I'm a grey beard who applied to a company specifically advertising for young developers. Got the job without mentioning my vintage. That was six years ago and they still haven't seen my face. I waited a while to gently break the news to them. If you're a technological senior citizen remote work is your friend.
Heh, I applied for and landed a position on the SRE team of a youngish startup that is almost entirely remote. I'm 55 and there is one other guy in his 40's I think who works out of Northern Cal. Other than him I'm 20 years older than everyone else and it's been a blast. We recently did a week-long retreat and I had a truly good time, which surprised me. Really the only thing I can say after 20 years in the business is you just never know. I got lucky this time around and fell in with a group of people who are perfect for me.
Ah, "Grey beard". The term Microsoft used to separate the old from the young at a conference when they first introduced the .NET framework. Classic "old bad, good new" sales.
As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc."
Yes I remember. Because it was yesterday just before I came to your conference!
I still went home and started learning what the hell XML was though. =(
> you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc.
I remember submitting my BASIC program on IBM punch cards. Using a card punch machine taught one to not make typos. You youngsters with your backspace keys!
Does anyone else remember using a hard-copy terminal? It's hard to even think about how I would edit, compile, debug and run programs where everything you typed or was echoed back, including passwords, was printed out on a paper roll. Want to look at your command-history? just grab the paper and look. Of course there was no fancy vi screen-oriented editor. We had ed and liked it!
We had a teletype machine at my school in 1980 connected to the local authority mainframe. There was nearly always a queue to type your own program but you could write it out on a sheet of paper (one character per box) and get a printout of somebody who had typed it in for you. When they made a mistake your program didn't run and you had to send it again the next week.
I certainly do. I found even punch cards preferable. The awkwardness of the input method meant that I stayed away from tech for almost 15 years after the first quarter of my freshman year in college.
I'm actually not kidding. My first programs were done on punchcards back in 1974 or 1975. I then moved on to ASR-33s (barf), DECWriters (much better) and then ADM-3A glass terminals (heaven - a working backspace!).
Using a text editor today is not much different than an ADM-3A, it just has more rows and columns on it and the font is slightly, but not much, nicer. (Why do the console fonts suck these days? Jeez)
Edit: the first screen editor I had ran on an ADM-3A and was a TECO macro. I think TECO was the first "tty noise" programming language.
WebForms can die in a fire, and thankfully has, for the most part, but WinForms is still plenty good enough for cranking out quick and dirty tools. Maybe I'm old, or it's just because I started out in high school doing VB6 forms applications, but I still prefer it unless I have a good reason, over WPF.
WinForms is also a pretty thin layer over Win32 controls, as well, so if you have to switch between .Net and native C/C++ Windows dev, it's less of a context switch.
WebForms changed the game. ASP was a sub-subset of VB, but WebForms with C# made websites full-scale eventful and stateful programs for the first time. I had never felt such power and freedom programming for the web.
Yes, some people would put humongous data structures in view state, and yes, more-better solutions have arisen, but WebForms deserves your respect!
>> I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms.
>> And I am relatively young.
I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who worked on WinForms and never used MFC or ATL or wrote C code to the Win16/32 API :).
Hm, depends on the business, I guess. Because from my experience, most business algorithms are proprietary and don’t have proper specifications. You can’t just use them somewhere else. You have to recreate them from scratch.
Only roughly half the world believes in SP's. The other half (like me) believes that writing even the barest of hints of logic into SP's is a serious crime.
So you'd rather write the same logic in every app, and trust that every developer of every app does the same and gets it identical? Good for keeping busy I suppose but if I were your manager I wouldn't pay you for it.
Enforcement is, uh, spotty. But the regulatory environment is enough to give applicants an advantage in this situation. Interviewers know they're ignorant of complex shifting rules, so are afraid to ask anything personal that isn't also spinnably vague.
Easy. Ask questions that only someone who has recently revised for exams would know. No-one enforcing this has any idea that coding a red-black tree from scratch on a whiteboard isn't something that any working programmer actually does...
Generally speaking, there's nobody out there proactively enforcing antidiscrimination laws. The enforcement pathway is reactive. You get penalized for discrimination (in theory) when someone you've discriminated against brings legal action against you.
In this case, someone would have to sue them. For instance, an older developer who interviews, believes he or she is being discriminated against on the basis of age, and uses the advertisement as further evidence in the complaint.
Sadly, there was an article a while back specifically about tech workers doing just that. Might want to lighten up on down voting given the truth of the statement.
how do you work for someone without them knowing your age? Do you keep that out of your CV? How about credentials and signing your contact? Seems very strange to me.
I amputated my birth year, education and about 20 years of experience from my CV. Health insurance paperwork went directly to the broker. This is an outfit that hires by test and interview and cares not about aught else. Turns out they're not that rare.
Your age or birth date probably shouldn't be on your CV. Unless you think it's relevant to the job somehow, but it probably isn't.
Not only should it not matter, but it's illegal for employers to ask about it or consider it in their hiring decision, so having it right there on your CV puts them in a bit of a tight spot. I think some recruiters will actually remove that type of thing before forwarding it on to the interviewers and hiring people.
