Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study

Why set these two things at odds?

It’s hard to imagine a better way to avoid having large numbers of destitute old people to worry about than finding a way to enable them to take care of themeselves. That is, providing opportunities for employment. If that makes you uncomfortable, consider the alternatives before you reject it... e.g., higher taxes — perhaps much higher, depending on demographic trends — to pay for warehousing indigent old people Naturally, budget pressures will make it debatable whether these warehouses are actually humane, so you’ll have that to deal with as well. (You may think twice about exactly how hard your standard are once you realize you’ll be entering the same system.)

By the way, if you want to be scientific you won’t want to draw strong conclusions about employing old people from the fact that fluid intelligence begins to decline fairly early in adulthood. First, fluid intelligence is just one component of general intelligence in that model. The other component increases or is basically flat up to retirement age. Second, these measures of intelligence are not that great for predicting job performance in general much less for the small overall decline associated with aging. Here’s some reading if you’re inclined to dig into that a bit [1]. Also, keep in mind an employer isn’t choosing from a random selection of people, where the weak effects of age-related IQ differences might nudge you between two otherwise equivalent prospective hires. They are choosing between a group of carefully selected, screened, interviewed, tested candidates with a career of experience (however long that is for each individual). To make age itself a significant factor in a hiring decision is to believe you are profoundly incompetent at hiring since you must believe your other information gathering techniques are pretty much worthless.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/

Can anyone share their two cents and pros/cons of being an EM vs IC? Any regrets?

But as a programmer in his 50s, when I have personally encountered age discrimination, it's been instant. It wasn't just a thumb on the scale or issues with disparate impact, it was an obvious and clear reaction the moment I walked in the door. It's always stunning when a very pleasant and productive phone conversation becomes immediately hostile when somebody sees my face.

On the other hand, those moments have relatively been rare, and this industry is currently so competitive that they register as "I dodged that bullet" rather than anything truly harmful, although it's definitely been enough for me to see the words "culture fit" as having the definition "we practice illegal discrimination".

BTW, whenever these articles show up on HN we always seem to assume that "tech worker" means developer, but it really refers to everybody: support, manager, tester, etc. If you're a developer, there's tons of ways to keep your skills strong. But the support person who's been keeping a Sybase instance running for the last 20 years or who maintains some spaghetti netware system doesn't necessarily have any marketable skills. There's a lot of people whose skillset is essentially "I've been here a long time".