I'm a 50+ greybeard (literally) and here's my story: I once figured I could improve my chances of getting a job if I shave my beard. I knew I looked much younger without it, people would get my age wrong by some 10-15 years. And so my 6 months-long search for a job that time ended in success on the first interview after I shaved it. The first one! I remember the faces of the guys who hired me when they saw my personal data on some tax form that I filled later, after the contract was signed.
Ageism in this industry is real. I think the root cause of it is investors, it's where the origins of this phenomenon are. They prefer younger entrepreneurs who in turn hire people like themselves, and so it propagates down the hierarchy as the company grows. It's transitive. In fact this is true for all types of discrimination.
I switched to entrepreneurship and feel the same effects here. Good luck raising money or even finding a co-founder. It's tough. Not going to shave my beard though.
I have no idea what could be done here other than for the aging tech people to unite and form their own companies, investment funds. Just like the other discriminated groups do - women, then racial and other minorities.
Edit: I should add, I was talking about a hands-on engineering job, not management. I love coding and not going to quit it because of ageism or pay or other circumstances.
I have more or less the same perception. My beard is grey, I'm getting bald (shaving keeps my hair below 1cm). People are still surprised when I say I'm 54. I wear geeky t-shirts and jeans. Ageism is real and some of the younglings treat me as someone whose knowledge is obsolete, only to be proven wrong. It's true I still remember my way around an Apple II and know what a 3278 was (and how they looked like) and some. One advantage we, The Elders, have is that we know not only how things got (and get, and will get) built, but we also know how they fail. Our current jobs were science fiction when we started, and we know the jobs of the younglings will be science fiction when they grow up. We seldom need more than five minutes to point out organizational issues that can cause a project to fail, and barely five more to list a couple actions to be taken to avert disaster - we don't have to figure it out - we just need to remember what we did.
My long and colorful history is a feature, not a bug.
> [...] we don't have to figure it out - we just need to remember what we did.
>
> My long and colorful history is a feature, not a bug.
Kids these days... No respect for their elders!
But yeah, spot on. That's exactly the specific issue I have with tech ageism, at least from the corporation's perspective.
I'm not saying that it's good to discriminate (on age or anything else), but from the dehumanizing RoI-oriented perspective of the corporation, it's just the dumb move to push the aging and the elderly on the side.
Why would you spend so many resources to bring a person to the top of the game, and then right when they start becoming really clever and useful, you start minding the color of their beard and render them obsolete?
It's like waiting for a green banana to become edible, and when it's at the perfect balance the one that's just right for you, you just pluck it and chuck it in the bin. WTF?
In any team I've worked, the guy with the gray temples has always been the most relaxed and significant contributor to any discussion - precisely thanks to the experience they developed over the past three and sometimes four decades.
Conversely, young upstarting devs who think they're interfacing with dinosaurs tend to not fare well.
That's probably because they lack the acumen to recognize golden egg-laying geese when they encounter them, and profit from the experience.
> One advantage we, The Elders, have is that we know not only how things got (and get, and will get) built, but we also know how they fail... We seldom need more than five minutes to point out organizational issues that can cause a project to fail,
Yep. 59yo here. I've seen so many failed projects over the years that it's just second nature now to know early on when one is going to fail and why - both on the organizational and the technical side. The problem with all of this experience with failure, though, is that it gets harder and harder to get motivated. It's difficult to maintain a positive attitude about all of this because you know human nature and you remember that your younger self didn't exactly listen to your elders when they tried to help you avoid failure either.
We just deployed another SIEM. The 8th of my career. The 7th will be decommed when the logs TTL.
The other 6 SIEMS no longer exist, I'm sure of it.
It gets harder to drum up the enthusiasm for Yet Another Security Appliance. They all have accounts, and roles, and reporting, and a little black box that does the magic trick...and they're all largely the same.
as someone who is becoming an elder, I can't help but feel a touch of Schadenfreude when I see youngsters run face-first into stuff that I've predicted will happen, secure in their knowledge that I'm a dinosaur and can't possibly know what I'm talking about any more.
It is, but I’ve watched companies who were doing well start hiring younger, cheaper -10x developers and people losing their incomes, pensions etc. because they listened to the ’cheap’ and trendy-seeming who were eager to people-please and ignorant of their ignorance.
The reverse is true, of course. ‘Expert beginners’ and those just looking to avoid any hard work or responsibility until they retire are equally as dangerous.
If you’re a non-technical business owner, manager or anyone else who relies on tech and the people who build and run it, it is completely impossible to choose wisely, as you simply don’t know who to believe.
I’ve got myself to positions of high trust in companies and then found my advice ignored both when I warn against:
1. Hiring those I can see are not just bad value but going to destroy tech and teams through arrogance and being given more responsibility than they should have (yet).
2. Leaving the dangerously incompetent ‘seniors’ and workshy in positions where they are either preventing any kind of growth or, worse, accelerating a death spiral which ends in either zero ability to compete or a tech disaster of some kind (lost or corrupted data, breach, etc.)
If you’re trusted, that doesn’t mean that your advice to spend some time building smaller teams of actually competent people - or whatever your proposal is, will be heeded. The smell of money over a short term (or lack of it) are usually going to win.
I like the phrase "-10x developers"... whose work has a net negative value 10 times the value added by an average developer (haven't heard it before, but surely such people exist!)
You are a mind capable of bridging space and time, but have only three years of experience, and don’t have a job at FAANG already, and will value 0.5% of common stock as fifty percent of your total compensation. Because your code is bulletproof and so is our coffee!
