I did feel a disadvantage myself when I was job searching a few months ago, but for me it was my personal attitude coming through more than anyone judging me by my age.
I felt that I just cannot get excited anymore about some of the bullshit the company leadership is throwing around, and neither could I overlook the massive mistakes the companies are making based on my own interview questions. But I do understand that a very small minority of these companies will actually succeed regardless of the nonsense. Otherwise the venture capital logic does not work.
Also my pay expectations were higher than most junior employees, cause I have a mortgage, family, etc. and I can see how it might be hard to justify paying for my experience when you're building yet another standard webapp.
Luckily for me, I was able to find a spot with experienced leadership building something actually new.
I say this as a greybeard myself, but as someone who been on the interviewer/hiring manager side of quite a few interviews with older candidates, it's a lot more common than they realize that they're just *bad*. Yes, there are many good ones, and yes the wisdom they have is a huge benefit. But plenty of them think this applies to them when it does not.
The most common issue is they've long since let themselves go technically. They've been flexing the same 2 or 3 muscles for ages, and let everything else atrophy. They haven't been staying abreast of current changes, and by that I don't mean jumping on the latest fad but rather knowing that the fads exist. So it winds up being the case that they have few useful/transferable skills and their "wisdom" really isn't all that useful outside of the exact niche they'd found themselves in for decades.
And then another large chunk of them wind up being jerks. I've been this person myself. Whether it being standoffish, crapping over what the company is doing without a full understanding of why they're doing it, or even just clearly being defensive about ageism.
My point isn't to dump on older candidates. Again, I sometimes am one :) But as is often the case, plenty of older candidates refuse to look in the mirror.
Life is short. Most fads are fads for reasons and I think you can learn to recognize and avoid them. I think the bigger problem is people thinking the fad tech is much harder than it is, or more essential than it is, and assuming bad things about people who don't know it just because they're old.
> They haven't been staying abreast of current changes, and by that I don't mean jumping on the latest fad but rather knowing that the fads exist.
Thing is if you’ve been around the block and have a decent understanding of fundamentals…it just doesn’t matter what the fad of the week is. It’s just noise. Old principles repackaged with different conventions.
Not sure why that has to be a red flag. It doesn’t mean people can’t learn. Just why bother spending personal investment on another fad?
This expectation is a serious problem in this industry.
> Thing is if you’ve been around the block and have a decent understanding of fundamentals…it just doesn’t matter what the fad of the week is. It’s just noise. Old principles repackaged with different conventions.
This is just not true. Entire fields exist today that didn't exist or barely existed even a few years ago.
As an example, the field I've been working in for ~7 years is Data Engineering, and it was "relatively" new when I first started, or at least the modern way of doing it was. Since then, some specific technologies have become fairly commonplace, like Airflow and dbt.
Does this mean everyone should have experience with this tech? No, of course not. But does this mean that someone should know that the field exists and what's different about it compared to other kinds of stacks? For some people, absolutely it's important. A "senior" backend engineer who wants to solve an "ETL-pipeline to Data Warehouse" shaped project will hopefully know that there are standard modern tools in that area, and not just to try and do it with {insert their standard backend framework}.
Similarly, someone who hasn't "kept up with the times" in the world of frontends might not know much about SPAs. Are SPAs always the solution? No, there are now trends going back towards traditional server-only approaches. But there's a difference in knowing that they exist and what their place is and choosing a different approach thoughtfully, vs not knowing they are even a thing.
> know that the field exists and what's different about it
This is closer to what I was trying to get at regard skills. I don't give a flip if someone knows Airflow, or DBT, or whatever. Besides, both of them are transitioning to the rear view mirror anyways. However I have found that it can be a surprisingly difficult jump for people to shift to directed graph based, data workflow thinking - some backgrounds more than others (side note: FP background tends to have no problem w/ models like pipeline oriented development)
But the real issue is how many people just ossify over time. I don't necessarily care that they've been using the same Enterprise Java/XML/PHP/etc stack since the early Aughts. I care that they've turned off their brain in the process and have little to no knowledge of the world beyond it. I care that they haven't solved a hard problem in 15+ years, and instead have been making small, incremental changes all this time. I've been there myself, and it takes a lot of work to dig out of it.
The thing an ideal older candidate would bring to the table is the ability to say "Oh yes, I've seen this concept 15 times over again. Here are the general pros of the approach, and here are the general cons. This new flavor patches over cons 4, 5, and 6 at the cost of losing pro 8. But we need to be careful about cons 2 & 3". The poor older candidate will state firmly that they've seen this all before and nothing new is happening here. There's a big difference between the two.
I'm kind of happy I'm not in webdev but embedded. There's not so much fads in this area.
In any case, I agree, fundamentals matter much more than superficial knowledge of fads.
Also I'm glad the OOP fad of the 90s and 00s seems to be finally dead. It felt almost religious. And it was frustrating to argue against the obvious issues.
