7 ms·

Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

141 points by carmenbr 7y ago

tabtab 7y ago
A similar discussion on ageism can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097
mdorazio 7y ago
Honest question: is this actually ageism or is it business cost-benefit analysis in action? You could argue that the benefit to the company of experience for a tech worker is only worth a maximum of X dollars. After that point, the company is better off hiring younger, cheaper employees with lower expectations than it is continuing to give raises, benefits, etc. to older workers. I would expect a salary plateau to be a natural result of the above + supply and demand in the market. Maybe that’s what the term ageism has come to mean (not its original definition)?
- notacoward 7y ago
  That's not an unreasonable view, but there's a big problem with how people measure the value of experience. The value of a younger programmer's work is relatively easy to measure. Not quite lines of code, but something reasonably close to it. As one's focus shifts - e.g. organizing, mentoring others, guiding technology choices, flagging code that works now but will break next year - those results become harder to measure. Just because it's harder to measure doesn't mean it's less, but that's a common kind of error. Under-valuing the contributions typical of older workers vs. those typical of younger workers is still ageism, but of a less conscious sort. As with most kinds of discrimination, people don't usually discriminate in a direct way. They do it with their assumptions, priorities, and assignment of value which just happen to produce disparate (but "rational") outcomes. Note: I'm not saying that older workers (I'm 54) deserve everything they get. There definitely are and have always been some older laurel-sitters whose friends pay them more than they should, and I was acutely aware of that when I myself was younger. I'm just saying "but they don't give proportional value" is often less true than people think.
  - pcurve 7y ago
    I agree with you about the difference in the type of value older workers can bring to the table. Their roles can have a more cross-functional and broader impact. I don't think anyone would discount its value. (I'm in my 40s) But another way to view this is through the lens of supply and demand. If there are over-supply of the roles that can only be filled by older workforce, then the pay will reflect that.
    - notacoward 7y ago
      > If there are over-supply of the roles that can only be filled by older workforce That's a pretty crucial question. Certainly at my age there really are fewer people. How true is that at 40? How unique is that "experience premium"? It seems impossible to evaluate the reality or prevalence of ageism without concrete answers (which I don't know either).
- ataturk 7y ago
  Were this similarly true for management types I would be more likely to accept it, but the people with the cash pay themselves first. Also, my generation was screwed out of future wages by offshoring and the incredible number of H1Bs that were brought in to accomplish that very thing: Kill our earning power. ETA: Outside if SV, there's nobody I know making 200K as a developer. NO ONE. We're all fixed in that 130-150 range and there we will remain until we either start an S Corp to grab a few more pennies in front of the steamroller or we smarten up, get out of tech, and do something totally different in our lives.
- axlee 7y ago
  I would believe it if that would apply to other positions. Why is it the case for us but not regular businessmen, lawyers, etc?
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    Professional athletes?
    - noirbot 7y ago
      It's a bit different, since there actually is a fall-off with age in sports. A 45 year old basketball player is almost definitely more injured and less capable than a 20-year old. In most sports, you get better for the first 5-10 years being a pro and then it's all downhill from there. Though, like tech, your trajectory at that point is usually management, analysis, or teaching.
  - Grustaf 7y ago
    In almost all industries you start out doing low level technical stuff and then over time transition to working with people. An analyst at a management consultancy, a bank or a hedge fund spends his time looking at balance sheets or excel, whereas partners go to meetings and dinners with clients. In a word, you make more money by transitioning from hard skills to soft, and since most developers are unwilling or unable to do this their salaries will plateau. But compared to the financial industry, and probably law, developers can count themselves lucky. Those industries work on an “up or out” principle, sticking around for 20 years as an analyst simply isn’t an option, no matter how good you are.
    - mdorazio 7y ago
      Think you nailed it here. For example, in the consulting world you can pretty easily calculate the dollar value of employees at different levels based on the rates you can charge for them, the hours they bill, the new revenue they bring, and their compensation. That calculation tends to put a pretty hard limit on salaries for people not willing/able to make the transition to highly billable SME or partner-type business development/practice management. In more traditional corporate roles, the compensation path is tied pretty heavily to growth in managerial skills and subject matter expertise in ways that don't always have parallels with software development. Even there, though, I've started seeing similar "ageism" as the article points out come into effect. Clients I've worked at have started coming to the realization that younger and more tech-savvy workers can often get to, say, 75% of the value of a 20-year employee for half the price in compensation.
malvosenior 7y ago
