Excellent news! Up until age 39, I was never not given an offer after interviewing. Now after 40, my offer rate has dropped to 1 in 14. So much for the claims that there is a shortage in tech. So crazy.
I'm a programmer in my late 50s. While age discrimination is real, and I certainly have my share of "not a culture fit" and "overqualified" rejections over the past 10 years, if you're getting rejected over 90% of the time then I strongly suspect the problem isn't age discrimination. It's much more likely that your skills are out of date or you've gained some bad interviewing habits that you should examine.
If people want to filter applicants based on age, it's pretty simple to do so before the interview stage.
"Overqualified" has got to be the softest insult you can throw at a job seeker. It ostensibly says "we aren't secure in ourselves as employers to challenge our workers to produce great work, nor do we value original thought, so we'd rather hire drones that don't rattle the cage".
It may also mean that the employer has reasons to believe that the candidate is well aware of his/her skill level and will treat this job as temporary while looking for a higher position in another company.
Yes, and no one jumps ship like a young tech worker at the base of their salary curve. The flip side of being able to code all day as a younger engineer is that nothing’s tying you to a job or location. One call from a recruiter in NYC, SF or Seattle and you’re gone.
If an employer fears this and truly feels this way that should be a signal to look at what's going on in their workforce, where gaps exist, and how someone with an "overqualified" work background can help the company close those gaps. You get to evaluate someone without feeling slimy for asking interviewees to work for free, the employee gets valuable experience and increases their worth to you as an organization and it makes it easier to promote them or give them commensurate pay (which: if this is what it took to pay someone overqualified what they're worth to begin with, then you probably deserve to have that person leave).
Sorry if it sounds abrasive-coming from a long history of being tired of the shallow excuses employers have for disqualifying great candidates while simultaneously bemoaning a "talent shortage".
As someone that's hired a lot of people being overqualified is an actual reason not to want to hire an applicant. The reason is because they are not likely to last in the position. Not every company is some high growth engineering phenomenon. Sometimes you need someone to fill a specific role and you'd like them to be stable in that role.
In which case the applicant's employment history would be a lot more relevant. As in, have they been job-hopping, historically "not-lasting" at a job? or do they commit to their work and see it through. If you're offering a decent job and pay fairly, there's no reason to assume an applicant will simply "not last" only because of them being "over-qualified", whatever that means.
I’ve personally applied for jobs I’ve been overqualified for with the intent of getting in the door and moving out of that position as fast as possible. That might be good for me, and good for the hiring organization, but I totally understand the hiring manager blowing me off, because I wouldn’t be filling his need, and in a couple months he’s back to sorting through resumes and doing interviews.
No, sorry. The issue is that a job that pays fairly for the position doesn’t feel fair to someone who is settling until they get the job they really want. That kind of person really is likely to leave quickly. Whether it’s worth hiring someone who wants to leave immediately depends on how quickly the company can get new hires up to speed and how much effort they put into interviewing.
Now, a company can define overqualified incorrectly. And they can misjudge the cost of a temporary hire. But people really do apply for jobs they think are beneath them until they get an offer.
I disagree, and feel as I mentioned that they candidate's history is more relevant than their age and a non-defined over-qualification. In any case, when that's a worry, bring it up as a concern during the hiring process, work it out with the candidate. Now I cannot deny it happens, as demonstrated by @WillPostForFood in this sub-thread, but that does not mean everybody, not even most candidates think along the same lines. A lot just want an honest job that pays fairly, and as I stated originally, their history would likely be more telling in that regard.
In some industries it means, "You've got a ton of experience, and know this stuff inside and out. But we don't want to pay for someone who knows what they're doing."
As you stated, they're looking for inexperienced drones.
Sometimes all you need are inexperienced drones. If you just need a developer to help write the next software as a service CRUD web app and you have experienced developers already, a drone with three years of experience may be good enough.
When it reality what it actually means is "your experience suggests you are worth more than what we're paying, and we'd rather not spend the time onboarding you just to have you leave in 6 months when you a job more commensurate with your experience and skills."
I've been on the employer side of taking a chance on overqualified folks and it's a waste of a lot of time and a lot of money.
Obviously depends on location and stuff, but you can get overqualified people to stay due to life circumstances (for example due to their significant other doing a postgraduate degree which means they can't easily move cities or country).
I guess you could hire an overqualified employee as a favor, because he really seems to need the job. He will be happy for a few months until he finds something better. It's up to you.
Every employee will be happy until they find something better, no? I mean I guess sure one could make a valid rebuttal that "overqualified" people are probably working on less borrowed time, if we take the metaphor all the way to the end of the line, right?
But I guess where I'm finding myself endlessly perplexed is the default assumption you're describing (and I'll gladly offer a concession to), versus the alternative of overqualified employees being seen as potential force multipliers for increasing productivity by allowing them to use their additional qualifications via some kind of tract towards management or specialized role? Even if it's on a small team?