> as someone who is becoming an elder, I can't help but feel a touch of Schadenfreude when I see youngsters run face-first into stuff that I've predicted will happen
I've learned some tact in my old age and no longer laugh when datetime formatting issues cause problems. I now act with empathy and gentle guidance.
Your role is not to prevent that from happening. Your role is to do your job and set an example, which the younglings will remember years down the road. Those are two different things.
Not only that, but I predicted how things would go badly and they did. Now I struggle to find motivation in a world that made the opposite choice of what I recommended, nearly every step of the way, so all of the things that I wanted to do feel harder to achieve than ever before.
I've come to realize that Winston Churchill's joke "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else" applies to everything, not just democracy and capitalism. In tech, you either find the right solution and get ahead of the pack long enough to make some money, or you watch helplessly as the pack applies brute force to whatever problem you were trying to solve and succeeds the hard way. Stuff like video cards and DALL-E 2 come to mind. Visionary ideas bordering on magic succeed (delayed by decades) not due to the current "state of the art" in tech, but despite it. And that work is important, because exhaustively eliminating every other potential solution in the problem space represents the real work of solving problems. That's what an economy is (churn).
So I've been learning to let go, practice nonattachment, drop expectation in all forms, and just be grateful as we head towards the Singularity around 2040 and the decline of the natural world between 2050 and 2100 if people and AI working together can't save the planet. Being clever doesn't matter anymore, effort doesn't matter anymore, because someone somewhere will invent whatever idea you're working on, yesterday, and keep all of the money for themselves.
The greatest failure of our time is that tech not only can't deliver its own end-goal (UBI, freedom from forced labor, self-actualization for all people), it actively stands in its way by fostering wealth inequality. The only winning move is not to play.
It's only a spectator sport if you're not downstream from those changes though.
I also think ageism is only part of the problem, it's stubbornness in general. Even if you're younger, it's difficult to translate hard-earned experience into respect because many engineers are infatuated with their own designs and algorithms. I've had people reject my advice even though I literally worked 2 years on app dedicated to solving that specific problem we were having. Of course they had egg on their face at the first demo. And they're still using that broken code.
As someone not in the software field who finds themself with people imparting wisdom frequently. I find that personally many times it's better to learn by trying even if someone who knows better than you says otherwise.
As for those of you who don't feel heard in work or life let me just say that that's no excuse not to try. Especially if it's of great importance. Even if you have to stick your neck out under a guillotine in order to say it. I imagine if that guy at NASA who discovered the fatal flaw in Challenger didn't stop at telling the NASA heads but maybe the news, the astronauts and even their families it could have been prevented.
Re>> "Ageism is real and some of the younglings treat me as someone whose knowledge is obsolete"
I know that you are correct, that many younglings treat greybeards as people whose knowledge is obsolete.
I'm closing in on 40. I was first mesmerized by computers in 1993 when a shareware copy of Doom was popped into my 486 based PC. "What is this witchcraft!? I must uncover the secrets to how this works!". I've been hooked ever since. When I first started playing with friends over a dial up modem, I was intimidated by all the technical options, prompting me to select my baud rate etc... What does all these even mean? I felt like the people who were working on these computers were wizards full of deep deep knowledge and I was drinking from a fire hose, just trying desperately to catch up. 30 years later, I still feel like I'm trying to catch up!!! Many younglings might think greybeard knowledge is obsolete, but I don't and I still feel like I'm behind the curve, trying to catch up. I know this is probably tangential to imposter syndrome, but man.... I still admire and look up to the greybeards. Edit: Continuing to learn about the old, the origins, and the history is like exploring an abandoned mine shaft still filled with gold and jewels, and I still feel that childlike wonder with technology.
Note: Fabien Sanglard's Black Books are great technical deep dives.
[Edit: Spelling. Though, I liked the term "greybears"]
"Ageism is real and some of the younglings treat me as someone whose knowledge is obsolete, only to be proven wrong."
This meme is slowly dying, but let me do my part here to kick it along to death faster.
Nothing here is intended to offend per se, because I consider everything I say here to be the natural order of things, and there's nothing wrong with it. Still, it's the truth.
I'm in my mid-40s now. I've hired a lot of juniors over the years. Never once have I hired someone new and gone "Oh my god, they know so much, my job is at risk and I'm going obsolete!"
No, what happen when I hire junior is that I look at where they are now, and where they need to be to be a fully functional member of the team, and kind of sigh and make a plan to try to get them there as quickly as possible, plotting a minimal path through the thicket of things necessary to be a functioning software engineer nowadays. Six months is generally a bare minimum time line for this. Sometimes it's more.
And that's just to get to functional. A well-rounded engineer that I can plausibly just pass a project to and see them largely get it done correctly and without blowing their own or my foot off? Years. Years. And I just mean that from a technical perspective... it's yet more before I feel comfortable inserting them into the political layers.
Again, not intended to be offensive. Everyone has to pass through this phase. Every mature programmer should expect to be mentoring like this; if you're in your 40s and haven't had to do this at all, take a careful look at your career, something's probably wrong. (I don't mean management; I mean mentorship.)
There was one intern a few years ago who turned my head in that he had parity with me on a couple of interesting and unusual skills, but still... it was parity at best, not amazingly better than me. And while he had some amazing building skills for an intern I could see the skillset was still very, very lopsided and he needed a lot of work on the question of what to do, rather than just the doing of things. It's OK. That's normal. I'm not even sure how to hypothesize someone coming out of college with amazing skills in knowing exactly what to do. From what I see even when 20-year-old startup founders get this right it's a combination of mentorship from investors and sheer luck. I despair of even imagining how to teach this skill from anything other than experience, beyond simply sensitizing a student to the fact that it is something they should be looking at as they grow as an engineer.
