
Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40 - carmenbr
https://insights.dice.com/2019/06/24/ageism-tech-professional-earnings/
======
neilv
The article's way of using "ageism" in the lede, and their title, both seem
odd, and seem to confuse the real issue of what I think what most people mean
by "ageism".

There seems to be a substantial tech industry aversion to hiring developers in
40s (sometimes 30s) or older.

But if you suggest that developers in their 40s expect salary to keep growing
without limit, that fuels hairtrigger resentment arguments about how those
people are just greedy and unrealistic, and that that's the cause of any
"ageism" they perceive.

That would be a diversion from legitimate issues of people getting their
resumes illegally screened for age, interview tests targeted at people with
CS101 fresh in mind, rejecting candidates for "culture fit" (not just
over-20s, but women, certain ethnicities/racial backgrounds, unapproved
sex/gender identification), etc.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
>"resumes illegally screened for age"

I'm happy this is a thing in the US and wish Europe would copy this since in
some Western European countries like Austria, having your birthday and
photograph on your resume is mandatory making discrimination a piece of cake.

~~~
neilv
Photos are another one in the US, with our wealth of diversity, yet ongoing
history of biases and marginalizing.

I used to hear in the US that some companies' HR had policies of discarding
all resumes with photos or certain other details, to reduce risk of the
company appearing to discriminate on basis of ethnicity or family status, for
example. Perhaps apocryphal, but I always heard not to include a photo.

And we heard of studies in which resumes with nothing changed but the name, to
a "black" one or a female one, were treated differently.

But then the most popular US resume Web sites introduced photos, to appear
alongside your resume and your messages.

~~~
burfog
Note that a name can only indicate culture, not physical traits. This is a
very different sort of discrimination.

------
scarface74
No this is not ageism. After a certain point, if you are an individual
contributor, your value is not worth more than someone with less experience.

A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as
someone with 20 years of experience. I also believe that the idea of the 10x
_developer_ while not a myth, is so rare it’s not worth trying to find for
most companies.

I speak as someone in my mid 40s who has been at this professionally for 20+
years [1].

I’m debating whether I want to take the next step of consulting or just stay
in development. I see my salary hitting a ceiling in the next two or three
years and I think I am okay with that.

[1] well for all intents and purposes maybe 12 years. I stagnated for a few
years and became an “expert beginner”.

~~~
jerf
"I also believe that the idea of the 10x developer while not a myth, is so
rare it’s not worth trying to find for most companies"

The problem with the 10x myth is that it assumes a single dimension of
productivity, and that no-one is ever negative so there's some sort of
sensible, positive "minimum" to talk about.

Senior developer leads a team of three other medium-experience developer, and
completes the project in six months. Junior developer leads a team of 5 other
even more junior developers, after six months they've got nearly nothing, so
we pull in another 4 semi-skilled developers and 2 contractors who are drowned
under the mess and don't know what to do, and six months later, the project is
cancelled entirely.

How many times better is the senior developer?

There's nothing even _remotely_ skewed about those numbers, either. Both are
totally realistic. And yes, senior engineer can fail, and junior engineer
could succeed. (Although the range of projects where a junior can succeed and
a senior can fail assuming adequate initial knowledgebase for both is fairly
narrow; generally if you find one, you've probably got a strawmanned "senior"
engineer who isn't actually senior but just a collection of stereotypes in
your head.)

If you're still offended:

A generally senior software engineer who knows nothing about the domain and
his team of three develop furiously for a year and eventually deliver the
first iteration of what was asked for, with another year to go on the project
to finish it. A generally software junior engineer who is deeply familiar with
the problem domain listens to the customer's problem and after a day's thought
realizes what they _really_ need is a very different, but also much simpler,
solution, which they deliver in two weeks by themselves. How many more times
valuable is the latter?

(I've actually advised someone like that in the construction industry. They
were switching into a programming career in their 40s. I said, look, there's
no realistic chance you're going to outprogram me in a really academic,
isolated sense of the term. But you've got contacts, the ability to pass the
shit test with other people in your industry which I and/or generic software
engineer have no chance of, and a deep understanding of the problem domain.
Don't worry about trying to outprogram a 20-years-experienced software
engineer, take advantage of the facts that you know what your customers really
need, and... you're there! and I (standing in for generic software engineers)
am not! Life's about playing what you're dealt, but people are generally dealt
more cards than they realize, I think. Not necessarily _better_ cards, but
they have _more_ cards than they think.)

I tend to agree there isn't a such thing as an engineer who is 10x more
productive than another, in the sense that they will do the same thing as that
other engineer, just 10 times faster. The key comes from doing things
_differently_ , most of the time.

There's other differences as well, such as being aware of the pitfalls. I
recently got myself put in charge of a billing system, and as a senior
engineer, I at least have the good sense to be suitably terrified, for
instance. "Move fast and break things" has its place, but "careful, paranoid
engineering" does too. Almost by definition, your really junior employees
don't really know how to do the latter. (They'll often be able to cargo cult
it, which can be a start, but they won't really understand it.)