Bob is overqualified for X, yet exceptional at Y. X+Y just happens to be a thing the team could possibly benefit from, helping the company as a whole. Maybe we should think about hiring Bob and grooming him to take ownership of X+Y and stewarding the rest of the team, helping them learn and become masters of X+Y in due time.
Does that make sense?
Hopefully the phrasing isn't too god awful there, coffee hasn't hit the lower brain yet :P
I had the luck of being overqualified for my first job, straight out of college. I did X (CAD), but I chose my career because I wanted to be a developer. I did Y (sysadmin) because I showed my employer that I could do more. For half a year I did X+Y for the salary of X because I was young, optimistic and eager to please... until they hired a real sysadmin because surely he could do Y better than someone who does X and Y on the side.
From this I learned that being overqualified is a risky proposition. Even if your team appreciates the added value, your company might have other plans. I believe it's better to tighten your belt and wait for a more suitable opportunity than risk hurting your career growth.
BTW, your phrasing is perfectly fine. Try to read mine.
You are assuming that interviewers read CVs/resumes before the interview....
A colleague recently had an experience at a second interview where the hiring manager proudly proclaimed that they hadn't read her CV and the interviewer was the one who had done the first interview!
"Skills out of date" is suspect, at best. We have been putting all new languages and libraries on top of the same old computer science concepts for decades now. It wouldn't be that hard to age-discriminate by looking specifically for Clojure experience, while saying anyone trying to substitute ANSI Common Lisp experience has their "skills out of date".
To put this into analogy form, it would be as though mathematicians could be perceived as out of date because they still used "x + y" for addition, rather than "add( x, y )", or "push(x) push(y) add", or whatever the latest fad in mathematical notation happened to be at the time. The concept of addition (over real numbers) hasn't changed for centuries. Some skills just can't go out of date. And yet some people are viewing those skills through a lens that makes older candidates look worse on paper, and are blaming the skill set, rather than the lens.
There are some skills that make otherwise inexperienced people more productive when they all share those skills, but at some level it all comes back to screening based on experience rather than aptitude. I don't have time to learn every new skill that comes down the pipe, from mere speculation that a future job opportunity might require it. I'm more likely to pick up only those that would be useful in my current day job, or for my latest side-project. All some employer has to do is pick a lot of "new" skills, that aren't appreciably different from new names for old skills, and magically, my skills are no longer up to date.
I hypothesize that the age discrimination in the industry isn't based on age, directly, but rather on perceived costs of employment, which tend to rise as people progress through their careers. Old people are more expensive. They want higher salaries. A lot of them have families, and mortgages, and their health insurance costs are higher. They worry about their 401(k) accounts.
One would think that it's easy to screen by age, based on the length of the resume, and simple math on any of the dates on it, but the people screening the resumes, and the ones rejecting candidates post-interview are not necessarily the same people. The HR folks know that age-related discrimination is illegal, so may be structuring sham interviews so that audits after the fact don't leave the company liable for enforcement actions. I have been through a few interviews where it just seemed like everyone was going through the motions. Maybe they already picked someone and were using me to cover their ass? Maybe there was something about me in particular that prompted an immediate rejection? Maybe I didn't fulfill some secret requirement? Did my breath stink? Did I whiteboard that wrong? Nope--they found someone to do the job more cheaply, and they were shopping around to make sure they got the best price. It just so happens that youth correlates positively with cheap.
It's difficult to say, when no one ever gives any interview feedback whatsoever, positive or negative. When you're in it, you start to get paranoid.
No way. Sorry to be blunt. Sure, my speed has decreased a little. But, I make better decisions which saves orders more time. And, my skills are still solidly top 15-20%. I know most modern databases, Java, Scala, Python, JavaScript, Angular, React ... the list goes on.
I only claim to be an expert in things I’m actually an expert in.
To be fair, I do try to interview at interesting companies. So, that could be the problem. Maybe, it’s easier in IT or government contractors. But, I’d be pretty depressed.
Honestly I wouldn't blame age or your skill set. It seems that the interview process for software engineers is broken and I'd be willing to bet that even then highest qualified young engineers are struggling to get offers.
I don't know how you're qualifying "even the highest qualified young engineers are struggling to get offers" but that doesn't jive with my experience these past couple of years. I'm not young any more but it still feels like a job seeker's market (spoken from the viewpoint of a fine but not outstanding engineer in his mid 30s, in a tech hub)
I said I'm willing to bet, meaning I have a hunch, not actual data. My hunch is based on personal experience, reading recent posts on HN about job searching, and seeing statistics on websites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor implying that many jobs openings have hundreds of qualified applicants. Granted, my hunch may be based on trying to get jobs at well known companies which is probably more competitive by nature, especially in a global market. Getting a job building marketing software at a mediocre agency for $45k/year is probably super easy. But most people don't want that.