Really? That seems very odd to me. In the UK I've never put my birth date, gender or photo on a CV and you're advised not to, unless you're applying to be like a model or something where I guess gender and photo is needed.
When I was in the 6th Form in the UK we were told we had to include a photo with CVs. Another reason you should never take careers advice from someone who became a careers advisor!
Immigration is still a pretty new thing for most of central Europe.
There weren't a significant number of visibly-foreign immigrants in Germany till the 60s or 70s and it took a couple more decades before those were seen as anything other than 'temporary guest workers'.
The UK and France (and even more so the US and other "New World" countries) had at least a few decades head-start for culture to get around the idea of immigration.
Depends on where you work. Anything influenced by the English-speaking world (IT, multinationals) – never attach a photo. A small local company – always attach a photo. Anything else – good luck deciding what to do.
Not really anymore, the latest version of the DIN norm on CVs has no photo or birthdate anymore, and in some states, it’s being discussed to ban it even.
Interesting! I graduated much later in life, don't put my DOB on resume and I've often been told that they expected me to be younger when they see me - now I get it!
One of the few perks of not finishing your degree until much later is the fact that you can put that date on your resume and people assume you're younger. It's expensive, though, considering how much and how fast college tuition has been shooting up in price the past 15 years.
In Hungary, it is standard to include a photo on the CV, so I do that. Recruiter friends told me how they consider non-photo applications secondary to ones with photos, and how a human face helps building a connection right from the start.
So my only reason for including my age on the CV is because I look like I'm 24, whereas I'm pushing 31.
Not just Hungary, most of Europe outside of the UK seems to do this. I remember finding it a bit odd the first time I had to sift through developer CVs and most of them had photos.
What's the story in Asia? I only know about Thailand where a photo, age, sex and religion(!) are standard on CVs. Most advertised jobs state requirement for male or female of a certain age.
My understanding is that it is not only possible not to mention your age in your CV, but even illegal for companies to ask you what your age is as part of the application process.
Putting your age isn't necessary when your experience goes back decades and you graduated from university before your hiring manager was even born. Similarly, your name can convey a lot of biases as well, such as gender and ethnicity.
That sounds like a very good move to let people have an equal opportunity to "get a foot in the door", so to speak, but I'm genuinely curious how biases may be reduced during the interview process (be it telephonic or direct) and interview questions that may be directed at one's experience? Is this even possible without having dedicated "how to interview people" learning sessions and monitoring?
"You’re a digital native with a demonstrated interest in startups, technology, social media, and shaking up industries...." -- Laundry Locker customer support lead. Not exactly a job that requires extensive qualifications.
"Digital Native - You can find anyone's email address anytime, search the depths of the web with ease, and possibly format basic HTML without skipping a beat...." - Marketing and social media intern
"Are a "digital native" - social platforms, Google, ordering online, etc. are all second nature to you. Upserve is the smart restaurant management assistant..." - Sales position. Must be able to order food online.
"Consider yourself a digital native. As an Account Executive, you will be responsible for fully immersing yourself in the clients’ business, products, consumers..." - Young and Rubicam advertising, multiple positions. Gotta keep out those old print media people.
We're not talking about understanding the technology here.
I feel like "Digital Natives" is a term non-technical, business people (most in entry level positions) use to make themselves feel better about the fact that their jobs don't require any kind of special skill or knowledge.
Its a term popularized by the BBC, they use "digital native" to mean people not old enough to remember a time before the web, and "digital immigrant" to mean anyone older.
The fact that "digital immigrants" built all this stuff and "digital natives" are just users of it, is too subtle for their journos to grasp.
The term has invaded the education system over here in Northern Europe as well, mainly for use by politicians as justification for not putting together proper computer courses in schools: "they're all digital natives, they know how computers work", meaning they can work YouTube and Flappy Bird on a touchscreen.
Digital is far older than the web. We had computers at home since as early as I can remember, but I distinctly remember in university when I first discovered a mysterious "xmosaic" in a menu on our system.
This is a market failing that anyone who is hiring can exploit.
I've worked for a guy who hired young, smart guys without much experience who he felt had potential and who also had some 55+ year old developers who he thought could do things. He was one of the best managers I've had.
So be smart and realise that people who don't fit into what you expect might find it a bit harder at some places to find a job and that you can get better people if you consider people who were not initially what you expected to hire.
I've found a pretty distinct lack of functional developer jobs in my region. Though I was surprised to find a local software company that has specifically recruited several Clojure developers.
That's part of the joke. Lots of devs keen to do Haskell, so market forces reduce the pay of such jobs, especially if they are not expert in nature (typical back/front end stuff). Yet you get someone who took the time to learn Haskell.
I watched some great videos from India Haskell meetups, which gives me the impression you can go to one of those and get "cheaper" developers. Not saying they'll work for odesk rates but certainly could be cheaper than a cubicaled SF worker.
As a hiring manager I always get excited when I have an applicant with 15+ years experience. I really want people with that much experience on our team. Unfortunately very few have gotten even half way through our hiring process.
