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The Brutal Ageism of Tech

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Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#201

Post by bsder »

There are two perceived problems with hiring older programmers:

1) Older programmers won't put up with bullshit. They expect to have reasonable goals, be listened to, be compensated fairly, and have a reasonable schedule. They've been around the block enough to identify bullshit and will leave when it starts getting too high.

2) Older programmers really don't always understand the "cool" social crap that teenagers are into this year (for good reason--most of it is garbage). Unfortunately, most of what Silicon Valley is interested in is "cool" social crap so that they can get a big buzz and flip the company to Google or Facebook.

Funnily enough, companies that value that silly thing known as "profit" are quite happy to hire older programmers. It's just a function of Silicon Valley not believing in profit that is causing the ageism.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#202

Post by sulam »

The author of this piece contacted me and at least two other co-workers of mine who are identifiably over 40 asking us to comment on this subject. I told him I thought there is a simple mathematical reason why the industry skews young -- we are hiring as rapidly as we can in most cases. Of course, as is too common in journalism, his story was already built and he was only searching for confirmation of it.

What's the distribution of software engineers by decade across a 40-year range? Is anyone here willing to argue that it's completely flat? Of course not, there are far more SWEs in their 20's than in their 60's.

I have never once had my age be an issue at work or in an interview. My resume clearly states my work experience, and goes back 20 years. I don't have to hide anything, and I don't expect I ever will. Am I willing to believe there are employers out there who try to discriminate by age? Of course there are, just like there are fraudulent companies you could work for, sexist assholes you could work for, etc.

None of these matter because you don't have to work for these people. As a competent engineer your skills are in demand, and you get to pick where you'd like to work. If you aren't a competent engineer, no amount of plastic surgery will get you hired, and please stop using your age as an excuse.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#203

Post by kybernetikos »

aortega wrote: post #139
Retric wrote: post #8

The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30. Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's…

Not so much. I'm 35, started programming at about 10 in my TI99-4A, typing games from magazines, etc. the usual stuff. No way a 40 year old guy have more experience than me in general programming, unless he was working at Microsoft or IBM at that date, and surely they are about less than 10000 of those guys in the world. Of course there are 40 year olds that may have way more experience than me in a specific language…

30 years ago, computers were actually pretty common. The school I went to had two rooms full of computers and were teaching programming to every child as part of the maths lessons. Software was being talked about everywhere.

I've heard a number of these comments recently drastically underestimating how long computers have been around.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#204

Post by hyperbovine »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #166
nknighthb wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

61 and climbing, but that number doesn't tell you much by itself. If you spend your career in SV as a reasonably in-demand developer and have no major life catastrophes, you might easily retire 5-10 years earlier with good money management. Partly depends on what kind of lifestyle you want in retirement, and where you plan to spend that retirement.

Live below your means, save the majority of your income, move someone nice and cheap (Central/South America, parts of Asia).

Come talk to me when you hit 50 :-) The "retire to Latin America" trope seems to be extremely popular amongst thirtysomethings who haven't necessarily considered what it would be like to suddenly put thousands of miles between yourself and aging parents, family, children, whatever friends you still have, etc. It just ain't that simple.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#205

Post by nknighthb »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #166
nknighthb wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

61 and climbing, but that number doesn't tell you much by itself. If you spend your career in SV as a reasonably in-demand developer and have no major life catastrophes, you might easily retire 5-10 years earlier with good money management. Partly depends on what kind of lifestyle you want in retirement, and where you plan to spend that retirement.

Live below your means, save the majority of your income, move someone nice and cheap (Central/South America, parts of Asia).

You don't have to leave the US to live somewhere a lot cheaper than SV or NYC. You don't even have to switch states.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#206

Post by saraid216 »

pmiller2 wrote: post #198
bad_user wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who do you think is going to be more productive? Who's going to put in 16 hour days at crunch time? I'm 31 years old, have been doing lots of crunch times of 16 hour days that lasted for weeks and I really hate this expectation and mentality. I'm more productive than ever, even though I started saying NO to overtime, because fuck you. Yet, I've worked with plenty of beginners and when I say beginners, I'm talking a…

I'd like to know where you work that you can say "fuck you" to overtime during crunch period. Because, you know, I might like to work there. Seriously, contact me. :) My email is in my profile.

This is what I guessed before I started following profile data traces:

* bad_user would be based "anywhere outside of Silicon Valley".

