It did super well in terms of upvotes and comments but not $ speaking (made $0)
This seems to be a current problem but what's the solution?
I have no problem interacting with younger ICs and even embrace my Dad-ness and Dad humor. I like mentoring and growing others, and I think it’s important to advocate for less experienced to get the lionsshare of the glory and attention.
For hiring, I just am not open about my age and mostly interact with people virtually. I don’t have my early irrelevant jobs and don’t show my graduation dates. So I haven’t seen it as a problem.
Boy do I feel this one. I'm 20 years in now and holy shit are there are a lot of bad leaders out there. What they all have in common is that they don't want to be gainsaid. Most leaders are completely allergic to meaningful feedback, hardly any of them ever ask for it. A lot of people seem to feel that once they are "in charge" they have somehow become infallible.
It's too bad because like `softwaredoug I love developing young people, most of them are very hungry for mentorship. I find that most younger ICs are very willing to listen and learn, but the leadership sees it as a problem for some reason that they're not struggling on their own on basic shit. What a waste of time of money.
Have a lot of skepticism towards our ego and question whether we’re acting on status or actually what’s best.
This may well be the value of a senior IC. You will be neutral in most of the situations, so VPs will be more willing to trust you as they know you don't have a hidden organizational agenda.
It was a staff engineer role, very well paid. I was given a take home task for one interview. I did my research and looked into why they were hiring. I downloaded their app, read all the bad reviews on responsiveness, UI, and such. I built something in one hour that would solve the things they had trouble with over 4 years, as a kind of demo of what I could do if they took me.
When we had the actual interview, holy shit did they attack me. "Open your code on this file. Explain what is wrong with your code. I will not even give a hint otherwise you fail. You must tell me what is wrong with your code."
I did get them to explain the "correct answer" despite the pressure, and they were very reluctant to do so. I checked the code afterwards and even cross-checked it with AI and discovered that they were probably wrong lol.
It wasn't age. It wasn't racism, sexism, etc. It was a technical leader being challenged by the idea of someone else being technically better than them. Juniors can do work as fast as seniors; it's more that seniors are trusted to change culture for the better. If someone has trouble finding someone senior enough, most of the time it's because they refuse to let an outsider change the culture.
I did eventually get another job. Similar situation. Take home interview, vastly modernized code architecture than what the interviewer was used to. But in this case, the interviewer actually wanted to make products, get sales, make the customers happy, make money. So the incentives were aligned and they were happy to bring me in to set up policies and stuff.
You need to look like you are a person who would be doing the job. You wouldn't hire a gardner with smooth hands, clean shoes, and no dirt under their nails would you?
Car mechanics, you can see it in their hands, and the way they act around cars.
Every profession has its tells, from what we wear, to our physical traits etc.
After a while, you know if someone adds up or not. But part of that is changing with the times. :)
Shorts and a Hawaiian shirt are comfortable but I guess that's still not ok in the office even though everyone wants to pretend they don't care.
Whatever it's not like I'd accept a non-remote job these days anyway.
Places with older engineers means:
1. things are done properly
2. less to break
3. no need to be on call
4. excellent WLB (no grind n burnout culture)
5. excellent mentoring and learning opportunities
6. sniper / laser focus on business fundamentals / making money rather than making noise on the internet streets
Not sure if there is a "solution" for that as a 35 yo hiring manager will probably have an easier time managing under-35 individual contributor comparing to a 50 yo one. Different perspectives, experiences, etc. So by hiring younger IC the manager makes a correct decision. Sucks for us older folks but that's life.
In The Days of Old, the folks running the corporation were almost always in their 50s. They might have been prejudiced towards folks my age (60s), but they didn't have issues with hiring what are now considered "older" folks (40s and 50s), with the only issue being cost (they might be ageist, simply for cost reasons).
The prejudice from younger folks is cultural, not cost. They don't want people around that make them feel uncomfortable. Many younger folks at tech companies, these days, make boatloads of money. It's not about cost.
From where I stand, it looks like a lot of modern tech companies are establishing a "college, but being paid" culture. It seems that many modern tech companies resemble idealized college campuses, more than traditional professional production environments.