I don't see many old sysadmins in companies I've worked in. Even fewer older developers, I have a slight worry that this career path has an affinity for youth- which I won't have for much longer.
You have to understand that people like me (35 years experience) are rare not just because people don't hire us, but there were 100 times fewer programmers back then and many have switched to management or moved on since then too. What happens 35 years from now of course I have no idea, I doubt 100% of all people will be programmers. The key is staying at the leading edge of whatever you are doing which of course keeps getting harder as the width of programming gets wider. The thing I miss most is being able to do everything and not be so specialized.
This is what makes me wonder, is there actually a steep age bias and drop-off of older developers or are we just living a demographics change? I'm guessing there are far more developers today than ten or twenty years ago. When those developers age, will we see a more natural age distribution?
If the Bureau of Labor stats are to be believed, the software industry workforce has doubled every fives years. Assuming new entrants to the field are younger, industry growth is the probably largest factor in the age distribution of programmers. As a 52 year old who's starting a new job search this week, I'm crossing my fingers on that logic.
Another factor is that as time goes on, some people exit coding and go into management. The older the cohort you're looking at, the more pronounced the effect becomes since more people have had the chance to churn.
Tech fields have an inherent disuse for seniority. Beyond five years, no one gives an f how long you have worked with a given toolchain/language. It's the hunger games. Medicine, finance, law, accounting...rightly or wrongly respect decades of experience. Tech is Logan's Run. Plan accordingly.
Nah, take a look at the general listings for anything from embedded to .NET to the javascript library de jour. You'll see the magical 5 year number pop up across the board for a reason. I've never worked in the SFO/brospace. Strictly old-school, east coast, precambrian hardware environments. Rules still apply.
And this is why software today is in such a sad state. Managers think it would be great to have an army of young engineers who don't question and just do what they're told. But any leader surrounded by sycophants will eventually fail. Management often doesn't realize that they really need the senior engineer who has the experience and confidence to say "NO". Because that engineer is the one who will prevent the project from collapsing under the weight of scope creep and tech debt.
> Because that engineer is the one who will prevent the project from collapsing under the weight of scope creep and tech debt.
That's the shitty thing: there's enough work that doesn't cross the threshold that requires you to pay for technical debt. Otherwise, a lot more managers would be getting burned by it. There's no electric shock when they hit the wrong button. Even if it isn't a "big boom" moment where you can't deliver some huge new feature because of bad architecture and lose a lot of potential money, the little payments are written off to the younger generation to actually rebuild the thing because they have energy/time to burn.
There's not really a single threshold though. I think the shittier thing is that software is just an incredible market for lemons. Even us programmers ourselves don't really know how good we are, and there is no way to accurately compare all the problems we faced with the problems we avoided. So forget about non-technical management, they could be paying twice as much for someone who takes 10x as long to deliver a feature and never have the first hope of getting a clue. Or they could hire someone who is demonstrably fast but paints the whole system into a corner where the next critical business feature requires a complete rewrite.
Experience is no silver bullet, but it generally goes a lot further than non-technical tea-leaf-reading or junior dev shotgun programming.
its possible to be experienced and not say no you know? the opposite is also true... the trick really is not saying yes or no, but understanding what your boss really wants, and offering a realistic way forward to achieve that.
"Tech fields have an inherent disuse for seniority. Beyond five years, no one gives an f how long you have worked with a given toolchain/language."
For front-end work maybe, lower down the stack, five years might not be enough to handle the more important things like the corporate RDBMS. A few grey hairs to oversee the youngsters is quite the norm the closer you get to the real value and money of organisations.
Also embedded software, aerospace software, medical devices. Those job listings always ask for at least 5 years of experience, or 10 - and that's not for a senior position at all.
I work in embedded. Unless it's for some god-awful DOD job, they don't put a premium on experience beyond five years. Even then, they don't put that much of a value on anyone in the non-managerial ranks experience beyond 10 years.
Knowing a language or toolchain isn't all you need to be a good developer. Knowledge of how to build maintainable, secure, reliable, scalable and usable systems is something that you get with years of experience (and frequently comes from making mistakes).
True, but companies don't care about those things, really, even in the supposedly developer-centric Bay Area. Just browse through any jobs thread or board, even (especially) the "Who's Hiring" HN thread. You're going to see a lot of "We're looking for an X developer" or "we're looking for a developer with Y years of experience in Stack X." Employers, even supposedly knowledgeable tech centric ones, routinely think the learning curve for a new stack or language is so great that they just can't risk even screening someone without specific experience.
It's because most of the who's hiring on HN posts are small 2-3 people startups that desperately need a new programmer.. yesterday. They're not a team that can afford to bring someone up to speed, even if that person is amazing in programming other things. Which is really unfortunate.
It isn't just the new startups. Hiring managers believe that the best indication you know how to do what they need done is to have done it before. And their vision of "done it before" is unfortunately very narrow.