> In Hired’s findings, tech pros were never offered more than $149,000 annually. I don't know where they are getting their data but that's a lot lower than good developers of all ages make. You can see on https://levels.fyi https://levels.fyi that large tech companies will pay senior developers 200-400k routinely. I don't necessarily doubt the analysis but the data is very incomplete if they didn't see a single offer over $150k.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  What percent of people are employed by the large tech companies, and what percent are employed in the rest of the world?
- ddgflorida 7y ago
  Googling "Senior Developer Salary" you'll see 120K +- 10K on average.
  - jknoepfler 7y ago
    https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engi... (the data in the actual link you're responding to, with actual level information) $120k/year is what I'd expect someone with 2-3 years experience to be making at Google as a base, with anywhere from $35k-$80k additional in signing bonus and stock offerings. "Senior Software Engineer" means different things at different companies, but to me it indicates someone who is expected to lead IC for a team, who has at least 5-7 years of experience building software. source: work at FANG company, have had exactly that offer with that experience level
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Despite what everyone would like to believe, FANG isn't the industry.
      - hinkley 7y ago
scarface74 7y ago
No this is not ageism. After a certain point, if you are an individual contributor, your value is not worth more than someone with less experience. A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience. I also believe that the idea of the 10x developer while not a myth, is so rare it’s not worth trying to find for most companies. I speak as someone in my mid 40s who has been at this professionally for 20+ years [1]. I’m debating whether I want to take the next step of consulting or just stay in development. I see my salary hitting a ceiling in the next two or three years and I think I am okay with that. [1] well for all intents and purposes maybe 12 years. I stagnated for a few years and became an “expert beginner”.
- slavapestov 7y ago
  I think the number of years in your post is off a bit. In San Francisco, you become a senior engineer within 2 years, and after 5 years you're either expected to go into management, or retire to southeast Asia with your IPO money.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ergothus 7y ago
    Your summary is a bit outdated, I believe. While there is definitely a ceiling as the above poster added, the last decade has had a LOT of effort in improving options for non-management IC development. The big companies are realizing there is value in keeping strong technical people in technical roles. You still have to improve your so-called "soft" skills, improving communication up and down the chain, and it does involve a reduction in actual coding time, but you end up more of a code manager than a person manager. None of which says there isn't a struggle, but the world is very different than when I had a manager told me I could never expect a decent job if I stayed in coding.
- Nursie 7y ago
  > A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience As a developer with 20 years experience ... I'm a lot better at what I do than I was ten years ago. Better at seeing how it relates to the business I'm working with, more productive in ways that are not just LoC. I'd be OK if I can sustain my current income... but I'd still like to take the step to being more of a consultant. I'm dancing on the edges of it now, between contractor and consultant.
boyadjian 7y ago
Ageism is the consequence of high birth rates. If many young people are available at low prices, why would you pay more for an older worker ? You can't have everything, have three children and then asking for a high salary. There are choices to be made in life.
- cryofan 7y ago
  but birth rates in West are low...but something else is high
Grustaf 7y ago
1. There are diminishing returns to experience within software development, as you get more experience there are fewer and fewer companies that have any use for those extra years of experience. 2. The perceived value of that extra experience is even lower. How many recruiters or even engineering managers can honestly claim to be able to leverage the last 5 years of experience from someone with 20+ years? 3. In most industries your salary stagnates much earlier than that unless you transition to a management role, and I think it is safe to say that developers are much less keen on taking that step than say bankers.
- plutonorm 7y ago
  And even if they are, transition into management is much harder. In my experience in the UK, in London at small to medium companies, I've never seen a promotion to management and only once seen promotion to senior developer. Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that perception is incredibly difficult.
  - switch007 7y ago
    > Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that perception is incredibly difficult. The pointy haired bosses all think we have severe autism and can't deal with people.
- nilkn 7y ago
  I would amend this to say that time spent in a career represents a commodity that one can invest in oneself, and different folks invest that commodity in different ways and to different extents. Some folks coast and fall into the category of "1 year of experience, 10 times in a row." Someone else gets more out of 2 years of working than the coasters get out of 10. In the worst case, you have a coaster who thinks they're actually in the second category. A simple number for years of experience is very hard to interpret as a result. Take someone in the second category and give them 10 years of experience and you get someone amazing at their craft. But you have to be able to reliably discern this in the interviewing process.
