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Age discrimination for older software engineers is real. It gets enforced in subtle ways. It is up or out culture at the end. Age discrimination doesn't get th

Age discrimination for older software engineers is real. It gets enforced in subtle ways. It is up or out culture at the end. Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination. I wish companies also added age in the diversity reports, and if they did talk about why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering. If we wish to make engineering career to span several decades, we should all actively try to get o address this.

jpindar 7y ago
We could start right here on HN by calling out those who use "grandma" to mean "person who can hardly even use a computer". People who are now old enough to be grandparents INVENTED computers and the internet.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  Soon its meaning will be replaced with "person who knows how to type"
  - deleted 7y ago
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- skj 7y ago
  My grandpa once fetched cigarettes for Von Neumann. Which is to say, he basically invented the computer.
  - masonic 7y ago
    When I operated mainframes, the raised floor area (where all the computers, drives, and major printers reside) was the only place one couldn't smoke.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I'm reminded of my dad, bought some surplus home security cams. They were surplus because they were discontinued on account of the firmware being shitty + spyware. Basic shlocked together embedded linux crap. Found someone that had developed fixed firmware. Re-flashed them with that. Figured out how to get them to send a notification to his phone when the motion sensor goes off so he knows when the deer are eating his wife's plants. My dad is 83.
  - vkazanov 7y ago
    My dad's in his 60s. Runs marathons once a year. Works on backend stuff in a ML startup. I am not sure I can make 10 km these days...
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - neilv 7y ago
    One of the early Foscam pan-tilt-zoom IR cameras? Your dad did better than I did. I liked the hardware, for the price point, and wasn't aware of alternative firmware. I ended up putting it on its own LAN with an old OpenWrt router, and kludging simple motion detection with a little program that ran on the router. (Script pulled frames from the camera with some HTTP interface using wget or curl, and used ImageMagick for the hard part.)
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      Foscam sounds familiar. My dad just mentioned it in passing. My dad is also retired. And the only thing he doesn't seem to be able to do is nothing.
  - coldacid 7y ago
    I wish my dad was still that clever and he's almost two decades younger. Your dad is awesome.
- sbilstein 7y ago
  Fact. As someone who runs a startup that targets grandparents, they know the internet well. I’ve even had a customer say “why do young people think we don’t know how to use the web? We invented the fucking thing!”
- smadurange 7y ago
  I remember I was sitting at a coffee shop and a lady sat in front of me and we started chatting. She would have been in her late 40s or early 50s. I thought she worked in banking or sales as many do around here. Turned out she was at IBM building early Unix systems. I was so impressed by our chat. She had left the industry at the time.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Heheh. My grandmother literally was a programmer. Not a computer scientist by a mile but she wrote software as a Sr Analyst in the oil industry— I believe her lingua franca were FORTRAN and COBOL. She retired in the late 80s and was hired back for a few years in the 90s because even then they didn’t have enough people working in the language to draw from. She passed away a few years ago now.
- Xavdidtheshadow 7y ago
  Let me start by saying that I absolutely agree with you - it's a dumb insult now and always has been. That said, anecdotally, my grandmother recently passed away having never used a computer in her life. Never sent an email, googled anything, or had a Facebook account. She was in her 90s and simply never had to use one. I often wondered what that life was like in 2019, but she had nothing to compare it to and thus couldn't really share. All that is to say, there really are both ends of the spectrum out there.
  - masonic 7y ago
    I bet there are more 20 year olds that have never driven than grandmas who have never used a computer.
- kyrieeschaton 7y ago
  Part of this is boomer performative incompetency at computers, which they do as a status/power move to demand humans serve them at various levels.
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  - csixty4 7y ago
    This sounds more like the behavior of a narcissist than a generational thing (and there are plenty in that generation).
  - eropple 7y ago
    This is important to echo, I think. In service industries (I'm most familiar with property management) there's a very real tendency for folks in today's "Grandma" range to just flap their hands and yell when asked to email instead of call, even when they get a receptionist who can take the problem down and email it in for them. But it's unreasonable to admit that they just want a person to bow and arrow and treat them specially, so it becomes an "I can't [so you have to]". And now a lot of this performative incompetency has now seeped into the general reference pool.
- jaabe 7y ago
  We do a lot of digitisation in the public sector of Denmark, in fact we’re world leaders in it along side Estonia. Being an old social democracy we tend to build solutions to be inclusive. This means you can opt out of a range of our digitised options, and it also means we do extensive service design and benchmarking to make sure meaningful software gets to the citizens and that they know how to use it. Almost every elderly citizen in my municipality is a digitally competent citizen. The ones who aren’t, often suffer from sicknesses like dementia or mental disabilities. By contrast we have twenty year olds who don’t know how to install a program that isn’t part of “the App Store” or don’t know double clicking with a mouse is a thing. In the tech part of it, we have old developers who’ve been through decades of soa vs microservices and a billion frameworks who can build solutions that require minimal maintenance. While some of our freshly educated engineers build things that can’t even last a year without needing major updates or refactoring because their hipster packages broke. We also have extremely talented youngsters and old engineers that can’t write a for loop, but in general, age is extremely valuable if you want to actually operate the software after you build it. Ageism is simply put silly, unfortunately it isn’t just a thing in tech l. I see it in several areas, even in the public sector of a Scandinavian country. I’m not sure what we can do about it, but we need to do something.
- anticensor 7y ago
  Grandma testing refers to one's own grandmother, not a random person.
  - jpindar 7y ago
    People can say whatever they want about their own grandma, but I've seen many comments that were clearly referring to grandmothers in general.
- AlexB138 7y ago
  I think, by and large, "calling out" is something we ought to be doing much less of.
  - jpindar 7y ago
    When I said "calling out", I meant responding to a post here, not doxing someone or stalking them on other platforms. If people started posting blatantly racist things here, should we not say anything?
- iak8god 7y ago
  This usage of "grandma" is sexist as well -- it's much more common than "grandpa".
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Now I know plenty of competent and masterful tech pioneers but they are sort of the exception that proves the rule - it generally is or was their career or at least a hobby and it isn't expected for them to know it. A young person from the first world who wasn't say a mennonite not knowing how to send an email attachment is seen as incompetent. An older person who doesn't is seen as not adapting to a changing world. While stereotyping is grossly unfair on an individual level judging the group based on the right end of the bell curve isn't a good representation. It would be like judging the intellectual capabilities of all children by 12 year old college graduates. Sure they prove capability and not to dismiss them out of hand but certainly not universality - moving all elementary school students to high school wouldn't be too effective for most.