> I'm kind of happy I'm not in webdev but embedded. There's not so much fads in this area.
How true is that about embedded though? I started out in that field for the first six years of my professional life, but it's been almost 15 years since then. I still know a lot more about it than the random dev who hasn't worked in it at all, but I kind of doubt I could be very intelligent about it without a bunch of catching up.
(Though obviously I agree that there are almost certainly faster changes in web dev.)
So it's interesting you say that. I worked extensively with C++ back then, and I did have occasion to do a few small C++ projects about 10 years ago, and C++ seems to have changed quite a bit. It was actually really impressive.
I'm not saying it would be very hard to learn the differences, but I definitely needed a primer back then of "here's how C++ has changed", because code really did look different in some ways.
C++11 was quite a break, C++14 very minor, C++17 a little bit more, but not as major.
C++2x is doing a lot of changes, but I haven't seen much of it in the embedded world yet. Mostly because C++17 is still considered new-ish in most safety-critical realms.
But say you have some C++<11 experience I think you would need a few weeks to get up to speed max.
> Thing is if you’ve been around the block and have a decent understanding of fundamentals…it just doesn’t matter what the fad of the week is.
You say that, but…
I find I have huge problems with VIPER, and while I can't tell if it's me or the design pattern, I do notice that some developers seem to swear by it (others, including me, swear at it).
I have that clip of Principal Skinner asking himself "Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." playing inside my own mind.
I don't want to wake up one day and find I'm Skinner.
Anecdote about older folks not staying abreast of the latest: A few years ago, I was being interviewed by a programmer far my senior (in both experience and age). I have my github link on my resume, and the interviewer noticed and asked "What's GitHub?"
Eh, I mean I've interviewed lots of just absolutely terrible candidates of all ages. Part of the problem seems to be that perception of this group is based on a narrative about their age in the first place.
(Not to mention, you meet someone for an hour, what do you really know about them? You can evaluate them for a job, but why are we spinning yarns about their internal motivations?)
The first two points seem subjective. Let’s face it, you’re not accessing people where they are. Your filling positions. Otherwise you’re an agent, or their mom.
>or even just clearly being defensive about ageism.
I mean, that makes sense? I would be just as defensive about racism or sexism if the vibe came off in an interview.
>They haven't been staying abreast of current changes, and by that I don't mean jumping on the latest fad but rather knowing that the fads exist.
I guess it depends on the domain. Sure, I can see web moving fast and the someone who focused on at best JQuery may not be needed for a company on Vue or React or whatever. Other domains don't change as radically though, or the tools are usually not as hard to transfer to as some think. People can underestimate the fundamentals at times as they try to expect 10 years of Swift experience out of a candidate.
The actual technologies matter less, and I'm not talking about "the fundamentals". It's more that they tend to have only been doing the exact small set of things for a long period of time. When I've hired such people much more often than not they struggle to learn, because they're no longer used to learning.
And much like I said the prior as a fellow greybeard, I'm saying this as someone who is much more cavalier than most people I've met about not expecting an exact set of skills. That said, I've noticed patterns of candidates who really struggle to catch up on their missing skills and this is one of them.
EDIT: to clarify a bit, the archetype I'm talking about are people who have pretty much turned off their brain and been on autopilot for 10, 20, or more years. It's not a problem if they're using a "dated" technology or whatever, it's a problem that they've been operating on rote muscle memory for ages. There are absolutely people who are using the dated technologies who don't fall into this trap.
Given my experience as someone much younger in industry, I wonder if this is less about them struggling to catch up and more about how no one wants to on board new hires these days. It feels like confounding evidence when suggesting that older people struggle to learn but also job training has been on the decline for a decade or so.
I'm sure older people are more outspoken. I have to dance around to mention that documentation is inadequate. Someone with more experience and opportunities may be more blunt about it.
Interviewers and executives are often younger than me. I never make the claim that I’ve seen this or that mistake being made before. If I need to inject something, I say “anyone read [that book on JAX]” or “happy to help setup a long-term Kanban for Kubernetes if we go that way”.
Heh - most are younger then me as well ... I had an interviewer about 15 years younger then me ask "what was the most important thing I learned about DevOps"... my reply was "dont deploy on Friday" :-) I got the job (and a chuckle) :-D
I used to work for someone that LOVED to deploy on Fridays. She would make us all stay late if whatever she wanted to finish this week was not done yet. So many 7pm on Friday deployments, ick.
Frustrating for everyone on board. Juniors don't get the training and experience they need to progress, Seniors don't get the compensation they deserve, and wizards are just having their time wasted when they get called and hear a salary that they probably made 20 years prior.
I guess it works, or the cost to do all that is low, otherwise so many places wouldn't do it.
I guess... I can see everyone thinks they're company is special and needs 'rock stars' and '10x's but generally 1 senior for every 5-10 juniors is fine for most places.