neilv 7y ago
The article's way of using "ageism" in the lede, and their title, both seem odd, and seem to confuse the real issue of what I think what most people mean by "ageism". There seems to be a substantial tech industry aversion to hiring developers in 40s (sometimes 30s) or older. But if you suggest that developers in their 40s expect salary to keep growing without limit, that fuels hairtrigger resentment arguments about how those people are just greedy and unrealistic, and that that's the cause of any "ageism" they perceive. That would be a diversion from legitimate issues of people getting their resumes illegally screened for age, interview tests targeted at people with CS101 fresh in mind, rejecting candidates for "culture fit" (not just over-20s, but women, certain ethnicities/racial backgrounds, unapproved sex/gender identification), etc.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  >"resumes illegally screened for age" I'm happy this is a thing in the US and wish Europe would copy this since in some Western European countries like Austria, having your birthday and photograph on your resume is mandatory making discrimination a piece of cake.
  - neilv 7y ago
    Photos are another one in the US, with our wealth of diversity, yet ongoing history of biases and marginalizing. I used to hear in the US that some companies' HR had policies of discarding all resumes with photos or certain other details, to reduce risk of the company appearing to discriminate on basis of ethnicity or family status, for example. Perhaps apocryphal, but I always heard not to include a photo. And we heard of studies in which resumes with nothing changed but the name, to a "black" one or a female one, were treated differently. But then the most popular US resume Web sites introduced photos, to appear alongside your resume and your messages.
    - burfog 7y ago
      Note that a name can only indicate culture, not physical traits. This is a very different sort of discrimination.
rpmcmurphy 7y ago
The bigger issue for us Olds is that we have serious financial and family responsibilities that make us highly undesirable employees in today's modern "I've got mine! Fuck you!" society. Imagine that you have a close family member with Stage 4 cancer. Who wants to have you on their team? Nobody, that's who. And you better be living in a jurisdiction with solid legal protections, or they will fire you in a hot second. That is a far greater concern than salary stagnation.
- badpun 7y ago
  Companies in general love people with obligations (kids, high mortgage etc.) because they're much more afraid of being fired, and thus are more obedient.
  - WalterSear 7y ago
    That hasn't been my experience, in particular when interviewing with managers and team leads younger than myself. The last one slipped, and as much as admitted that he was concerned that I wouldn't be able to work as hard: he had presumed that I had children to take care of. It used to piss me off, but now it's just discouraging.
fooblitzky 7y ago
This is why you should always try and save at least 30% from every paycheck. Assuming you start working at 21, you should then have enough invested to live off the passive income by the time you reach 49.
40acres 7y ago
I work with a lot of folks over 40, the two things I've seen that make me doubt ageism studies -- especially in tech, is that older engineers on average seem less likely to consider new technologies, and older engineers are more concerned about day to day stability and are less risk averse to consider another job which may pay higher because they have kids in school, mortgage, etc.
- cmiles74 7y ago
  I have to disagree with this assertion. While my information is anecdotal I can attest to its veracity (I am 45 years old). Over the last two months I have been arguing in a professional manner for my company to move towards .Net Core and React (away from older Framework code and Angular 1.x) Arguably neither of these technologies is super new, but they seem to be new enough that I've been getting push back over various concerns (often over learning something new). I have to say, on the whole most of the push back is from younger developers, many of whom are in their mid-thirties. My point being that I don't believe that age is necessarily the deciding factor. In my experience most developers tend to lose some of their interest in the field at some point in their career and other do not. Everyone seems to hit that point at a different age, some of them quite young and others quite old. I'm definitely risk averse but not averse to new technologies. ;-)
- barbarr 7y ago
  Your statement is literally ageism.
bcheung 7y ago
Based on the findings I think it is premature to say this is ageism. There are multiple other factors going on here: 1) As senior developers become more skilled there is a diminishing return in terms of compensation. This happens regardless of age. A developer with 40 years of experience is not really worth that much more than a developer with 30 years of experience. 2) As developers get nearer towards retirement there is less incentive for them to stay at the top of their field. 3) As developers get older they tend to want to find a place they enjoy working at rather than playing the salary game every 2 years.
- bduerst 7y ago
  True, but it should be easy to control for this right? Check the progression in other skilled fields and cross reference into tech.
jlukic 7y ago
I think generally current startup hiring discriminates in hiring for post vs pre internet age programmers and that could possibly account for the statistical differences in salary for developers that didn’t spend their entire careers under the current paradigm.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

