I sort of grew up with computers. My older brother and I got a mini version of a mechanical difference engine when I was a kid. When I was about 11 my Dad got me occasional use of a time sharing system, so that planted some desire in my brain for using computers. In high school I took a class at a local university.
It disturbs me to hear younger people talking pessimistically about their future careers. I advise them to keep learning and working on things that are useful and that they enjoy working on.
Edit: I did run into age bias, or at least I think it was: I had done a homework interview assignment and phone interviews for a back end job for Wikipedia and it seemed like they very much liked what I offered. Then, 1 minute into a video conference interview, I was brushed aside. So, I should have said that I have never had on the job age bias.
I think contracting is a lot different and in that case more experienced consultants are preferred over younger ones where as it is the opposite when it comes to permanent employment.
The thing I don't agree with is that we should be expected to keep learning. As if knowing how to design and write software isn't enough for a solid career, we must learn the "newest" programming paradigm, latest js framework, etc. But this gets in to deeper issues of our profession that allows ageism.
Edit: Just looked at your website and it looks like you are 100% a contractor... Again, I think they are 2 very different labor markets for contractors and employees.
I absolutely agree with you that learning many frameworks is probably not a good use of our time. "Just in time learning" of frameworks is usually good enough but knowing a few programming languages, and occasionally learning a new one makes sense.
Things change, people do discover better ways to work, and not knowing fads does impact one's ability to work in a team.
I'm in my mid 30's and I've already seen better sets of technologies appear with order of magnitude improvements twice. And I expect to claim one more time when the current fad of strict but flexible languages get sustainable.
You obviously have ton of expertise and experience to make age a non issue. This is not the case for older people trying to break into programming.
Employers often take a chance with younger employee over older ones if all things are equal. That is bias the article is taking about.
If I'm lucky, maybe the young person will want to work with my company for a decade or two, or even more. Would the 55 year old want to work for several decades more?
Of course, I am also worried about age bias. I'm curious what will happen if/when I decide to join a company again after age 40.
Then again, I don't allow stupid data structures or algorithms questions in interviews. I can pretty much tell someone's experience level by the types of interview questions they ask.
I have never had to do it, but I'd like to think the 60-year old version of me would be much better at my job than I am. Thus, if I hire them, I'd wonder "why am I tech lead? It really should be the other way around".
There are many aspects of the high tech workspace that don't really appeal to a lot of people, especially as they enter middle age (but by no means limited, plenty of young people don't like it either). Ping pong tables, video game consoles, open offices. The office setup is also a factor - I read an article (NYTimes, I think) about a middle aged woman journalist whose company was purchased by a modern tech media company. She lost her private office and worked in a big open room, with back visibility, where her (often much younger) coworkers were able to track her more frequent trips to the bathroom.
Funny thing for me, I was disappointed with this culture even when I was young. I majored in literature as well as math (with a cs focus), and I remember when I was younger how drawn I was to movies that kind of glamorized adulthood for me (the party scene in the movie "Manhattan" where the intellectual avant guard banter really appealed to me - I know it was a fantasy, but aren't all aspirations about what you want to grow up, to an extent?).
I started working at Sun Micro after grad school, and while I didn't want to be a lawyer or in finance, I envied something about my friends who went into these fields - they were treated as adults. Their getaways were to nice restaurants, our office getaway was at Dave N Busters. It was a letdown. And I'd say that tech culture has double down on this kind of thing since I was a grad student back in the late 90s.
Honestly, a lot about tech culture is really very unappealing to people who don't want to live in a permanent state of extended adolescence. I'm willing to take this a little further and say it isn't an accident - I do think that some elements of high tech are vaguely threatened by the notion that programmers and other technical types are actually adults who might prefer to go to dinner and the opera than dave n busters ad laser tag.
It's more of a gut feeling, or an intuition, but I do think that this plays a much bigger role in the disinterest a lot of people have in tech - including young tech workers themselves (who, in spite of a few notorious statements, generally are not the source of age discrimination). A lot of people, to quote someone fairly insightful on this issue, actually value propriety, protocol, and privacy, and will look elsewhere for a career if those things are in short supply in high tech.
On a brighter note I always felt joelonsoftware addressed this in a very positive way.
Yet, I am scared to loose my job. I don't know if the recruiter will look past my age and lack of trendy technologies in my resume.
1. Remove everything from your resume past 6 or so years in the past. Put a little note at the bottom saying that your extended work history is available upon request. Nobody wants to read a resume over 1 page anyway.
