In my experience, it depends on the company. At Facebook, 90% of my peers were younger than me (I was 30). At LinkedIn, right now, many of my peers are around the same age or older than me (I'm 35). I imagine in places like Microsoft or Oracle there are plenty of 40/50+ engineers who aren't worried about being kicked out.
Is 40 the New 60?
201–210 of 381 posts
Re: Is 40 the New 60?
#202Having lived in the tech software world from the late 1970s through 2012 I can say that age discrimination has always been a part of the software world but it is survivable. See other comments in this thread. I remember chats with my older co-workers about where are all the older programmers? I think part is discrimination but another part is that people burn out and go do something else. I have seen this in even the very best programmers I have worked with. By the way, this is not new to software. A common practice in the aerospace industry was to bid low for a contract and when you got it fire all the old guys and replace them with cheaper young guys.
Re: Is 40 the New 60?
#20340 is not the new 60. Not even close. At 40, I've done some of the best work I've ever done and my pay has been better than ever. I'm 52 now and the trend has only gotten better. Why? Its because at 40, I had a much deeper understanding of the tech, I understood of the whole business process and I had the maturity to deal with people in a productive way. You won't find all of those in a 25 year old developer. The onl…
"I worked with someone my age who only strong skills are a large enterprise storage system. He is a dinosaur and his future is limited. That's not his age, its the way he chose to build is CV." I suppose everything is a choice. I have worked on tech that doesn't have a future because the company needs someone to fill those shitty positions. I naively believed the company when they talked about them taking care of emp…
Yea, don't do that. Being able to sell your story to other tech people why your past projects are fun, interesting and maybe hard makes life so much easier and for the most part makes working more fun too. That doesn't mean every moment has to be amazing and developing but if it rarely is you're painting yourself into a corner.
Re: Is 40 the New 60?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you say so. But just as you doubt the vigor of the “somewhat pessimistic” candidate (in your words, you didn’t say they were toxic), others will doubt the sincerity of your overwhelming optimism. So is life.
When we discuss these types of candidates, that is always the tone of the discussion. It's good to discuss the pluses and minuses of an approach, we encourage this in our architecture section of the interview loop and during the initial screen when discussing line items in the resumes. It's having a general negative attitude... bad mouthing past employers, being negative to a tech stack (and literally not couching it…
You’ll find a lack of social intelligence in the entire age range, but younger candidates seem to get more of a pass than older ones (or perhaps because the senior candidates have more rope to hang themselves with). Over negativity about past employers is indeed a warning sign (though some negativity is fine, like if you ask the question “what did you dislike about your past employer? “), but pessimism in small quantities shouldn’t be taken as an automatic negative. I would definitely be suspicious if all the opinions a senior candidate had were positive. If they can’t list the bad as well as good about some tech, they probably don’t really understand it.
Re: Is 40 the New 60?
#205Agism isn't about cognitive ability.
Agism isn't about younger developers somehow being better than older ones.
Agism is about taking advantage of younger workers.
Agism is about discrimination.
Agism is about money.
Re: Is 40 the New 60?
#206The author case is somewhat special because he is more accomplished that the average senior dev.
But in the general case the problem occurs because software development is seen by those in power as factory/production work. For most companies we are expensive factory workers. And factory workers rarely get hired past 35 and rarely survive past that age unless there is an union involved.
My experience is in an offshore market in South America. I guess in other countries the situation is different.
Re: Is 40 the New 60?
#207It's because they know you won't be as gullible. It's that simple.
Re: Is 40 the New 60?
#208I don't doubt this, and I'm truly sympathetic to the author's experience. However it doesn't match my experiences. At this age I find I'm getting better and better job offers. Too senior has never been a problem, these offers have been at principal or senior staff levels. I don't think I've been managing my career particularly well (15 years in and 5 jobs), and I've avoided management as best I can, but it doesn't se…
Why is one job a problem, as long as that job keeps you up-to-date with the current state of the art?
But what is state of the art? My interviews since 2013 have let me know that Perl is not any good as a language. Perl is bad and programmers who use Perl are bad. If I describe my experience in the industry from 1993 to 2003 which involved lots of Perl in the abstract then it often sounds good in interviews, but if I describe that experience as having been steeped in Perl then it is a huge, useless turn off.
The problem is that the state of the art in programming is whatever is shiny and new and often unnecessary. Lots of employers are hiring for Kubernetes experience when they absolutely do not have enough demand for their services to justify messing around with Kubernetes, but it doesn't matter. They also don't have the patience and depth to bother listening to some old person explain in detail why Kubernetes is the wrong tool for them and a waste of resources.
Corporate programming has become all about idols and mystery such that Perl has been cast out and Kubernetes is pure awesome no matter how irrelevant. As long as some old person can suck up to confused young people about what counts as cool code and frameworks then they might count as up to date with the current state of the art. And with this the unfortunate reality emerges that for older and experienced contributors starting a company is becoming as easy or easier than actually getting a job.
Re: Is 40 the New 60?
#209Don't even get me started (just take a shufti through my posting history on this very site. You'll see this is a subject that has my attention) . > while the experience that comes with age is valued in fields like music, it counts against you in tech. Yup. The Jurassic-scale disasters that are becoming increasingly common, these days, are evidence of unsteady hands at the wheel. I'm not saying that older folks are be…
You post this all the time. You did 27 years at one single company, as you point out so proudly and often. After a stint like that, anyone would be unhireable. It isn't your age, as so many others on this chain have pointed out. You didn't build your CV to be attractive to new employers at all , and when eventually that became relevant again, you were out of luck. I read your posts whenever I see them, it's obvious y…
> After a stint like that, anyone would be unhireable
I've been with my current employer for 4 years, and all going well I'll stay with them until retirement (I'm almost 50 now, so another 15-odd years). The pay is good (for where I live), the work is varied and mostly interesting. It'd seem a bit crazy to jump ship just in case they take against me at some point in the future, no?
Re: Is 40 the New 60?
#210Personal anecdote: I'm 29, and while I've spent most of my 20s striving to look older (via style, haircut, facial hair, etc)...something flipped this year and I can't help but want to look younger. Could be because my first kid was born this year, could be because I'm approaching that mythical "30" so many young folks dread, or it could be unspoken age-related pressures about the industry we work in. I'm not sure, but it's funny how obvious and suddenly it happened.