141 points by carmenbr 7y ago

A similar discussion on ageism can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097

mdorazio 7y ago

Honest question: is this actually ageism or is it business cost-benefit analysis in action? You could argue that the benefit to the company of experience for a tech worker is only worth a maximum of X dollars. After that point, the company is better off hiring younger, cheaper employees with lower expectations than it is continuing to give raises, benefits, etc. to older workers. I would expect a salary plateau to be a natural result of the above + supply and demand in the market. Maybe that’s what the term ageism has come to mean (not its original definition)?

notacoward 7y ago
That's not an unreasonable view, but there's a big problem with how people measure the value of experience. The value of a younger programmer's work is relatively easy to measure. Not quite lines of code, but something reasonably close to it. As one's focus shifts - e.g. organizing, mentoring others, guiding technology choices, flagging code that works now but will break next year - those results become harder to measure. Just because it's harder to measure doesn't mean it's less, but that's a common kind of error. Under-valuing the contributions typical of older workers vs. those typical of younger workers is still ageism, but of a less conscious sort. As with most kinds of discrimination, people don't usually discriminate in a direct way. They do it with their assumptions, priorities, and assignment of value which just happen to produce disparate (but "rational") outcomes. Note: I'm not saying that older workers (I'm 54) deserve everything they get. There definitely are and have always been some older laurel-sitters whose friends pay them more than they should, and I was acutely aware of that when I myself was younger. I'm just saying "but they don't give proportional value" is often less true than people think.
- pcurve 7y ago
  I agree with you about the difference in the type of value older workers can bring to the table. Their roles can have a more cross-functional and broader impact. I don't think anyone would discount its value. (I'm in my 40s) But another way to view this is through the lens of supply and demand. If there are over-supply of the roles that can only be filled by older workforce, then the pay will reflect that.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    > If there are over-supply of the roles that can only be filled by older workforce That's a pretty crucial question. Certainly at my age there really are fewer people. How true is that at 40? How unique is that "experience premium"? It seems impossible to evaluate the reality or prevalence of ageism without concrete answers (which I don't know either).
ataturk 7y ago
Were this similarly true for management types I would be more likely to accept it, but the people with the cash pay themselves first. Also, my generation was screwed out of future wages by offshoring and the incredible number of H1Bs that were brought in to accomplish that very thing: Kill our earning power. ETA: Outside if SV, there's nobody I know making 200K as a developer. NO ONE. We're all fixed in that 130-150 range and there we will remain until we either start an S Corp to grab a few more pennies in front of the steamroller or we smarten up, get out of tech, and do something totally different in our lives.
axlee 7y ago
I would believe it if that would apply to other positions. Why is it the case for us but not regular businessmen, lawyers, etc?
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Professional athletes?
  - noirbot 7y ago
    It's a bit different, since there actually is a fall-off with age in sports. A 45 year old basketball player is almost definitely more injured and less capable than a 20-year old. In most sports, you get better for the first 5-10 years being a pro and then it's all downhill from there. Though, like tech, your trajectory at that point is usually management, analysis, or teaching.
- Grustaf 7y ago
  In almost all industries you start out doing low level technical stuff and then over time transition to working with people. An analyst at a management consultancy, a bank or a hedge fund spends his time looking at balance sheets or excel, whereas partners go to meetings and dinners with clients. In a word, you make more money by transitioning from hard skills to soft, and since most developers are unwilling or unable to do this their salaries will plateau. But compared to the financial industry, and probably law, developers can count themselves lucky. Those industries work on an “up or out” principle, sticking around for 20 years as an analyst simply isn’t an option, no matter how good you are.
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    Think you nailed it here. For example, in the consulting world you can pretty easily calculate the dollar value of employees at different levels based on the rates you can charge for them, the hours they bill, the new revenue they bring, and their compensation. That calculation tends to put a pretty hard limit on salaries for people not willing/able to make the transition to highly billable SME or partner-type business development/practice management. In more traditional corporate roles, the compensation path is tied pretty heavily to growth in managerial skills and subject matter expertise in ways that don't always have parallels with software development. Even there, though, I've started seeing similar "ageism" as the article points out come into effect. Clients I've worked at have started coming to the realization that younger and more tech-savvy workers can often get to, say, 75% of the value of a 20-year employee for half the price in compensation.

