

Should developers worry about ageism? - tyn
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37671/should-developers-worry-about-ageism

======
geebee
I'm 37, and I had a recent experience with this.

I went on a few interviews, and I didn't get either job. I passed a phone
screening, long brutal technical quizzes, and a few hours with managers. These
were for senior dev positions, but I suspect most of the candidates were
younger, maybe late 20s early 30s.

I didn't feel any age-related discrimination at all, but I still felt
something was wrong. I started asking myself, "why am I standing here, at a
whiteboard, showing an interviewer how to recursively search a binary tree?"
"Why am I creating the primal of the dual and proving that the min of one
problem is the max of the other under optimal circumstances?" I solved the
problems, but maybe they picked up on something from me that shows... maybe a
slight irritation or exhaustion.

I realized that it's not ageism. I was irritated with myself. Sure, I
"shouldn't" be doing this for the umpteenth time, but the shouldn't is
directed at me, not them.

If you've been in the business for over a decade, yeah, maybe you "shouldn't"
be taking technical quizzes, but that's because you "should" have a reputation
to stand on, not because interviewers should see your grey hair and decide
that it's a stand-in for testing your technical chops! (I got into programming
late, so even though I'm 37, I've only been seriously programming for about 10
years).

I remember Joel Spolsky (a big proponent of having devs write code during
interviews) still said (I'm paraphrasing here) "if you're an independent film
maker and Uma Thurman is interested in your film, you don't ask her to
audition, you try to sign her!"

The top celebrities in our world tend to be the leads on extremely successful
open source projects. While very few devs can get this "celebrity" status, you
can still a smaller useful network - and really, how many job offers do you
really need?

Speaking at conferences, working on open source projects, working on side
projects, writing interesting articles in a blog are all good ways to do this.
On a much smaller level, just being very helpful and engaged in your job, and
producing good software can help.

I'm on that smaller level, but I realized "why am I doing this?" I called up
my network, discussed some jobs, and got a nice senior dev/architect position
pretty quickly. No technical interview was needed, because these folks had
already worked with me on code plenty of times.

It's not ageism to say that your career and approach to development needs to
change as you get older. Another line I loved from a movie called "surfing for
life" - "age is inevitable, it's the growth that's optional".

~~~
projectileboy
I'm also 37, and I haven't encountered ageism (yet). I might be lucky, however
- I get most of my gigs through a tight network of acquaintances, and so I
rarely have to interview. My experience is that so many places are so
desperate for truly good help (where "good" also means you're capable of
communicating well with other human beings), that age matters much less than
it might otherwise.

------
jimbokun
One thing I find comical is the idea that young people have an easier time
keeping their skills "up to date."

One of the truisms of computer science and computer industry is that the
practice in industry reflects things that were current in computer science one
or two decades ago. If a SmallTalk or Lisp developer fell into a coma 10 or 20
years ago, they are not going to be shocked by how much progress has been made
while they were out of commission. They are going to be amazed that the median
developer still does not have as productive environment as they did when they
were last conscious.

Give them a couple days to get up to speed on the general idea behind HTML and
web browsers, and a couple more days to get the specific details of whatever C
derived syntax is being used, and they will be ready to be productive. If you
are a new developer, everything you are learning is new. For an old developer,
it's just a matter of learning the diffs.

~~~
jwilliams
I think it's a shame many new developers will never see a mainframe
environment (I barely did)... There is a massive amount of things that are
just "done right" (and plenty wrong) that are great things to learn from.

So even if the technology is "legacy" - there is a lot you can bring forward
to almost any domain.

------
russell
Ageism exists and it gets worse as you get older. I think geebee did the right
thing, but came to the wrong conclusion. If you are experienced and good, you
are probably expensive. You can probably be replaced by 2 new grads, H1B's, or
a whole offshore team. I was. Read the comments on stackoverflow and you will
see such stupid comments as the one who said he didnt like older programmers
because they talked about their kids, yeah must be old 30 somethings. Or the
usual inane remarks that imply older programmers never made it beyond Cobol.

Experience does matter. LOC per year dont matter; it's writing the right
lines, or choosing the right architecture that does matter.