There was a brief window in the 1990s where the industry underwent a technological convulsion and switched away from expensive mainframes to commodity computers and the internet/web. In that brief window, which I was lucky enough to capture and ride, a fresh young whelpling who had spent the last couple of months fiddling with this newfound "web" thing could do some things that the mainframe folks couldn't. There were still plenty of lessons that could have been learned from the mainframe folks, but for whatever reason, be in the internet just not being there yet, an unbridgeable cultural gap between the hacker mindset and the IBM mindset, whatever reason, the communication and wisdom transfer just didn't happen. That hasn't happened since then and I see no prospect of it happening in the next 10 years, not because the next 10 years won't see change but because the people like me of that era have already ridden any number of waves since then and adapted and I don't see that sort of convulsive surprise happening again.
The idea that someone in their 50s just has to be old and out of date is not just silly but downright ludicrous. Getting to "well rounded" in 2022 is something that will require you until your mid-30s minimum anymore.
I think a lot of the ageism that still lives in the industry are people who are unskilled and unaware. They can't even perceive what it is they are missing, so they are incapable of recognizing the skill gap. Since a lot of the ageism probably resides in people who aren't even engineers, managers, recruiters, people who are for any number of reasons good and bad simply incapable of interacting with engineers and being able to assess their skill levels, it's a plausible guess.
One thing I find with young and exuberant people and their assumptions about old greybeards such as myself is that they are somewhat immodest about their knowledge. I’ll readily own up to not being an expert on some new tech and they will act as though they possess all the new hotness until we get into the thick of a project and we discover that my “cursory” grasp of the new tech actually goes significantly deeper than theirs. Sure, you’ve done a few projects with technology X, but I’ve actually bothered to find out how it really works under the covers. Both are valuable, but I’m getting you out of a jam because I’m willing to walk up and down the stack and debug problems at any level, whereas you’re stuck in the hot abstraction of the day. You’re welcome.
I'm 55 in the middle of the US and I am like "where are all the junior devs that are coming for my job?". Where I am, there is not enough of them.
I have one kid in college an another going into her senior year of high school. Seems like very few their peers are going into computer science. I know it is not for every body, but it is surprising how unpopular it is.
I'm 39 and have been doing things in this realm since my teens. C64 was my first computer and I still know how to POKE my way around them.
There's a lot of great programmers coming up, but I often find their depth of knowledge to be limited. They can get to elegant solutions, but when it comes to how it fits into a larger distributed system architecture, security, scalability or long term maintainability they seem to start falling short. I've watched a lot of less experienced engineers want to just hit the "reset" button nonstop during an AWS outage, for hopes that resetting the system will clear up the problem and not intuiting the likely causes and consequences.
They simply need more time to expand out their layers of knowledge and experience. It will happen over time! I do feel that I was born of an era when many of the layers were more obvious to interact with and less abstracted. It is easy for a developer to get many years into their career and never interact with assembly these days - such was far less likely in the early 80's unless you wanted to only run slow BASIC programs forever.
If you're in the middle of the US, there's a good chance that there aren't that many local tech jobs, requiring moving to a big city (which many don't want). It's also possible that they can make similar money in a trade as they can at the local tech jobs. If they do pay the same, I'd probably recommend a trade over IT. I know I won't be pushing my kid to be a dev based on my own dissatisfaction with the industry.
Stress will kill you no matter what your profession. Physical exercise can save your life. I nearly died on one IT job, and nearly killed myself on another. I became an investor to escape the pressure to undertake such positions, and now only do things I enjoy. Enough action for flow, not enough for excessive stress - and do physically challenging recreations.
> I see no prospect of it happening in the next 10 years
It's happening right now: the field is being flooded by data-kids who reason in different terms. They are statisticians first and programmers later. Their models can do stuff that bit-pushers like me will always struggle with. 10-15 years from now they'll run everything, and you won't be able to code a helloworld without specifying a ML model.
I'm dabbling in that world right now. Along with the fact that, well, I'm dabbling in that world right now... no. They're doing different thing. You won't have ML models creating UI code (and I mean, actual UI code to draw widgets, not just assembling UIs) or any number of other tasks. They're doing new things. And we have plenty of time to learn, just like I haven't been left behind by any number of other things. It won't be like the web.
(In fact I've been generally unimpressed by the people I've seen so far. The ML math is complicated, but there's a whole lot of "just fire this at that without understanding why" in the actual practitioners. I've found I have a better understanding of what is and is not possible and why than they seem to rather often. This comes back to my extended education background, though; my training is old but less obsolete than you may think, a lot of modern ML stuff isn't some totally new thing just invented yesterday, but a couple of slight tweaks to established stuff that worked really well combined with finally having the CPU firepower to use it.)
That has to be said again. Basically all of deep learning, which is what people mainly mean today when they say "ML", is at least 20 years old. Other data science techniques? Even older. The big spurt seen recently is mainly the result of a) faster hardware and b) larger datasets [1]. At some point the "low-hanging fruit" achievable by scaling up and crunching down MOAR DATA will be all taken and then soemone will need to do all the hard work of figuring out new techniques, or at least building bigger computers. Who's going to do that? All the people who are "passionate about machine learning" and are experts in Tensorflow and PyTorch? I wouldn't bet my money on that. Thirty years from now the people leading the field will be people with thirty years of experience in thinking real hard about real hard problems. As they usually are [2].
