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No Country for Old Developers

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Re: No Country for Old Developers

#51

Post by tharne »

duxup wrote: post #42
yodsanklai wrote: post #37

I just got a SWE job offer at a FAANG and I'm in my mid-forties. I took the exact same interviews as anybody else. They've also been contacted me regularly for the last three years. My age isn't written on my resume, but they can easily infer I'm in my forties. My guess is that recruiters don't care as long as they think you have a chance passing the coding interviews. I realize that older developers are slightly unc…

>I realize that older developers are slightly uncommon, I wonder if that is really the case or not.

It is not. I think the idea comes from the fact that people have this idea of "developers" as people who work for startups or FAANG companies. Most developers work in unsexy industries and in boring places. Insurance companies in Indiana, a hospital Utah, an manufacturing plant outside of Houston, etc.

There's also the fact that middle-aged developers raising families don't have time to blog and be "influencers" on social media.

That being said, ageism is definitely an issue in the industry. A lot of it has to do with so many companies having an "FTE" based approach to viewing things. Some moron with an MBA and no actual real-world skills sees a 55 year-old developer and thinks, "I can replace him with two new grads and still have money left over".

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#52

Post by dennis_jeeves »

necheffa wrote: post #39
bartread wrote: post #17

"Young people are just smarter." - Mark Zuckerberg Spoken like a naive individual without much in the way of life experience. Keep taking the pills, Mark. Onto more positive points, whilst I have no doubt that ageism exists in our industry, there are also companies with a more enlightened view of age and experience. I tend to prefer hiring people with more experience, in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, when I can. I particu…

> I tend to prefer hiring people with more experience, in their 30s, 40s, and 50s > I particularly like those who've worked for a variety of different companies during their careers I hope you see how these are two very conflicting ideals. Are you assuming that other companies will train your staff for you?

>Are you assuming that other companies will train your staff for you?

Hmm... you are talking it out of context...

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#53

Post by matz1 »

_qulr wrote: post #6

"But skills can beat ageism" I dislike this typical response, because it comes close to blaming the victim, and indeed many people do blame the victims of ageism, attributing stereotypical attitudes to them. Imagine claiming "skills can beat racism" or "skills can beat sexism". No, nothing beats discrimination, because it was never based on the existence or absence of skills. Rather, prejudiced people take one look a…

Sure you can dislike all you want but what its gonna do?

Which is more practical and useful: Change people perception or skills ?

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#54

Post by barry-cotter »

mojuba wrote: post #44

The most dreadful thing in this industry to me is this: how many years of experience do you have? 1 2 3 4 5+ That's it. Fin. More than 5 doesn't matter. The truth is that the difference between 30 years and 5 years of experience in a particular field can be as big as between 1 and 5. I just want to ask, does anyone in the industry really care about this fact? Does it matter to any company out there? Have you ever see…

Nobody really needs someone with 30 years of general experience because each such person is unique, impossible to completely replace. If you have the level of expertise that comes from real understanding of six different fields attained from five years of good work in them you might literally be the only person with that combination of skills. There are definitely under a 1,000 of you. If you have 30 years of experience but maybe five of real learning then you’re presumably competent but you’re not super special, just competent and known to be competent. After 30 years in the same field you could be one of those people with serious deep expertise. Those people are valuable but the market is thin. You need to make your skills known so work finds you through your network, or you need to become a consultant in spirit if not fact and sell. Loudly trumpet your expertise.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#55

Post by orange_tee »

Is ageism a thing or is it just the fact that in every industry there is a push to move up the ladder? You are just not supposed to be doing grunt work at 50. This is true of all professions. People below you don't want you to be occupying their spot, and people above you have a hard time with a guy who is senior to them in age and experience.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#56

Post by unishark »

watwut wrote: post #43
unishark wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just want to rant against SV, I totally agree. It's certainly not fair, because it basically says you have to "work twice as hard" as they say. But the statement is factually correct. While it would certainly be preferable for society to be the one to change and such that your ageism problem goes away. In the meantime, merit matters, and usable advice for an individual to deal with this problem is by building…

> It's certainly not fair, because it basically says you have to "work twice as hard" as they say. But the statement is factually correct. It assumes that everyone is lazying around basically. Because of people are not lazying around, no, you can not just work twice as hard. Because you are already working hard, exactly as your competitors do. No people can't double their hard work every time they are treated unfairl…

"Hard work" is ultimately just a simple metaphor. I would characterize the advice here as maneuvering into a niche in your field with the highest demand for labor and with less competition (i.e. the niche using the most up-to-date technologies).

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#57

Post by sylvain_kerkour »

Young people are mainly more easily influenced.

It's far easier to convince a young person without a family nor passion in life to work for 12 hours a day for little money rather than experienced people.

It's also far easier to sell hyped, useless technological solutions to young, non-experienced people who don't understand the problem to solve.

I say this as a young developer who took too much time to recover from the marketing hype maintained by money seeking vendors.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#58

Post by notacoward »

Like other "isms" ageism rarely announces itself as such. Instead it cloaks itself in other forms of bias that "just happen" to be correlated with age. For example, oncall requirements and late meetings/offsites are primarily burdensome to those with families, but that's disproportionately older workers. Open offices are less endurable for older workers because of otherwise-neutral changes in hearing and concentration. And so on.

An even more subtle form of ageism is discrimination against certain technical/process habits that are correlated with when one entered the industry and therefore with age. For example, older engineers are more likely to believe in thinking through problems before starting to code, but in a "move fast" culture that's considered outdated. Older developers are likely to be more conservative when estimating technical difficulty or time to completion, which gets interpreted as unwillingness to commit (especially compared to younger developers who often wildly overcommit and suffer no consequence). Older workers are more likely to push back against corporate happy-talk because they've heard it all before and it never amounted to anything, but that can be interpreted as disloyalty or a "culture fit" problem.

Ageism is not one big obvious thing; it's a collection of small subtle things. Bit by bit by bit, these things nibble away at older workers' individual productivity and collaborative opportunities. Many overcome it. I did OK for myself in three years when I was 20+ years older than the median for the two groups I was in at a FAANG. But just because a problem is overcome doesn't mean it's not a problem.

Re: No Country for Old Developers

#59

Post by marstall »

rossdavidh wrote: post #45

I started coding professionally in my mid-30's. I am in my early 50's. If I have ever been discriminated against because of my age, I am not aware of it, and don't care because I've always found work. Now, I should mention that I did switch a few years back to doing consulting/temporary positions, although sometimes these "temporary" positions last over a year. This means two things: 1) I buy my own healthcare insura…

yes, same here. my first SWE job was at 26, now 52 and my career has never felt more stable in terms of my ability to get another good job if my current one fell through. i love what i do and have a strong motivation to earn, so I have always made an effort to stay current, and that's translated to continually being in demand. I feel confident I'll be be able ride it out as long as I need to, if my health and the economy hold up!
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