The salary thing is annoying - for a while it seemed like most jobs were listing salaries because of CA/CO/MA requiring it. But it seems to be going back to the old "D.O.E" thing again :-/
1 senior for 10 juniors is not a sustainable ratio unless the average person is a senior for 10x as long as they were a junior -- meaning, I guess, that in a 30 year career, you are "junior" for three years on average. I understand that this has been "sustainable" in the past because the industry was expanding, but can that continue forever?
Wow, I've never seen someone three years off the turnip truck called senior. I would say it's usually more like 5-10, basically everyone left after those with management ambitions have flown in that direction. I'm in a relatively sleepy part of the industry though.
I've had a similar attitude issue, not due to lack of excitement but just being more blunt, assertive, and fearless than I was as a junior. I'm not a total jerk completely missing a verbal filter, but I definitely have a shorter fuse and ended up getting let go last year for being rough with an inept coworker (politics were against me as a consultant too). I guess I need to cage my rage a little bit.
This. A lot of younger folks confuse assertiveness with being confrontational. I made a tactful suggestion that maybe our agendas are too full because we start every meeting ten minutes late. That was too confrontational according to my boss. Lol. I just can’t be quiet when table stakes stuff like this is happening.
I don't think it's a cut and dry issue. Many, if not most jobs/contracts put you in a very awkward position of dealing with something or someone who is incompetent, unfair, etc. I don't see a normal human reaction to that as being a personal or professional failure. It's unfortunate, but I think that rather than necessarily just being better at suppressing your natural reactions, the takeaway might be to try harder to get better colleagues.
That's my big challenge, I want to get the money for the experience I bring, but ultimately companies don't see it that way. Just more bets I can't really afford to take. :(
When I was coming up a long while back, there were exciting employers that filled their ranks with ambitious recent grads and lavished them with ping pong tables and soda fountains in the "war room" full of knock-off Aeron chairs and various configurations of conference tables. We'd work crazy hours and move fast with tools we didn't really understand. Most of us would get laid off multiple times as the companies we were working for evaporated, but a few would find themselves in the right place at the right time and win the lottery.
Only a few of those companies from era that remain, and most of the people who stayed in that game ended up with a four page long CV with a dozen unknown or comically failed employers, with all sorts of inflated titles.
But there was this other set of companies that were obnoxiously boring, with middle aged engineers in goatees working sane hours in semi-private offices and cubicles with peers they'd been working besides for 10 and 20 and 30 years. They'd been around, they had a business model that was proven, and they had the institutional knowledge to sustain it.
Many of those companies are still around and many of them are still stocked up with middle aged engineers in goatees with short CV's spanning many years.
I think the proportions between these two company styles varies based on how how much money is being shoved into the industry, and I think it can be hard for an older engineer who dallied with the kids for too long to situate themselves at the more stable workplaces. They often don't really fit in with either culture.
If we’re talking about FAANG tier or similar, then a junior FAANG engineer can be making as much as an enterprise company staff engineer with decades of experience about to retire in their 60s.
Even if we’re not talking about FAANG tier, interviewing around I’ve been given offers at tech companies that were up to 1.5x my enterprise senior SWE comp.
Work life balance is gamble either way. I’ve seen enterprise companies paying 150k working their employees on death marches, and tech companies paying 500k where everyone leaves at five.
Usually the cheaper the pay, the worse the death marches are. The company is either struggling to make a profit, or the managers are too greedy and saving up to buy a beach front mansion at your expense.
A higher pay rate means the company is profitable enough to spread the profits around. It may not last forever, but it's good while it's there.
It's a safe and stable place to go. Of course, if everyone wanted safety there wouldn't be so much rush into startups or entertainment industries, especially by young starry-eyed creatives.
Interestingly though.. there is a lot more upside than most folks realize. Look at the execs at some medium sized enterprise software shop - they are making a lot of cash.
The article calls it an "open secret" in the industry, but it isn't even much of a secret. Most companies have explicit "manage up or manage out" policies for engineers, which means that if you have been at a certain level for too many years you get fired and replaced by someone younger. They say you need to work hard and get promoted to senior staff/principal/director/VP, but then the promo budget says only 2 people in the org can get promoted to those ranks every year. So what about everyone else?
fwiw, each org I have been at that had the up-or-out policy had a "terminal" career stage where it no longer applied. In other words, juniors needed to work to midlevel, midlevel to senior. However, senior was a terminal role and as such you did not have to progress further up the ladder.
You should probably couch that in terms of % of base comp or you're going to get people's hopes a lot higher than is reasonable.
I don't think I saw substantially more than 10k in Seattle, or heard rumors of non-sales coworkers seeing much more than that. Inflation adjusted maybe twice that, still less than half of yours. But you might also make 3x what we made because goddamn are condos expensive down there.
some of that will pay out over 4 years so maybe it's not accurate, I'd say I got an extra 5% beyond my TC that I wasn't expecting that vests this year.