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[1] My standard reference for this is a guy called Geoff Hinton. Some people in machine learning may have heard the name. Quoting:
AMT: Ok, so you have been working on neural networks for decades but it has only exploded in its application potential in the last few years, why is that?
Geoffrey Hinton: I think it’s mainly because of the amount of computation and the amount of data now around but it’s also partly because there have been some technical improvements in the algorithms. Particularly in the algorithms for doing unsupervised learning where you’re not told what the right answer is but the main thing is the computation and the amount of data.
[2] Check out the birth dates of the current generation of deep learning luminaries. Geoff Hinton: 1947. Yoshua Bengio: 1964. Yann LeCun: 1960. Jurgen Schmidhuber: 1963. It goes on. Go ahead and tell those guys they're greybeards who don't get what the kids today are doing.
Anyone who has gone through the extreme pixel-level iteration process of honing a UI at a company that really cares about UX knows we are very, very far off from letting AI do it.
> you won't be able to code a helloworld without specifying a ML model.
I think the current ML world will have an overfitting reckoning. ML can optimize situations that are very normative, but struggles to create good solutions to situations in which the best outcomes are fairly distribute (but still specific best actions in certain scenarios).
ML cannot tell you what data or choices even matter in life, it can only help optimize those things once we've decided that. This is where age comes in as there's a correlation to, perhaps causal by, age on wisdom.
> I think the current ML world will have an overfitting reckoning.
It seems like current ML (at least large-language models and transformers) will actually run out of publicly-accessible data to train on - the current models have scraped the majority of the useful text and image data on the public Internet, and it's not clear that we'll gain access to orders of magnitude more data, which according to the Chinchilla paper is the bottleneck on transformer performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321522
In my experience many of those "statisticians first and programmers later" "data-kids" aren't great at programming. Yes, they can build models, but when they need to build code around that model it's often pretty awful in my experience having worked with some of them. They still need us oldsters to help them out of the messes they make.
That is not a good thing. Nor do I think it’s completely true anyway. I have the advantage of a strong analytical background (PhD physics) and over a decade of experience in software development. The “data kids” struggle with the parts that actually make their jobs possible (engineering) and that part is not undergoing any kind of paradigm shift at this time.
> Ageism is real and some of the younglings treat me as someone whose knowledge is obsolete, only to be proven wrong.
It's possible you are assigning this sentiment yourself. I've always noticed a great deal of cultish nonsense in this industry. People promoting tools and techniques that have no reasoned basis and are often downright harmful. Where age comes into this is that as you become older you become more confident at identifying this BS and better at dismissing it. Played out in the context of a range of aged coworkers, this _looks_ like they think you are clueless because you are old. But a wise young person would have exactly the same attitude as you have. It's not that these folks are young, it's that they are unaware they're in a cult.
I believe ageism is real. But I would blunt it a bit: I think engineers hire people "like them". That explains the ageism, sexism, racism....
I say that blunts it a bit because I think I don't blame engineers to look for someone like them — it comes easy, it is probably easier to judge someone who you feel shares your own life experiences.
But yeah, some years back we interviewed a guy for the team who was about my age (early 50's at that time). I thought he was top notch. But a younger engineer on the team pushed hard to reject him for the role. Why? "I think he's a bad fit for the team." That was the only reason we could get for his rejection.
Sure, just an anecdote. I see red flags now though when someone says "not a good fit" (whatever that means).
Comments like this make me wonder if other posters are living in an alternate universe from me.
The engineers I've known and worked with were more likely to judge someone as being "like them" for their usage of Emacs vs Vim than their race, and everyone is always trying to recruit more women.
The ageism is more tied to actual technology things. The young engineer thinks the latest blog post they read about how to do async programming or manage deployments is the greatest thing in the world and only wants to hire people who think the same. The elder engineer recognizes it all as slight tweaks and rehashes on older ideas, frameworks and systems and is more ambivalent and not as excited to dive into learning their hundredth new way to accomplish the same task.
If management cares about business outcomes, the elder engineer is great. If management cares about vanity metrics and using the latest, coolest frameworks, the younger engineer is great.
> The engineers I've known and worked with were more likely to judge someone as being "like them" for their usage of Emacs vs Vim than their race
There's such a thing as conscious and unconscious bias. People don't sit in the interviewing room and think to themselves "well this person is white, like me, so I like the idea of hiring them more", but the thought is still there at the back of their mind (and before someone jumps down my throat, no, I'm not saying everyone has this bias, I'm not accusing you personally of being a racist, I'm saying that this kind of unconscious bias is prevalent throughout society)
Unconscious bias is not a well supported psychological construct. The Implicit Association Test, upon which the theory of unconscious bias is based, has a poor track record for consistency and does not predict actual discriminatory behavior.
Some of the scientists who originated this work have since distanced themselves from it, because people have run with the concept far beyond what the science supports.
Edit: your contrary sources do not discredit the thesis of the national review article. They conflate the many different (often legitimate) heuristics or subconscious influences on cognition with Unconscious Bias, which is specifically the idea that people can be racist/sexist/whatever without even knowing it, and that the presence of this latent bigotry can be measured with an Implicit Association Test.
The latter, stronger claim is complete BS and is not supported by the science. This is a classic motte-and-bailey tactic.