I had the misfortune of working for two "30 under 30 CEO" led companies. I was in my 40s at the time. Never again. I can relate to the "college, but being paid" description, but for me it was more like "high school, but being paid".
Is the company that much more likely to blow up and go out of business due to inexperience of the younger guys at the helm? Perhaps, but it's their company and that's how you gain experience in the first place. And IF it blows up in their face they'll learn (hopefully) and their 2nd, 3rd, 4th shots will be so much better.
50yo+ just need to stay away from these places to avoid becoming collateral damage. We don't have our entire lives ahead of us to make up for the lost time and wages. So not getting hired there is not really a problem.
Of course it leaves 50yo+ with fewer places to work and earn salary. Sucks, believe me, I know.
Hip companies dont hire me, maybe some tech consultants, that would not be considered cool, like accenture or IBM.
A few years ago I was one of the first people in my country tomigrate my company android app to Kotlin, this helped me land in the app development team of a big bank in my country and I was by far the oldest dude. Everybody called me "uncle" there, very common to young people in my country to call older people that, because most where college kids.
I've now got a checklist I create for myself to go through when reviewing resumes for the role. It includes a number of legitimate reasons it's okay to reject a candidate and I try to make myself pick one of them. I also have a thing under the rejection section that just says "Are you sure you're not rejecting this person because they're older than you?"
I realize how stupid it is to feel this way, but it's hard to un-train an emotional response.
Is there ageism? I'm sure. As an old, I'm going to avoid companies that give off a younger, coder bro type vibe. Partially because I assume they're more likely to be ageist. But mostly because even if they *didn't* have an ageist viewpoint and hired me, I know it's just not where I personally want to be.
I'm in my 50s and had no problems getting hired 3+ years ago at a FAANG as well as a handful of other companies. Granted it was a good hiring environment, but I also took 3 years off and I had to work hard to Leetcode back into shape.
I still have a lot of energy and it comes across in my interviews. I don't have an ego, I know that just because I have >30 years experience doesn't mean that I know more than my coworkers that are 30 years younger than me. I work hard and try to earn my paycheck every day and I'm not quibbling over lunch menus and complaining about the ingredients used at the cafeteria.
I think as long as you not only have the technical skills but can also sell yourself as a good teammate with matching energy, it shouldn't be a problem. I think younger folks respect people that can match their energy and motivation and don't want to be dragged down by know-it-alls or slow workers.
This is not to dismiss LLMs entirely, but they always get touted as “they can do ABC, as long as an experienced dev reviews the output”. And with LLMs hindering the growth of juniors in one way or another, I can definitely see a market for “senior” developers down the road.
Maybe I'll be wrong, and in 2050, there won't even be human software engineers anymore, but I'm not so sure that will be the case.
This is how you get disasters like Ocean Gate where management would rather hire fresh college grads than listen to experienced hires point out mistakes.
Sure, if you want to use an LLM to produce code that works you need to have enough knowledge and experience to be able to review and, if necessary, request changes.
However, another (IMO, even more powerful) aspect of LLMs, is their utility as a learning tool. They excel at imparting knowledge about new concepts, because they act as a personalized teacher.
I find it doubtful that use of LLMs will result in less experienced and knowledgeable engineers in the future.
Excuse me?
Give the whole thing 5-10 years until the impact of juniors learning nothing and having the perseverance and attention span of about 10 minutes and the effects will show in the industry. Yes, LLMs + agents have value here and there, but remember on where they get that value from: they learn from the internet. And papers already show that if LLMs learn from their own output, the quality degrades quickly.
So, more code written by LLMs on Github equals subsequent generations for LLMs learn from subpar examples.
Furthermore, they mostly learn from "en vogue" languages because they have lots of examples. But I wouldn't trust an LLM with a 10 foot pole doing Lisp or Cobol or any RTOS related C code with safety requirements.
I wouldn't trust an LLM to write a proper GPU or CUDA driver. But if there's nobody around knowing how to do that, how do you expect future drivers to be implemented?