malvosenior 7y ago

> In Hired’s findings, tech pros were never offered more than $149,000 annually. I don't know where they are getting their data but that's a lot lower than good developers of all ages make. You can see on https://levels.fyi https://levels.fyi that large tech companies will pay senior developers 200-400k routinely. I don't necessarily doubt the analysis but the data is very incomplete if they didn't see a single offer over $150k.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
What percent of people are employed by the large tech companies, and what percent are employed in the rest of the world?
ddgflorida 7y ago
Googling "Senior Developer Salary" you'll see 120K +- 10K on average.
- jknoepfler 7y ago
  https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engi... (the data in the actual link you're responding to, with actual level information) $120k/year is what I'd expect someone with 2-3 years experience to be making at Google as a base, with anywhere from $35k-$80k additional in signing bonus and stock offerings. "Senior Software Engineer" means different things at different companies, but to me it indicates someone who is expected to lead IC for a team, who has at least 5-7 years of experience building software. source: work at FANG company, have had exactly that offer with that experience level
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Despite what everyone would like to believe, FANG isn't the industry.
    - hinkley 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

No this is not ageism. After a certain point, if you are an individual contributor, your value is not worth more than someone with less experience. A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience. I also believe that the idea of the 10x developer while not a myth, is so rare it’s not worth trying to find for most companies. I speak as someone in my mid 40s who has been at this professionally for 20+ years [1]. I’m debating whether I want to take the next step of consulting or just stay in development. I see my salary hitting a ceiling in the next two or three years and I think I am okay with that. [1] well for all intents and purposes maybe 12 years. I stagnated for a few years and became an “expert beginner”.

slavapestov 7y ago
I think the number of years in your post is off a bit. In San Francisco, you become a senior engineer within 2 years, and after 5 years you're either expected to go into management, or retire to southeast Asia with your IPO money.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ergothus 7y ago
  Your summary is a bit outdated, I believe. While there is definitely a ceiling as the above poster added, the last decade has had a LOT of effort in improving options for non-management IC development. The big companies are realizing there is value in keeping strong technical people in technical roles. You still have to improve your so-called "soft" skills, improving communication up and down the chain, and it does involve a reduction in actual coding time, but you end up more of a code manager than a person manager. None of which says there isn't a struggle, but the world is very different than when I had a manager told me I could never expect a decent job if I stayed in coding.
Nursie 7y ago
> A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience As a developer with 20 years experience ... I'm a lot better at what I do than I was ten years ago. Better at seeing how it relates to the business I'm working with, more productive in ways that are not just LoC. I'd be OK if I can sustain my current income... but I'd still like to take the step to being more of a consultant. I'm dancing on the edges of it now, between contractor and consultant.

boyadjian 7y ago

Ageism is the consequence of high birth rates. If many young people are available at low prices, why would you pay more for an older worker ? You can't have everything, have three children and then asking for a high salary. There are choices to be made in life.

cryofan 7y ago
but birth rates in West are low...but something else is high

Grustaf 7y ago

1. There are diminishing returns to experience within software development, as you get more experience there are fewer and fewer companies that have any use for those extra years of experience. 2. The perceived value of that extra experience is even lower. How many recruiters or even engineering managers can honestly claim to be able to leverage the last 5 years of experience from someone with 20+ years? 3. In most industries your salary stagnates much earlier than that unless you transition to a management role, and I think it is safe to say that developers are much less keen on taking that step than say bankers.

plutonorm 7y ago
And even if they are, transition into management is much harder. In my experience in the UK, in London at small to medium companies, I've never seen a promotion to management and only once seen promotion to senior developer. Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that perception is incredibly difficult.
- switch007 7y ago
  > Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that perception is incredibly difficult. The pointy haired bosses all think we have severe autism and can't deal with people.
nilkn 7y ago
I would amend this to say that time spent in a career represents a commodity that one can invest in oneself, and different folks invest that commodity in different ways and to different extents. Some folks coast and fall into the category of "1 year of experience, 10 times in a row." Someone else gets more out of 2 years of working than the coasters get out of 10. In the worst case, you have a coaster who thinks they're actually in the second category. A simple number for years of experience is very hard to interpret as a result. Take someone in the second category and give them 10 years of experience and you get someone amazing at their craft. But you have to be able to reliably discern this in the interviewing process.

neilv 7y ago

The article's way of using "ageism" in the lede, and their title, both seem odd, and seem to confuse the real issue of what I think what most people mean by "ageism". There seems to be a substantial tech industry aversion to hiring developers in 40s (sometimes 30s) or older. But if you suggest that developers in their 40s expect salary to keep growing without limit, that fuels hairtrigger resentment arguments about how those people are just greedy and unrealistic, and that that's the cause of any "ageism" they perceive. That would be a diversion from legitimate issues of people getting their resumes illegally screened for age, interview tests targeted at people with CS101 fresh in mind, rejecting candidates for "culture fit" (not just over-20s, but women, certain ethnicities/racial backgrounds, unapproved sex/gender identification), etc.

