argue that older people have it worse. Maybe in Silicon Valley they do, but I
can't see that happening where I live (Netherlands)

------
user5994461
Don't believe the lies a single second.

The truth is, it is NOT tough being 3X-4X in silicon valley.

What is tough is accepting to put up with startups about to fail, long hours,
mediocre pay, little benefits and immature coworkers. That does limit the size
of the job market.

That issue is faced by everyone, independently of their age. The youngers
selves just happen to have lower standards in average

------
JohnLeTigre
I'm no quiche eater, I will code until I die

~~~
throwanem
Perhaps you mean "quiche"? A guiche is a genital piercing. It would be an odd
thing to eat.

~~~
JohnLeTigre
lol thanks :) now fixed

------
marmot777
That's absurd. Most other industries, people get some respect for experience.
I'd understand not hiring someone who had not kept up but people of any age
can stop learning. If someone's on top of things, why would their age have
anything to do with the hiring decision? Not being "into" the same things is
flat out childish.

------
dba7dba
Ageism is a clear and present bigotry. Just like racism, sexism, and etc.

And ageism was really born in Silicon Valley, of all places.

------
smoyer
The only way to fight ageism is with reverse-ageism ... you can't meaningfully
change the overall statistics without "penalizing those young'ins".

Disclaimer: I've got an AARP card so I'm obviously on the right side of this
discrimination!

------
bogomipz
Is "cultural fit" a euphemism for age bias now? This is not the fist time I
have her it used in this unfortunate context in the last few months. I feel
bad that this happened to this person but I applaud his idea and hope it gains
traction.

------
Pica_soO
I think it would help alot to build the same stock of myths about old guys,
who where let go and then had a come back on the youngsters. Most of this
social machine is build from self-propelling myths, so if you would keep that
up, agism dissolved.

------
vaporland
[http://www.meetup.com/DenverIPhone/messages/boards/thread/25...](http://www.meetup.com/DenverIPhone/messages/boards/thread/25461812)

~~~
vaporland
"There are tons of federal acts trying to make everyone equal but at the end
of the day companies know exactly what they want and will say "their
personality doesn't fit the culture" or "their experience isn't a match" when
in reality the individual is too old. "

------
Uptrenda
I wish more websites were this clean and simple. I'm not being sarcastic but
its genuinely nice not to have 10 million ads, banners, and tracking cookies
load every time I refresh (and nice idea for the website too.)

------
mateo411
I suppose senior means something different on this job posting board.

------
PaulHoule
Funny, I know a lot of greybeards who stay in San Jose because they can afford
to. They bought their house when prices were a lot less, and thanks to Prop 13
their taxes are low.

------
gshakir
Come work for the government. Help to save tax payer's money and get paid
well. Yes, the pace is slow but you can get lot accomplished in-between
things.

~~~
asimuvPR
Post or email more info? :)

------
AStellersSeaCow
I think there's a fair amount of reporting bias in this issue, personally. I'd
totally non-scientifically split older (over age 35) engineers into three
rough categories. This is not meant to be comprehensive or empirical, it's
just mirroring my anecdotal experiences as someone who has been in tech for 20
years:

\- Average or better engineers. Between the facts that they are competent and
have 10+ years of experience, they tend to have zero problem finding and
keeping good, well-paying jobs. If they run into ageism, it gets lost in the
flood of other offers they're likely to get in the same round of interviewing.

\- Below average engineers. These may be the source of some of the ageism
complaints, but it's missing the forest for the trees. They are a common sight
in government/non-profit orgs or old first-mover companies: folks who may have
"senior" in their title but have been doing simplistic work on the same
outdated project for their whole career. Have trouble finding new jobs when
they are inevitably laid off not because of their age, but because they simply
aren't good engineers.

\- Dinosaurs, ie- people who were good or even great engineers ten or twenty
years ago, but have not kept their skills and knowledge base current. These
are the people who are most likely to be affected by legit ageism, in my
experience. A slightly fictionalized representative scenario from hiring a
position at my last job, for work on a Java webservice: "Well, the 50-year-old
blew through the whiteboarding in textbook C and can concisely enumerate the
advantages of different caching policies off the top of his head, but has
never used Java, worked on a web service, or used an RCS more modern than
subversion. The 25-year-old struggled a bit in the coding exercise and gave an
imperfect answer in the theory questions, but his resume has a link to his
Github, which includes a RESTful webservice he wrote in Java. And the 50yo
asked for the tip of the salary range, about 20% more."

I've faced that sort of decision quite a few times, and it's not easy. I could
see why the older candidate would suspect ageism played a role if they didn't
get the job. But the power is in the candidate's hands to create the better
outcome: if the 50yo spends some time familiarizing themselves with marketable
modern technologies then they get hired over less experienced candidates the
vast majority of the time.