There's isn't a quick fix or easy solution.
I feel like I'm a better employee now, because I feel like I can be more honest. If a manager says something stupid, I feel totally comfortable checking them on it. When I was younger that wasn't the case. I was always nervous about retribution. However, there's a flip-side to this: a lot of managers don't like to be checked. Also, there's exploitability. When I was younger, I never said no to any proposed work, regardless of how it impacted my "personal time". Now, my attitude is, "Work this weekend? Nope. Get a junior to do that. I'm going surfing this weekend." LOL
Who says you can't have role models in your 50s? :)
1) Your salary demands exceed the budgeted amount for the position
2) You probably aren't willing to work insane hours any more
Even if your skill set vastly exceeds that of a wet-behind-the-ears engineer and can work at a far higher level, be more productive, and produce higher quality work, it's almost impossible to make that apparent when interviewing, especially when those doing the interviews are much younger.
I've thought about this a lot lately. This is true for the obvious reasons, but it's more true than it seems.
As an older, experienced dev I sometimes flirt with the idea of aiming for a mid-level developer job where I can just cruise. I'd expect the paycheck to be proportionately smaller than where I'm at now, but that's fine.
But there's no way this would actually work out. Red flags would be raised all over the place at most companies like this. For one, it'd be viewed as a red flag that I'm cool taking that huge paycut. And then of course no one appreciates being told that you want to come in, get a week's worth of work done in a day, and then clock out.
- I've found junior engineers super resistant to new tech. Very rigid thinking, there is only way way to do something bc that's all they've ever learned, very religious about tech stacks, crazy strong opinions based on crazy limited experience - lack of work ethic, no call, no show, procrastinating right up until the deadline and then expecting code reviews, merges/releases to work on their schedule -tendency to fuck around and play games etc all day (see above) -limited experience with people from different backgrounds, culture etc.
So they want to get in, get it done, go home. This usually leads to stuff getting done at a steady cadence.
This is a bit sarcastic of course, seeing other ridiculous comments about older engineers.
There's something to be said about people who just want to get their work done in reasonable time with reasonable quality and not chase every new fad like like a dog with ADHD in a squirrel habitat.
In a tightly woven, interdependent system like modern civilization, it is placing a huge strain on us structurally as well as psychologically. Add to this it is an easy exploit for power ala “my leadership is great, <out group> over there is your problem”, combined with mass media platforms and the whole thing is cracking at the edges.
How do we mitigate this though? It seems to take a massive concerted effort for a person to overcome those implicit biases. I was speaking with a family member the other day who is clearly primed by media in their country to assume that all current structural ills are caused by immigrants, and when probed about people of that same group that were actually in her life, she said “Well, Mr. so and so that works at the school is just a lovely decent hardworking man.” But she couldn’t take the leap that there are statistically more Mr. so and so’s in the group than the “bad ones” she was hearing about in the news. I’ve seen this pattern across all of business and politics.
Don’t even get me started on the whole “culture fit” hiring standards.
We are all alone, if not for communications.
It is bias in communications, knowledge of the various forms of bias, their methods, and countermeasures that enable individuals and groups to move past argument and towards shared understandings. With shared understanding naturally causes shared compromise and solutions. Without shared understanding, situations degenerate to stalemate, war, welfare states, and economic slave states.
Individual self conversation, recognition of it, it's biases and countermeasures lay a foundation for a rational individual. The lack of formal and public recognition of self conversation itself is hurdle one. Once that is recognized, a foundation for a rational public can be considered.
Then communicating with others inter-personally, with peers, spouses, coworkers, managers, authorities and strangers. Pairs, small groups, larger groups, and audience dynamics: these all have biases, which are often magnifications of the same bias at a self conversation level. New bias forms are here too, and they must also be recognized, understood, and countermeasures established. This is all nothing but communicating, but doing so effectively, causing understanding in others, and gaining understanding from those less communication-ally skilled.
Now let's take these biases and add in mass media, social media, and all the network effects they bring to the communication situation. Strangely enough, yet again the countermeasures that operate at lower levels continue to function here - except now we're dealing with the public. countermeasures now require public education.