It's unfortunate and also a terrible business model. In those cases it's clear the business isn't mature or ready enough to actually hire human beings, in my opinion. Not that I'd agree with their conclusion about who they need to hire anyway. There isn't an experienced developer out there who can't pick up the frameworks and languages (exceptions exist of course, e.g. for quirky languages like brainfuck or paradigm shifts like procedural to functional) these CRUD-by-other-names shops use within a week, and if their business is that close to failure without developer help they can't afford to be picky.
A company that's a startup building an MVP for a consumer app might not care if its software ever works reliably, or will be maintainable in five years. But if you're a bank, or a big on-line retailer, or a company that sells enterprise software - a business where you or your customers push billions of dollars of business through a software system - you definitely do care.
> But if you're a bank, or a big on-line retailer, or a company that sells enterprise software - a business where you or your customers push billions of dollars of business through a software system - you definitely do care.
Funny, those companies have the least reliable, performant, and maintainable code.
Experience. The worst horrors I've seen have been in the finance sector. I'm currently working on one where the developers don't know transactions exist. And millions of dollars of transactions daily are coordinated by users emailing inline csv files.
I see the opposite more often. Younger people have stuff to do after work. It's the guy with a wife and 3 screaming kids that wants to work long hours.
I think both hold true. The young can do a good crunch week that the old can't because of responsibilities, the old will some times have home situations that allow them to put in more overtime consistently.
There is a younger streak in small VC startups, and an older streak in the larger AppFaceGooSoft streak of companies as people tend to realize that the EV tends to be better for the typical employee at the larger ones.
FWIW one of the factors in choosing my current employer (I'm not "old" by any other industry's standards, but starting to have some visible grey in my hair) was how many of the people I met there who were older/more experienced, married with kids, etc.
Which is nice. People care about work/life balance, have been around the block a few times so there's less stereotypical startup attitude. Also some of the best in-office conversations with co-workers I've had.
Outside of the startups and fast growth companies there are a lot of "tech" jobs where people makes careers out of it. The jobs might not be sexy and might not pay top dollar but also don't churn employees nor require long work weeks.
My opinion is HN readers are skewed towards the former, not the latter.
I am getting ready to start year 11 at a University. I am 62 years old, make a good wages, but not too dollar. I manage a small web team and I get to write Java, Python, and bash. I also get to do log file analysis with splunk which I love.
A majority of the HN crowd is in their 20's. They're making around 6 figures (albeit in a very high COL area) while their peers are still in grad school, slinging it out in the gig economy for peanuts, or even living at home still searching for a decent job. Software seems like it was a good choice.
By mid 30's, though, their intelligent friends will be doing well in their fields, too - making partner in the law firm, a big book of clients, management positions. Their salaries are now approaching yours.
You've hit the salary cap. Raises barely match inflation. (we're not talking about the top 5% at the Big Four, but the rest of us). Your management hired a few H1B's from India, and they don't mind working 12 hour days, even on Saturday. If you don't do the same, it's noticed. You work in a big open environment with no privacy. Now nearing 40, you notice that you're not getting as much recruiter email.
I hate to be disillusioned, but this is what I've seen. And please realize that 95% of us aren't working at Google or Facebook with $150K salaries and lots of equity. We're making $100k or so, relative to COL, with little room for growth. At best half the 'team' works in Bangalore, and more and more foreign workers are coming over on short-term visas. Each year it seems things get a little worse - longer hours, less space, less budget for hardware and training, tighter deadlines, more BS Agile / Scrum.
A lot of my friends with less 'lucrative' degrees in sociology, psychology, etc. work for state and federal government or typical Fortune 500 companies. They are only some $20K back from me now in our mid to late 30's, and they have lots of room to move up the chain.
Even more importantly, they get actual bonuses or cuts of the profit since they are more exposed to the company's sales and budgets. They have corporate expense accounts, offices, wear nice clothes to work, get to travel and attend corporate events, and never have to spend their free time learning yet another damn JS framework.
With such high salaries what if you sleep on a couch, live off the proverbial ramen for a 5-10 years, pump it all into investments, then go retire somewhere cheaper?
What's wrong with Philippines?
I have several friends living and making families in Philippines, and been there a few times. I would prefer my kids growing up there than in most western "first world" countries. Things are more chaotic yet strangely more relaxed, people on average have a much higher breaking point too. About Colombia, Colombian friends tell me is not a bad life either.
It's nothing specific to PH. You have things like entire families living on the streets, more crime, poverty, corruption & ignorance. Growing up in the typical SEA public school isn't good from an education and safety standpoint.
While growing up somewhere like the typical Canadian, Singaporean or German school system and environment is significantly safer and healthier.
The USA is a shit show with it being the 3rd world in some schools, and being pretty much a public school with private school levels of education & pressure.
You can live the private international school, gated community and chauffeured life to shelter the kids from that, and then send them to a western university. Or a village life to avoid a lot of that, but it still isn't great.
Do they really retire early though? I always hear people in forums saying how they'll save up and not have kids to retire by 40 but never meet anyone that has done that. I really doubt most programmers that don't go into management and didn't win the startup lottery retire much earlier than other careers.
This is one of the subtle underlying justifications for ageism in tech: it's the assumption that if you were any good in your youth, you'd already made your fortune before 40, so anyone over 40 still working in tech must suck, right?