On a personal note, in the above scenario we did end up bringing on the 50yo
with amazing fundamentals, and he was a total dud - possibly the worst hire
I've ever made. Bungled almost every Git interaction, couldn't work in Linux
and frequently screwed up deployments, great imperative code but all his
architecture was early 90s-style spaghetti. The important takeaway that I
tried to stress with the team wasn't that older devs can't learn and shouldn't
be hired, just that THAT dev couldn't learn and shouldn't have been hired.

------
gregfjohnson
62-year-old developer here. I was at a small company until it lost funding and
went under five years ago. At the age of 57, I was freaking out about finding
a new job. Three weeks later, I was hired at my current company. Obviously
this is a single data point, an anecdote, etc. However, I have seen the same
scenario for several friends my age.

The place I work at needs to find and hire exceptionally talented people
(embedded software in life-critical medical devices; sloppy or buggy code,
someone could die.) It knows it does not have the allure of big names such as
Google. So, it does something like the Oakland A's, and plays Money Ball. It
goes for the pudgy, dumpy, overlooked players who always seem to get on base
somehow. It knows it has no chance at the golden children, the 27-year-old
Stanford PhD's who are perfect in every way. So, it casts a wide net, and
looks closely at people who might be overlooked by other organizations.

I managed to luck into finding a great, well-connected recruiter. He was
instrumental in helping me get placed quickly. And, as you've heard so many
times you will probably scream if you hear it once more, "networking". A
friend who already had a job at my new company put in a good word when I was
going through the recruiting process.

I heard a great line about mathematicians: "Mathematics is a terrible
profession. The only people who should do it are people who can't not do it."
There are people out there who feel that way about programming. My daughter
teases me that when I retire she knows exactly what I will do: spend more time
hacking on open source projects.

The core truth of your inner being at some point overtakes you. If you live
and breathe to code, if you still secretly wonder why people actually pay you
to play all day with computers, you will be fine as you get older continuing
to be a programmer.

One thing about getting older: You begin to realize, "Now is the time." No
more resume padding, no more attempts at strategizing to optimize career moves
down the road. No more doing things you hate in order to lay the groundwork
for that ineffable special something that seems to beckon from just over the
horizon.

Older people don't need to be told, "Be honest with yourself, find your
passion" etc. Been there, done that. Life will do that to you. Expect that
when you are in your 50's or 60's, you will have settled in to what really
does work for you. For some, it is software development. For others, it is
full-time church work. (My wife.) For others, it is gardening. (A retired
former executive I wave to every morning as I'm heading out to work.)

Bottom line: You would not want to work at a place that is too arrogant and
stupid to consider older job candidates, or that turns its nose up at anyone
who does not fit a preconceived template, or that looks to monetize the
naivete of young developers. Their loss. They are doing you a favor by passing
you over. Screw them.

------
futureproofd
What geezer configured this webserver? Link is down >:(

------
employee8000
I'm in my mid 40s and have not had any problems getting interviews and job
offers. It might depend on your attitude and your skill set. There might be a
time when my age will become a factor but not yet.

I've more than accepted that kids half my age are very talented and I need to
prove my worth. Boy there are 26 year olds that I work with that are so mature
and intelligent that it makes me worry. But my experience does buy some
benefits, namely in how careful I code and being able to spot architectural
and code issues well before most of my coworkers.

Meanwhile I'm spending 1-2 hrs every night reading and programming and
learning new tech so that I don't fall behind. And it's not easy to do this,
believe me but if it keeps me employed then I have to do it.

~~~
nul_byte
Thats very much the same approach I take. As long as I can keep learning and
expanding what I know, I don't think I will go to wrong.

------
fatdog
Can someone state honestly and pseudonymously why they don't hire oldz?

Speculating I would say:

\- chose younger hire because cheaper and can be moulded into company specific
role. \- younger candidate more easily managed by less experienced (cheaper)
manager. \- wants to keep culture "pure," and needs kids to drink kool-aid. \-
values power and control over less experienced technically acceptable
candidates. \- get extra effort and all nighters out of people who think they
need "experience." \- want to leverage kids love of novelty to react and
respond to developments that seem like minor details to people with
experience. \- younger people have less sensitivity to change. \- early stage
companies want to reduce exposure to risk from having to re-negotiate once key
developer has them by balls.

If you are old, present as harmless. The more hippy dippy and spergy you come
off as, the less threatening you will be, the more you will disarm
clients/employers.

~~~
employee8000
I'm in my 40s. I interview frequently and the problem with most devs over 40
is that they are slow or dont keep up with technology.

I interviewed one guy in his 60s who went to school at MIT for his phd. I was
excited. And then when it came to the coding exercise not only was he using
perl, which had no relevance to our stack (which he was informed about) he
took 3x as long to complete the question. I interviewed another older person
who had no idea what JSON was. "Oh it's like XML, I get it."

