Ask HN: Why there are few older people and women in tech?

Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM, Oracle have lots of olders and women.

Maybe the hiptech should think on why that is.

At several points during a typical engineer's career, he/she will be offered the "opportunity" to move into a less-technical role; for example, engineering management, product management, or sales. These transfers, even if intended to be temporary, nearly always turn out to be one-way: after a couple of years away from hard development, the engineer finds that his/her skills have grown soft, and that technology has advanced to the point where it's difficult to catch up. So the older that an engineer is, the greater the probability that he/she has fallen into one of these non-technical career sinks.

Never been a woman, but I've been an older programmer for about 20 years now, so I can only speak to the kinds of things I've faced. Yeah, anecdotes are not evidence, yada-yada, take my words for what they are worth.

Programmers are not just expensive, they are damn expensive, and that goes double for experienced programmers. If you have to lay off programmers, would you rather lay off 1 older programmer, or 2 younger programmers?

So how is an older programmer supposed to demonstrate that his experience justifies his higher salary? We've talked in other threads about how hard it is to measure programmer productivity. It takes a very talented management chain to make the right call. But any idiot can compare two salaries and see which one is the largest.

If you are in this biz long enough, you are going to find yourself trying to explain to a manager with 5 years experience what it took you 20 years of hard experience to learn, and they are just not going to get it.

It’s one of those things you really have no control over. You just argue as persuasively as you can, but end of the day, your boss gets the final decision, and gets to judge your performance. When their brilliant plan fails, they are going to blame you—-not necessarily out of any malice, but just because they are in no epistemic position to realize what just happened.

I actually have a lot of sympathy for management. If I make a mistake as a programmer, it’s just a bug fix and a new unit test. If they make a mistake, someone’s whole life is plunged into crisis. The stakes are way higher AND it’s way harder to make the right call.