Not everyone wins the lottery, but the rest of us still have to pay bills. And no, just because we didn't exit on a unicorn in our 20s doesn't mean we suck!
Not true outside of the Valley and other niche fields, like finance, and even in those places it isn't that often that folks retire early. The average salaries for developers tend to be higher across the board, but not "retire by 40 or even 50" higher.
don't see many old sysadmins ... well, how many do you actually see anyway? Usually they're invisible. Secondly, the profession of sysadmin is disappearing fast with automation, and older and more experienced people have probably ridden that wave somewhere else already.
More precisely, "DevOps" is the new way to pretend we don't need a sysadmin. It usually doesn't take long for me to wish for a greybeard with a background in debugging kernel drivers.
Just so you know, i am a young apprentice in an IT department. The official average age of developpers here is 41... I can count the employees under 30 in my two hands. Could probably even count the one under 35...
Of the 3 Linux admins that were above me last decade or so, none are still in the industry.
One went into medicine, one went into real estate, and the last I believe became a firearm instructor.
None had passion for Linux or sysadmin per se. It was just a job they could get with enough pay and lifestyle (stable location, hours etc) they wanted. When they got older, they simply moved onto different jobs that they thought could pay them more or enjoyed more.
I do wonder, how the job market of linux/sysadmin will shape out in 20 years...
As a sysadmin with 10+ years of experience moving into development, I agree. The only issue with DevOps is that unless you have a good CS or programming background, you need to spend a few years studying up on coding, coding tools etc. A lot of companies looking for DevOps are asking for Senior Developers etc instead of senior SysAdmin experience. I have however seen one or two companies starting to hire both too balance the knowledge but this might just be experienced managers :)
If you want to talk front-line production support, dealing with extremely time critical issues whilst remaining calm sysadmins then they skew 35+ where I work. We need guys who can handle the pressure. They're also the guys asking me for lab servers and training so they can keep up with what's coming next. Some people just enjoy the job and learning new things.
Squeezed at both ends! At some point I passed from too young to too old, but never got to enjoy the supposed middle period. I remember the struggle of trying to prove myself during my early career and then suddenly found myself in "mid-career" and being pinged by recruiters for entry level positions.
Noe, despite my self-confidence, articles such as this make me uneasy for the future. I don't really want to "graduate" to a management job. I love writing code and solving problems. I just hope there will continue to be enough level-headed hiring managers to let me do the job I love.
We say three years plus for senior engineer. We have people with that experience who are fantastic software engineers and completely deserve the title. You don't need 15+ years of experience to be a good engineer, but it helps.
> A lot of older programmers seem to think they have 20 years of experience, when they only have the same year of experience 20 times.
A lot of younger programmers seems to think they have 3 years of experience, when they only have the same month of experience 36 times.
Experience is made up by the experiences you had, if you have never worked in a proper environment or never actually tried to improve your craft, years doesn't matter much.
And the myth of "being up to date", it can mean different things for different people. Sadly sometimes it just means that you need to have played with the latest fad that will disappear in a few years. In that case i'd prefer someone that's not up to date but can learn something different and it's used to do things the proper way.
I agree, a lot of younger programmers think they have 3 years experience when they've had the same month of experience 36 times.
And this is not a dig against old people per se. But it's the sunk cost fallacy.
If you've only been doing something for 3 years, and it's wrong, it's easier to convince them that it's wrong, vs. if you've been doing something for 20 years, it's a lot harder to convince somebody that they're doing it wrong.
Especially if they've been successful doing things their way for 20 years.
You represent the other extreme with your comment. Very few software projects have more than two or three years of "experience fertility," for the kind of experience you mean. There's a difference between someone who can't even last a year to get a project from prototype to some semblance of maturity and someone who wants to move on after one to two years when a project reaches the point at which maintenance overtakes new development.
What's the difference between somebody who works on four different projects over 8 years for company X and somebody who works on four different projects for four different companies over the same period, in this context?
Nothing different between working at the same company for different projects, and working at different companies.
Maintenance work is easy, less time consuming, and frankly mostly requires less effort. If you fall into that trap, and end up maintaining a large system that is slowly becoming obsolete, you're not building up more skills.
A lot of older workers (and I am one of them) end up doing that cause that's the easy path, the one requiring no effort at all. And that leads you to becoming unemployable.
Lots of folks commenting here on there not being many older developers around. Well considering there are at least 10x more developers now than there were 30 years ago, and people generally get into it when they're young, this is completely expected.
It's not about age distribution, it's about the obstacles you encounter when you're older. Even if it's only a desire by that younger majority to be around people who are just like them.
My point is that the distribution of developer ages at your work place is not an indication of age-discrimination, not that age-discrimination doesn't exist.
Recently I got an email about a job that seemed interesting. It's a well known company that used to be a startup but is now a mature company. I went to the job description page: 8+ years experience, tech stack I'm familiar with, mostly backend work, seems ok so far.
Then I get to the last line. Open office, has video games, happy hours, other typical things designed to attract those in their 20s. It's all a hidden message screaming, if you're old, don't apply. And they want someone with 8+ years experience! It's ridiculous.