Nope. Not emacs vs vim. The biggest thing is what kind of music. Also, what kind of slang. I know this because I was young once, too. When I got a coworker who was twenty years older than me, it made me uncomfortable. Weird 'dad' jokes. Musical references that were completely out of it. Stories about the past. I like people and I liked them but, it was also, always a little uncomfortable. We were peers but they, well, nobody is a true peer with a twenty year gap. Uncomfortable.
Today, hiring authorities are more likely to be young. They also feel uncomfortable with someone who has a huge amount more experience.
Something I learned from my father when I was really young. When you don't know something, say "I don't know" first, then "We can probably figure it out".
What I've seen is that most people dumb enough (I say this about myself) to join startups are young, privileged, and foolish. So even if you have hiring initiatives and strategies to make a diverse company (in age, identity, whatever) the pool of people that will even reply to your recruiters is pretty homogeneous.
So I don't think it's just management and business outcomes, the pool of people that you can even hire for the smaller/riskier businesses is just very different than at big tech (or even non-tech businesses with sizeable software and GIS teams).
Don't get me wrong, I love working for startups. But if I were twenty years older I might care a lot more about the bad 401k matching and progressively longer time/lower outcomes for liquidity in startup equity.
I usually find when people discuss fit, it's helpful to ask specifically what behaviors indicated which personality traits that the co-worker is trying to filter out. Asking for precision also shifts the discussion from something general like fit to specific things like which traits is this company trying to select for, and whether or not the other interviewers agree that a behavior indicated a specific personality trait.
I don't have studies to back this up, but I find personally it helps give an avenue for co-workers to argue against bigotry without accusing anyone of behaving in a bigoted away.
Exactly. Managers should insist that peer-reviewers give specific attributes or behaviors.
Also, "cultural fit" questions can be casually ageist as hell. I was asked once (at 40 or so), "We like to skateboard around the office for fun. What do you like to do?" I sincerely believe it was (for the 20-something interviewer) an innocent, almost routine interview question. I diffused the question by saying that sounded like a blast but I prefer Nerf Blaster wars or pranking people by hijacking their wireless mouse or whatever. I got the job offer but I've been on other interviews where I aced the manager's and technical interviews but got shut down by a barely college graduate who clearly didn't think they'd have to work with "their Dad." Not much you can do about that.
By saying 'not a good fit' requires additional details to be valid you are actually acknowledging that 'not a good fit' is not a valid reason to not hire someone, those additional details are the valid reason to not hire someone.
When people say "not a good fit" they mean "cultural fit" ie, not related to technical skill, which is what the context of the parent post was implying. Maybe that's not so ubiquitous, but I've come across a technical person not be able to point out exactly what they don't like about another technical person's skills.
Ageism is very real. I worked with a guy at a startup who literally said about a candidate, "He's too old to work here." Meaning he wouldn't be able to fit in and relate to his coworkers regardless of his technical ability.
Sidenote, he also voted to reject a candidate because, "we have too many white guys." (He himself was a white man)
Now the guy who said that was one of the few people in my career that I truly disliked working with but I'm sure for every guy like him who says those things out loud there are 10 thinking it to themselves.
One solution I've found is to increase the frequency of interview shadowing. That way you at least have two people in the room, hearing and seeing the same things, and able to catch and call out biases.
Don't underestimate the fact that many companies also like younger workers because it is easier to pressure them to work more hours than they should. Less chances of kids or a family they need to attend to, and higher chances of falling for the "office perks" which is a ruse to keep you in the office as much as possible.
So? The young kids will work more hours; I'll get more done.
I'll get more done because I won't create the bad architectures that they will. I won't write the bugs that they do. I won't head down the dead ends that they do. (Yes, I'll still do a few. They'll do enough more that I'll still finish ahead of them, even with working fewer hours.)
That's not the way senior management sees it, though. They want asses on seats, they want to see people plugging through the night on the CEO's latest darling concept so that they feel important. They also don't give that much of a shit about bad architectures, they want something online tomorrow they can show investors and sell quickly.
Easy answer (to get the job offer, anyway) when asked "We sometimes work long hours. Are you OK with that?" I answer, "I've pulled 80-90 hour weeks (just last year) & luckily my kids are old enough that they don't need much attention on weekdays or weekends. Also, (to emphasize my "partying days are over" advantage), my friends don't drag me into as much nonsense as they used to."
Once you get the job (although, I highly recommend you avoid taking a job if you get a death march software plantation vibe), you manage high demands by nailing management on requirements and milestones and then out-plan and out-deliver your work so you have an answer for "hey, why are you leaving when we're all working overtime?" If you put in overtime at the start, assist other people and show you can deliver, then they can't give you much grief later.
I agree, but I would also like to point out a different form of the ageism that I see all the time in my line of work. I'm in tech retail sales. My stores customer base is a bit older, trending more over retired. There is a certain mindset among this age group that goes back a number of years that computers and technology was the playground of the young, so they think because they are older they can get away with not knowing what's going on in technology. I remember the jokes where some older person (in this case around 30-40) would have serious trouble understanding some technology, be it a computer or VCR, and having to call some teenager to their rescue. Too many older people decided that these newfangled toys are just for the kids, and that stuck. So now I have older seniors looking to buy a computer or printer and not understanding how it works because "I'm an older person, I don't know these things like you younger people."
It feels like the old jokes have pervaded our minds and now the younger see the greybeards as some senior citizen who's out of touch on technology. This shouldn't be the case.
I'm an engineer, and I genuinely try to eliminate bias from my hiring process. It's well, a grey area between engineers hiring people "like them" or engineers hiring people that are good engineers and good team members. I've interviewed many people that were one or the other but not both.