all_blue_chucks 7y ago
"If he hasn't made it to management / principal engineer by that age he must be a slow learner and therefore not [company] material"
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  I taught myself to code on a C=64. I took a detour in life and was in management of a completely non tech related industry while putting myself through an engineering degree. I've been programming professionally for some time now. Through it all, all I have ever wanted to do was program. Why is it so bad that that is all I still want to do that at 47? Especially when I'm damned good at it!?
  - all2 7y ago
    The US Military used to have a separate track for technical specialists. The only rank left over from that track is "Specialist - E4". That line went all the way up to SGT Major, IIRC. So, you aren't bad for wanting that; specialization (to the degree of artisan) seems to have fallen out of vogue (except for rockstar roles, which some exist in programming).
  - danbolt 7y ago
    It was before my time, but I really love the Commodore 64's accessibility and learning curve in certain ways. One could mess around in Basic and slowly learn programming, as well as decide to drop into 6502 and manipulate things more intimately. Someone interested could slowly learn the ins/outs of their computer and become a competent operator while having fun making something interactive. I really admire the generation older than me having that sort of experience, as I think by the time I was exposed to later PCs things had become more and more abstracted. Not that we should return to my romantic notion of Commodore 64s, but there's something that feels holistic about it than a more conventional PC setup today.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I also started programming in 65C02 assembly in the 80s on an Apple //e and have been a professional developer since 1996. During that time, I’ve only been anything close to management (the dev lead for a medium size company) for 2 years. I hated every minute of the lead part. I left the company to work for a small startup and negotiated not to be a team lead. I reiterated that at my last review. I’m much more effective just being a member of different teams and guiding the teams through just mentoring, advising and demonstrating. If at all possible, I plan to be here at least another 4 or 5 years, but this will be my last software development full time salaried job hopefully. I’ll be 50. I personally haven’t heard ageism being that much of an issue from other developers who are also 40+ who have kept their skills and their network current - ie we hardly ever get rejected from jobs we apply for. But, I definitely plan on contracting or consulting after I leave my current job.
jacobolus 7y ago
One reason for a lower proportion of older programmers is that the field overall has grown dramatically, and many older programmers move to management, while new people entering the field tend to be younger. But median age for programmers is ~40.
- leereeves 7y ago
  > median age for programmers is ~40. That's encouraging, but a bit difficult to believe. What's your source?
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    web search -> data from the american community survey (done by the US census bureau) But here’s a BLS page, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm Adding up a few related categories that’s only counting about 2 million workers, so it’s also possible that some younger workers aren’t being properly counted in the right category. Dunno... Also keep in mind, a whole lot of programmers are working on some legacy enterprise applications instead of working at young companies on web apps. In some companies the age distribution is going to skew much younger.
- sys_64738 7y ago
  Those youngsters will age too and be over 40 someday.
jimrhods23 7y ago
This is one of the reasons I am now contracting. Most of my clients have never even seen my face and I don't have to get involved in company culture clashes or politics.
- scarface74 7y ago
  If I look back at my career, the stress has never come from the technical responsibility of producing software, it’s always the politics and red tape. I don’t do large companies. I realized that I’m just not a fit for them after working at what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech) company. Not dealing with corporate politics by either working for a small company as a salaried employee or working for any company as a contractor is the only way that I’m going to be able to keep doing this for another two decades.
- cutler 7y ago
  How do you manage to never show your face? Do you mean sub-contracting where someone else does the work and interfaces with clients?
  - pdwetz 7y ago
    Remote work? I rarely have in-person client meetings anymore. And honestly at my old job it had offices around the country so even then there were people I'd worked on projects with for years and had never met in person.
  - jimrhods23 7y ago
    Remote work. It's 99% over the phone/skype/webex (usually voice only). On occasion, it's video.
    - cutler 7y ago
      Video or in-person - they're still going to see your face.
jimmaswell 7y ago
Some would say it's simply that cognitive decline due to aging makes older people less likely to be able to cut it as a programmer, especially given the higher rate of change in the field placing less emphasis on crystalized intelligence and more on adaptability compared to other fields.
- diego_moita 7y ago
  > Some would say it's [...] cognitive decline due to aging And I say that this assumption without evidence is a textbook example of a prejudice. Therefore, those "some" are bigots but the good news is they'll stop being it in a few decades, when they'll become the target of this very same bigotry.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    An individual can easily remain capable into late age, but it's not evidence of age discrimination if mostly young people work at/apply to some positions. Here's some evidence of cognitive decline: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/
    - millstone 7y ago
      You just cited "mostly young people work at some positions" as evidence against age discrimination.
    - howard941 7y ago
      Skimming, that is an interesting article. I feel more productive in my newfound dotage than I was in my twenties. Nevertheless I suppose the data don't lie, do they? Or mislead? > Results from three methods of estimating retest effects in this project,... converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s. If you (and I hope you do) live well beyond your 20s and 30s I hope you'll remember that getting fucked by ageism is real and unavoidable if you work for the man in this industry.
_jal 7y ago
I think a lot of companies don't realize the damage they do to themselves. I can understand the appeal to startup managers; to be blunt and a bit uncharitable, hire youngins' and you get cheaper people whom you can push around more and train up in your own particular pathologies, instead of dealing with imported ones. But if the firm survives the startup phase, you really want anchors, both in technical and cultural dimensions. A certain type of tech-manager feels threatened by that, I think, so they jettison anyone who might be too independent. Not to mention, experience matters. There are a few folks on my team who are the go-to folks, not because of their title, but because they tend to know the correct answer/are able to diagnose and fix your weird issue. Those people, without exception, are neither young nor managers. "Sonny, that reminds me of the time I canceled a 3 month reporting project with two hour's worth of awk..."
- scarface74 7y ago
  Firms aren’t trying to survive the startup phase. That’s just it. A minuscule number of startups ever survive as an ongoing independent entity especially if they are venture backed. Their main goal is to get acquired. Look no further than YC funded companies. Only one has ever gone public. I used to be idealistic about software development and architecture and wanted to do things “right”. When I realized that venture capital backed companies wanted me to just apply enough duck tape to get customers to survive until they got their next round of funding or got acquired, I stopped thinking long term.
  - pm90 7y ago
