Admirable, but in practice this is tough. We have always been age-agnostic and all our engineering hires are remote. I don’t explicitly ask, but can get a sense of how old someone is in the phone call portion of interview. My takeaway from doing hundreds of these interviews is that even after correcting for experience levels, age correlates with inflated expectations: salary, paid vacation, benefits, etc. This alone has been our hurdle to hiring people 40+.
This seems strange to me, it seems these people would continue adjusting salary and benefits exceptions downward until they found a job, or they would find a company that is paying what they are looking for. I know it is a lucrative field, but is every software developer 40+ financially established enough to be that picky?
Side note: paid vacations seem like pretty low exceptions, maybe you are taking advantage of inexperienced developers, maybe you meant amount they expect too much time off.
I'm a 40+ developer, and yes, we do find companies that will pay what we're looking for. If this guy won't, fine, feel free to hire cheaper developers. That's the way a competitive labor market is supposed to work. Employers can't just get their pick of whoever the heck they want at a price they unilaterally name unless they're the only employer. Thankfully, they aren't.
The market pays the least it can among the alternatives. If the younger were smarter, they wouldn't undercut the elder on price, and therefore maximize their value.
Exactly. Age has no place being passed to the proposed compensation function. Experience and other correlated parameters are valid, but age itself is not.
If a candidate and the employer can’t reach an agreement, so be it. If that is because the candidate inflates their expectations because of their age [or wisdom], well, see previous sentence.
I think the point is that people who are older usually fall in the "more expensive" side of the compensation curve: We expect a higher salary, we want more paid vacation and we are looking for more expensive benefits (paid family health plan instead of only personal).
I turn 40 this December; 20 years ago I got bought with just being able to get into a programming job (in the small town in La Paz, BCS Mexico), the fact that I was paid OK was good Vacations and all that extra stuff was just icing on the cake. I didn't care about the "retirement" things (in Mexico by law everyone gets "poor mans" version of 401k). 20 years later, darn I am sure I am WAY more picky than then.
But when you are in a position to hire and there is no apparent benefit to hiring someone who wants more money vs someone with the same skills and relevant experience, why would you hire the person who wants more money?
We don't deserve a higher salary because we are older. "Respect your elders" is a very cultural thing. We should "respect" all people the same. We should "respect" (acknowledge) people that do things worthy of respect.
Ugh, cmon. You are really straining to be outraged here.
That is not at all what I said. In my experience, older people almost always ask for above market compensation regardless of experience. We don’t hire people that ask for too much money regardless of age.
We get much more “value” when we choose a less experienced candidate who wants much less money, but it is a gamble. Are they trainable? Will they stick around?
But I prefer that gamble to the one where we pay someone more money who has no discernible skill edge over other candidates. Actually, I don’t understand the upside to that gamble at all, which is why I never take it. Should I just assume that they will be more successful simply because they are asking for more money?
I think this is the game as well. Companies want to minimize risk for new hires, so would rather hire someone at $X and get 2-3 years out of them than hire someone at $2X and hope they get twice the value out of them before they retire or call time on their bullshit.
A small % of new hires (in their 20s and 30s) will stick around for >10 years, and the value you get then from years of incremental pay raises is huge. Those people are comfortable and don't know their market value or are too afraid to go and get it.
Younger folks do not deliver the same quality, and go on unproductive goose/chases a lot more often. It takes years to develop the detail-oriented skills of quality software delivery. I know because I was one of them.
Would you say a new culinary grad delivered the same quality pizza as Jeff Varasano, who’s been honing a craft for multiple decades?
Now if you’re in a field that doesn’t require high quality, then cheaper makes sense. Let the market decide. Unfortunately it is inefficient due to biases. Oldies know their cv has a good chance of hitting the bin without a further look, if they have the grey hairs of experience.
> If I can hire someone to do the same work at the same quality level for less money, why wouldn’t I do this?
That makes sense. But what if the older developer has more experience and can demonstrate greater skill? People tend to become more skilled with more experience, and having been exposed to different technologies gives one a larger perspective to base decisions on. Also helps with challenging bugs, and knowing what sort of leaky abstractions the tower of modern software is built on top of.
The comments above tend to be about refusing to even consider hiring developers over a certain age despite whatever experience and skills they have, or treating them poorly because they are older.