2. Don't list any years on your education--just list the institutions. That's an easy way to leak your age.
3. Regularly scrub for "outdated" technologies and topics. Instead of writing perl scripts to parse log files and output reports with Tcl/Tk, you were a full-stack developer who processed data analytics from critical business infrastructure.
Is that weekends are for? I do that too but do wonder at times...
Do not worry too much. Its much easier to "hack" dumb recruiters then C code.
As someone who recently graduated and is "one of them damn kids" - a lot of people from my graduating class know a lot more about marketing then actual programming.
Since 2008 - the world has became a much more cruel place - and that has forced many of us to graduating since then to play an arms race with "trends" - switch jobs constantly and be selfish.
The way I see anyone who has been writing production code since 1990 is a WW2 veteran. You guys have been through the PC revolution, Internet revolution, survived the dot com bubble, shipped code before git, stackoverflow.
I think if you projected that experience into confidence you could easily do whatever you wanted - you deserve it !
The resume doesn't need to 'look' trendy, but it can't look stale either.
I recognize you will probably make fewer dumb mistakes than a younger developer, and your experience probably enables you to learn new technologies faster (though I'd wonder if you didn't list any trendy technologies on your resume). On the flip side, if your resume showed a long period without any significant career advancement I might question your competence.
What are we talking about here ? Comparing a developer with 10 year experience vs with 20 years ? Or one fresh out of school, with a senior developer ?
Because around here, your salary will be determined by your actual responsibilities and the only way for a guy with 20+ years of experience to make more than one with 5-10 years is to have been in that company for during those 20 years, accruing benefits.
Similarly, contract price are about the same. They haven't even raised much in the last 10 years. Unless you become consultant on a specific topic, you are getting paid the same regardless how much more experience you have over 3 years.
The inflexibility has a flip side too: a developer that has been developing for 20 years is most likely doing exactly what he wants to do. Can probably count on him to be there to see the project through production, and not having "move up" or strategically move to other office, technology stack, companies.
In 2000, I remember most people over 30 being clueless about the Internet (given that the population who were familiar with the Internet in the 80swas so small...that core group was of course super clueful, but was of measure zero vs. people who were learning about it in college every year.)
Now, it's largely been the case that anyone in engineering/tech has had extensive contact with the Internet, even if not a CS person, since the 90s. 30s/40s today are a lot different from 15 years ago.
In 10-20y, there will be plenty of 50/60 year olds who had grown up with the Internet.
So while this might be a problem now, it's correcting itself with time.
that assumes that the reasons behind age discrimination/bias are purely based on competence (or lack thereof).
I don't see the problem correcting itself when it seems the drivers behind age discrimination are wages and perceived cultural fit (anecdotally more evident in cases where the manager is younger than the candidate)
I'm not going to be a good culture fit when I want work/life balance, no more than 40 hours a week of work, not on call 24/7, etc.
EDIT: Perhaps I've just been working the wrong gigs. Thanks for the feedback all.
This is a situation where it's not age discrimination at all - it's merely a candidate pricing themselves out of the market. Similarly, toomuchtodo suggests that as his life moves forward he'll be less willing to put the work in than his younger peers. That reduces his value.
Perhaps a significant chunk of age discrimination is merely workers being unwilling to recognize/acknowledge their actual market worth.
we are in a new era, one in which someone's age doesn't really tell you anything about their tech relevance. we generally hire based on experience only, not specific technologies or schools, so we end up with employees all over the map.
Older people tend toward higher BMI, and younger overweight people "carry" their weight better.
Discrimination on appearance is already well-documented.
Same thing for Android/iOS programming, or mobile websites, or microservices, or NoSQL etc etc. Some will have had them from school onward, others will have encountered them late in their career.
So wouldn't the future be a little more forgiving when the number of 50-something engineers is quite a bit more than (presumably) what it is today?
So just stay relevant? I'm 28, been coding for 19 years. What was relevant to learn when I was in middle and high school is completely useless now. All those endless hours spent learning how to make games in Pascal, irrelevant technologies. All those endless hours spent learning PHP3/4 and cobbling together websites and crude frameworks, irrelevant tech.
But on a higher level, all of that has proven useful. Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant.
Keep improving. Be an engineer, not just a coder.
I used to think like you.
But I'm 51 now. I've discovered that I was wrong.
The younger the technical interviewer, the less interested they are in my experience. I'm guessing that the less experience they have, the less value they see in experience. I suspect I was the same way 25 years ago.
I now understand why good developers go on to be lousy managers. They get old and get pushed out of development. Mid-level management is all that's available to them.