    There are still companies that build good products and focus on core engineering. Maybe not (all) startups, but despite the preponderance of every kind of startup, there are still many who at their core are solving difficult engineering problems. Of course, reality gets in the way and they often have to cut corners every now and then.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      That may be the case, but if they take outside funding, their primary focus is by definition not to be a “lifestyle company”, but to have an exit strategy. Statistically, that exit strategy is to get acquired. Your investors don’t care about how well architected your code is or the amount of automated test coverage you have.
kevingadd 7y ago
It's really nasty. Imagine how bad the intersection of it must be, like the odds of getting laid off if you're old and black or old and female? I bet the odds approach 100%.
- PorterDuff 7y ago
  Hard to say. Me = 35+ years in harness. Black coworkers in that time = 0 Female coworkers in that time = 3
- scarface74 7y ago
  I’m Black and have a disability that only allows me to type with one hand. I can tell you with almost 100% certainty that I haven’t been discriminated against. How do I know? My success rate from applying for a job to not getting rejected (ie I take myself out of the running after I get an offer) is close to 100% over the past 20 years. I also don’t blindly submit my resume without an internal referral or through an external recruiter. Software development is very egalitarian. I could say the same about age but no one can tell my age yet. I go to interviews clean shaven and most non Blacks can’t tell my age without any outward signs like grey hair or a receding hairline.
- dx87 7y ago
  It depends on what kind of work they're doing. If they're doing government contracting, they'll probably never get fired because they fill so many "diversity checkboxes" that their company will want to keep them on just for help winning contracts.
willart4food 7y ago
Age discrimination for older workers everywhere is real.
- godzillabrennus 7y ago
  Not in medicine and there are some legal roles and financial roles where it’s beneficial.
  - kamaal 7y ago
    You don't start working soon in Medicine either. Basically the decade you spend studying, the lost decade of early adult life of 20's gets shifted the 50's.
  - arkades 7y ago
    Not in the same way, but there definitely is in medicine. It’s less severe because you don’t finish training until you are in your thirties, so you’re good until your ... oh, fifties? Maybe sixties? After that, you had better be visibly up to date on your field, because it will be people’s starting assumption that you are woefully behind the times. And, in fairness, it seems like many docs at that stage of their career are.
    - hopler 7y ago
      Sixties is retirement age.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
Part of the reason age discrimination does not get the coverage is that age discrimination disproportionately affects white males. This is due to the fact that as you go back in time in the US, white males made up a higher percent of college graduates and professionals than they do now. One side effect of this is that age discrimination likely makes your diversity numbers better.
- colllectorof 7y ago
  Age discrimination affects everyone. But older people tend to vote conservative, so left-leaning media has no interest in engaging with that group and right-leaning media is more interested in the "corporations are always good" meta-narrative. It's not politically opportune.
- novaRom 7y ago
  Interesting observation.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Age is part of diversity as well
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
    I agree, but not everybody sees it like that. I have seen companies talk about how they hired more people of a specific gender or race and increased their diversity with respect to gender or race. I have never ever seen a company ever talk about how they hired more older workers and increased their diversity with respect to age.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  I'm really confused here, anecdotally I see age-discrimination concerns about the same rate as female-representation concerns in my engineering-related social media (HN). But I'm open to being incorrect as I'm only a human; do you have any statistical media analysis to verify the lack of coverage?
freyir 7y ago
> "why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering" No, there's a small percentage of older folks in software engineering. In almost any other engineering discipline, you'll find many older engineers who enjoy long careers, and whose perceived value often grows with age. That's because actual engineering principles change very slowly. Most software jobs do not involve much engineering in the traditional sense; most of the effort is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week libraries and frameworks, information that will be often be outdated and useless in a few years.
- mk926 7y ago
  Yes
- markbnj 7y ago
  I have no doubt there is some age discrimination, though I haven't experienced it personally. What I want to point out here is that there were a lot fewer of us in total when I first started (I'm 58 now). I find very few peers my own age now, but I also found very few peers my own age when I was 25. So just going by percentages may be misleading for a relatively young discipline.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    I wonder about that, too, although I'm "only" 45. I still have tons of people pinging me with new job offers, and they don't look like the sort of job offers that they're going to offer a 25-year-old. Regardless, I put a lot of effort into making sure that they need me more than I need them.
- manfredo 7y ago
  I'm always unsure about how to judge whether the lower percentages of older engineers I see is due to age discrimination or just a low percentage of older engineers period. Software developers are young in general. And interestingly the United States has the highest average age [1]. At my workplace I can count at least one "greybeard" on most teams. I don't get the sense that they are discriminated against because of their age. I've always enjoyed talking with them about how software development used to be back in the day. I remember talking to one guy that worked on a text editor back in the 80s that was backed by a mainframe. The terminal didn't have enough computing power to manage the whole document, so it only stored a few pages locally and swapped them in from the mainframe as the user scrolled to them. Things like bulk find-replace were done via an RPC. It's interesting how many parallels this has to modern client-server web-apps. I especially like to hear from people that programmed on punch cards - that's kind of stuff is fascinating to me. I also wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is due to expectations of an ever-increasing salary. I remember one older co-worker that interviewed for a job, liked the company, and got an offer that he dismissed as "not much higher than entry level" and even called the offer insulting. My line of reasoning was that if he didn't have relevant domain experience why wouldn't get paid not much more than a new grad? It was still well into the 100-200k range - in the Bay Area but in a cheaper city (San Bruno I think). More than enough to save and live a comfortable life. I wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is more about being realistic about the fact that years of experience don't automatically translate into higher productivity, paying younger folk commensurate with their contribution - as opposed to other industries where it's entrenched that young people get paid less and older people get paid more. Not saying age discrimination doesn't exist. I've seen job adverts that explicitly specified an age cap of 40 (despite this being blatantly illegal). 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-age-programmer-2015-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-age-programme... It's worth noting that surveying from Stack Overflow can mean significant selecting bias.
burtonator 7y ago
I with mental disorders would get more attention. ADHD, PTSD, dyslexia, social anxiety disorder, etc. Just because someone is white and male doesn't mean they're not struggling or discriminated against.
duxup 7y ago
