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The Brutal Ageism of Tech

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Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#211

Post by jroseattle »

I've been hiring for our engineering team recently, and for us ageism is a very real thing that we try to combat. But it's not what one might expect. We're building a team of experienced engineers, and experience is key. Zuckerberg made his comment in 2007, but I bet he has highly refined his thinking since then.

We look at engineer hiring to determine what's valuable, and what's teachable. Do we want our engineers to be current? Yes, but only reasonably so. Anyone who has been around long enough will recognize that most currently popular technologies in use as tools of the trade are simply iterations on ideas that have existed for a long time. Any individual who thinks we're in the dawn of some amazing age where the tools are only understood by a certain generation is, for lack of a better word, foolish.

So, for us being current is really just status at a point-in-time. It's entirely teachable (or better yet, learnable.) But what's valuable? Understanding your trade is important to us, but having real experiences under your belt is super-critical.

Have you ever run a large-scale operation where your code was mission-critical? That's important to us. Ever been responsible for deployment that required zero downtime? That's important. Ever had to ship code and the difference between success and failure meant revenue and jobs? That's important. Ever actually done more than one thing besides {web/mobile/admin/etc.}? That's important.

So, we try to combat ageism by ensuring we give young folks a chance. Not everyone gets that opportunity, but we do so sparingly when we feel such an investment is worth our time, money and effort.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#212

Post by elohesra »

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…

I'd check wealthy corporations by this logic, and check whether the average age of programming staff is higher than in SV.

It would certainly match up with my experience in London, where it seemed that a lot of the programmers over the age of 30 were working for large, established finance companies. The age of programmers around the 'Silicon Roundabout' startups tends to skew a lot closer to mid 20s.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#213

Post by dasil003 »

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…

I'm 35 and I was doing OOP via HyperTalk and AppleSoft BASIC with a dose of 65C816 assembler before you picked up your calculator. Also, TIs were toys compared to HPs.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#214

Post by makomk »

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…

It's not going to be self-correcting because - at least for startups - the VC companies providing the funds also believe that older programmers are no good, and companies aren't going to survive very well if they run out of funding. Plus, once companies get past the VC stage, this is likely to be deeply embedded in corporate culture and they'll be at the point where they're established enough that they can do worse than the competition and still succeed.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#215

Post by hartator »

I am hearing a lot of stories about why youngster are overrated but not really a lot the other way around.

Maybe it's an unpopular opinion here.

In reality, young people are less paid than older counterparts in almost every economic sectors for the same skills. I mean that'a known truth! Silicon valley is the opposite? Good for the them.

I think there is 2 strong biases against older founders that might explain the situation:

1) The man is not a programmer and don't have a feeling for high tech stuff. I know founders here in Paris in their forties. They are starting web startups while not even knowing how to connect to wifi! But because they are old and have connections, they get funding! You are telling me in the valley it is the exact opposite? It seems just fair to me!

2) The man is a programmer and a good one. In their forties, you might expect him to make something like 350k and have a good title like CTO or lead developer. Why he will risk everything to start a new company? I can understand why people feels it's odd. Maybe there is a 1:20 odds to make it so he must aim for at least $7m to make any financial sense to him. Or maybe he is not a good programmer.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#216

Post by arethuza »

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…

"My point is that if computer tech is only 30 year old"

I'd be really interested as to how you get that figure...

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#217

Post by yeukhon »

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…

What is this social crap we are talking about? Are you referring to social network applications?

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#218

Post by collyw »

pistle wrote: post #75
zomgbbq wrote: post #55

I'm a 40+ engineer in the NYC metro area and I've never felt more in-demand in my life! I think it boils down to a simple idea: computer-science is a dynamic field and THE FUN PART is that you need to always be learning. There are still some colleagues my age who still wax about the days of writing JCL for their mainframe jobs and never evolved past the 80's and perhaps they gave a bad name for others who built on th…

It's never easier to blitz through interviews and ramp on new tech than if you've seen most/all of it before. We're just figuring out where the old abstractions land and the syntactic sugar has made life easier. There is a massive personality issue at play. If you love this stuff, you don't let new stuff pass you by and end up being a specialist on the dead end. You're constantly sharpening the sword... because you l…

Depends on the interview. I would not do well in algorithmic questions these days, because I know better than to write my own. I was good a that stuff at University, but I have never had the need to implement a linked list or hash table since.

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#219

Post by skrebbel »

Anecdotal: I'm a part-time CTO (long story) of a startup. I'm 30 myself. We hired 6 engineers in total up until now: three interns in their twenties, who're very smart and motivated but also inexperienced; two programmers with a few years of professional experience who can get to real decent (well written, unit tested, etc) code on the first go; and 1 guy of over 40.

When hiring, I was very skeptical of the guy over 40. His CV showed that he had spent most of his time building boring information systems for government agencies. This did not feel cool and startuppy at all. Also, he's gray-haired and he looks a bit dorky. We really liked him in person though, and he seemed to know what he was talking about, so we hired him anyway.

Only a few weeks later, I was already certain that he was the best hire we made up until now. Hypothetically, when forced, I would fire any two other team members to be able to keep him on the team (and he's on only half weeks). He's experienced, very much down to business, he cuts through the crap and through technical fads, and currently ensures that we're building the most lean and simple backend that I've ever seen. In a programming language that he's never seen before, and with a database engine that he's never used before.

For me, the general takeaway was that the wisdom to "not only hire copies of yourself" is very true indeed. More specifically, "older" guys (for tech industry standards) often have a lot more fundamental skills to bring to the table than perfect command of this year's technologie du jour.

Hire older people!

Re: The Brutal Ageism of Tech

#220

Post by bowlofpetunias »

tl;dr: immature companies have immature staffing policies.

It's not even remarkable, and may have nothing to do with ageism, although that will be the effective result if it concerns large parts of an industry. Just like the sexism and racism of tech, it's mostly about hiring policies mirroring the identity of the companies and the people who founded them.

It doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed as a serious issue, because it hampers the industry and is detrimental to society, but in the long run, those companies will adapt or die.

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