What exactly drives you to interesting companies? If you are a programmer, your job will be: read data from A, repackage it, send to B. How IT or government contract is different? And you can make a greater difference there IMO. (That's how I see it now, after many years of vain pursuits and disappointments )
Maybe people are worried you'll rock the boat with all those technologies you list. If the group has settled on using React, the last thing they want is someone constantly trying to convert them to Angular.
Another possibility is you don't know those things as well as you think. When you say React do you mean React v.16? Does that include webpack, and if so, which version? If you're claiming to be an expert on all those things, it would make me skeptical. I bet you'd have better results if you focused on a few technologies you unambiguously ARE an expert at, and list the other things as footnotes.
I'm not far from being an older dev, and I've been struggling more and more with cynicism in myself. Everything you said is 100% true, but I have to force myself to avoid phrases like "technology fad" or "young, excitable devs" when I'm mentoring younger devs. Because even though those things are true, verbalizing them would demoralize the team.
I don't argue against the latest fads. I hate the idea of Node/Electron/ various JS based cross platform mobile frameworks with a passion, but I do look to see what is paying the most and has the most openings. I'll jump on whatever fad that the market wants.
Older devs, after seeing enough technology fads, are much more sensitive to bullshit. Which makes them a bit sarcastic WRT any new fad. Not a desirable trait from the employer's perspective :)
Sarcasm in general is not a desirable trait. You can explain the pros and cons of different technology choices without being sarcastic.
A green developer who wants to rewrite everything is $LANGUAGE is just as bad as the self-important greybeard rolling his eyes and scoffing at anything that isn't $OTHER_LANGUAGE.
Age discrimination in tech is dumb. I've got a dev 30 years my senior sitting across from me and I guarantee he will code circles around 90% of the devs on HN, and 100% of the new grads getting jobs at big tech (and will until he dies). He's got a huge amount of knowledge in programming, our domain (NLP), he's fast, thorough, and thoughtful.
Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically useless for years.
I think the real value in recent grads (from a startup perspective) is that they're young and naive enough to work long hours based on 'team spirit' and the dream of 'making an impact' rather than silly old ideas like earning a real salary or a getting a big enough amount of equity to matter. And they usually don't have families to keep them from working long hours either. They'll drink whatever kool-aid the startup is based on much more readily than some grumpy old-timer.
"Do you want to help disrupt <........> ? Want to work with < blockchain, microservices, ML/AI>, and want to work 16 hours a day without or with little ownership? Join us, we are a young dynamic international team, free organic lunches, free Macbook, we're all bros here. Take our whiteboard interview and see if you're a cultural fit!"
None of that actually provides real value though. There's zero point to overworking programmers - that's how you get crap.
I think it's probably just VC bias driven by the number of unicorns which had young founders (VCs aren't after 'moderately successful startups', where founders tend to be older, they're after wildly successful unicorns).
Those young founders hire "people like themselves" which naturally means people their age or younger.
There's a certain degree of implicit age discrimination baked into the default hiring process of most startups too - all of those questions about reversing binary trees or implementing quicksort biases hiring toward recent grads who have just learned it and away from the experienced devs (because 99% of devs simply never use this kind of theory).
tl;dr VCs cargo cult and end up investing in young founders, young founders cargo cult their interview process and hire people "like themselves".
VCs also want people who "disrupt" like Facebook has disrupted personal information and data, or Uber and driverless cars. Older people have to be evil (subject to opinion) to start a company to do that, but younger people see Zuck's $$ without knowing where it comes from and want the same thing. They can modify their ethics if necessary, and it only happens bit by bit, which makes it easier.
A long time ago, back when I was a recent grad, I often worked long hours simply because coding is so damned fun. I remember thinking, "Damn, I can't believe that they pay me this much for something that I'd do for free anyway! What fools!!"
That hasn't completely escaped, but with a family and 25 years experience, I put that into a different perspective now.
Some of reasons I’ve seen for ageism in startups are cost and “not a culture fit”. Cost I understand, but I believe more experienced people end up being cheaper in the long run when you account for speed, correctness, and long term maintainability. The culture piece stems from the “would I get a beer with this person” and will he/she work as “hard” as a younger candidate with less responsibilities.
Startups need to start realizing that it’s okay to have diversity and different cultural groups. By putting yourself in the stereotypical startup culture box you greatly limit your ability to hire and create diversity. If everyone thinks and acts the same you miss out on valuable perspectives and ideas.
Startups aren’t going to change. The goal should be to marginalize their influence and effects on tech hiring. They are simply not important enough (by hiring volume) to carry the weight they currently do.
>They are simply not important enough (by hiring volume) to carry the weight they currently do.