> A recruiter told him that he wouldn’t be appealing to employers and opined that Six should be chief technology officer at this point in his career, not a software developer, Six says.
I have been flat-out told that I should ask for less, because of my age. I have had recruiters hang up on me, as soon as they figured out my age.
I gave up, after a while, (but I am still producing quite a bit of code -just for free). I guess that is considered an optimal outcome, by today's tech industry, but I am quite aware that I have the skills and experience to make other people millions. I have never been particularly interested in scooping up large piles of dosh, myself. I just really enjoy the work.
Dunno where you've worked but up-or-out ejects most people destined for "out" long, long before they reach the point where ageism is even a consideration.
I think GP may be more referring to the notion that an older employee is going to have a flatter trajectory. If they come in as a 3 they expect to leave as a 3 or 4. Versus the children who come in at a 2 and plan to leave as a 5.
Okay, and the linked article isn't saying that every old person faces age discrimination in the industry. It's safe to say that most don't. That doesn't mean it isn't a problem, or that the problem should be ignored.
Depends on how you define 'the field'- if you mean SV cutting edge unicorn selling ad stuff, then yes. If you include some place like Lockheed Martin or Northrup Grumman doing boring non-cutting edge stuff like aerospace or signal analysis, then no.
Apparently. Why else were companies scooping up bootcamp grads for 200k+ to make yet another CRUD app? They clearly feel that investment will be worth it.
Compensation of course isn't the best factor for determining cutting edge. Defense contractors for instance, can work on some truly novel tech but salaries in government has hard caps. But it is telling of something when the above scenario was true not too long ago.
Yeah, I dropped my /s. Too many years of watching people do embedded, RF, flight control systems and whatnot for 20 years for half what FAANG was throwing at recent grads. Not that there isn't some truly inspiring engineering happening there, though IIRC correctly the people who first built that stuff weren't exactly spring chickens.
I don't understand the obsession with being young - when the SR-71 Blackbird had its first flight, Kelly Johnson was 54 years old. I'm not old, but not that young anymore, and from what I've seen, there's a spectrum of ability in all age groups.
And pay does not exactly line up with 'Value' produced (which itself is a nebulous concept)
I interview a lot of candidates and the quality of a lot of the recent grads makes it seem like I won’t be hurting for income until the day I croak. I’ve been interviewing people on and off for about 20 years now, and the talent pool has gotten much worse in the past decade. Might be because a lot of kids are choosing the field to “get rich”, might be just general deterioration of education idk. Case in point: over the past month I interviewed 8 fresh grads. Only one was actually good and got an enthusiastic vote from me. What to do with this is not clear to me. If anything you need to be much better educated to make a serious dent in this field today compared to 20 years ago.
Which is to say, companies discriminating against the older workers are doing so to their own detriment, in my opinion.
That's interesting because IMO and other peers - it's not that the interviews are hard, it's that the market is clearly saturated. They either don't get interviews, or even if they "do well" employers ghost and never give feedback.
All of the bigtech is still hiring, folks with good track record have no trouble moving around. Perhaps even _too little_ trouble, as evidenced by attrition in my neck of the corporate woods of folks who are going to be darn near impossible to replace. A large segment of bigtech is hiring and firing thousands of people pretty much at the same time. It's psychotic, inhumane and counterproductive (IMO), but that's currently how it is.
Big tech is definitely not hiring like it used to. I’m not sure where you’re getting your source but big tech has been doing most of the layoffs for the last 18 months and not rehiring to fill.
Not "like it used to", but it's hiring, for sure. And it's not "rehiring" mostly - it's hiring in different places than the ones from which they lay off.
You're gonna need a source for this. Every person I know in SV is having trouble getting interviews at big tech employers outside of FB. FB is the only one that is actively still interviewing - and they're negotiating people down aggressively because they know they're the only ones hiring. We've had articles here about it.
Dude, I’m _interviewing candidates_ every week at one of the FANGs that is not Meta. I _am_ the “source”. If you have any AI/ML skills, and the corresponding track record, the market is not dead by any stretch. Could be that those persons aren’t in demand right now. I also know a ton of people at Google, and Google is hiring as well, in spite of the much publicized layoffs. I don’t understand this (it takes someone external 3-6 months to get productive there, and some people don’t make it at all), but it’s a fact.
I did not say that. I said market is not dead for ml/ai and adjacent fields for sure, since that’s where I am. That doesn’t mean hiring is dead everywhere else.
Super basic stuff about the ML projects they claim to have worked on and a typical leetcode easy/medium problem that does not require that you know the solution, in whatever programming language they felt comfortable using. I wish things were this easy for me when I was starting out. I can’t really go any easier than that - if they can’t even navigate this they’d be absolutely lost here and their productivity impact would be negative.