ChuckNorris89 7y ago
>"resumes illegally screened for age" I'm happy this is a thing in the US and wish Europe would copy this since in some Western European countries like Austria, having your birthday and photograph on your resume is mandatory making discrimination a piece of cake.
- neilv 7y ago
  Photos are another one in the US, with our wealth of diversity, yet ongoing history of biases and marginalizing. I used to hear in the US that some companies' HR had policies of discarding all resumes with photos or certain other details, to reduce risk of the company appearing to discriminate on basis of ethnicity or family status, for example. Perhaps apocryphal, but I always heard not to include a photo. And we heard of studies in which resumes with nothing changed but the name, to a "black" one or a female one, were treated differently. But then the most popular US resume Web sites introduced photos, to appear alongside your resume and your messages.
  - burfog 7y ago
    Note that a name can only indicate culture, not physical traits. This is a very different sort of discrimination.

rpmcmurphy 7y ago

The bigger issue for us Olds is that we have serious financial and family responsibilities that make us highly undesirable employees in today's modern "I've got mine! Fuck you!" society. Imagine that you have a close family member with Stage 4 cancer. Who wants to have you on their team? Nobody, that's who. And you better be living in a jurisdiction with solid legal protections, or they will fire you in a hot second. That is a far greater concern than salary stagnation.

badpun 7y ago
Companies in general love people with obligations (kids, high mortgage etc.) because they're much more afraid of being fired, and thus are more obedient.
- WalterSear 7y ago
  That hasn't been my experience, in particular when interviewing with managers and team leads younger than myself. The last one slipped, and as much as admitted that he was concerned that I wouldn't be able to work as hard: he had presumed that I had children to take care of. It used to piss me off, but now it's just discouraging.

fooblitzky 7y ago

This is why you should always try and save at least 30% from every paycheck. Assuming you start working at 21, you should then have enough invested to live off the passive income by the time you reach 49.

40acres 7y ago

I work with a lot of folks over 40, the two things I've seen that make me doubt ageism studies -- especially in tech, is that older engineers on average seem less likely to consider new technologies, and older engineers are more concerned about day to day stability and are less risk averse to consider another job which may pay higher because they have kids in school, mortgage, etc.

cmiles74 7y ago
I have to disagree with this assertion. While my information is anecdotal I can attest to its veracity (I am 45 years old). Over the last two months I have been arguing in a professional manner for my company to move towards .Net Core and React (away from older Framework code and Angular 1.x) Arguably neither of these technologies is super new, but they seem to be new enough that I've been getting push back over various concerns (often over learning something new). I have to say, on the whole most of the push back is from younger developers, many of whom are in their mid-thirties. My point being that I don't believe that age is necessarily the deciding factor. In my experience most developers tend to lose some of their interest in the field at some point in their career and other do not. Everyone seems to hit that point at a different age, some of them quite young and others quite old. I'm definitely risk averse but not averse to new technologies. ;-)
barbarr 7y ago
Your statement is literally ageism.

bcheung 7y ago

Based on the findings I think it is premature to say this is ageism. There are multiple other factors going on here: 1) As senior developers become more skilled there is a diminishing return in terms of compensation. This happens regardless of age. A developer with 40 years of experience is not really worth that much more than a developer with 30 years of experience. 2) As developers get nearer towards retirement there is less incentive for them to stay at the top of their field. 3) As developers get older they tend to want to find a place they enjoy working at rather than playing the salary game every 2 years.

bduerst 7y ago
True, but it should be easy to control for this right? Check the progression in other skilled fields and cross reference into tech.

jlukic 7y ago

I think generally current startup hiring discriminates in hiring for post vs pre internet age programmers and that could possibly account for the statistical differences in salary for developers that didn’t spend their entire careers under the current paradigm.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]