* You wouldn't be.

I was right. (bad_user is in Romania, according to his LinkedIn.)

That's not to say it's easy to blow off demands of overtime outside of Silicon Valley either (I've heard horror stories about game companies), but the tech companies that you can do it at seem much more common.

It may simply be founder/executive age. When the CEO has to go coach Little League, he loses any moral high ground he had for saying you can't go play with your kids.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#207

Post by Tohhou »

bsder wrote: post #201

There are two perceived problems with hiring older programmers: 1) Older programmers won't put up with bullshit. They expect to have reasonable goals, be listened to, be compensated fairly, and have a reasonable schedule. They've been around the block enough to identify bullshit and will leave when it starts getting too high. 2) Older programmers really don't always understand the "cool" social crap that teenagers ar…

Then the "problem" should be self correcting assuming the companies which make money survive (which they do), and those which don't focus on making money evaporate (which they do). Or maybe it's not a "problem" if only some companies are doing it, because they value things which the older people don't have interest in, and so the older people self select themselves out by choice.

Is there a list of companies which value profit so the people who complain about the "problem" (from companies most likely to not be around after too long) can go work for them?

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#208

Post by untilHellbanned »

michaelochurch wrote: post #188

The ageism culture doesn't come from programmers. Young engineers (I am one) venerate the badass older programmers. It comes from the business people who've colonized us. Business is full of degenerate narcissists, and the one thing narcissists can't stand is age, though it awaits us all. Because we've been colonized in recent years-- the R&D culture that used to characterize programming has been replaced by closed a…

chickenhawking is spot on.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#209

Post by bad_user »

saraid216 wrote: post #206
pmiller2 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know where you work that you can say "fuck you" to overtime during crunch period. Because, you know, I might like to work there. Seriously, contact me. :) My email is in my profile.

This is what I guessed before I started following profile data traces: * bad_user would be based "anywhere outside of Silicon Valley". * You wouldn't be. I was right. (bad_user is in Romania, according to his LinkedIn.) That's not to say it's easy to blow off demands of overtime outside of Silicon Valley either (I've heard horror stories about game companies), but the tech companies that you can do it at seem much mo…

Yes, I'm in Romania, but I've been working exclusively with Sillicon Valley companies and have been working within startup environments for the last 5 years.

Being able to say NO is not a matter of where you work, but rather one of actually saying NO. It may not work well of course, your managers and peers might not like that, the secret being to not be at the bottom of the chain - as in, you have to be reliable and capable and work on hard enough problems as to not be easily replaceable. If you can prove that you're as good or even better than somebody doing overwork (which is entirely possible because of the reasons I outlined), then nobody will mind, as in the end it's all about the value / artifacts produced, not about the lines of code written and not about the number of hours worked.

And in my oppinion, if you can't produce value while working regular hours, then working overtime won't help anyway. And if you can't produce value with overtime, do you think your boss will keep you hired just because you're a "hard worker"? The market really doesn't care about that and your boss/manager would be an incompetent if he thinks otherwise.

Speaking of market forces, it's a mistery to me how you Sillicon Valley based developers, that live at the horse's mouth so to speak, can't easily switch to jobs that you like in case you're working in environments full of jerks. I mean, even if everybody expects you to work overtime or to do things you don't like, you can always build your own startup for Christ's sake, something that I (being outside of the US) can't easily do.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#210

Post by hrktb »

Tohhou wrote: post #207
bsder wrote: post #201

There are two perceived problems with hiring older programmers: 1) Older programmers won't put up with bullshit. They expect to have reasonable goals, be listened to, be compensated fairly, and have a reasonable schedule. They've been around the block enough to identify bullshit and will leave when it starts getting too high. 2) Older programmers really don't always understand the "cool" social crap that teenagers ar…

Then the "problem" should be self correcting assuming the companies which make money survive (which they do), and those which don't focus on making money evaporate (which they do). Or maybe it's not a "problem" if only some companies are doing it, because they value things which the older people don't have interest in, and so the older people self select themselves out by choice. Is there a list of companies which va…

> Then the "problem" should be self correcting assuming the companies which make money survive (which they do)

This derails in reality because you'll have companies making money but bullshitting their employees to save most of it. You don't need the best of the best programmers to have a shippable product, and even if such a company is only mildly profitable, keeping the profits at the top makes it a good place for stake holders.

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