Fortunately I still have a job in an older development group. I still have some value, for now.
The point of age bias isn't bias against people without relevant skills, its an actual bias against person of certain ages.
Our industry is ripe with stories of folks with extremely relevant skill sets not getting jobs after a certain age (50 seems to be common).
There is some (unintentional I'm sure) age bias even in the response of "stay relevant" as if the implication is that older devs don't do that as a matter of course while younger ones do.
One thing that older people (50+) have impressed upon me is that learning gets harder as you age. It's not just that your body and mind become tired more easily. In general, if a 20-year-old and a 50-year-old spend the same amount of time studying something, the 20-year-old will do better on a quiz. At least, that's what older people tell me. I'm your age, so I haven't experienced this firsthand.
If at some point your rate of learning becomes slower than the rate at which relevant technologies change, it's not possible to stay relevant. Your deep understanding won't do you nearly as much good if you only know languages and frameworks from 15 years ago.
Better. Why just stop there. Avoid the need to do something to make a living. Save, invest and plan for your retirement.
Once you've done that, you could on any day 'enjoy' programming just for fun.
Teenagers want to take their behavioural cues from older children and young adults, but they simply don't have enough interaction with them so instead take their cues from what they believe to be true via mass media.
Imagine how many fewer 15 year olds would ask "what can I do with calculus" if they had to brush shoulders with 20 year old engineering students and could visibly see what kind of projects you'd work on with a deeper mathematics background?
Cross-polination programs do exist today, but its not the same thing as having it be systemic.
Although that's not what i had in mind when i mentioned education. Grades: Grades are the segregation. We are conditioned from a young age to accept social structures that discourage socialization between people of different age groups. Studies have shown that children learn better when they are in groups comprising a range of ages instead of just a single age.
Most people have an aversion towards camaraderie and integration with people who are significantly younger or older for way too long. Children are only supposed to have a few adult authority figures in their life until college, and even then it's weird to be friends with someone older than a grad student.
When does age discrimination end? Pretty sure the article highlights evidence that it doesn't end.
Alternatives? Not hard to imagine. In other societies past and present (and hopefully future) people of all ages have ample opportunity to make strong social connections with people of other ages. Our social structures actively discourage cohesion between age cohorts.
Young people work for longer hours, don't fall sick often, come in on weekends and are more productive.
By definition, there will always be less numbers of managers than technicians.
Being a manager is a different skillset and not everyone WANTS to be a manager.
Typical comment from a clueless pointy haired boss!
People have to realize this will be them, and that normalized hate is unacceptable and speak up against it.
I don't see "ageism", exactly. I see the experience bar being set very low. When "senior software engineer" means 5-7 years of experience, then what are you with 30 years? You're completely outside the comprehension of most hiring managers.
If you want to be regarded as more than "old person with a bit more than 5-7 years of experience", then you need to use those years to learn how to do harder things than most people with 5-7 years of experience know how to do.
Keep asking yourself "What's the next thing I need to learn to advance my career?" That probably isn't the next web framework (learning that just lets you tread water). It might be Android or iOS, though.
So far the only kind of "age-related" "discrimination" (note the quotation marks) that I faced that I know of have been the "you're too expensive for us, we'll hire a junior engineer and train him" type deal.
I do prefer/tend to work for small companies and startups so even though I have a reasonably decent "enterprise development" and "CS" type backgrounds I'm more or less up to speed on (or at least aware of) the latest developments in the industry so if a potential employer wants to see me hack some homework CRUD assignment using whatever hot-shot stack they are looking to use it won't take me long to set it up.
Age discrimination might be a serious problem elsewhere, but with OSU's chronic issues I'd be hard pressed to believe these people were discriminated against.
Indeed, you get a different employee when you hire an older person. Sometimes that's helpful; sometimes not. We can't wave a wand and make that go away.
I'll also say that I only had a handful of non-college interviews before my mid-30s, so I don't have a ton of data on if this were true when I was younger.
One of the reasons I love being in tech (I am 44) is that you become so familiar with change your start seeing it as an inevitable force of continuous opportunity, instead of something to fear. That mindset keeps you young at heart.
I suspect that age discrimination lawsuits are more likely from slow moving industries, like the academia example in the OP.
The only place where I felt concerned about age discrimination is at YC. "How old are you?" is the third question on the application even before the question "What will your company do".
Having been invited to YC HQ twice now (thank you), I don't think age discrimination is an issue and I can't fault them for asking. But being asked that question upfront still messes with my psychology.
This is simultaneously amusing and saddening.