The jokes on them. The generations are getting smaller and smaller. The lack of junior roles is making that pool even smaller. A giant bubble is forming. They spent the last 5 years talking about diversity and how great it is and how it makes better teams. Now every job is 5+ YOE. Do as I say, not as I do tech.
Even as an experienced engineer the sheer amount of knowledge you get access to from a single prompt without having to read any tutorial or book can change a Junior into Senior very quickly.
I just hope it wont face the same issue google had:
- starting with good answers and evolving into mud
For now, my feelings are that AI can be really helpful if you know the field. You need to be senior to know how to ask things and to understand the answers.
For anyone not understanding the domain, AI is just a glorified stack overflow but with hallucinations.
Hallucinations can be fought but you need to suggest that you got the wrong answer and why. And that requires a deep understanding of the domain.
Honestly I’m really frightened that we collectively accept that AI is an acceptable source of truth and that it’s ok to make decisions from its output or worse, use it as a learning material.
You don't get anywhere faster "learning" from something that lies to you 20% of the time.
It's a bit like working with a bad colleague who is very fast, but very arrogant. You can't trust what they say because they're wrong often enough to make costly mistakes common. But you can't fight them on every little thing, either. The only solution is to already be an expert, and ignore them when they're wrong.
I honestly believe AI -- if it has a dramatic impact at all -- will only reduce the value of junior employees.
My entire formal education and subsequent career stands in opposition to this statement. Unless you mean that learning requires being lied to more than 20% of the time.
That sounds like exaggeration to me, in service of a bias against "formal education". But OK. YMMV.
My statement applies only to the experience of working with the things, and relates not at all to "formal education". If I have to learn the subject to debug what they're putting out, then the rate-limiting step of using them is...learning the subject. Same as it ever was.
Having a stochastic parrot spit a stream of 20% nonsense at me doesn't make learning go faster -- it definitely does make work go faster if I'm already an expert, however.
I actually think the time I spent in school was valuable and that formal education gets a bad rap around here. I believe that my teachers all had good intentions. But they weren't always right. In my experience nobody is right 80% of the time.
I'm skeptical of the AI hype but I do believe there is value. Similar to self driving cars an AI assistant or teacher doesn't have to be right all the time, it only has to be right more often. Proper use of this tool will require skillbuilding like anything else.
Oh, I'm not saying there's no value, just that I don't think the value is nearly the magnitude being hyped, and certainly not for the "speeding up the junior to senior transition" posited by the comment at the top of the thread. And sure, every teacher is wrong at some rate -- but the way we deal with that is by thinking for ourselves, asking lots of teachers, working out the differences, etc. This inherently takes time.
Pick some domain that you know nothing about, and ask a transformer model to solve a known problem in the space. It will give you a reply. Is the reply correct? Assuming that you even know how to ask the right question to get a sensible answer (which itself requires expertise), assessing the quality of the answer certainly requires expertise that you don't have. So either you figure it out for yourself (as slow as learning from any other source), or you take it on blind faith.
If I had to wager on the area where I think these models are going to lead to big changes, it's reading and summarization, not generation. "Describe how node deletion in b-trees works in 500 words" is a heck of a lot more useful than asking a transformer to write code to implement node deletion in a b-tree.
I can't really speak for previous posts, but I've personally seen a huge uptick in how fast I can move through material using LLMs - not because I'm asking them how things work or to explain things to me, but because they remove the slog of memorizing ancillary boilerplate and help me find the terms I need to search the docs for.
These are very specific things that you can't get as efficiently elsewhere. Essentially, it's not so much about the language model outputting information that I can understand, but more about the language model being able to parse MY queries and respond with something that's kinda good-enough.
Say you're looking at a chunk of code you didn't write, and you want to know what function foo_man_chu() is doing. You could go straight to the documentation for that function, but in many cases it's interacting with a bunch of other systems that are documented elsewhere, and not referenced in that material. If you ask GPT to explain it to you, it pops out a (reliable enough) list of things to RTFM on. This takes what could be a couple hours deep-reading through stack / google and distills it down to like ten minutes.
This effect is magnified the less you know about the domain, if you do it right.
Multiply that by the amount of times you have to do this in the course of teaching yourself something and it adds up quite a bit. This may be what the parent is talking about.
AI won't be as impactful in generating good results (though it may result in middle management firing devs/admins since they think they're easily replaceable).
As an example, I asked claude.ai to generate an ansible playbook for patching a Docker cluster. It created one, something I'd expect a junior admin to be able to whip up pretty easily. Then I noticed something funky. The playbook was OS agnostic, just using some where clauses to handle debian, RHEL, etc. Nice stuff, but wrong. One of the tasks was to clean the cache after apply updates. The AI got apt correct (autoclean), but assumed incorrectly that yum had the same parameter. Just a small detail that would have shown up when the playbook was run, but when it can't handle the small details, why bother?