Unforunately, they are. A large proportion of the tech industry is startups / small businesses. I'd be surprised if Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft make up even 10% of tech workers.
Amazon has 566,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)), but it's unclear how many of those are actually tech workers. Amazon has a lot of retail and warehouse workers, many of who with wages so low they qualify for food stamps.
Apple - 123,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.)
Apple's 2014 SEC filing said that half of their employees are retail workers, so let's give Apple 62,000 tech workers.
Even if we pretended that all 566,000 Amazon employees were actually tech workers (they're not) and the above numbers were US-only employees (they're not), that would total to about 860,000 tech workers.
860,000 / 7 million = 12.3%
That means that at least 87.7% of American tech workers do not work at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft, despite these companies being five of the richest tech companies in the world.
I agree. I'd like to see us quit romanticizing the SV Bro culture of 20-something startup hipsters. The goal of a startup is NOT TO BE a startup forever. Often, having a bit of 50-year-old wisdom is one of the best things one can do. Without that, we have 24 year olds "discovering" Lisp every couple of decades.
It is often very difficult to explain to non-developers how your first point could possibly be true. Even if you have regular discussions regarding the value of experience and the possible damage that could be done by a bad or inexperienced developer. I find that it is easy to agree at a surface level that those concepts make sense, but if someone has not actually had the experience of writing software, they have trouble really understanding this concept. Most people still see most jobs as doing x unit of work over y unit of time. So the more time that someone is willing to spend each day the better. We all know that a bad developer can actually produce negative gains for the team, but it is a hard concept to fully explain.
I wonder if comparing it to home improvement type work would be a good universal analogy for most people. Would you rather hire the inexperienced person to come do your plumbing or the 30 year professional. The former doesn't give you a proper estimate but will work endlessly at a lower rate on the problem. This person eventually completely messes up and a water pipe in your ceiling leaks for days. Or you could have hired the other person who would almost certainly have completed it within the estimated time frame with professional quality and never caused the pipe leak.
Some of reasons I’ve seen for ageism in startups are cost and “not a culture fit”. Cost I understand, but I believe more experienced people end up being cheaper in the long run when you account for speed, correctness, and long term maintainability. The culture piece stems from the “would I get a beer with this person” and will he/she work as “hard” as a younger candidate with less responsibilities.
Most SV companies talk a big game about "diversity," but that never extends to diversity of age.
It's funny how so many people in the valley don't understand that discrimination based on age is just as illegal as discrimination based on race or sex or any other protected class.
Only if you discriminate against old people, it is legal to openly discriminate against the young.
I guess I'm biased because I'm young but it's a little non-sensical since young people are the ones with student debt and record-high housing costs to pay for while 50-year-olds have decades of savings and stock market and real-estate appreciation to fall back on if they find themselves unemployed.
>50-year-olds have decades of savings and stock market and real-estate appreciation to fall back on if they find themselves unemployed.
That's a lovely stereotype, but far from the truth; which is why so many people are working into their 70's these days and why reverse mortgages are on the rise.
There was an article in the newspaper (You can Google what that is) recently that noted that more than half of Americans have less than $5,000 in retirement savings. A similar number live in apartments.
The whole "decades of savings" thing is a cultural myth that Millennials use to make themselves feel like victims. Somehow they think they're the only generation that's ever been through hard times.
> Somehow they think they're the only generation that's ever been through hard times.
Not sure how you inferred this from my comment. My parents went through much harder times when they were my age.
However, unemployment would be a trivial inconvenience for them now at 50. They’d probably just retire and not bother looking for another full time gig. I don’t really know any 26-year-olds who could say the same.
Edit: I looked at the data and the median 55-59 year old in the US has US$150k in net worth vs. US$19k for the median 25-29 year old. Why would the former need extra legal protections against employment discrimination and the latter not?
Net worth and savings are not the same thing. But let’s pretend for a second it was and a 55 year old was to lose his/her job and never have another source of income. That means the $150k would have to last 20+ years on average, which is $7500 a year to live on. But now let’s stop pretending and realize that net worth includes the value of assets, like cars and houses. So the amount to live on is even less money unless they sell all their assets. We are also assuming the house, car, and credit cards are paid off and there aren’t monthly debt obligations.
> Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads.
They will work more hours for less money. This is nothing new. My first job out of university in the early 1990s was for one of the "big" consulting firms. 50-60 hour work weeks were the norm. I made decent money (they paid overtime) especially for a first job, but I wouldn't do it at my age now with a family and kids.
Why is there a belief in this industry that working more hours == productivity? Arguably a more experienced developer could do the same work (if not better) in less hours. The right to not work 12 hours a Day shouldnt be something that is earned with age. If a team is consistently required to put in unreasonably long hours it’s either due to being understaffed or poor planning. Both are a recipe for disaster...