I did a coding bootcamp with a bunch of folks. A few older guys like me, and mostly younger folks. We all had a great time working together (I wish we could have more) and we compared notes after interviews. Older folks like me, got lots of "culture" questions that were so vague. I'd ask what they mean but they can't really explain what they were getting at. I'd just explain that I've worked with a lot of different people, mentored new employees, etc. When we compared interview notes younger folks, never heard that phrase. Now that could be nothing, but it felt like something. One guy from the camp actually had the HR person call him up and say they were concerned about his age. When he asked her what that meant, she couldn't explain exactly. He thought maybe she realized what she said and was embarrassed, he was annoyed so he asked later what they were concerned about "oh your age, you're older".... nope, she apparently didn't think anything was wrong with that. Meanwhile I got my job eventually. I see folks come and go. Younger folks realizing they don't like the work and moving on (nothing wrong with that) others invited to move on. The president of the company says to me one day "You just seem to get a lot of these things, you can talk to customers, our sales guys, I like your communication.." and so on. Like yeah, because I've done other technical things before, have experience. Experience pays in a lot of ways.
- Mandatum 7y ago
  Honestly I think the best way to address this, is to call it out before it becomes an issue. Tell them why you're still in an engineering role. There is a reason, and some folks are just bad at their jobs, have no people skills or their skills stalled decades ago and they checked out. Others, like yourself, are still interested in engineering and have no interest in management. You're at an age where you will always be put on equal footing or above those you interview with BECAUSE of your age. Use it.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Yup, you have to sort of go on offense I think and say "I've got experience, that's an asset, here is why."
profalseidol 7y ago
Yet the bigger issue is allowing only a handful of hands make these decisions while we give them the lionshare of our blood and sweat.
shams93 7y ago
They have tried to push me out of the industry many times, I'm pushing 50 but my ability to learn new things rapidly has enabled me to hang on long past what some might consider my expiration date. To some extent the 21st century can seem like Logan's Run, really the Feds expect us to work until we're over 70 years old, but given tech is perhaps the only decent paying industry left the impact of age discrimination has a broad impact across a lot of areas including projected tax revenues.
- koffiezet 7y ago
  > but my ability to learn new things rapidly This is one of the issues in my experience, you might be in the minority there. I'm pushing 40 and notice I have a lot more interest in new technology and stacks than many of my colleagues (I've always been like that) - but the 'more experienced' they get, the harder it becomes to convince them of the advantages of new approaches, and disadvantages of their 'proven' way of working, especially seasoned developers. They are also usually in more senior or team leader positions, which means they are very influential or can call the shots. I've seen months wasted on projects that could be just as well written in Python in a few days by a single developer, just because the 'senior dev' had something against interpreted languages and the only option for him was C++. As much as I liked the guy personally, and respected his skillset, he seriously limited technological progress within that company - which was a huge part of the reason I quit there and became freelance. Ever since - I've seen quite a few very similar situations. Young people will jump into things without looking - which is not good, but saying no to them and blocking off their stupid ideas is a lot easier than saying no to a guy with 30 years of experience...
Fnoord 7y ago
Not just for software engineers. Age discrimination is real. It exists for young people, but it also exists for the group at hand here: old people. It is real in general and in the end of last century it has become severe because of our quickly shifting society (the "computer" and "networking" revolutions, among others)
jillesvangurp 7y ago
This comes up a lot. People are definitely biased towards young, white, males doing most of the coding because it is mostly young white males doing the coding. Part of this is simple demographics. Part of this is confirmation bias. And part of this is our education system and culture filtering out disproportionate amounts of women and non whites who for whatever reason never even get on the career-path for becoming an engineer. Some countries are much worse at this than others. Uncle Bob has a nice article explaining that the number of programmers doubles every five years: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html So the chance of encountering somebody over 40 in a project is about 2^4 or one in 16, assuming lots of people in their early 20s are outnumbering those in their forties. It jumps to 32 for people over 45, 64 for people in their early fifties. I know people who are still coding in their late sixties. I'm 44, and most people I deal with are below 30. Most of the people my age that I know or used to work are by and large still active in the field though a few of them have become managers. Also, seniority means they tend to be big earners and typically too expensive for small projects. Quite a few are doing very lucrative free lance gigs at premium rates, disappeared into big corporations in some senior role, etc.
Angostura 7y ago
I'm in my 50s, so I hope you take this the right way - is it actually age discrimination, or is it higher salary discrimination?
coldtea 7y ago
>Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination. That's because the vocal parts for the "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" are mainly white well-off younger people. Gender causes naturally draw them in. And through they are predominantly white, race causes make them appear as hip and invested in other cultures. For them being old is not a reality. If it's anything, it's obscene. Why don't these old people just die? That's the same reason those giving coverage to "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" also get a free pass on pissing on poor people (whether "white trash" or black/latinos/etc when they're not subjected to race-driven but poverty driven abuses).
therockhead 7y ago
"Age discrimination for older software engineers is real." Can't say I've seen this in Ireland, I found that good experienced developers are highly valued. Do you think it's worse in places like SF than the rest of the USA ?
cameldrv 7y ago
While certainly age discrimination does exist, I'm 41 and I haven't experienced it yet. If anything, I've found that what I do is more in demand than ever, partially because there's been so much growth in the industry that there are proportionately very few people that have been around as long as I have. A big part of the reason you see so few gray hairs is that there just aren't that many of them to hire.
madrox 7y ago
I have hired a good number of "grey hairs" in my time. Usually they're lead engineer IC types. They typically have a couple kids, have great stories about software development in the 80s (one guy was at NeXT with Jobs!), and know everything about your favorite framework but don't think it's world-changing. They usually have a story about how they took 5 years doing something wild and non-software related. These engineers, in my experience, have the greatest likelihood of being great hires. They require less management, understand getting results, and have a much easier time working with more kinds of people. They write code with an eye for maintenance, and are more likely to stick around for the long haul to maintain that code instead of job hopping for promotions and raises. Bad managers can be reluctant to hire them or keep them because they can be intimidating to manage. They quite often have more experience than their managers, and are more inclined to challenge their ideas. Inexperienced software engineering managers I've met think they have to know more than than their team or they'll be a threat to their position. There are also the usual "soft concerns" that are very similar to the ones leveled against hiring women, such as being more likely to choose work/life balance. I was lucky in that I worked with my first grey hair for several years before becoming a manager and taking them on, so we already had a working relationship. Without that, I imagine I would've fallen into the traps above.