It wrote a template that passed a playbook linter. Whether any of the tasks were actually correct is highly questionable. I caught the errors because I have lots of experience. Maybe we need an AI to double check the work of the first AI?
Not to derail the thread, but its really not that simple. People are subject to their own biases and knowledge gaps. Long form responses do not fix either of those issues though they might help with the latter. If it really upskilled everyone that cleanly its effect on roles would've happened by now.
I've noticed a lot of people frankly do not have the natural "context length" needed to really take advantage of AI and there are those that are really benefitting from it, but they're in the smallest minority.
Man, comment was greyed between reading and clicking reply - I get that the back-and-forth over AI is a thing but if you're gonna respond negatively to an arguable point based on a topic with this much nuance, at least respond with words as well as downvotes. ANYWAY...
...It's that very google issue that convinces me the most important thing we can do is build towards locally runnable LLMs. There's no reason we can't eventually get to gpt4-or-better on consumer hardware, it's just going to take some time and research and we're gonna have to dodge the incessant ladder-pulls that the big dogs keep lobbying for ("AI is dangerous! Only we can be trusted(tm)!").
You can't enshittify an application I own, that's running on my hardware. Not with the current state of things, at least.
I'd suggest starting with being around the interfaces between orgs.. Anywhere you can put your head down and work for days without talking to other companies is a luxury to indulge in sparingly if you are insuring for future employment as not the cheapest labor in not the cheapest land.
Is work life balance really better when you have to worry bout finding your next gig and also that everything’s on you (don’t have a team/others to fall back on)?
If you bounce from full time to full time with 75% unemployment you are a no-hire many places and almost universally in a downturn. Consulting and contracting is often used to be vague and even pretend you are unsuccessfully looking for contracts a lot of the time precisely because that is the reality for many and more acceptable for many types of employment.
If your FTE role is general developer you are jumping with no experience and will need to be lucky. If your last FTE role is sales engineer or professional services, you are already proficient in many of the skills and networked. If you aren't sure how to get a first contract you didn't really choose the right FTE role yet.
In my past experience, Apple was full of graybeards who could code circles around younger devs. They’re the ones who knew how to build and maintain high quality software.
I’m not sure if it’s the same way now, but I was highly impressed with my former coworkers’ caliber.
I worked with them (not as an Apple employee). I had tremendous respect for their work.
Apple's quality has been declining recently. I have been trying to get both SwiftUI and Core/CreateML into something I can ship, and keep slamming into walls.
It was true when I left a year ago. I was surprised to find the next hire after me was 20 years my senior. I actually felt like my mid-30s “youth” worked against me at times there.
No you see, that's precisely the problem. Going bad because of your age is a choice. Being descriminated against because of your age, which is what ageism is, is not a choice.
I feel this. I got the "you look older than your profile pic" comment during an interview last year. That one was fun. Dude wanted to know if I could even code anymore.
Sheesh - what a lame statement. All the juniors I've worked with are very keen to learn from us old timers, and likewise their enthusiasm and energy rubs off on us. It's a win-win as far as I'm concerned.
Indeed, we can intensify or we can reduce fault lines. Labeling old or young folks with worst stereotypes will not solve problems apart from giving jollies to some on social media.
So far for me working with young people has been lot of fun and learning on both sides.
I think some organizations, groups or individuals are more about having all the right traits and buzzword experience on the CV and are more afraid of being disillusioned about anything that is part of that kind of goal than interested in really solving problems or learning skills to actually do so.
I would imagine it's extremely hard to prove though. The prospective employer could just maintain that the applicant "wouldn't be a good culture fit" or similar.
Literally all companies in my industry have an application track just "for graduates". They just want young kids, I never understood how this is legal. What am I missing?
My experience includes taking on a lot of various challenges and doing what it takes to ship quality products on time. But when I interview very little of that comes up or has much weight. Current interviewers usually want an immediate demonstration of a relevant skill in considerable detail. The idea that someone who has shipped many different types of product can adapt quickly doesn't seem to be considered valid. Not only that, there seems to be a lot of weight put on knowing Agile and being able to take orders instead of going on whatever engineering tangent comes up. It seems like engineers who have developed a particular set of desirable skills have a great advantage and those with a lot of proven general talent are mostly not even in the game.
One of the more subtle ways this is exhibited is by only preferring certain recent tech stacks, or orienting interview questions around computer science concepts that are only quite modern - especially if either of these have nothing to do with the toolset actually used. (or, asking for a recent transcript!). I've seen ALL of this in the time I've been looking for work, repeatedly.
It's very annoying, but most can be overcome if one's got time and patience.
That's all over the place. After all, one of the reasons to interview with a company is to see if their working culture is one that'd fit you. But then, I'm Canadian and have yet to find one that really didn't.... ok I know of a couple that do not, but I never applied to them.