I think by spreading knowledge of interpersonal and self conversation biases, their countermeasures immediate and positive effect lay the foundation for widespread respect of effective communications. After all, the lack of it often only needs to be pointed out for people to consider the ease of adopting knowledge about and the countermeasures that enable more success communicating, which directly correlates to actual success. And that is with everything a person does, because this perspective begins with one's self conversation, reducing the bias there, first. That generates a more rational person, more aware, more active. Push this to network effects, and now we're talking societal change. It's a plan to impress secondary considerations on the general public, because that's the primary countermeasure in communication issues: consider further.
But the vibe I'm hearing lately is that junior engineers can't get jobs, because AI. I don't know if that reflects the reality (I haven't been trying to find a job as a junior in quite a while), but people are complaining about that these days.
In other words, it’s not ageism when one can’t even get an interview in the first place. Assuming you’ve kept your resume concise and removed education dates, etc. Which I have for the last twenty years or so, since the turn of the century! cough
In the resume, you can remove your experience prior to certain date (which is recommended anyways as it makes your resume shorter and very few employers care what you did 15 years ago), but you do have to list your education and most ATS systems require graduation dates.
Even if you do manage to omit the dates, if you were senior developer or architect in the very the first position from 12 years ago that you have on your resume, the recruiter/hiring manager will be able to put 2 and 2 together.
All the advice I've heard from the career/job search/whatever coaches/advisors was to not try to hide your age but use it your advantage. Trying to hide your age doesn't just make you looking silly, it might create an impression that you're hiding something more serious.
But yeah, looking younger and healthier definitely doesn't hurt, not just in job search but in life in general.
That is, the senior ICs start to resemble a strong product manager, or an effective director without a team. These are all good - until the company suddenly no longer needs them. Maybe their team has become a cost center. Maybe the project gets into maintenance mode. Or maybe the product has been so stable that the company does not even need more alignment. At that time, the ICs will find that all the institutional knowledge and so-called "leadership" is not that transferrable. And when they go out and interview for a new job, they find that they can't even sketch a solid design.
Sadly, I don't have a solution. There are exceptions. I guess it's natural that a senior engineer will gain breadth but also get distracted as they age. What they need is a different kind of depth. They can still be of value to a younger team if they are like a hard-science professor who depends on their PhD students to write papers, yet they can still advise the students as no one else. In industry, my role models are people like Michael Stonebreaker, who can still shape the architectures of modern databases in his 80s. Wernher von Braun of Saturn V rockets, who could come up with new rockets like no one else. Or Kelly Johnson of U-2, who could direct and unblock his engineers with ease. Or Marc Brooker of Amazon, who seems able to go deep into both database and distributed systems to keep coming up with amazing systems. But then, I'm not sure how many people can be talented as those engineers.
Or maybe another way is to get domain expertise, like how payment works, how insurance works, how accounting works, and etc?
All my former colleagues and reports 15-20 years younger than me landed jobs within a matter of months. Those of us 50+ remain unemployed a year later. It isn't about skills; I was at the top of my game when a layoff robbed me of my livelihood. It isn't a matter of pay. One of my former reports whom I mentored when I was a senior IC left right before the layoff hit with a job offer making as much as I was at the time as a manager.
It was even explicitly revealed to me by an insider and former colleague who referred me to one position that I didn't get that the hiring committee wanted to go with someone younger, after which he caught himself and backtracked saying "earlier in their career". I was told on another occasion that I'd make a great addition as a manager or principal IC, but that they were reviewing their needs and deciding to search for someone less senior.
Ageism is 100% real.
It is rare that a company will take you up on that offer though. It really highlights what the money is actually about and how tribal "professional" "business" can be.
