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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

#181

Post by greggarious »

DrNuke wrote: post #38
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? Over 40 here. The most difficult part is human interaction. Youngsters are obviously well behind their own hype and have their right to try. Mature folks like me take things with a grain of salt and acknowledge hard work is only a part of the picture, often not the most important. From a technical point of view, the headless chickens thing is also common but, again,…

>youngsters have their right to believe they are Einstein, Feynman or Jobs.

or all three at once

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

#183

Post by scarface74 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #54
nomercy400 wrote: post #32

As somebody who does interviews for developers in a Java shop, a very blunt view of things: Any coding you've done more than five years ago isn't relevant anymore. I can't remember what I did five years ago. It is probably outdated, replaced or not in use any more. Looking back at my projects from five years ago, I would probably not agree with most of the code, as I've learned a lot of new things. I do care about yo…

> Any coding you've done more than five years ago isn't relevant anymore. I can't remember what I did five years ago. It is probably outdated, replaced or not in use any more. I tend to disagree. Not only a lot of five years old technology is still relevant today, but someone that showed great skills 5/10 years ago has still great potential today.

Any coding you've done more than five years ago isn't relevant anymore

I've been developing in .Net for 12 years. It's still relevant.

I started using Linq with C# in 2008 and using it with Sql Server. Now I'm using Linq with the Mongo driver.

JavaScript and Bootstrap are just as relevant today as it was 5 years ago. In 2007 if you knew Java or .Net you were marketable as an enterprise developer. In 2017, you are just as marketable.

The fundamentals don't change that much.

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

#184

Post by zengid »

asdfasdfasd333 wrote: post #179

This is much bigger problem than gender discrimination in tech. Until this is addressed, I won't take the latter seriously.

Discrimination is discrimination. If you're not going to stand up for others, don't expect anyone to stand up for you.

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

#185

Post by Can_Not »

nickjj wrote: post #154
adventurer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really have the opportunity to be discriminated against in the same way, so you probably don't really count.

Honestly I would say there's more chances of being discriminated against. Instead of potentially dealing with HR reps or developers behind closed doors people are consuming my content out in the open and judging every video / piece of content.

That might be bullying, but it's not employment discrimination.

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

#186

Post by zxcvvcxz »

allengeorge wrote: post #73

I suspect there are a couple of reasons - especially in the newer/startup space: * Salary. Older employees are more experienced, but, just as importantly, they've already job-hopped a bit, so their base is a lot higher. And they've probably a lot more personal financial responsibilities. All told, they're unlikely to go for the same salary as a new grad. * Interview process. Anecdotal experience, but, the interview p…

As an employer in the "newer/startup space", I have some thoughts on this:

> * Salary. Older employees are more experienced, but, just as importantly, they've already job-hopped a bit, so their base is a lot higher.

First of all, why does job hopping entitle you to a higher salary? A guy who's done 5 jobs of 2 years each, with one of them being most relevant to my position, vs. someone who's done 1 job of 10 years somewhere most relevant to my position is an easy choice. The latter will be more useful for my organization. Job hopping also seems negatively correlated to specialization, which IMO is your key differentiated value as a prospective employee.

Why should your career ADHD command a higher salary?

> And they've probably a lot more personal financial responsibilities. All told, they're unlikely to go for the same salary as a new grad.

Yeah, I can see this coming from a mile away and so I tend to not waste the time of people for whom this is the case. The easiest way for me to do this is being upfront about salary for the position.

> * Interview process. Anecdotal experience, but, the interview process is structured towards new grads. They've studied algorithms recently, so it's at their fingertips. Unless you've brushed up before interviewing you can look sloppy and unsure in comparison. This can be harder if you've an existing job and family commitments. (Note: I'm not saying you shouldn't study; just pointing out that this can happen.)

Fair.

> * It's hard to gauge experience. Simply because a person has been in the industry for 10 years doesn't mean that they're "more experienced".

True.