One employer asked for my high school graduation transcript! Another was clearer and wanted university transcript - in essence, grades and grade point average. (the actual terms might be a Canadian thing, I'm not sure what "list of courses and grades" works out to elsewhere)
On the flip side, when none of the kids know C any longer, you can hire me out of retirement at phenomenal expense to help maintain your legacy code. :)
I know a lot of people who has zero trouble getting hired for a whole career suddenly start having trouble in their 40s.
In my 40s I started getting turned down (for the first time ever!) for the weirdest reasons. "Wouldn't be able to handle working with uncooperative teams within the company." (Whaaa...? Dodged a bullet there.) "Not passionate about programming." (Did you not look at my resume? My books I wrote to give away?) Are these _really_ the reasons?
And you do notice it when everyone interviewing you is under 30. Not that being under 30 is bad, but a diverse workplace is a plus in my mind.
A friend of mine started dyeing his hair and landed a job soon thereafter, after over a year of looking. If I were going on the hunt again, I'd definitely do that. My face looks younger than it is. But what a bullshit thing to have to do. (I can hear all the women here saying, "oh you poor thing how will you survive". Yes, yes, I know. It's bullshit all around.)
Now I'm in academia for semi-retirement, which is what I really love anyway, where experience has value that remains undiminished by age. :)
Discrimination is what happens when you don't have good measurement for capability. People have to make decisions, and in general you have more applicants than roles, so you use heuristics. Obviously its wrong (and illegal) but it's not going to change until you offer a reasonable alternative that measures technical and social (personality/EQ) merit.
> Discrimination is what happens when you don't have good measurement for capability.
This is obviously not the general case for discrimination, often it flies in the face of good measurements. Do you mean in this particular case, that because we don't have good metrics for developers, discrimination easily slips in?
Sure ageism is a thing, but I can't help but think that long experience in industry can be sort of a "get another job" superpower.
After a couple of decades in industry, I've formed so many professional relationships that it's hard for me to imagine that I might have any real trouble finding another job if I lost my current one. I mean, I guess I could be delusional and find it to be really tough at some point, but it hasn't happened so far. People I've worked with have gone on to start their own companies or have risen to senior director roles. In fact for the job before the one I have now a senior director practically yanked me out of my previous company and shoved me into his current company.
I don't think about recruiters sticking their noses up at me because of my age or buzzwords on my resume and such at all. If I want in somewhere, I just email someone I've worked with previously and ask if they think there might be something at their current company for me. It usually doesn't take long for their hiring manager to be asking me for an intro meeting. Only then does a recruiter get involved, and they're not screening me. They're setting up an interview loop. Often with people hand-picked by the hiring manager.
Look, I know ageism is real and it does happen and has a real impact on people. But on the other hand, if you've been working for 20+ years in industry and have generally left a good impression on your co-workers, how can you not have contacts sprinkled around in your industry who can give you a leg up on the job-finding process?
> how can you not have contacts sprinkled around in your industry who can give you a leg up on the job-finding process?
I can answer that because I see that situation coming. I just can't be bothered talking to people if I can avoid it. At this moment I have one manager who manages I think 3 people. He gives me problems to solve. I don't talk to anyone else in a company that hires 300+ people. When I leave I won't have any contacts sprinkled around, just my manager. That's how.
I definitely feel like it's the opposite. A lot of jobs require a proven track record with the number of years being like 5+ YOE. I graduated last may and still haven't gotten any offers. That being said, it's probably just me having a skill issue XD.
I have C code older than some of the young dev coworkers I've had. I have software running on embedded devices in the field (in gas stations, for example) thats older than some of them too.
Before we age, we lack experience, context, produce less useful work per hour worked, and get paid less. Legality aside, isn't it rational to discriminate against younger people?
Our industry isn't powered by the rare genius, but by the magnitude of line coders that the best impact they can do is just not cause issues as they develop the next version that adds feature x and y promised by some sales engineer to a big client.
Sure, by 40 you're not likely to change the world. But in your 20's, you're not likely to change the world either. It's a long shot. Focusing on the fact that the long shot odds gets worse as a reason to not hire people just doesn't make sense.
Geniuses follow the same curve as virtually everyone else. Humans are most active, energetic and quick in our late teens to early 30s and fall off steadily after that.
People in this thread need to ask themselves why they're engaging in age-denialism.
>People in this thread need to ask themselves why they're engaging in age-denialism.
Simple: compensation and hiring practices run counter to this notion. If you're most productive in your 20's you should be paid more for that productivity, and years of experience wouldn't be such a mandatory metric.
Neither is true in practice. Older people have more expeirence, and get paid more. Policy makers have a median age in the late 50's. Young people are hired for peanuts and hope to get more money as they get more experience, regardless of if they are treading water or are in fact the most productive member of a company.