You're probably seeing a hidden message where there isn't one. The culture/benefits sections of most job descriptions are generic and that generic portion of the hiring message is tailored to the majority of hires the company is likely to attract via job postings. For most tech companies that is going to be candidates directly or recently our of university, and the majority of that majority does perceive/expect many of these types of office perks as hallmarks of a successful tech company. The message isn't intended to exclude you or me. The message is intended to hook the easily hookable.
I am sorry, but what is wrong with having video games in the office?
At both my previous companies I played games time to time, with co-workers. 15 mins of playing Fifa with a co-worker end s up both relaxing, and productive as you both bond and hash out things, and often much better than boring meeting.
I am 35 btw. Also, our CEO regularly played as well.
I have been at an office/environment (Amazon), with cubicles, or offices, people coming in, going home at 5:30pm, no social time, nothing interesting. I thought that was awful, and I would never work in a place that doesn't understand that creativity requires some play time as well.
This is all anecdotal evidence of course, but my exposure to this sort of office culture has been much more negative than what you described. Every place I've ever worked, I've played video games or done other fun stuff with my coworkers, sometimes as a part of every day. Nothing wrong with that, I wouldn't have had it any other way. This is the norm, but I don't think this is what people are talking about in this thread.
The negative variant of "come work here, we have video games in the office!" happens when there is an expectation from management (or even just the rest of the team) that everyone is going to participate in Mandatory Team Playtime whether they enjoy it or not. And the 1-2 hours of Mandatory Team Playtime always means that you have to stay at work for an additional 1-2 hours just to get your job done. Or maybe Mandatory Team Playtime is a consolation prize for making you work through the weekend.
I usually find there being too much to do to spend time playing video games or whatever at the job, unless there is a company after-hours event.
I'm not exactly on the younger side either, being 32 and having only been working professionally for almost 4 years. It's not that I don't love games either - if the game industry paid comparatively, I would certainly consider going into that industry, and have plenty of very successful friends in it.
That said, I don't view the presence of these things as discrimination - if you don't want to participate, don't. Nobody is forcing you, and if they want to falsify performance reviews/withhold promotions when you're clearly outperforming your peers/etc., then I'd get down and dirty letting them know that their behavior is crap, and then job search because I don't want to work for a company like that.
The problem isn't the games, it's the office space. Having video games, foosball, table tennis, etc near your work space is distracting as hell. If they are optional and silent (from my perspective) it's not a problem but me experience has been the opposite.
I had management buy everyone nerf guns once as part of a "hitting our targets" marketing campaign. It seemed like every time you got deep into concentration a nerf dart would ricochet into your screen. Needless to say, we missed our targets.
I've had the nerf war going on around me as well. Everyone else in the office shooting at each other, me in the middle fiddling in my terminals. I learned that if you just don't respond, you don't become a target and you can get on with whatever you were doing (YMMV).
It's not the video games themselves. It's the culture. It's a way to keep young employees in the office longer. It's not uncommon for these places to have people roll in around 10am and stay until 10pm. That's not a place I want to work at, and I'm not even 30 yet. But you can bet your life savings on a company firing anyone for not playing this game. That's why I won't work for a place with videogames.
I've worked at a bunch of places with video games in SV. Most of the time it's barely touched.
Meals is what really determines how long people stayed. Sometimes 3 people would play video games. Sometimes a team creates a lunch time card game routine. Some teams really love foosball or whatever.
If a place didn't serve 6pm dinner, people tend to leave before dinner time since they got hungry. If they served dinner, then they consistently stayed until dinner time. If dinner was too late like 8pm, then they might as well of had no dinner for most employees.
10am-10pm places develop often because it's a small startup, and because normal commute hours are horrible. I don't know many people although who actually works anything near those 12 hour days.
That's complete bullshit, I work for one of those company that happens to have video games around. Not everyone play, but after work, we sometimes get around and play for a couple of hours and we just have so much fun that we end up going home late. What's wrong with that?
But realize that companies do not give you these 'perks' like free food, games, laundry, etc. as a bonus. It is to keep you at work for more and more hours.
Honestly, I don't think it is a bad thing if you do enjoy this sort of thing and are young without kids, wife, etc.
The problem is that it creates the 'bro' culture that turns off anyone who isn't in the same demographic. When most of the team is staying late, bonding with COD, those that don't - the 40 year old who needs to pick up his kid, or the 25 year old woman who doesn't play XBox - tend to be excluded as time goes on.
To be completely honest, I've always thought the complaints of sexism in tech were completely bullshit.
But when I look at things as a mid 30's guy who is already seeing hints of ageism and really have no desire to stay 'till 10pm playing video games, I have to wonder if maybe I was somewhat wrong, and maybe the typical SV software environment is somewhat toxic for anyone not a 25 year old guy - females included.
Free food is the real perk that changes hours. Everything else isn't used that much or is very very company/team dependent and you have to evaluate them on a company basis.
10 companies might give laundry, video games, board/table games, free gyms and all 3 meals. How the company or team uses those things is very company dependent. Laundry service is not used that much most of the time, since you usually have to pay. It's usually just a purple tie pickup/dropoff closet.
