
On Getting Old(er) in Tech - LisaDziuba
https://dev.to/corgibytes/on-getting-older-in-tech
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LisaDziuba
Age discrimination is a real thing. In the non-tech world, when you're 35+ AND
you're living in Ukraine, you can struggle to find a job. I'm not sure if this
applies to the engineering jobs here, because developers are always in demand
(We have many big outsourcing companies, which hire like crazy).

But what I see, is that all candidates for our iOS job postings were around
20-27y.o. Honestly, I'm not sure if we would hire older developer to work in
our team. Not being mean, just it's difficult to have a huge age difference in
the team (we all around 22 -25 y.o., small startup team).

What do you think? Would you hire an "older" developer? Did you personally
face such issue?

~~~
informatimago
It's not necessarily difficult to have age differences in a team: it depends
on the people and the team culture.

Notice that iOS development is basically Cocoa, which is basically OpenStep,
which is basically NeXTstep, which existed since 1988. Therefore you may very
well find people 50 years old and more, who know very well, NeXTstep,
OpenStep, Cocoa and iOS, with 29 years of experience developping applications
on this platform!

If I had the opportunity to hire such a developer to work with a team of
newbies, I wouldn't hesitate, he would be invaluable (and too bad he'd be so
close to retirement!).

On the other hand, it may be hard to find them, because they're probably
working on their own apps.

In one of my first jobs when I was twenty, there was an old engineer (70+),
from which we learned a lot. If you can organize you team such as people are
helpful and teaching one another to improve in capabilities and how-to, then
having a diverse team, in formation, experience and age is a great way to get
a very good team. (and diversity in sex or race just doesn't matter; what
matters is formation and experience, and age is only a strong indicator for
different formations and experiences, while sex and race are not).

