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Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

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Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#141

Post by FigBug »

oldboyFX wrote: post #33

I see all these articles about the average employee age at startups being 20-30, and how older developers face discrimination. Now this is 100% anecdotal, but I know a few 45+ year old developers and most of them are long-time corporate employees and are not really interested in the whole startup / bloggosphere / tech hype world. They have good stable jobs (think Perl, .NET, Java), and are mainly focused on their fam…

> Older developers of HN, what are your experiences?

I turned 40 this year, I haven't noticed any differences. I've been contracting since 2010 and I never meet most of my clients, I guess they could guess my age from the length of my experience. I specialize in Pro Audio / DSP which seems to be an older field, maybe because it's slower changing and experience is more important.

I think racial / gender discrimination is a bigger issue than age.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#142

Post by walshemj »

allengeorge wrote: post #80
dogruck wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of those points are actually age discriminatory. For example, why assume that an older person should earn more than a younger person? Instead, it's better to think about paying people in proportion to the value that they provide to the company. I understand that many startups simply do not have the cash required to pay a high base salary. But, that's what equity compensation is for.

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear: I'm not asking companies to pay older employees more. I'm simply pointing out that job-hopping and personal commitments make it likely that older employees will demand a higher salary, which smaller companies may be loath to give.

Tough just because your a small company doesn't excuse you from how the market works or laws on discrimination.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#143

Post by humanrebar »

wpietri wrote: post #129
humanrebar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to gauge experience I think this could be solved by coming up with a more common vocabulary of tech job titles. In medicine you have technicians, orderlies, surgeons, general practitioners, anesthesiologists, physician-scientists, nurses, physicians' assistants, teaching physicians, and so on. Not to mention all the hospital administrators. They're not all "medical engineers". They don't (at least not to…

Stability in titles requires stability in human labor. But our whole job is automation, meaning turning stable labor over to machines. So much of our work is defined by our current perspectives, our current constructed tools; those naturally change too. I think it will be quite a while before things in our field settle down, if they ever do. My dad made software for decades until he retired. My brother and I have bee…

I agree with all that. I think it's already happening, too. You can be a "test engineer" or work in "quality assurance" and get pigeonholed easily. But one person's pigeonhole is another person's dream 9-5 job. I don't see a harm in labelling the expectations that are already there.

I think there's wisdom in waiting for established roles before defining them. "Container engineer" is too specific or at least too early. But "Relational database administrator" (or something) has been around for decades and will be around for some time to come. Maybe the DB vendors and tools will change, but experience in data migrations and transactional thinking is valuable regardless.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#144

Post by walshemj »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #41
oldboyFX wrote: post #33

I see all these articles about the average employee age at startups being 20-30, and how older developers face discrimination. Now this is 100% anecdotal, but I know a few 45+ year old developers and most of them are long-time corporate employees and are not really interested in the whole startup / bloggosphere / tech hype world. They have good stable jobs (think Perl, .NET, Java), and are mainly focused on their fam…

Selection bias. The older tech workers that have survived the industry have done so in "safer" corporate environments. If startups have bias against older employees, they simply couldn't survive the industry there in general barring a few exceptions. It isn't well known that people become more conservative as they age actually, younger people tend to be more liberal, they aren't changing their ideologies much as they…

that statement "they simply couldn't survive the industry" is screamingly ageist do you hold similar views against females and BME candidates.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#145

Post by walshemj »

intellectronica wrote: post #60
eric_h wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age discrimination can also be salary discrimination. People with more experience rightfully require more in salary.

This is a view that actually sometimes prevents older people from managing it in market. Because of how fast technology moves, much of your experience from 10+ years ago isn't very relevant today, so if you expect a higher salary because of it you will be disappointed. It's important to be realistic and accept that if you've been working since your early 20s, you accumulate experience that might result in a higher sa…

sorry that's crap learning a new tech is not a problem for a competent developer having decades of experience means you have seen problems 20 years ago the experience of which is relevant eg I was doing map reduce in the 80's that experience would directly be applicable to day even though I was using Pl1/G then and would use Python or Java today

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#147

Post by dominotw »

psyc wrote: post #136
oldboyFX wrote: post #33

I see all these articles about the average employee age at startups being 20-30, and how older developers face discrimination. Now this is 100% anecdotal, but I know a few 45+ year old developers and most of them are long-time corporate employees and are not really interested in the whole startup / bloggosphere / tech hype world. They have good stable jobs (think Perl, .NET, Java), and are mainly focused on their fam…

I can't be sure yet, but I'm starting to be concerned. I turned 40 recently. My current job search has lasted about 5x longer than any previous job search. I've been turned down for nonsensical reasons, such as not having enough experience in a specific language that I have a lot of experience in. (That was an assertion by the interviewer, not the result of technical questioning.) I've been interviewed several times…

I was recently rejected by a big tech company for not knowing Java 8. I code in scala in my day job and haven't kept up with changes in java. My coding exercise language options were nodejs,java, python, I submitted solution java 7.

Interviewer said to my face( well..on the phone) that they won't be "moving forward" because I don't keep up with changes in technology and they are a 'fast moving' tech environment.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#148

Post by emerged »

d--b wrote: post #45

I'm 35 and I'm not worried AT ALL that I will be discriminated after I am 40. I think in a way we're the golden tech generation, we screwed our elders by discriminating against them when the industry was in disruption and now we're screwing the younger generation like in any other mature industry. I'm saying "we" as in "my generation", I don't feel I personally took a big part in any of it.

That's an interesting angle to look at this from. It may be less about age as a number, and more about how the generations are perceiving each other. I'm 36 and haven't even felt the beginning creep of age discrimination. I'll probably always be perceived as someone who was a teenager teaching himself how to code during the years when software was just beginning to catch fire. Our generation will likely continue to hire each other well into old age.

Re: Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

#149

Post by barkingtoad »

oldboyFX wrote: post #33

I see all these articles about the average employee age at startups being 20-30, and how older developers face discrimination. Now this is 100% anecdotal, but I know a few 45+ year old developers and most of them are long-time corporate employees and are not really interested in the whole startup / bloggosphere / tech hype world. They have good stable jobs (think Perl, .NET, Java), and are mainly focused on their fam…

Linux Engineer, 53. When my cow-orker lent me the book version of "No Country For Old Men" saying "Here, this is going around", I figured I might be in trouble. I was laid off in the middle of the bad times, could not find anything for years, and have been rebooting my career since then.

In my last interview, the recruiter said I was ruled out because I was "weak on nginx". The interviewer didn't ask about nginx, but you know, whatever.

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