I think the "staying late, bonding with COD" company is like the minority 'nightmare' thing that gets all the media attention, while most of them are pretty normal, does something at lunch sometimes and eats all the free meals.
> But realize that companies do not give you these 'perks' like free food, games, laundry, etc. as a bonus. It is to keep you at work for more and more hours.
It's give and take, nothing is for free, and this deal is a pretty good one imo :)
> The problem is that it creates the 'bro' culture that turns off anyone who isn't in the same demographic. When most of the team is staying late, bonding with COD, those that don't - the 40 year old who needs to pick up his kid, or the 25 year old woman who doesn't play XBox - tend to be excluded as time goes on.
So we shouldn't bond and have fun because of these people :D?
No I think you should do what you want; it certainly isn't the job of young male engineers to make sure everyone else is included in their environment. God knows that other groups were never especially inclusive to many of 'us' growing up.
Absolutely nothing wrong with it. But people with families, kids that need help with homework, etc won't be able to do that often if ever. Being young very often also means having fewer commitments.
Or you have different interests. Perhaps you don't expect to be friends with coworkers - so long as folks get along well at the office, that's enough. Perhaps you would rather have the compartmentalism. Perhaps you'd rather play at home while not wearing pants. Perhaps you'd rather spend time with a loved one, your children, and the couple of friends that you've had for years.
Perhaps you are an introvert and really need the downtime. Perhaps you are an artist and enjoy that instead. Maybe you play an instrument and get an hour of practice most days. Maybe you like theater or a good dinner in lue of a few hours of video games.
Not playing games after work isn't an indicator of someone's life sucking. It just means they have different interests or priorities in life that don't match up to spending a few hours at work playing games.
Well I'd say it depends what kind of game you guys have. If it's COD like in some of the comments I can understand. But in my office we mostly play goofy party game, I sometimes invite my gf over to play with us and she manages to have fun while not being a gamer as well. Here's a list I made:
No idea. In fact, having some complicated games to learn and compete at is likely a good thing if you have a team of gamers and give your brain a mental break from work while still having something interesting to chew on. Think high level play in fighting games/MOBAs, number crunching in MMOs, FPS map strategies, car simulation builds, sports strategies and teams, etc.
Even if you don't want to think about that stuff, you can then turn to doing silly things and giving yourself a break.
I would have a similarly visceral reaction to that line, but I wouldn't interpret it as a "keep out" sign for older developers. Rather, it's a gigantic red flag for wiser developers of any age. They're looking for people they can trick into working 60-80 hour weeks, every week. Those are probably going to be mostly recent grads in their 20s, but they're actually selecting for naïveté and the lack of a personal life rather than youth.
Let's see, most recent environment like that had me at late 40s (at the time), two guys mid 40s, the boss late 40s, and some young uns.
We all had nerf guns, regular silliness, and fairly regular beer+gaming sessions with the app company down the hall. They had a couple of full size multi game arcade machines, and a console. :)
I'll be old when they nail the lid shut :p I'd rather talk about games, motorbikes and beer than golf any day thanks. Unless you mean willingness to give up weekends for dubious reasons and pull stupid hours regularly - then on that score I've been old since my 20s.
That said I have experienced age discrimination - tech is rife with it, but never if I got past HR or recruiting types. I don't know why tech makes it more likely - it's not like every or even most companies are looking for the naive to work 10am-10pm daily.
You know who made the most use of the kegerator and the board game night at my last business? The sixty-year-old dude with a wife and two kids. He spent one-and-a-half nights a week at the office drinking, playing games, and socializing and was otherwise headed home by five. He made good use of that networking time, though, and partially because the tooling was there; he'd not have had a chance to interact with the office full of twentysomethings if he'd not had work provided socialization tools and had to go out out to interact.
It didn't exactly work - he eventually was fired in a really bad bit of house-training for cronies... But he was very popular. The tooling you're reading as a young people's perk is actually a pretty good neutral ground: if work didn't have a kegerator, I'd probably not go out, I'd be at home, not working and not thinking about work.
When I worked at a place with the average age was mid 30s and being mid 20s made me one of the youngest, we all played a lot of lunch time foosball and ping pong, left the video games untouched and were still an 'old' person friendly place.
Depends on what you mean by experience. I'm skeptical, to say the least. No doubt there are 29 year olds who have been "coding" for 20 years and being paid for it for 13 of them. That's different from having experience.
There are voices that are stating there is a serious shortage of highly skilled tech workers in the Valley and as a result the H1B Visa quotas must be dramatically increased and policies amended to allow for foreign workers.
There are also regular claims of ageism in the Valley against people who are possibly not only highly skilled but also possess many years of real world, "rubber on the road" experience.
Isn't one way to ensure your continuing relevance to avoid managerial positions? In my experience a lot of older people are less attractive employees because after 10 years of management their skills are very generic and hard to specify.
YMMV but after almost 20 years I try to keep a foot firmly in both camps and position myself as an early-stage generalist who can also lead and magnify the productivity of the whole team.