> * Finally, we devalue experience. A personal bugbear is hearing hiring managers say that they can train up a new grad to be a tech lead in about a year. Unless you've worked on a couple of largish projects - and seen your own designs evolve in response to requirements, I question that strategy. But, who knows - maybe I'm completely off-base there.

The factor here, roughly speaking, is IQ. Give me someone with higher raw intelligence and they'll often quickly get somewhere that someone with more experience has. Just existing and showing up for 10 years doesn't mean you're automatically better than all the 22-year-olds I have lined up for an interview.

---

I wanted to voice some unpopular opinions from the other side of this coin because it seems most people on HN resonate more with the "employee" rather than the "employer".

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

#187

Post by tiggybear »

curtis wrote: post #168

My last job search (in Seattle) took me months longer than I was expecting. This could be ageism at work (I'm 48), but I'm still inclined to think that there's a more mundane explanation: The recruitment and hiring process for software engineers has gone from crappy to damn near broken. If ageism is a significant problem right now, it's possible that it is primarily a completely unintended side-effect of how were doi…

Thank god we don't unionize (part of our salary might go to under qualified colleagues instead of under qualified executives...the horror).

My sister, a nurse, takes about a 20minutes-1hour phone call every time she needs a new position. That's it. Then she gets an answer. That is what being in an in-demand field with workers rights looks like (nurses tend to be (are all?) unionized). She also makes 6-figures in the bay area in her mid-20's with a bachelors from a no-name school.

But tech workers will shout down unions while it's currently feasible to make them. Unfortunately, when they finally realize they need them they will no longer have the leverage to unionize.

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

#188

Post by philsnow »

Can_Not wrote: post #157
JohnnyConatus wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said except for one thing: developer salaries later-on are not artificially kept down vs the value they create. The are artificially inflated when they are younger due to the scarcity of developers. This is why one can become a "Senior Developer" at 24 (such as I did) because the title is matched to the salary as opposed to the actual amount of experience it would take to be a "senior" any…

Is there an official definition chart for terms like junior, mid, senior? I keep hearing people sneer at the presumed miss-use of those terms as if everyone knew the official definitions. Last place I worked, senior was just the dev who's been there the longest.

These terms are often defined in terms of autonomy and scope: if you can look around and see what needs to be done, break it down into workable sub-units, wrangle resources somehow (big projects tend to need more than one person working on them), and get it done, that can mean that you're "senior".

I see people on various forums (fora?) asking what number of years of experience makes someone "senior". The most common answer I see is 5. It reminds me of this https://i.imgur.com/7sws9p8.jpg

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

#189

Post by allengeorge »

DavidWoof wrote: post #178
allengeorge wrote: post #73

I suspect there are a couple of reasons - especially in the newer/startup space: * Salary. Older employees are more experienced, but, just as importantly, they've already job-hopped a bit, so their base is a lot higher. And they've probably a lot more personal financial responsibilities. All told, they're unlikely to go for the same salary as a new grad. * Interview process. Anecdotal experience, but, the interview p…

All of those reasons sound reasonable, and if I were trying to come up with reasons in the abstract I'd probably come up with a list like that. 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 ver…

Please don’t take my points above as all-inclusive! I can imagine cases where individuals (for whatever reason) have an instinctive bias against older employees. That’s unfortunate, and it means they can lose out on excellent talent by evaluating people in terms of questionable generalizations instead of their specific circumstances.

The funny thing is...as the developed world’s population ages they’ll have to unlearn that bias.

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

#190

Post by fecak »

I recruited in tech for 20 years and now I write resumes, mostly for tech professionals. I generally start talking to my resume clients about ageism around 40 as well.

I may ask if we want to keep the oldest jobs on the resume (which tend to be irrelevant anyway) or to list graduation dates that reveal age. I go through a quick exercise with clients to show how old they are "on paper", the basic formula being that we assume you were ~22 when you graduated college (or if no grad date or college education is listed, we may assume you were between 20-22 when you started the first job on the resume). If we remove the oldest job(s) and delete graduation dates, we can often mask age a little bit if that is desired.

Many clients decide not to try masking age, as any company that might discriminate based on age isn't a place they would want to work. I respect that as well.

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