~~~
scarface74
My statement was referring specifically to an "individual contributor" and I
said as much in the original post. If you are a team lead, by definition you
aren't just an "individual contributor" and you're also not the "10x
developer". Your increased effectiveness is because you have a team under you
and you are a "force multiplier".

 _but "careful, paranoid engineering" does too. Almost by definition, your
really junior employees don't really know how to do the latter. (They'll often
be able to cargo cult it, which can be a start, but they won't really
understand it.)_

I also specifically said the difference between someone with 10 years of
experience and someone with 20 years experience. If you have 10 years of
experience -- you hopefully aren't a "really junior employee".

~~~
jbay808
I've worked with a 10x developer. He wasn't a team lead because he wasn't
interested in being a team lead and also probably wouldn't have been nearly as
good at it as the person who was.

But man, was he ever transformative. Not only in terms of handling the most
technically challenging tasks and solving the black-magic challenges that
nobody else wanted to touch, knowing the C standard like the back of his hand,
and getting things done quickly to a high standard of quality. He also was a
force multiplier, because he would help others debug their problems when they
got stuck and get them back on their feet and productive again, give advice
for how to best handle various edge cases, and designed and maintained our
tooling. He was a mentor to junior members of the team, and the team lead
would ask his input and advice for how long things might take, what risks he
could see causing delays, etc.

You can't plan around having someone like that but they make a world of
difference if you're lucky enough to work alongside one.

~~~
blueboo
Likewise. To have someone with immaculate technical judgment means you
potentially have a custodian that keeps an entire multi-team codebase on
track.

------
mdorazio
Honest question: is this actually ageism or is it business cost-benefit
analysis in action? You could argue that the benefit to the company of
experience for a tech worker is only worth a maximum of X dollars. After that
point, the company is better off hiring younger, _cheaper_ employees with
lower expectations than it is continuing to give raises, benefits, etc. to
older workers.

I would expect a salary plateau to be a natural result of the above + supply
and demand in the market. Maybe that’s what the term ageism has come to mean
(not its original definition)?

~~~
axlee
I would believe it if that would apply to other positions. Why is it the case
for us but not regular businessmen, lawyers, etc?

~~~
Grustaf
In almost all industries you start out doing low level technical stuff and
then over time transition to working with people. An analyst at a management
consultancy, a bank or a hedge fund spends his time looking at balance sheets
or excel, whereas partners go to meetings and dinners with clients.

In a word, you make more money by transitioning from hard skills to soft, and
since most developers are unwilling or unable to do this their salaries will
plateau.

But compared to the financial industry, and probably law, developers can count
themselves lucky. Those industries work on an “up or out” principle, sticking
around for 20 years as an analyst simply isn’t an option, no matter how good
you are.

~~~
mdorazio
Think you nailed it here. For example, in the consulting world you can pretty
easily calculate the dollar value of employees at different levels based on
the rates you can charge for them, the hours they bill, the new revenue they
bring, and their compensation. That calculation tends to put a pretty hard
limit on salaries for people not willing/able to make the transition to highly
billable SME or partner-type business development/practice management.

In more traditional corporate roles, the compensation path is tied pretty
heavily to growth in managerial skills and subject matter expertise in ways
that don't always have parallels with software development. Even there,
though, I've started seeing similar "ageism" as the article points out come
into effect. Clients I've worked at have started coming to the realization
that younger and more tech-savvy workers can often get to, say, 75% of the
value of a 20-year employee for half the price in compensation.

------
rpmcmurphy
The bigger issue for us Olds is that we have serious financial and family
responsibilities that make us highly undesirable employees in today's modern
"I've got mine! Fuck you!" society.

Imagine that you have a close family member with Stage 4 cancer. Who wants to
have you on their team? Nobody, that's who. And you better be living in a
jurisdiction with solid legal protections, or they will fire you in a hot
second.

That is a far greater concern than salary stagnation.