Managers who aren't technically illiterate suck, programmers who can't see beyond the scope of their own little fiefdom also suck. If you can marry disparate skills from a few different areas you can really work magic in the right position.
Ageism is endemic in Sillicon Valley and it starts at the top. Look at Y Combinator -- the founder basically 'ageismed' himself out of his job and put a kid in charge of the business.
we started up when i was 25 and i attribute much of our success to hiring people older than us, by up to +30 years.
the benefits go both ways. 30-50 year old engineers don't like working for 40-60 year old career-management dipshits who have never done their jobs before.
There should at least be maximum age limits for the supreme court. Pushing people to retain their positions despite entering positions where mental faculties are degenerating for entirely political ends is a horrific outcome.
For comparison, judges of the UK supreme court resign at 70/75. Australian judges resign at 70. Canadian judges resign at 75. If the US had rules similar to any of these countries, there would currently be 4 vacancies on the court.
I think it's ridiculous there is a minimum age at all. Sure I wouldn't vote for a 21 year old, but there is no reason they should be excluded from running.
I'm thankful to work in for the federal govt. where mid 30s to 60s is the age range. Also, the pay for fed govt work is comparably to what engineers in Silicon Valley make, but the cost of living is way lower in this Mid-Atlantic city/area.
Though if your single and like to mingle with co-workers and make friends your not going to find that working for the fed; most are married and or recently arrived in the US.
It's good that you're satisfied, but saying that the federal government is comparable to what engineers make in Silicon Valley tells me you don't actually know what engineers make in Silicon Valley.
Can you make similar in the fed on the low level... Sure(though I don't make that myself) based on your negotiation skills. The higher salaries Seen you can if your a Java developer vs a web developer.
Also if your on a long term hourly contract no benefits as a web dev for the fed and with today's climate/demand you definitely can make just about anything in that range.
not sure why i was down voted I was just saying ageism isn't found in the fed, the money can be just as good as it is in the valley and the cost of living is incredibly less.
Disclaimer: The following are existential questions that do not reflect my own beliefs in any way, shape, or form.
Why do older people deserve jobs? Why does anyone deserve a job? Are there instances where we as a society accept people NOT deserving a job? How different is age as an attribute compared to: Felons, the mentally impaired, the under-qualified, those lacking physical attributes?
There's a moral argument to be made that people deserve jobs because society forces you to work. If you don't work, and you're not independently wealthy, you can't support yourself. Therefore to say people don't deserve jobs is to say they deserve to be out on the street.
Great answer. And even if you don't buy into the morality bit, those in charge figured out long ago that giving the little people a job, regardless of how pointless or wasteful, is better and cheaper than having to constantly deal with hungry, angry men on the verge of revolt.
And if the plebs get too demanding, the owners just push up the price of basic goods like housing, taxes, and food via inflation. So now you think you're doing great, making six figures, but in reality you're worse off than the previous generation while producing twice as much profit for your masters. But at least you're not causing trouble.
> How different is age as an attribute compared to: Felons, the mentally impaired, the under-qualified, those lacking physical attributes?
For that question to work you need to explain why age would disqualify somebody.
A felon has committed a serious crime in the past, demonstrating they may be unsafe or untrustworthy.
A mentally impaired person may not be able to think things through and solve problems that come up in day-to-day work.
By definition, an under-qualified person can't do the job.
A person lacking a physical attribute may literally not be able to perform the required tasks.
There is nothing like that directly associated with growing old. In fact, experience is a big positive, and that actually increases with age, which should make older people more desirable than younger ones.
And how is this supposed to be worse than hiring a series of youngsters, each not yet knowing how any company works, and then replace'em when they are just begining to get a clue?
Why would you replace them when they "get a clue"? I really don't understand what everyone here is on about, including the downvoters.
The parent asserted there is nothing disqualifying an older person from being hired. I gave one reason, essentially that health declines when you age.
No one refuted my point, yet I get downvoted to oblivion. It kind of says something about older people if this is how they respond to critical thinking.
I can't say that this sort of response is unexpected, though, given my experiences with the older generations. They tend to be short tempered and unwilling to consider alternative evidence to their (foregone?) conclusions.
I guess that's another reason to avoid hiring older workers. They're likely to have a lot of hubris.
Fair question: It's less about why someone "deserves a job" and more about human rights. We are all human beings who deserve equal treatment under the law, including consideration for employment. Older people breathe air and eat food just like everyone else. If it were legal to exclude +65 (or +40) from employment, what exactly are they supposed to do?
This fairness argument is complicated by what happens in down economies. Experienced (read: older) people tend to crowd out the younger folks for jobs. I don't know an equitable fix for this, but throwing people out of the workforce for something they can't change doesn't seem right.
Your premise is flawed. It's not about deserving a job, it's about equal treatment under the law.
For example, you don't have to have a quota of certain demographic makeup legally, you just cannot have dismissed a candidate predominantly for the purposes of age or race.
This is begging the question from the outset. Jobs aren't handed out like a treat for good behaviour; they're not something you deserve or not. Unless someone else is taking care of you, you have to work in order to remain alive.