>Why is there a belief in this industry that working more hours == productivity?
Lack of manager ability to measure productivity based on anything else. Between POs, BAs, business representatives, and IT managers there are a lot of people who don't seem to be able to grasp why two relatively simple to describe tasks can require such vast differences in time. So it becomes hard for them to judge if their developer is wasting their time or not (and let's not even begin on overall lack of trust to begin with), so the only fall back measure is if they have their butt in the seat and appear to be working. And even if you are lucky enough that everyone you directly deal with either understands the basics on why sizing varies so greatly or able to accept it without question, you still have to deal with middle managers walking the floor who measure productivity the same as they would in a factory. And if you are lucky enough to not even have this problems, you still have to deal with cultural norms set in party by all the jobs which aren't as lucky.
Well in the case of consulting it's more billable hours, thus more profit. The clients should be the ones asking "why do you need 20 developers working 60 hours a week on this inventory system" but they seemed to accept it as normal.
My guess is that it's a myth that developed from the industrial era when more widgets could be produced in 12 hours than 8. The fact that developers don't do specialized line work doesn't seem to register.
As people are noting on this thread, startups are their own thing. During my startup days, we were always the next sale or funding round away from going belly up. We pulled late hours to get in the latest features for our president to "sell" to investors.
Good managers can measure effectiveness. The problem is it's hard to quantify to higher ups, and even when you do quantify the data, it never beats the sales guy drinking with the boss and knowing the boss's taste in wo/men.
I think that measurement implies a quantity being measured, so it sounds like we agree on the main point. Managers can form opinions about who is effective, but the silly quantities they come up with don't end up being useful, because "mistakes avoided" isn't an observable[0]. You can't count events that didn't happen, yet such hypothetical suppositions are crucial to appreciating the benefits of experience.
Thanks - I've had that notion for a long time, but could never put it as succinctly. "You can't count events that didn't happen."
Had a lowball offer from a company once - had some friends working there. I could see from some earlier code that some really basic web knowledge was being overlooked. I won't go in to details, but... this was something I'd pointed out to one of the managers there (met at a local meetup). Fixing it then would have taken about 2-3 hours, scanning all the code to ensure it was in sync. Instead, the problem spread as they grew, and it's harder to fix when there are dozens of staff and thousands of files in use vs 5 staff and a dozen files. It became a 'this has to be fixed in order to close mega-deal X integration with company Y', and it took multiple devs several weeks of full-on effort to rectify everything.
How do you quantify that? "Please, take my advice, doing this 4 hours of work now now will save you >$50k and weeks of opportunity cost in 4 years". Generally people don't seem to care.
One of the worst people I worked with was a guy who worked 12+ hours and his code was insanely complex for no good reason. He rewrote other people's code over night without any review. Because he was good friend with management he could get away with it. He created a 100.000 line ETL tool that I replaced with 1000 lines one, that also run 10-100 times faster. I did it while explained everything to all of the team members so everybody was onboard. I never work more than 8 hours and I am willing to be fired over this. I guess work more hours is not indication of any quality and people should not be judged based on this.
>He created a 100.000 line ETL tool that I replaced with 1000 lines one, that also run 10-100 times faster. I did it while explained everything to all of the team members so everybody was onboard.
Data import processes often seem to get shuffled to people usually least prepared to understand how to handle them.
2 anecdotes:
1. worked someplace years ago who would take in customer data, transform it in to our structure, then put in to mysql (2004 mysql). larger projects... this ended up taking 24 hours in some cases. I spent some time (a few hours), and had the whole thing working in under an hour. Working with a couple other folks there they got it down to around 20-25 minutes. The big secret was .... dropping indexes, importing chunks in to memory (vs disk), then copying the memory table to disk after a chunk. This was first met with "that can't work... we've already optimized everything... etc". Until it was demonstrated.
2. Colleague worked at a company which was primarily email marketing. They'd take in email lists, "import" them (which created some related metadata records, etc). The guy who wrote this importer had 'rewritten it to be faster' a year earlier, and larger imports (we're talking like... 10k emails) were taking days. Onboarding a client of 30k emails would take 2 weeks. It was literally insane code. My colleague rewrote the whole thing to work the 30k emails in under an hour, documented the code, had tests demonstrating weird edge cases... "Can't trust it - original dev needs to review it first". He (my colleague) was part of a group of people who was let go a couple months later (and was also approaching 40).
The phrase "big data" was also taking hold as a buzzword around the time of incident 2 (2 years ago maybe?). People think anything that can't fit in to excel is somehow 'big data'.
> People think anything that can't fit in to excel is somehow 'big data'.
To be fair, I'd say this is only true if "excel" is generalized to "the largest non-distributed-computing tool they're personally aware of".