~~~
badpun
Companies in general love people with obligations (kids, high mortgage etc.)
because they're much more afraid of being fired, and thus are more obedient.

~~~
WalterSear
That hasn't been my experience, in particular when interviewing with managers
and team leads younger than myself.

The last one slipped, and as much as admitted that he was concerned that I
wouldn't be able to work as hard: he had presumed that I had children to take
care of.

It used to piss me off, but now it's just discouraging.

------
bcheung
Based on the findings I think it is premature to say this is ageism.

There are multiple other factors going on here:

1) As senior developers become more skilled there is a diminishing return in
terms of compensation. This happens regardless of age. A developer with 40
years of experience is not really worth that much more than a developer with
30 years of experience.

2) As developers get nearer towards retirement there is less incentive for
them to stay at the top of their field.

3) As developers get older they tend to want to find a place they enjoy
working at rather than playing the salary game every 2 years.

~~~
bduerst
True, but it should be easy to control for this right? Check the progression
in other skilled fields and cross reference into tech.

------
Grustaf
1\. There are diminishing returns to experience within software development,
as you get more experience there are fewer and fewer companies that have any
use for those extra years of experience.

2\. The _perceived_ value of that extra experience is even lower. How many
recruiters or even engineering managers can honestly claim to be able to
leverage the last 5 years of experience from someone with 20+ years?

3\. In most industries your salary stagnates much earlier than that unless you
transition to a management role, and I think it is safe to say that developers
are much less keen on taking that step than say bankers.

~~~
plutonorm
And even if they are, transition into management is much harder. In my
experience in the UK, in London at small to medium companies, I've never seen
a promotion to management and only once seen promotion to senior developer.
Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that
perception is incredibly difficult.

~~~
switch007
> Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the
> that perception is incredibly difficult.

The pointy haired bosses all think we have severe autism and can't deal with
people.

------
40acres
I work with a lot of folks over 40, the two things I've seen that make me
doubt ageism studies -- especially in tech, is that older engineers on average
seem less likely to consider new technologies, and older engineers are more
concerned about day to day stability and are less risk averse to consider
another job which may pay higher because they have kids in school, mortgage,
etc.

~~~
cmiles74
I have to disagree with this assertion. While my information is anecdotal I
can attest to its veracity (I am 45 years old).

Over the last two months I have been arguing in a professional manner for my
company to move towards .Net Core and React (away from older Framework code
and Angular 1.x) Arguably neither of these technologies is super new, but they
seem to be new enough that I've been getting push back over various concerns
(often over learning something new). I have to say, on the whole most of the
push back is from younger developers, many of whom are in their mid-thirties.

My point being that I don't believe that age is necessarily the deciding
factor. In my experience most developers tend to lose some of their interest
in the field at some point in their career and other do not. Everyone seems to
hit that point at a different age, some of them quite young and others quite
old.

I'm definitely risk averse but not averse to new technologies. ;-)

------
tabtab
A similar discussion on ageism can be found at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097)

------
boyadjian
Ageism is the consequence of high birth rates. If many young people are
available at low prices, why would you pay more for an older worker ? You
can't have everything, have three children and then asking for a high salary.
There are choices to be made in life.

------
jlukic
I think generally current startup hiring discriminates in hiring for post vs
pre internet age programmers and that could possibly account for the
statistical differences in salary for developers that didn’t spend their
entire careers under the current paradigm.

------
fooblitzky
This is why you should always try and save at least 30% from every paycheck.
Assuming you start working at 21, you should then have enough invested to live
off the passive income by the time you reach 49.

------
malvosenior
> _In Hired’s findings, tech pros were never offered more than $149,000
> annually._

I don't know where they are getting their data but that's a lot lower than
good developers of all ages make. You can see on
[https://levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) that large tech companies will pay
senior developers 200-400k routinely.

I don't necessarily doubt the analysis but the data is very incomplete if they
didn't see a single offer over $150k.

~~~
hinkley
Are you seeing over $150k anywhere other than SF?

~~~
Jach
Seattle area also. And I've seen increasing numbers of remote offers that are
close ($170k base was the most recent I saw), you could live in a cornfield
for all they care.

It's not a difference of FANG vs. non-FANG, and not even necessarily of
location, it's a difference of tech company (or trying-to-act-like a tech
company, "tech-like") and not. A lot of words could be spent trying to define
exactly what I mean by "tech company" and certainly some non-tech-companies
might have tech sub-departments that are given enough autonomy to be
sufficiently "tech-like". But mostly it's just a mindset. Tech companies are
full of people who understand it's the tech workers who are responsible for
the lion's share of the company's success, and so they're often run by
technical people too. They understand it so well that some of them had to be
sued in order for salaries to rise proportional to contribution again (even if
still too low) since the socially low rung of individual contributors even at
tech companies often fail to see it well enough to complain, which puts the
sibling comment about 2009's "reasonable salary" in another light. (See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation))

~~~
hinkley
I can tell you that a lot of older companies in Seattle have not yet caught up
with that change of conditions. Plenty of places are still 20% below that, and
they aren't looking for junior people.