Not only that, young engineers will be build whatever without questioning the value, business people prefer this. They dont want an engineer raising product questions
also, it is true that technology moves quickly, startups dont need experts in tech thats no longer bleeding edge. large old school companies still do, so the number of companies that are viable employers decreases
Changing a culture's norms is incredibly difficult. The only way I've heard about it happening is through massive pressure, from either a large social group vocally pushing against an issue (with consequences), or a large industry spending millions of dollars to advertise something (diamonds, washing machines) and exploiting some other cultural bias to do so. Cultural norms can also change temporarily (we all worked remote during a pandemic and productivity went up, but after that it would seem our productivity went down? and women became industrial workers during WW2, but after that apparently they weren't good enough?).
So even if the norm did change temporarily, you need continued pressure to make it stick. I have not heard of any massive cultural pressure to end ageism, so I would not expect it to end.
As I learned when I rewrote 10+ times my resume, you have to hide your experience and age because anything over 8-10 years is just not relevant anymore, or causes ageism (even ATS/GPT/LLM/AI/BOT give you negative points for the age). I have experienced this firsthand, since I have 20+ YoE.
In general, not only in the software industry, people just like younger people more. They're better looking, and they have more energy and enthusiasm. It's a cognitive bias that isn't unlike racism and sexism, it's going to weight the odds in the favour of young people in every industry.
And that's setting aside the fact that older people are closer to retirement and unlikely to spend a long time at the company in question.
I do not think most people think of themselves as being "ageist", but it manifests in their actions. Usually a department will be filled with a group of young people, and in the interview process, someone will say, "I do not think this person would be a good culture fit". But they do not realize that they just do not want an old person because they seem different then what is already in the team.
I also have a hunch, that "leet code tests", in the hiring process has a hidden agenda of weeding out "older people". Those kind of tests are usually on knowledge one might have learned in a college course and subsequently forgot about. Or, if you are juggling a family, you may not have time to go do all day knowledge crunch study to get the algorithms into your head.
Companies do not want to come right out and say "we do not want to hire old people", but they selfishly want the most value for their buck. They want to drive down wages and extract value. What is more valuable to a company? A middle aged programmer who has to go home at 5pm to help take care of the kids? Or do they get more value out of a young person just out of college who has something to prove?
I have seen perfectly reasonable people pass over hiring older people because they do not want to hire someone who might know more than they do, or someone who might push back on decisions. They want someone young who will just do what they say.
As a society, I do not think we address such issues well.
* will they be on-call?
* can they work long hours?
* how do I delegate to them?
* are they going to resist new tech?Your kid is better off not going to school for a day, or arriving late. They're not doing anything important in school.
Depending on company, maybe they need to hire people to do important things and have responsibility for important things. Somebody who would prioritize things like driving their kids to school over that is a no-hire. They should work a job which is less important, like I myself do.
* Will they be on on-call or out partying with their friends? * Are they committed to the work or will they hop to another company once trained? * Are they able to work within our codebase or just jump to the next hot thing?
These types of questions are ridiculous for both sides.
No, it won't work. Biologically, 25 years old without a family responsibilities will not get it anyway.
If you are 25 years old, single and your friends are similar to you, what would you do? Most I know are working 12-14 hour/day, because they eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work.
Reply to below:
Of course. But if you plan ahead properly, it will be extremely rare. To the point where it isn’t economical to have people on call. Because the downtime was caused by a meteor or maybe AWS.
If it is truly mission critical, have a night shift.
Maybe you are writing libraries/frameworks?
Any service running on production can fail anytime, whether you did everything right or not, things break sometimes.
If you're older, keep your skills up to date, be chill, be open minded, and keep hope alive.
I’m also older and stand up for myself. This is not without its own troubles.
I am however thinking about what the next 20 years are gonna look like career, location and opportunity wise as I can see some challenges ahead where I live
But overall many companies seem to value and attract more of the same culture they already have in place. So to a degree, I’d say yes ageism exists in certain companies that don’t value experience as highly as other qualities.
That's averaging 5 startups every year. How can you get good experience, or even truly understand a business, if you're averaging just around two months at a company or multiple companies in the same period?
How can a 20 something with very little experience actually consult? Based on what experience?
I suspect before ageism disappears it will first swing the other way where older tech workers snub young people entering the industry writing them off as vibecoders who don’t know anything and are easily replaced with an AI.