Granted, that may usually be a spreadsheet, but at least in the tech industry, people do know of DBMSes. They just happen to think an affordable single server is an order of magnitude smaller than is actually achievable, even if it's an order of magnitude larger than a spreadsheet.
> Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically useless for years.
I generally agree with your post, but this statement is just wrong (possibly there are a few counter-example domains). If a company cannot get value from new grads within, say, 6 months, it is the problem of the tech lead they are working for.
We routinely get very useful work from summer interns, who are gone completely in 8-12 weeks. This does require organization and a little effort though: pose work they can complete in 1 month, calm them that they do not need to do it quickly, offer support if needed and check progress weekly; and pay attention -- if they sense the attitude that they are useless to the team they will often work that way, too.
TBH, this works maybe 50% of the time (we get useful results from half the interns and nothing from the other half), but I suspect full time employees are not 100% useful either. Just my 2c.
It’s cheaper to buy many lottery ticket new grads, a few who might turn out brilliant, and just burn out the others convincing them to work harder than people who know better will. Then, sometimes managers get burnt out experienced engineers who nevertheless stay, and maybe some managers form negative stereotypes about experienced engineers. This is what I have seen in practice at a former job and it seems to fit the data to me.
A lot of people are building CRUD apps and adtech, so real skills like NLP will be less valuable (for the bulk of their hires) than being cheap and willing to work long hours.
My company has found a competitive advantage by doing blind hiring and getting super talented people (sometimes older, sometimes female) that other companies have undervalued.
What are some common exit strategies in the industry? It seems like early startup options for employees are more of a lottery ticket than retirement plan.
You move one of the larger, more conservative companies that employ probably 90% of the world's tech workforce. You do the non-sexy ETL work, or line-of-business app development, that 90% of the world's developer workforce does.
Web forums are RIDICULOUSLY overweighted toward students and younger startup employees. Partially because older workers have jobs and families and better stuff to do than play online. Partially because the work they do isn't particularly worth writing about, and the latest fads aren't that relevant to their work.
But please don't have the misguided assumption that what you see on HN or Reddit is truly representative of the industry as a whole. It took me a long time, and a lot of unnecessary anxiety, to wake up and see the bigger picture.
I guess it would the founder path, consultancy, moving to a bigger company, moving to a company where seniors are valued... and of course focus on maintenance for deep pockets.
Consultancy, building up soft skills that you can't easily offshore, saving money and doing sensible investments instead of buying tech toys to throw away, be open minded that someday I might do a completely different kind of job.
In Austria, not even Javascript can beat Java (33% more job openings!). At least in Europe, Java will continue to rule supreme in the foreseeable future. I am currently part of a big project involving >300 people that will lead to 50 - 100 Spring Boot microservices that will run at least 10 years...
I highly doubt that. Websites are much more throw-away than the average enterprise backend processing app, even for large apps like Gmail I suspect the churn is orders of magnitudes larger than in their backend systems started in 2004.
COBOL skills remain valuable because they're running hard-to-replace data processing systems at the core of large corporations. Java fills the same role.
I just rejected a path to management a couple of months ago after trying a lead role for a few months and deciding it's not a good fit for what I want to do. I really hope I didn't screw myself over for the future, but on the other hand if the only way I'll have a future in this industry when I get older is in management roles I don't like I may as well move on to something else at that point.
No one will even talk to you about a management position, without already having been a manager, no matter how much experience you have as a developer. The only path to management is to acquire it from the inside.
This is the absolute truth. I've been a lead or performing the role of a lead for most of my career. Recently I started taking on management responsibilities, then I got a new VP who decided I needed a manager because I didn't have the experience. I've seen people who can't manage their way out of a paper bag, but seemingly despite the fact that I've been filling the role for the past year, I'm not qualified for it. It's very frustrating.
Are you in the Bay area? I think that in the bay area it is easier to find a tech job regardless of age. Startups are one place but there are a lot of smaller established tech companies. Try biomedical companies or pharma. At some point, basically every company is a tech company or use technology in some way which requires a few software engineers. Even so.. even the big "old" companies (aka IBM) routinely try to remove older workers from their payrolls: https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...
I'm not saying you're this person, but a lot of people making this claim are also the people that seem argue with literally everything. They always claim they know better. "Oh your team of 8 has spent the last 12 months building this complex webapp with React? Gosh darn millennial hipsters and their FRAMEWORKS. I could have built it with jQuery in a week, and still had a nickel leftover for the trolley!"
Yes I've exaggerated this scenario a bit, but the point stands and it's very real.
Wait what? What did you just do? Did you just claim that most people above 40 are argumentative anti progress coders? Or did you claim that most people who are claiming age based discrimination are such? Either way, how can you back these statements?
They’re claiming the latter. Whether or not it’s true I don’t know.