Your notions are only really true for top level sports, where gynmasts and professional athletes are in fact hired, compensated, and performed at their peak in the early 20's and tend to burn out (relative to other early 20's athletes) as they approach 30.
It's true everywhere. Older people are paid more for no good reason, it's just "the way things are" that you get a raise every year. In a freer market, it wouldn't be the case.
I just described an industry where it's not. You don't make money playing sports in your 30's. If you still wanna work by that time, you teach others sport, be a newscaster, or sell your brand. They may or may not make millions. It depends on how you sell yourself, but most athletes aren't salesmen.
> In a freer market, it wouldn't be the case.
We're about as free as we're going to get. You can quit or be laid off at anytime and hires in tech get amazing compensation for relatively little experience compared to fields like medicine, law, or accounting.
You're free to enact such a model yourself and see how well it works if you're confident in it. But market forces aren't dumb either.
As a self proclaimed genius, you may want to take a step back and question your position. If everyone in the comments is disagreeing with you, that may be a signal that you are missing due to your own bias.
The average founder is over 40. They are the folks making money. Not sure what geniuses have to do with where you are coming from. Sure, most mathematicians who make a name for themselves are young. But most people changing the world and making money with tech? That's the over 40 crowd because they have been professionals and understand what other professionals need.
The thing about ageism in IT is a matter of statistics.
If you hire a bad junior you are few thousend in back.
If you hire a bad senior you are tens of thousends in back.
Noone wants to make bad decisions, so we use stereotypes we know to prefilter. Its not very pragmatic but lets be honest as engineers we know world is not pragmatic.
Ageism is pretty much only talked about when it affects older people. Younger people - broadly millenials and younger - have just had to make piece with the ageism they've faced their entire lives and continue to face. I understand that one day I'll be old too, but my sympathies are limited and it'll be nothing truly new for us when people start dismissing us for being old, since people have been dismissing us for being young plenty. It'll probably hurt a little more since I tend to identify more with younger people than Gen X or older millenials, but in the end it won't be anything I'm not used to. So consider this me playing the world's smallest violin.
That is such a weird take for a young software dev to have - you are uniquely positioned in an intersection of both age and the industry you're in to have faced extremely little ageism. Compared to just about anyone else working their way up and gaining experience elsewhere, you've had it easy. The lack of perspective is staggering.
You'd fully deserve that violin played for you later on in your career.
That's just a bunch of empty assertions you're putting forward, you need to back those up with an actual explanation of how you formed those beliefs.
You might say most of my comment was just a bunch of assertions, but they were assertions about my own perception of my own experience. I think you have a higher burden to elaborate when you're making assertions about someone else's experience, especially when it contradicts what they allege.
I didn't realise this was an assertion scoring debate rather than just a discussion, but here goes:
* I have experienced what software development was like 25yrs ago, when it also took a lot longer to gain seniority and responsibility.
* I started my career in a different engineering field. I saw a very different age<->seniority progression than the quick one in software. In fact that was why I switched to tech even if software was slower back then than now.
The combination of both those was the basis for claiming that young software devs have been in an extraordinarily privileged position in recent years. Do you have any idea what it's like outside software?
You're going to have to make a better case that young software engineers these days experience ageism at a similar level to other professions or time periods. It is now an industry that skews young and quickly discards age. You'd also need to distinguish between lack of experience and just being young to claim it's ageism.
And the age groups you were deriding were the ones that broke down those barriers for younger devs in the first place. Did you consider they would've experienced worse and sought to change it?
Your non specific comment seemed like an extremely self centered view of the wider industry that lacked perspective and contradicted a near universally understood situation. You were the one making the extraordinary claim that needed backup.
Your incredibly broad generalisation got a necessarily broad reply which you're now complaining about just being an empty assertion. You did nothing to elaborate about your experience was - what did you expect? Maybe if you'd been more specific about what you've faced you would've got different answers.
Everyone had to get educated one way or the other and hit the pavement for a job. It's just natural to need to prove yourself when you're at the least valuable point in your career.
Facing that again when at your most experienced and valuable makes a lot less sense.
Hang in there buddy. We hire qualified people of all ages who like to learn and get their work done. I'm GenX and I've heard all the age stuff before in my youth as well.
(1) Be yourself
(2) Provide value
(3) Take on some of the boring stuff that adds to business continuity
Number 3 is not sexy, but good management notices.
I felt that I just cannot get excited anymore about some of the bullshit the company leadership is throwing around, and neither could I overlook the massive mistakes the companies are making based on my own interview questions. But I do understand that a very small minority of these companies will actually succeed regardless of the nonsense. Otherwise the venture capital logic does not work.
Also my pay expectations were higher than most junior employees, cause I have a mortgage, family, etc. and I can see how it might be hard to justify paying for my experience when you're building yet another standard webapp.
Luckily for me, I was able to find a spot with experienced leadership building something actually new.