One of the things we've done is to conduct our first screening interview as a phone, rather than video, call. We found this helps eliminate some minor levels of bias related to physical appearance when forming that initial opinion, particularly because that first contact should be all about whether the base criteria is met.
I was having trouble finding a job. I dyed my beard back to my original hair color and had 4 offers within 2 weeks.
Dyeing your beard feels disingenuous and smells a little funny at first, but it really works. People remarked that I:
- Had lost weight
- Looked less tired
- Must be feeling better
- You must be under so much less stress now
- You look younger
I look forward to retiring and letting it go gray again. For now I think I need to keep it at least partially colored instead of looking like santa claus.
Also a literal greybeard (mid 50s) and I haven't seen ageism. Not sure if it's because I'm on the east coast and it's different here or I'm just not aware of it. I've sort of been expecting to hit it, but instead I feel as though I get a lot of respect from younger developers and they often seek out my opinion on things. Maybe it's just luck, but there are a couple of things I try to do that may play a role.
One is that I never try to pull rank on anyone or dismiss anyone's ideas or concerns. Respecting others' abilities and experiences makes it easy for them to return that respect as they are not feeling defensive.
Another is I try not to be dismissive of whatever new tech or fads they may be invested in, but rather acknowledge that they are attempts to solve real problems and I can understand what they are trying to do, even if I think there are better solutions. I take a sort of exaggeratedly open-minded attitude in order to head off any assumption that I don't like their ideas because they are new.
Finally, I'm quick to share my experience. Everybody likes war stories and if you always have a war story for every situation people will start to understand the value of experience. Of course humility is important in that. I share my mistakes more than my successes so as to avoid coming across as a pompous windbag.
That's my experience anyway. Who knows, may just be that I've gotten lucky.
I'm also a literal greybeard (early 60s) on the east coast, and I haven't found this ageism to be a problem. Young companies are about "what can you do for me" and 40 years of experience gives me the intuition about architecture and implementation that you don't get without having lived through lots of failed projects!
Also, with a long career, you probably have a number of significant successes under your belt, and, while past success does not guarantee future success, it appears that past failure is a strong indicator of future failure. New teams want people with a track record of success.
100% this. Ageism manifests as dismissiveness or intimidation. Keeping skills current & showing accomplishments negates the first and humility and being personable helps mitigate the second.
Sometimes in an interview when I suspect the interviewer is uncomfortable with assessing "their Dad", I throw a lot of curiosity at them about their skills & career & ask their advice about the company or tech stack they use. That helps breakdown the "too old to learn & won't listen to me" stereotypes.
Same story. At about 40 I shaved my epic beard, took graduation dates off my resume and limited it to about the last 10 years of work. Fresh shave and haircut for any f2f interview. So far so good.
Now I'm 51 and lucky enough to be able to seriously consider not taking another job after the current one runs its course (which may be a long time, I don't know). But if I do go out after another job I may invest in a few months of facials and spa treatments to get that maximally youthful look :)
Younger than you but already affected by ageism due to long career, and I hate hate hate removing old, relevant experience but it seems necessary. Omitting a decade of serious experience while only in your 30s sucks.
On the plus side they perceive you as Talent with Potential, or something. On the downside it means you get treated like a junior by some jackass Uncle Bob fan who has just a handful of years of real experience. It levels the playing field in a crappy way.
Writing a good resume is very much a skill. You always want to keep the length limited and focus on the most relevant parts of the most relevant experience. Anyone with a decently solid career probably has far too much experience to put it all on a resume that any hiring manager would actually read.
I often like to write up for myself a "full" resume with plenty of details about everything, making it way too long, then tailor it as needed for any specific job I want to apply for by cutting out stuff less relevant for that specific position until it's short enough, like 2 pages max.
Add an Other Skills & Experience section at the end of your resume with relevant experience minus the dates. It'll be picked up by the keyword bots & maybe trigger curiosity from hiring managers who will bring you in just to ask about it. When asked, say "a few years ago I worked on ..." instead of giving dates. An employer hungry for those skills will likely not care that there isn't a date attached.
I took the opposite path: after years of concealing my age as much as possible I grew out my beard, which is very much gray. I got positive results pretty quickly, though not how I expected.
People were attracted to what they imagined was the depth of my experience. Not that this imagined depth isn't real, but they didn't usually investigate far enough to know whether it was real. The gray beard was all they needed.
I've had some grey hair since 17 - visibly noticeable by... 19 or 20. My dad was basically gray/white hair by early 40s, and I inherited that trait. It was certainly noticeable by my mid 20s, and probably both helped and hurt along the way in various business/job/work contexts.
Never could grow a beard, so 'graybeard' has never been a literal issue for me. :)
In my mid 30s, I could, at a distance, pass for late 40s or 50. As I've moved towards that milestone, I don't think there's been much of a change. That's not just me thinking that - I get told that now and then.
I've always had a baby face and didn't grow out my beard until into my mid 30s. Overnight change. Although not gray, I was no longer treated like a new hire by groups in the large corporation I worked in.
I am not a grey beard yet but I am getting there quickly. My time in the industry is they value youth because it is exploitable not because they're like-minded. A young person with few responsibilities, no kids, no house, perhaps not even a significant other is easier to get to stick to exploitative pager duty schedules, long nights, etc for little pay and a party once in a while. Older people tend to be more concerned with raw numbers such as salary and total comp which presents a problem for this kind of grifter.