As an old myself I can say anecdotally that nearly all of the interviewees we bring in who exhibit this behavior are graybeards like myself, but even then they’re a minority
The gp poster only states their age and their interview success ratios, in a fairly neutral tone.
Jumping from this kind of information to conclusions about the gp's willingness to argue or anything else is exactly what this lawsuit is directed against, and I am looking forward to this practice being eradicated.
Sounds contentious. In my experience, if older co-workers have any common differences from younger ones, it’s the opposite of what you suggest. I find myself amazed by the humbleness and acceptance that so often comes with age. Also, my observations speak to older folks having great work ethics and organizational skills, even in absence of experience with the particular task at hand.
I don't think I get your point. Are you implying that trashtalking hip design trends is grounds for age discrimination? Or that older employees give an amount of pushback on design decisions that makes them literally unhirable?
I can trashtalk the design on everything I've directly worked on more accurately and damningly than things I read about online that seem like bad ideas. And I do.
Do you think because I find fun to rip on things in contexts where hyperbole and humor are permissible, that it negatively impacts my ability to exercise coolheaded evaluation in collaboration and decision making contexts?
By their very nature almost every single JS library is a hip design trend. The fact that there are so many JS libraries as to warrant a Wikipedia page should prove that point. Most libraries have a specific use case they excel at, but the hype surrounding them usually is more than the usefulness of the library. Claiming that React isn't trendy is kind of like claiming BTRFS isn't trendy. It's being developed and used by Facebook. ReactOS can use it. At the end of the day it will still be niche until it either becomes bloated to provide more usefulness a la JQuery or stops being trendy and just does what it does.
No, I'm under 30 and React is probably a hip design trend, just like Angular and Bootstrap were. Perspective is valuable.
People are offended because the post you're replying to literally only said, "I've gotten less job offers since I turned 40."
Your response was, "well, that's probably your fault."
To rephrase one of your earlier comments, "I'm really not saying you're ageist. I'm just saying I've experienced a non-trivial amount of victim blaming that looks like this, and it's a possibility worth considering if you want other people to take you seriously."
a) Getting pushback on your idea is not necessarily someone taking offense
b) Casting react as a "hip design trend" is not - in and of itself - a statement about it's fitness for a purpose. It's a statement about popularity, and highly visible things should expect criticism.
c) Even if trendy is meant to disparage the tool as nothing more than a flash in the pan, I think that gets to my (unaddressed) point about hyperbolic language in unimportant discussions.
e) "The reaction proves the point" can be applied to any disagreement, therefore it doesn't reinforce a point without more substance that they're meaningfully connected.
d) It's still unclear what your point was supposed to be. My ask for clarity was not facetious, so far I'm only responding to the point I can infer but find flimsy enough that I preemptively conceded you might be getting at something else.
Your point stands and is about as real as the idea of millenial hipsters saying "Oh, sure, we have a jQuery app that works right now, but that's so 2010, if you don't have an SPA everyone is laughing at you and if you think you're going to write an SPA with just jQuery do you even code bra, let's spend 6 months converting Angreactive, it's the modern-iest framework out there!"
Which is to say, sure, you can boil people down to caricatures, and there will even be people who match them. There are reflexively recalcitrant developers who don't want to adopt anything new, there are technological magpies whose decisions are driven by fashion and resume bullet points. The former probably do tend older, as they have a sense of less time in general and would prefer to reserve learning for new capabilities rather than different ways of doing the same thing, and perhaps even be judicious about time learning vs doing things they value. The latter probably do skew younger, as it's easier to feel you have years and energy to burn and less reference for how change works in the industry.
So what's very real are the incentives and tradeoffs underlying the decision making. The idea that what the past has provided is often adequate and investment in the new has costs is correct. The idea that there may be improvements in the new is also correct.
If you believe this, maybe having cranky 50 year olds who are going to make your organization justify its decisions is actually an asset along with people who are curious to invest in the new shiny...
You should really not be afraid to hire/work with people who know things you don't. And, you will do well to actively solicit and consider their advice, not fight and disparage it.
You put your scenario in disparaging terms, but consider another way to look at it:
- They may well actually know better. Listen, ask questions and learn.
- You say arguing, but you most definitely want people who think critically about literally everything. (You also need people who will get on board with the plan even thought they don't necessarily agree with all the details.)
I'm really not. I'm just saying I've experienced a non-trivial amount of "that person", and it's a possibility worth considering if they want to remain hireable.
No hyperbole. Seriously, I was as shocked as you are. It was a very humiliating experience.
A few interesting things that I’ve experienced:
- Companies tend to like me enough that they keep asking me back to “meet more people” - a very time-wasting process that often ends with silence (and no returned emails or calls)
- When rejected from a particularly interesting company, I will sometimes offer to work for free or a discounted rate initially, just so I can prove what I can do. No one has ever taken that offer.