It makes them look like a weaker candidate when they are slower or less
knowledgeable. If you keep up with technology and trends it really makes a
difference. It doesn't matter that "I can pick it up quickly" because as a
hiring manager why take the risk when someone already has the knowledge?

~~~
groby_b
Note: JSON _is_ just like XML in that it's a horrible data interchange format
;) And if "knowing JSON" is a key skill you interview for... You possibly
might want to ask different questions. Unless you repeatedly build the same
thing - see below.

Any decent developer, no matter their age, should be able to figure out what
JSON is in about as much time as it takes to have a coffee. If they can't do
_that_ , you have a real problem.

> as a hiring manager why take the risk when someone already has the
> knowledge?

As a hiring manager: Because we're not redoing already solved things, we solve
new problems. The person with the knowledge holds the advantage for a few
months. And then the person with the problem solving skills catches up. Of
course, if you keep building the same type of app over and over - which is
fine, and equally necessary - those months are never made up for, and
experience matters more than problem solving.

Ultimately, you hire for the jobs you need to fill. For my part, I'm happy to
take anybody who understands CS and is able to learn over somebody who already
knows my tech but is stumped by new problems. (No matter the age)

YMMV.

~~~
Animats
JSON is really just like S-expressions, of course. It's trees all the way
down.

(At least until you have to process so much XML that you have to do it
sequentially, rather than parse it into a tree in memory.)

------
karma_vaccum123
I'm 46 now and holding out until I get to 50, at which point I fully intend to
promote myself to employers as a token they can put in their diversity
promotional material they promote as an antidote to criticisms.

------
20yrs_no_equity
Unlike most engineers I want to be a manager. But it seems there is no
opportunity for that. It seems that the non-engineers who are in the executive
positions want non-engineers to manager engineers perpetuating the problems
startups have.

There are few engineering management positions listed. The few I saw in the
bay area resulted in excluding me because of my age (Stripe, I'm looking at
you.)

It's frustrating to keep being pushed into individual contributor roles and
then have low quality engineering managers hired in above you. (And I know I
can do it because I end up leading teams all the time, they naturally form a
round me. The members of the team are very happy with me- I have no authority
but I end up leading them anyway.)

So I think the route for "old" folks is blocked also by the desire of non-
engineers to make engineering management be done by non-engineers.

~~~
GFischer
I did a Masters in Management of Technology, that opened up several recruiting
opportunities.

I ended up not getting a management position however (they're extremely hard
to get here in Uruguay), I believe it was because, like you, I didn't have a
formal management position (I did end up having a lot of informal authority at
my last job, and I've already won a lot of trust at my current one 3 months
in).

------
exstudent2
I think a good path, not often discussed, is for older developers to dedicate
some portion of their time developing side-projects that can create a passive
(or not so passive) income stream.

Being "old" gives you a lot of time to try various ideas. Eventually some
should stick if you're truly pushing your skills; not just programming skills
but product/marketing skills as well.

------
princetontiger
You know what? I worked for a large tech company (unnamed) a few years ago.
There were tons of old people who viewed the younger folks in contempt. It can
happen both ways.

~~~
6stringmerc
Absolutely; I made my entry in to Fortune XXX level companies by way of my
tech skills doing basic things with Word that SVPs & MDs couldn't be bothered
to learn, yet were critical to actually driving business. The hostility was
palpable sometimes. There were a slim few senior staff workers who genuinely
expressed gratitude for filling in for a very large, important skill-set they
simply didn't grasp or feel compelled to learn during their professional
careers. Being on the same team, I appreciated that, certainly not put-downs
and disrespect during the process because of my seniority.

------
tn13
I am 30 and I recently changed my apartment because there were simply too many
old people in the complex. I want to live in apartments where there are plenty
of girls who just crossed the legal age limit to drink.

We all love youth and there is a good reason for why so. But at the same time
because we are older and we tend to have more money and control more stuff.
Most of the 30 something coders will rise up to the higher positions in next
10 years.

~~~
emodendroket
> I am 30 and I recently changed my apartment because there were simply too
> many old people in the complex. I want to live in apartments where there are
> plenty of girls who just crossed the legal age limit to drink.

That sounds like the opposite of what I want so I'd say we don't "all love
youth."

------
vemv
You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end.

If you are a young programmer and your salary merely covers your costs of
living (including leisure etc), it seems to me that you need a plan.

~~~
tjic
I've been a coder. I've been a manager. I've owned a firm that had 15
employees.

Of all of these, I prefer to be a coder.

I'm just 5 years away from 50, and let me tell you: not only do I want to be a
developer at 50, I want to be a developer at 70.

Being a developer means getting paid good money to work on problems that are
perfectly suited to my INTJ / spergy personality. There's nothing else I'd
rather do with my (work) time.

~~~
kyled
What did your firm do?

~~~
tjic
I owned two businesses:

* SmartFlix.com (dvd rental business) * Heavyink.com (comic book ecommerce)