jpindar 7y ago

We could start right here on HN by calling out those who use "grandma" to mean "person who can hardly even use a computer". People who are now old enough to be grandparents INVENTED computers and the internet.

newnewpdro 7y ago
Soon its meaning will be replaced with "person who knows how to type"
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
skj 7y ago
My grandpa once fetched cigarettes for Von Neumann. Which is to say, he basically invented the computer.
- masonic 7y ago
  When I operated mainframes, the raised floor area (where all the computers, drives, and major printers reside) was the only place one couldn't smoke.
Gibbon1 7y ago
I'm reminded of my dad, bought some surplus home security cams. They were surplus because they were discontinued on account of the firmware being shitty + spyware. Basic shlocked together embedded linux crap. Found someone that had developed fixed firmware. Re-flashed them with that. Figured out how to get them to send a notification to his phone when the motion sensor goes off so he knows when the deer are eating his wife's plants. My dad is 83.
- vkazanov 7y ago
  My dad's in his 60s. Runs marathons once a year. Works on backend stuff in a ML startup. I am not sure I can make 10 km these days...
- deleted 7y ago
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- neilv 7y ago
  One of the early Foscam pan-tilt-zoom IR cameras? Your dad did better than I did. I liked the hardware, for the price point, and wasn't aware of alternative firmware. I ended up putting it on its own LAN with an old OpenWrt router, and kludging simple motion detection with a little program that ran on the router. (Script pulled frames from the camera with some HTTP interface using wget or curl, and used ImageMagick for the hard part.)
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Foscam sounds familiar. My dad just mentioned it in passing. My dad is also retired. And the only thing he doesn't seem to be able to do is nothing.
- coldacid 7y ago
  I wish my dad was still that clever and he's almost two decades younger. Your dad is awesome.
sbilstein 7y ago
Fact. As someone who runs a startup that targets grandparents, they know the internet well. I’ve even had a customer say “why do young people think we don’t know how to use the web? We invented the fucking thing!”
smadurange 7y ago
I remember I was sitting at a coffee shop and a lady sat in front of me and we started chatting. She would have been in her late 40s or early 50s. I thought she worked in banking or sales as many do around here. Turned out she was at IBM building early Unix systems. I was so impressed by our chat. She had left the industry at the time.
52-6F-62 7y ago
Heheh. My grandmother literally was a programmer. Not a computer scientist by a mile but she wrote software as a Sr Analyst in the oil industry— I believe her lingua franca were FORTRAN and COBOL. She retired in the late 80s and was hired back for a few years in the 90s because even then they didn’t have enough people working in the language to draw from. She passed away a few years ago now.
Xavdidtheshadow 7y ago
Let me start by saying that I absolutely agree with you - it's a dumb insult now and always has been. That said, anecdotally, my grandmother recently passed away having never used a computer in her life. Never sent an email, googled anything, or had a Facebook account. She was in her 90s and simply never had to use one. I often wondered what that life was like in 2019, but she had nothing to compare it to and thus couldn't really share. All that is to say, there really are both ends of the spectrum out there.
- masonic 7y ago
  I bet there are more 20 year olds that have never driven than grandmas who have never used a computer.
kyrieeschaton 7y ago
Part of this is boomer performative incompetency at computers, which they do as a status/power move to demand humans serve them at various levels.
- deleted 7y ago
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- csixty4 7y ago
  This sounds more like the behavior of a narcissist than a generational thing (and there are plenty in that generation).
- eropple 7y ago
  This is important to echo, I think. In service industries (I'm most familiar with property management) there's a very real tendency for folks in today's "Grandma" range to just flap their hands and yell when asked to email instead of call, even when they get a receptionist who can take the problem down and email it in for them. But it's unreasonable to admit that they just want a person to bow and arrow and treat them specially, so it becomes an "I can't [so you have to]". And now a lot of this performative incompetency has now seeped into the general reference pool.
jaabe 7y ago
We do a lot of digitisation in the public sector of Denmark, in fact we’re world leaders in it along side Estonia. Being an old social democracy we tend to build solutions to be inclusive. This means you can opt out of a range of our digitised options, and it also means we do extensive service design and benchmarking to make sure meaningful software gets to the citizens and that they know how to use it. Almost every elderly citizen in my municipality is a digitally competent citizen. The ones who aren’t, often suffer from sicknesses like dementia or mental disabilities. By contrast we have twenty year olds who don’t know how to install a program that isn’t part of “the App Store” or don’t know double clicking with a mouse is a thing. In the tech part of it, we have old developers who’ve been through decades of soa vs microservices and a billion frameworks who can build solutions that require minimal maintenance. While some of our freshly educated engineers build things that can’t even last a year without needing major updates or refactoring because their hipster packages broke. We also have extremely talented youngsters and old engineers that can’t write a for loop, but in general, age is extremely valuable if you want to actually operate the software after you build it. Ageism is simply put silly, unfortunately it isn’t just a thing in tech l. I see it in several areas, even in the public sector of a Scandinavian country. I’m not sure what we can do about it, but we need to do something.
anticensor 7y ago
Grandma testing refers to one's own grandmother, not a random person.
- jpindar 7y ago
  People can say whatever they want about their own grandma, but I've seen many comments that were clearly referring to grandmothers in general.
AlexB138 7y ago
I think, by and large, "calling out" is something we ought to be doing much less of.
- jpindar 7y ago
  When I said "calling out", I meant responding to a post here, not doxing someone or stalking them on other platforms. If people started posting blatantly racist things here, should we not say anything?
iak8god 7y ago
This usage of "grandma" is sexist as well -- it's much more common than "grandpa".
Nasrudith 7y ago
Now I know plenty of competent and masterful tech pioneers but they are sort of the exception that proves the rule - it generally is or was their career or at least a hobby and it isn't expected for them to know it. A young person from the first world who wasn't say a mennonite not knowing how to send an email attachment is seen as incompetent. An older person who doesn't is seen as not adapting to a changing world. While stereotyping is grossly unfair on an individual level judging the group based on the right end of the bell curve isn't a good representation. It would be like judging the intellectual capabilities of all children by 12 year old college graduates. Sure they prove capability and not to dismiss them out of hand but certainly not universality - moving all elementary school students to high school wouldn't be too effective for most.