Go into companies and industries where this culture isn't the norm, however, and you'll find teams full of 40-50+ year old software engineers. Defense, aerospace, government, construction, medical tech, research labs, education.
However are you sure you want to take the cut in prestige/pay?
In the medtech space there's a huge need for project mangers, etc wish medical experience. So knowing how to code and how to query databases along with all that medical knowledge would be a super power.
However, I can't imagine you'd be happy as a junior engineer churning out react code but maybe?
I started programming on a zx80 and trs-80 clone at 11 years old, and have devoured new languages, methodologies, tricks and tips, computer science breakthroughs, and so-on throughout my career, but still do not have work currently.
If you want to go to school because you're interested, then that's cool. But to think you can make a living out of it when you're 30 years older than the tens of thousands of kids that you're competing against... I really don't think it's worth it unless you want to form your own startup that is medical-related.
If I had the money I could go hire a half dozen solid software engineers and at least 2 solid DevOps/SRE types today. I'm betting people in other fields could do the same.
And yet, good people remain unemployed and scared.
In the end, HR hiring team fails to recruit because in makes the process to expensive for candidates, and the CEOS hire more HR recruitment becasue they think the problem is the lack of people to hire. HR needs to justify the salary, and makes hiring more a pain in the ass, feeding the vicious cycle.
I miss the times where HR only responsabily was to process salary payment.
Though I don't completely agree but won't completely ignore.
I see this applies to tech as well.
When you start as junior you tinker with boilerplate code. everything seems magical. As you grow learn and becomes wiser, things what seemed magical before become logical
After 10 years, surface level saturates. You will start to dig deeper. Things will again start to become magical and then slowly fades into logical.
Then you go deeper and again process repeats.
More deeper you go, you will find the luxury to shake the surface level toys. Some innovation happens at surface level, but you are deep down still going.
There is not end line. You retire when you want to stop. Your choice!
But much more still to be explored! Humanity continues!
In short, As you grow, go deeper, become wiser, shake the status quo, innovate, repeat. Surface level people will Go gaga. But you don't react because you are still going deeper...
A potential resource is this Podcast/Site: https://www.itgetslateearly.com/ I fast forward some as the host has a chip on her shoulder but her guests have nuggets. I really need to work out feeding the podcast to an AI Agent to extract those tasty bits!
You can easily find an older person ranting against the idea of using full stack javascript, unaware of the V8 changes while still having some valid criticisms
But then wonder if their rejection is ageism, instead of the rant
just one example
Enterprise software is going nowhere but sideways for 2 decades already.
But yes, the velocity of new bullshit with dubious value that is consistently getting add on top of each other is just amazing.
By the way, I still haven't seen any single project get value out of SaaS auth (both auths) systems. Why the hell people use them?
Also, I had to check: "The key to driving your business forward? One powerful AI platform that keeps your most important assets on track, every decision on point, and your fleet of AI agents at peak performance. That’s Workday."
Well, people here still didn't manage to make LLMs do anything useful. That's despite a strong push from the top to use them, and many very smart people. They did manage to design a very promising tool that uses LLM in a way that uses its strengths and add a lot of value (that seems to be completely unparalleled - and we just invited the entire economic sector for a talk), but didn't manage to make it work well yet. So, our fleet of AI agents at peak performance...
Treating a person as part of a group is the problem.
And when you are trying to isolate one person out of many, like for a job hire, it's not easy to avoid mass-filtering to speed it up.
Yes, but it's efficient and effective in a large number of cases.
Those with no programming experience is a group. Those who just graduated a CS program is a group. Fresh bootcamp grads are a group. People with 5+ years of experience with your tech stack are a group.
Is there someone with no programming experience who would turn out to be great? Of course; none of us were born with programming experience, but most people are practical enough to not bat an eye when we use past experience as a proxy to quickly pre-filter the possible candidate pool.
Weird, it says there your wife did.
I did the rest, being developing, contacting companies and talking to over 40s.
I know it doesn't matter to the topic at had, but I actually went on and read all about your project, and that caught my attention. :)