That being said despite having literal grey in my beard I have never had an issue getting a job. I keep my skills loosely up to date (I still don't follow the latest language trends) and know which industries I can move in. Most people age out into management and older ICs are hard to find beyond late 30s and early 40s.
I was sitting at lunch the other day at my large tech company office when I overheard a wonderful conversation from the table behind me about the "kinds" of managers a team might have that included this snippet:
"I mean, you could get someone midcareer, say age 25 or so, and they'll be really fiery and excited, but they won't know everything yet. But it means that you can figure it out. Or, I mean you could get someone super senior like 35, and then they'll be the expert but they'll be old and slow"
Not only did this go entirely unchallenged, but everyone seemed fully in agreement.
This is one example, but conversations like this that assume that by 35 or at most 40 you're all worn out and washed up are fairly common.
Having started this job during COVID, I didn't realize how young everyone in my company is, but after this conversation, I realized that I only know one engineer over 40 here.
(I know some managers that are over 40, but none that I know are yet 50.)
Another literal 50+ greybeard here. I'll offer a counter example: In the Fortune 500 company I work for, we are absolutely FILLED with greybeards. I's say that the average age is pushing 40 and the average tenure with the company is 10+ with a significant percentage being 20+ y.o.e. (including me).
Do you think different companies at different stages have different biases? mojuba's comment that age discrimination is initially investor driven might no longer apply at a fortune 500 company. Or perhaps other cultural factors (e.g. about the industry/domain) pull in a different direction?
I came from a big bank with lots of graybeards to a small startup were I'm 10 years older than the oldest person (who's the cto). It's been fine here though a little awkward at times with contexts I don't know about. Not a big deal though. Now as I continue to get older, I do worry I'll have to go back to those mega companies when it's time to move on and I start to really look the age.
Most Fortune 500 software jobs are poorly compensated line-of-business app building. Decent work for a certain sort (not speaking of intellect or ability, but personality and similar other factors), but hardly challenging or technically sophisticated for the most part
There is ageism for sure. That said, I've probably isolated myself from a lot of it because if a company boasts (as often happens at "work at a startup", etc type events) "we work hard, we play hard", "we are a family" - no. Tell me about what you are building, what you intend to deliver and how you are doing it. What one does in their private life is up to them and should not be tied to corporate culture. If the team isn't experienced and has to work more to achieve commitments - that is a management / hiring issue.
I will certainly expand contributions as needed to help make things successful, but I will not give up my own life to backfill for poor management or hires - did that multiple times and doesn't gain you anything.
That said, making sure junior members are set up for success and get help and mentoring and guidance needed is part of being a senior member. For me, that is part of my calculation when determining timelines and deliverables.
That’s funny, I believe I experienced ageism but on the other end of the age spectrum. I couldn’t figure out why I was making it so far in interviews but not getting the job. This happened for months. Then one day I decided to grow out my beard to look older. I’m 25. With my beard I rarely get carded, without it I always get carded. Same story as you, the first round of interviews came and my beard saved the day. Now once I reach a year 6 months at this company I’ll shave it ;)
Glad to meet someone else with this problem. People would talk to me as if I was not old enough to be taken seriously, even though I had been working professionally in the field since my 18th birthday. One time, I was told that I should be at the company for at least 6 months before offering an opinion. It's understandable when someone is just inexperienced, but by rendering a judgment on someone's expertise based on perceived age, I can't help but call it reverse ageism.
Now closing in on 50 with my share of life experience (good and bad) and some gray hairs setting in, it has gotten better, although people often mistake me for being 10-15 years younger than I actually am.
57M here and still love coding.
Ageism is very real - but so is the tech shortage. So it's a good time to be a greybeard. I was at a Google event a few years back. A colleague (53M) expressed to a Google PM his interest in coming to work for Google. The PM said bluntly "Google doesn't hire people over 50".
The employee average cost-benefit curve inverts at 40. At least that's what the beancounters will say.
Considering that Google has lost (OK, settled) some high-profile age discrimination lawsuits over the years, that may not be an inaccurate statement, but it’s a pretty stupid move to say that to a prospective employee.
Ageism in tech is like throwing a kick blind and seeing someone getting kicked and figuring that's the guy you kicked. Then 20 years later you get a kick in the butt and realise that was who you kicked.
I'm not quite a graybeard yet – even though the first shades are starting to appear – but I have been working for about 24 years now. Frankly, lots of my middle-aged colleagues have been sitting on a chair doing the same thing for 20 years and have not kept up to date. Experience is important, as is being able to predict what approaches will get a project in the weeds. It's not necessary to chase the latest shiny thing, but some serious effort is required to stay up to date instead of immediately assuming ageism. Experience would be so much more valuable if you have something worthwhile to add to discussions about the merits and challenges of newer technologies of the last 5-10 years like for example Javascript frameworks or Kubernetes and other cloud and hybrid strategies.
One thing I’ve always thought would be interesting is that age discrimination laws only protect people older than 40.
That means you can legally discriminate against young people.
If ageism is truly a thing it means that there exist old people that are undervalued by the market.
Starting a company or having roles that are specifically 40+ only could be an interesting hiring advantage if that’s true. Especially if mentorship is part of the role.
Also - from friends that teach at university, lots of young people don’t know what a file system is and can’t navigate basic files/folders or hierarchies. They’re confused by files opening in applications (these are CS freshman). A bit unrelated but a lot of the “old” knowledge remains extremely relevant especially when kids exposure to only ios abstracts relevant bits away.