all_blue_chucks 7y ago

"If he hasn't made it to management / principal engineer by that age he must be a slow learner and therefore not [company] material"

JustSomeNobody 7y ago
I taught myself to code on a C=64. I took a detour in life and was in management of a completely non tech related industry while putting myself through an engineering degree. I've been programming professionally for some time now. Through it all, all I have ever wanted to do was program. Why is it so bad that that is all I still want to do that at 47? Especially when I'm damned good at it!?
- all2 7y ago
  The US Military used to have a separate track for technical specialists. The only rank left over from that track is "Specialist - E4". That line went all the way up to SGT Major, IIRC. So, you aren't bad for wanting that; specialization (to the degree of artisan) seems to have fallen out of vogue (except for rockstar roles, which some exist in programming).
- danbolt 7y ago
  It was before my time, but I really love the Commodore 64's accessibility and learning curve in certain ways. One could mess around in Basic and slowly learn programming, as well as decide to drop into 6502 and manipulate things more intimately. Someone interested could slowly learn the ins/outs of their computer and become a competent operator while having fun making something interactive. I really admire the generation older than me having that sort of experience, as I think by the time I was exposed to later PCs things had become more and more abstracted. Not that we should return to my romantic notion of Commodore 64s, but there's something that feels holistic about it than a more conventional PC setup today.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I also started programming in 65C02 assembly in the 80s on an Apple //e and have been a professional developer since 1996. During that time, I’ve only been anything close to management (the dev lead for a medium size company) for 2 years. I hated every minute of the lead part. I left the company to work for a small startup and negotiated not to be a team lead. I reiterated that at my last review. I’m much more effective just being a member of different teams and guiding the teams through just mentoring, advising and demonstrating. If at all possible, I plan to be here at least another 4 or 5 years, but this will be my last software development full time salaried job hopefully. I’ll be 50. I personally haven’t heard ageism being that much of an issue from other developers who are also 40+ who have kept their skills and their network current - ie we hardly ever get rejected from jobs we apply for. But, I definitely plan on contracting or consulting after I leave my current job.

jacobolus 7y ago

One reason for a lower proportion of older programmers is that the field overall has grown dramatically, and many older programmers move to management, while new people entering the field tend to be younger. But median age for programmers is ~40.

leereeves 7y ago
> median age for programmers is ~40. That's encouraging, but a bit difficult to believe. What's your source?
- jacobolus 7y ago
  web search -> data from the american community survey (done by the US census bureau) But here’s a BLS page, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm Adding up a few related categories that’s only counting about 2 million workers, so it’s also possible that some younger workers aren’t being properly counted in the right category. Dunno... Also keep in mind, a whole lot of programmers are working on some legacy enterprise applications instead of working at young companies on web apps. In some companies the age distribution is going to skew much younger.
sys_64738 7y ago
Those youngsters will age too and be over 40 someday.

jimrhods23 7y ago

This is one of the reasons I am now contracting. Most of my clients have never even seen my face and I don't have to get involved in company culture clashes or politics.

scarface74 7y ago
If I look back at my career, the stress has never come from the technical responsibility of producing software, it’s always the politics and red tape. I don’t do large companies. I realized that I’m just not a fit for them after working at what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech) company. Not dealing with corporate politics by either working for a small company as a salaried employee or working for any company as a contractor is the only way that I’m going to be able to keep doing this for another two decades.
cutler 7y ago
How do you manage to never show your face? Do you mean sub-contracting where someone else does the work and interfaces with clients?
- pdwetz 7y ago
  Remote work? I rarely have in-person client meetings anymore. And honestly at my old job it had offices around the country so even then there were people I'd worked on projects with for years and had never met in person.
- jimrhods23 7y ago
  Remote work. It's 99% over the phone/skype/webex (usually voice only). On occasion, it's video.
  - cutler 7y ago
    Video or in-person - they're still going to see your face.

jimmaswell 7y ago

Some would say it's simply that cognitive decline due to aging makes older people less likely to be able to cut it as a programmer, especially given the higher rate of change in the field placing less emphasis on crystalized intelligence and more on adaptability compared to other fields.

diego_moita 7y ago
> Some would say it's [...] cognitive decline due to aging And I say that this assumption without evidence is a textbook example of a prejudice. Therefore, those "some" are bigots but the good news is they'll stop being it in a few decades, when they'll become the target of this very same bigotry.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  An individual can easily remain capable into late age, but it's not evidence of age discrimination if mostly young people work at/apply to some positions. Here's some evidence of cognitive decline: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/
  - millstone 7y ago
    You just cited "mostly young people work at some positions" as evidence against age discrimination.
  - howard941 7y ago
    Skimming, that is an interesting article. I feel more productive in my newfound dotage than I was in my twenties. Nevertheless I suppose the data don't lie, do they? Or mislead? > Results from three methods of estimating retest effects in this project,... converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s. If you (and I hope you do) live well beyond your 20s and 30s I hope you'll remember that getting fucked by ageism is real and unavoidable if you work for the man in this industry.

_jal 7y ago

I think a lot of companies don't realize the damage they do to themselves. I can understand the appeal to startup managers; to be blunt and a bit uncharitable, hire youngins' and you get cheaper people whom you can push around more and train up in your own particular pathologies, instead of dealing with imported ones. But if the firm survives the startup phase, you really want anchors, both in technical and cultural dimensions. A certain type of tech-manager feels threatened by that, I think, so they jettison anyone who might be too independent. Not to mention, experience matters. There are a few folks on my team who are the go-to folks, not because of their title, but because they tend to know the correct answer/are able to diagnose and fix your weird issue. Those people, without exception, are neither young nor managers. "Sonny, that reminds me of the time I canceled a 3 month reporting project with two hour's worth of awk..."

scarface74 7y ago
Firms aren’t trying to survive the startup phase. That’s just it. A minuscule number of startups ever survive as an ongoing independent entity especially if they are venture backed. Their main goal is to get acquired. Look no further than YC funded companies. Only one has ever gone public. I used to be idealistic about software development and architecture and wanted to do things “right”. When I realized that venture capital backed companies wanted me to just apply enough duck tape to get customers to survive until they got their next round of funding or got acquired, I stopped thinking long term.
- pm90 7y ago
  There are still companies that build good products and focus on core engineering. Maybe not (all) startups, but despite the preponderance of every kind of startup, there are still many who at their core are solving difficult engineering problems. Of course, reality gets in the way and they often have to cut corners every now and then.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    That may be the case, but if they take outside funding, their primary focus is by definition not to be a “lifestyle company”, but to have an exit strategy. Statistically, that exit strategy is to get acquired. Your investors don’t care about how well architected your code is or the amount of automated test coverage you have.

kevingadd 7y ago

It's really nasty. Imagine how bad the intersection of it must be, like the odds of getting laid off if you're old and black or old and female? I bet the odds approach 100%.