geebee hit the interview nail right on the head. Most interviews are
structured to weed out incompetent new grads, hence the programming tasks and
the language lawyer questions. When I'm in an interview, I really dont want to
waste my time describing when I would use an abstract class over an interface.
Why waste time with programming problems with someone who has been doning it
for 20-30 years. The successful interviews discuss how I would tackle the real
problems that the company faces.

~~~
akeefer
As someone who's conducted dozens of interviews over the last few years, I can
tell you that there's no way to infer from someone's age or resume if they can
code or not. Plenty of people with stellar resumes and 20 years' experience
come in and absolutely bomb on relatively simple coding problems. Maybe they
used to know how to code but have gotten rusty since they've been doing more
management or hands-off architecture recently, but for whatever reason they
can't solve problems that any recent grad ought to be able to solve. Some of
those people can talk a good game when discussing higher-level stuff or when
they're doing a lot of hand-waving, but they just can't translate it into code
effectively. My point is not that "older" people can't code: when you do find
someone with 20 years experience who can code well, they're generally
incredibly valuable. Rather, it's that you always have to be skeptical and
can't take someone's resume or stated experience and skills at face value.
Those questions are there to filter out people that won't be successful in our
company because their coding skills are below par, regardless of age,
experience, or education.

If someone asks you to do something that seems "beneath" you or trivial, just
do it as well and as quickly as you can so you can get it over with and talk
about more interesting things, or use the problem itself as an excuse to start
a conversation about something more interesting than the problem itself ("the
interesting thing here, is that if you write it this way it's easier to test"
or "if you used a language like X, you could write this more easily," or
"realistically, I think this function would be more useful if you changed it
to behave like this, so that it would then be useful for doing Y and Z as well
as X.")

It's nothing personal, it's just the interviewer's job to be skeptical about
your stated skills until you prove to him or her that they shouldn't be.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I think ageism sometimes shows in the assumption that the "rusty skills"
phenomenon is so much more prevalent than the "untalented graduate"
phenomenon. So, yes, I agree that interviewers need to be skeptical. But they
need to be skeptical about their own preconceptions as well.

------
strlen
There's legitimate worry about ageism: too often employers don't offer a non-
management ladder. The answer for that is to work at a company that offers
such a ladder (there are many) or work in a start-up (where they can't afford
to have "pure managers").

There is also shops which are driven by buzzwords rather than actual
technology, who are just looking for bunch of kids who match a keyword list. I
wouldn't want to work there anyway (whether at my present age, or in ten-
fifteen years).

There's also the illegitimate worry: "some 22 year-old will replace me"; this
is of the same genre as "my job will get outsourced to India". The answer to
that is don't do simple, trivial work. Be something besides a byte pusher
(incidentally, great deal of "web development" is indeed simply pushing
bytes). Anyone can make a CRUD app with PHP and MySQL: learn something which
isn't immediately listed in the craigslist jobs section, perhaps? I'd argue
that, for example, no place that is hiring Haskell developers or developers
with understanding of machine learning practices age discrimination.

------
tptacek
Quick response to 2nd place comment: if you're older and your skills profile
is burdened with assembly language, we're always interested in talking to you.
=)

------
tallpapab
Whistling past the graveyard. Keeping your skills up is necessary, but
insufficient. Over 50? Welcome to the top of the layoff list. The baby boomers
are getting kicked out of the workforce. There has long been worry about what
will happen when the boomers retire in large numbers. Well, it may be
happening early. Good luck to us all.

~~~
tptacek
What this tells me is that when you reach your (conventional) prime earning
years, your "hard" skills focus should start tilting towards things that will
help you entrepreneurially.

The reality is, once you hit 30, if there's a tangible "layoff list" anywhere
you work, you have a serious career risk you should mitigate.

------
utnick
depends on the industry and company I think.. maybe there is ageism in the
ruby on rails web dev world

But, in one defense industry company I worked at the average developer age was
in the 40s. If anything there was reverse ageism there.

Point is just be good at what you do and dont worry about it.

~~~
tptacek
Python actually feels like a "younger" crowd to me than Ruby, which got a big
influx of Java and "agile" people.

------
known
This topic was discussed 3 years back in
[http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.302825....](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.302825.73)

------
byrneseyeview
Developers shouldn't worry about something they can use. If you're young,
people will naturally overestimate your ability to learn new things; if you're
old, they will assume you already know older technologies pretty well ("If
he's been doing this for twenty years, how could he _not_ have encountered
that at some point?")

------
time_management
There are "ageist" technology employers out there, especially on Wall Street
where 35 is considered "old" (you're either MD-level or at the top of the RIF
list), but my observation is that if you're good, you can always find someone
who will hire you.

I think that a problem a lot of aging developers face is that many of them
went into "programming" because, like law or medicine, it was a respectable
career choice that provided a middle-class standard of living and a cozy work
environment. This is fine, but if you're not willing to dedicate serious
energy to keeping your skills up to date, you are going to be forced to
contend either with an income plateau, or a move into management.

~~~
gaius
I think that at many employers experience can work against you especially if
the manager isn't too technical. A 22-year-old will be like "I'm a net-
generation Ruby rockstar and I'll build you a ninja terrorist website" whereas
a 40-year-old will be more, umm, realistic.

~~~
olefoo
The 22-year old will also be willing to accept a lower salary; and be less
able at the politics of the workplace and more willing to be abused.

~~~
olefoo
I am curious as to why this comment is garnering so many upvotes.

Let me be clear; I do not think those traits are net positives overall. The
fact that when we are young we are a bit too willing to defer to authority is
an artefact of buggy monkeyware. Any Manager/CTO who hires youngsters because
they are easy to browbeat and relatively cheap is on crack; it feels real good
at first, but it destroys you sooner rather than later.

Most teams benefit from a diversity in age as well as in outlook. You need
people who are experienced enough to be able to see through the bullshit, but
you also need people who will stay up late hacking on a skunk works project
because they are excited about the work.

~~~
tptacek
I don't understand your point here. Holding the quality and priority of the
work constant, the employee who is cheaper and easier to "browbeat" is in fact
lower drag. The market is very rationally going to select for the lowest drag
fit for any role.

~~~
jimbokun
"Holding the quality and priority of the work constant"

That is a large qualification. It is possible that quality of work and
willingness to be browbeaten are inversely correlated.

~~~
tptacek
That isn't my experience at all. I've found no correlation at all.