Approaching 61. Got two offers this year. The current hot market seems to (temporarily) make ageism slightly less of a thing than it used to be. Probably losing the white pony tail a couple years ago helped too. Dying my hair is out of the question, the only thing that isn't gray on my head are my eyebrows.
I did take my ID badge for my current job with blue hair, however.
I am approaching that age where I worry people are going to discriminate against me because of age -- I am lucky that I do look younger than I am (even with beard).
But I'm wondering if I should edit my resume to make my age less apparent from it -- remove the earliest part of my career from my resume? I have the academic degrees I've earned on my resume -- remove the dates of them too?
There's definitely a school of thought that you should remove dates and trim older jobs. When I last switched jobs a number of years back a good friend of mine strongly advised doing so and I did. Though I ended up getting a job through a personal connection so I doubt anyone did much more than glance at my resume anyway. (And the company had quite a few relatively senior--as in older--people.
>Ageism in this industry is real. I think the root cause of it is investors, it's where the origins of this phenomenon are.
It's a simple but profound statement. Ageism (and many other 'isms') would not exist if older people did not discriminate against other older people. Investors would typically be older people.
Where I work plenty of the developers here are what you would call 'greybeards'. I've always enjoyed talking to them and they have interesting stories to tell.
It seems you run into ageism less when you look outside of VC ran companies, but that's based on anecdotes I've heard from others and just my observation.
> I once figured I could improve my chances of getting a job if I shave my beard.
When I was an SDE 2, I kept contributing (what I felt were) consistent, marked improvements to my team and our products, but I didn't get a promo. Then I let my beard grow out and I appeared a good deal older. Shortly thereafter, I got my senior promotion.
Of course, there's no counterfactual. Maybe I just needed more time under my belt for my promo, or maybe other people were getting their well-deserved promotions before I got mine. But it felt like shedding that babyface helped me out back then. Maybe in a few years (I'm in my 40s now), I'll want to shave again to stay in the sweet spot appearance-wise.
Sorry to hear of these experiences, it should be that you get recognition when you devote a lifetime to a field.
But I wonder if this is mostly a US-centric phenomenon. Or maybe it is a tribal mentality, I wonder if web devs of 20 years ago face the same problem with younger web devs today. Or a large amount of web devs considering everything and everyone who doesn't work in the browser to be stoneage.
As an anecdote, I once worked with a gentleman twice my age who cut his teeth writing assembly for an obscure HP platform, and I had huge respect for him. And it was obvious that even though we were developing a modern full stack webapp in Python and React, he had an excellent mind for the tough engineering questions.
It was in Europe, and no I'm not a web dev. About 6-7 years ago I switched from systems programming in C/C++ to iOS, Android and some backend, but mostly iOS which is my favorite platform now. I did some web development years ago but never really liked or enjoyed it honestly.
Web development is probably more fluid compared to other areas. Browsers evolve like crazy and make frameworks and other tech obsolete pretty fast. So keeping up here might be quite challenging for all ages I imagine.
I’m also 50+ and I wonder how reliable it is to just “present younger” (which I do) because the hiring manager may be the gatekeeper of prejudice, and s/he knows your age.
Is it really the “culture fit” i.e. do people feel like you’re their dad, or will it be a factor when they review your CV and see you are not only overqualified, but don’t know React?
I agree with your suggestion and it’s one reason why I’m starting a consulting company. I figure when the chips are down, the bosses need the work done, and the Olds get that. We’ll see, I’m just starting, but I’d love to end up with a stable of 65-year-olds helping startups actually ship.
This is really dumb, the best engineer i ever worked with were at least 40, and the best was 55+.
I think software is a place where a selection occur whit ageing: if you're not that good and can't improve, you will get increasingly frustrated and either leave or get to a management post. If you are "good", you will at least stay at your level, but mostl likely improve with age. Average people like me stagnate and i can see myself decline if i don't do anything to retain my skills.
Is there data to support the claim that more ageism occurs in this industry than others? I think it is probably true, but I'm wondering if there's any hard evidence. I suppose it's going to be pretty hard to get reliable data on this. We can get statistics on mean age vs other industries, but those numbers alone don't prove age discrimination.
what is the next thing to do? wear fluo color clothing and have some piercings and wear bracelets with lucky charms, and end every sentence with “far out bro”?
like you say, we need to come together as a community and industry and oppose these and other forms of stealth discrimination.
i’m wondering if the coding interviews are organized to facilitate discrimination by age.
What about your college degree on your resume? Don't you have to list the year you graduated? Even job portals that make everyone fill the damn web forms manually, it generally always asks when one graduated.
I am not sure if its just investors though. If you are hiring someone to do run of the mill crud/etl type jobs then a younger person is a better hire. I've noticed a marked drop in my energy levels as I've gotten older into my 40s.
Weather is unethical or not is prbly an different issue but reasoning behind it makes perfect sense to me.
Ageism in this industry is real. I think the root cause of it is investors, it's where the origins of this phenomenon are. They prefer younger entrepreneurs who in turn hire people like themselves, and so it propagates down the hierarchy as the company grows. It's transitive. In fact this is true for all types of discrimination.
I switched to entrepreneurship and feel the same effects here. Good luck raising money or even finding a co-founder. It's tough. Not going to shave my beard though.
I have no idea what could be done here other than for the aging tech people to unite and form their own companies, investment funds. Just like the other discriminated groups do - women, then racial and other minorities.
Edit: I should add, I was talking about a hands-on engineering job, not management. I love coding and not going to quit it because of ageism or pay or other circumstances.