PorterDuff 7y ago
Hard to say. Me = 35+ years in harness. Black coworkers in that time = 0 Female coworkers in that time = 3
scarface74 7y ago
I’m Black and have a disability that only allows me to type with one hand. I can tell you with almost 100% certainty that I haven’t been discriminated against. How do I know? My success rate from applying for a job to not getting rejected (ie I take myself out of the running after I get an offer) is close to 100% over the past 20 years. I also don’t blindly submit my resume without an internal referral or through an external recruiter. Software development is very egalitarian. I could say the same about age but no one can tell my age yet. I go to interviews clean shaven and most non Blacks can’t tell my age without any outward signs like grey hair or a receding hairline.
dx87 7y ago
It depends on what kind of work they're doing. If they're doing government contracting, they'll probably never get fired because they fill so many "diversity checkboxes" that their company will want to keep them on just for help winning contracts.

willart4food 7y ago

Age discrimination for older workers everywhere is real.

godzillabrennus 7y ago
Not in medicine and there are some legal roles and financial roles where it’s beneficial.
- kamaal 7y ago
  You don't start working soon in Medicine either. Basically the decade you spend studying, the lost decade of early adult life of 20's gets shifted the 50's.
- arkades 7y ago
  Not in the same way, but there definitely is in medicine. It’s less severe because you don’t finish training until you are in your thirties, so you’re good until your ... oh, fifties? Maybe sixties? After that, you had better be visibly up to date on your field, because it will be people’s starting assumption that you are woefully behind the times. And, in fairness, it seems like many docs at that stage of their career are.
  - hopler 7y ago
    Sixties is retirement age.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

Part of the reason age discrimination does not get the coverage is that age discrimination disproportionately affects white males. This is due to the fact that as you go back in time in the US, white males made up a higher percent of college graduates and professionals than they do now. One side effect of this is that age discrimination likely makes your diversity numbers better.

colllectorof 7y ago
Age discrimination affects everyone. But older people tend to vote conservative, so left-leaning media has no interest in engaging with that group and right-leaning media is more interested in the "corporations are always good" meta-narrative. It's not politically opportune.
novaRom 7y ago
Interesting observation.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Age is part of diversity as well
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  I agree, but not everybody sees it like that. I have seen companies talk about how they hired more people of a specific gender or race and increased their diversity with respect to gender or race. I have never ever seen a company ever talk about how they hired more older workers and increased their diversity with respect to age.
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
I'm really confused here, anecdotally I see age-discrimination concerns about the same rate as female-representation concerns in my engineering-related social media (HN). But I'm open to being incorrect as I'm only a human; do you have any statistical media analysis to verify the lack of coverage?

freyir 7y ago

> "why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering" No, there's a small percentage of older folks in software engineering. In almost any other engineering discipline, you'll find many older engineers who enjoy long careers, and whose perceived value often grows with age. That's because actual engineering principles change very slowly. Most software jobs do not involve much engineering in the traditional sense; most of the effort is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week libraries and frameworks, information that will be often be outdated and useless in a few years.

mk926 7y ago
Yes
markbnj 7y ago
I have no doubt there is some age discrimination, though I haven't experienced it personally. What I want to point out here is that there were a lot fewer of us in total when I first started (I'm 58 now). I find very few peers my own age now, but I also found very few peers my own age when I was 25. So just going by percentages may be misleading for a relatively young discipline.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  I wonder about that, too, although I'm "only" 45. I still have tons of people pinging me with new job offers, and they don't look like the sort of job offers that they're going to offer a 25-year-old. Regardless, I put a lot of effort into making sure that they need me more than I need them.
manfredo 7y ago
I'm always unsure about how to judge whether the lower percentages of older engineers I see is due to age discrimination or just a low percentage of older engineers period. Software developers are young in general. And interestingly the United States has the highest average age [1]. At my workplace I can count at least one "greybeard" on most teams. I don't get the sense that they are discriminated against because of their age. I've always enjoyed talking with them about how software development used to be back in the day. I remember talking to one guy that worked on a text editor back in the 80s that was backed by a mainframe. The terminal didn't have enough computing power to manage the whole document, so it only stored a few pages locally and swapped them in from the mainframe as the user scrolled to them. Things like bulk find-replace were done via an RPC. It's interesting how many parallels this has to modern client-server web-apps. I especially like to hear from people that programmed on punch cards - that's kind of stuff is fascinating to me. I also wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is due to expectations of an ever-increasing salary. I remember one older co-worker that interviewed for a job, liked the company, and got an offer that he dismissed as "not much higher than entry level" and even called the offer insulting. My line of reasoning was that if he didn't have relevant domain experience why wouldn't get paid not much more than a new grad? It was still well into the 100-200k range - in the Bay Area but in a cheaper city (San Bruno I think). More than enough to save and live a comfortable life. I wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is more about being realistic about the fact that years of experience don't automatically translate into higher productivity, paying younger folk commensurate with their contribution - as opposed to other industries where it's entrenched that young people get paid less and older people get paid more. Not saying age discrimination doesn't exist. I've seen job adverts that explicitly specified an age cap of 40 (despite this being blatantly illegal). 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-age-programmer-2015-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-age-programme... It's worth noting that surveying from Stack Overflow can mean significant selecting bias.

burtonator 7y ago

I with mental disorders would get more attention. ADHD, PTSD, dyslexia, social anxiety disorder, etc. Just because someone is white and male doesn't mean they're not struggling or discriminated against.

duxup 7y ago

I did a coding bootcamp with a bunch of folks. A few older guys like me, and mostly younger folks. We all had a great time working together (I wish we could have more) and we compared notes after interviews. Older folks like me, got lots of "culture" questions that were so vague. I'd ask what they mean but they can't really explain what they were getting at. I'd just explain that I've worked with a lot of different people, mentored new employees, etc. When we compared interview notes younger folks, never heard that phrase. Now that could be nothing, but it felt like something. One guy from the camp actually had the HR person call him up and say they were concerned about his age. When he asked her what that meant, she couldn't explain exactly. He thought maybe she realized what she said and was embarrassed, he was annoyed so he asked later what they were concerned about "oh your age, you're older".... nope, she apparently didn't think anything was wrong with that. Meanwhile I got my job eventually. I see folks come and go. Younger folks realizing they don't like the work and moving on (nothing wrong with that) others invited to move on. The president of the company says to me one day "You just seem to get a lot of these things, you can talk to customers, our sales guys, I like your communication.." and so on. Like yeah, because I've done other technical things before, have experience. Experience pays in a lot of ways.

Mandatum 7y ago
Honestly I think the best way to address this, is to call it out before it becomes an issue. Tell them why you're still in an engineering role. There is a reason, and some folks are just bad at their jobs, have no people skills or their skills stalled decades ago and they checked out. Others, like yourself, are still interested in engineering and have no interest in management. You're at an age where you will always be put on equal footing or above those you interview with BECAUSE of your age. Use it.
- duxup 7y ago
  Yup, you have to sort of go on offense I think and say "I've got experience, that's an asset, here is why."

profalseidol 7y ago

Yet the bigger issue is allowing only a handful of hands make these decisions while we give them the lionshare of our blood and sweat.

shams93 7y ago

They have tried to push me out of the industry many times, I'm pushing 50 but my ability to learn new things rapidly has enabled me to hang on long past what some might consider my expiration date. To some extent the 21st century can seem like Logan's Run, really the Feds expect us to work until we're over 70 years old, but given tech is perhaps the only decent paying industry left the impact of age discrimination has a broad impact across a lot of areas including projected tax revenues.

koffiezet 7y ago
> but my ability to learn new things rapidly This is one of the issues in my experience, you might be in the minority there. I'm pushing 40 and notice I have a lot more interest in new technology and stacks than many of my colleagues (I've always been like that) - but the 'more experienced' they get, the harder it becomes to convince them of the advantages of new approaches, and disadvantages of their 'proven' way of working, especially seasoned developers. They are also usually in more senior or team leader positions, which means they are very influential or can call the shots. I've seen months wasted on projects that could be just as well written in Python in a few days by a single developer, just because the 'senior dev' had something against interpreted languages and the only option for him was C++. As much as I liked the guy personally, and respected his skillset, he seriously limited technological progress within that company - which was a huge part of the reason I quit there and became freelance. Ever since - I've seen quite a few very similar situations. Young people will jump into things without looking - which is not good, but saying no to them and blocking off their stupid ideas is a lot easier than saying no to a guy with 30 years of experience...

Fnoord 7y ago

Not just for software engineers. Age discrimination is real. It exists for young people, but it also exists for the group at hand here: old people. It is real in general and in the end of last century it has become severe because of our quickly shifting society (the "computer" and "networking" revolutions, among others)

jillesvangurp 7y ago

This comes up a lot. People are definitely biased towards young, white, males doing most of the coding because it is mostly young white males doing the coding. Part of this is simple demographics. Part of this is confirmation bias. And part of this is our education system and culture filtering out disproportionate amounts of women and non whites who for whatever reason never even get on the career-path for becoming an engineer. Some countries are much worse at this than others. Uncle Bob has a nice article explaining that the number of programmers doubles every five years: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html So the chance of encountering somebody over 40 in a project is about 2^4 or one in 16, assuming lots of people in their early 20s are outnumbering those in their forties. It jumps to 32 for people over 45, 64 for people in their early fifties. I know people who are still coding in their late sixties. I'm 44, and most people I deal with are below 30. Most of the people my age that I know or used to work are by and large still active in the field though a few of them have become managers. Also, seniority means they tend to be big earners and typically too expensive for small projects. Quite a few are doing very lucrative free lance gigs at premium rates, disappeared into big corporations in some senior role, etc.

Angostura 7y ago

I'm in my 50s, so I hope you take this the right way - is it actually age discrimination, or is it higher salary discrimination?

coldtea 7y ago

>Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination. That's because the vocal parts for the "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" are mainly white well-off younger people. Gender causes naturally draw them in. And through they are predominantly white, race causes make them appear as hip and invested in other cultures. For them being old is not a reality. If it's anything, it's obscene. Why don't these old people just die? That's the same reason those giving coverage to "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" also get a free pass on pissing on poor people (whether "white trash" or black/latinos/etc when they're not subjected to race-driven but poverty driven abuses).

therockhead 7y ago

"Age discrimination for older software engineers is real." Can't say I've seen this in Ireland, I found that good experienced developers are highly valued. Do you think it's worse in places like SF than the rest of the USA ?

cameldrv 7y ago

While certainly age discrimination does exist, I'm 41 and I haven't experienced it yet. If anything, I've found that what I do is more in demand than ever, partially because there's been so much growth in the industry that there are proportionately very few people that have been around as long as I have. A big part of the reason you see so few gray hairs is that there just aren't that many of them to hire.

madrox 7y ago

I have hired a good number of "grey hairs" in my time. Usually they're lead engineer IC types. They typically have a couple kids, have great stories about software development in the 80s (one guy was at NeXT with Jobs!), and know everything about your favorite framework but don't think it's world-changing. They usually have a story about how they took 5 years doing something wild and non-software related. These engineers, in my experience, have the greatest likelihood of being great hires. They require less management, understand getting results, and have a much easier time working with more kinds of people. They write code with an eye for maintenance, and are more likely to stick around for the long haul to maintain that code instead of job hopping for promotions and raises. Bad managers can be reluctant to hire them or keep them because they can be intimidating to manage. They quite often have more experience than their managers, and are more inclined to challenge their ideas. Inexperienced software engineering managers I've met think they have to know more than than their team or they'll be a threat to their position. There are also the usual "soft concerns" that are very similar to the ones leveled against hiring women, such as being more likely to choose work/life balance. I was lucky in that I worked with my first grey hair for several years before becoming a manager and taking them on, so we already had a working relationship. Without that, I imagine I would've fallen into the traps above.