- I have even offered to work at a very discounted salary, on par with a new grad salary. My rational is that I’ll still make more than I would at Whole Foods, and I’m confident that they’ll be impressed enough to bump me to my normal salary. No takers. Although one company did say that by hiring me, I would “cause more harm than good”. WTF?
Definitely never offer to work for free or a reduced rate. It just shows that you are desperate and don't value yourself. If you want to work for free, give speeches or contribute to open source or write a book. There activities will get you respected by other people. Working for cheap makes you lose people's respect.
Never lower your rate. If you want to make yourself cheaper for the company, offer to work fewer hours, or on a fixed-term contract rather than permanent employment. For those options, you should also actually be raising your hourly rate, because you'll then have to cover more of your own costs, like taxes and insurance.
And don't let anyone squeeze you to make your actual rate lower. I once went to an interview where I was told that the expectation would be for 45 hours of billable work per week, and so I immediately told them that my salary expectation for that would be 20% higher than for a 40 hour work week. They could raise the salary, or lower the work hours, because on a per-hour basis, their pay range was suddenly no longer competitive.
They declined to negotiate that. So I eventually went to work for someone else more willing to pay me what I think I'm worth.
Don't work for free; it just encourages those who try to scam free work out of people. The only person for whom you should be doing unpaid work is yourself.
When I was a contractor the only customers who changed their mind when I put in a lowball offer were people who like to take advantage of other people, definitely not the ones you want to work with. Most other people will reject you not because of your price but because of other factors and price is just an excuse.
When you post firsthand testimony like this, the typical reaction is a pile on of unsolicited advice. When you don't grovel in gratitude and promptly turn your life around in response to the brilliant wisdom of a bunch of internet strangers who know an entire paragraph about your problem, you will be quickly labeled as clearly the cause of your problem, never mind the information in the very article currently under discussion that makes it clear there are large scale forces at work. No, you cannot possibly be a victim of circumstance. You just must not be trying hard enough and making lame excuses to cover that up, like playing the victim card because you obviously have a victim mentality. If you argue it, that will be further evidence of your personal defects.
>Up until age 39, I was never not given an offer after interviewing. Now after 40, my offer rate has dropped to 1 in 14.
Sorry to say this, but get used, as I have, to getting flooded with employment offers that might as well have a note on the bottom that says "all are welcome to apply-EXCEPT YOU." Why they bother to waste resources to send these out is beyond me, unless they are just sadistic.
Nobody can claim they are discriminating if they "offer jobs to "senior" devs as well. I have known people with disabilities that get similar treatment where it was very clear they wouldn't be hired but boxes had to be checked to - what appears - avoid liability.
Boggles my mind that companies do this. I'm just out of college and am amazed by the depth of knowledge older programmers have. A lot of them can find bugs on an almost instinctive level .
I think it might come down to founders being insecure around older engineers who probably won't be afraid to call them out on dumb decisions and won't be as likely to drink the hpye kool-aid because they've seen it all before.
Seems like an opportunity for startups to get great talent.
I once heard about a bug, diagnosed it, fixed it, and checked in the fix within a span of 15 minutes. The [younger] person who told me about it then looked at me like I was some kind of celestial being that inadvertently let their glamour slip for a moment--they were awestruck. Apparently, they had been struggling with it for a week. I didn't even realize it was a big deal.
That's what hiring older people gets you. But you also have to connect them with younger people.
And yeah, the corporate hype-ade gets dumped right into the potted plants now. But we don't exactly call people out on their dumb decisions, though, as much as factor them into future estimates. Telling truth to power gets you fired at most places, so you share your concerns only in private with your direct supervisor. Then you either polish up your resume again, or you work around all the dumb decisions that have already been made, plus the new one. If they didn't bother to consult with the expert before making that stupid plan, they're probably not going to listen to expert critiques after the fact. Always secure your own paycheck before helping out the company. They won't ever reward you for self-sacrifice.
There's a serious problem with the current economic cycle that basically makes technical expertise and efficiency irrelevant to the ways companies make money nowadays. It's a nasty thing to admit to yourself, but unless you do, you risk ending up exactly like that - no hire despite perfect technical skills due to unspoken reasons you didn't catch.
Because the majority of startups are bullshit businesses that are destined to fail, and only those who can recognize the intrinsic problems with them could ever help the founders pivot to something sane and profitable before the runway is gone.
Just out of curiosity: what kind of roles are you applying for? Are those the entry-level positions, non-specialized "senior %LANGUAGENAME% developer", or something requiring solid domain-specific experience?
Is that really the end game? Am I an outlier since I don't want to manage people, I just want to write code? I'm 50 and have been programming since age 13 and I've turned down offers to move into management, since my 1st love is actually building things. Is it really just expected that at some point we all give up what we love to do just to fit into some corporate culture?
Seems to be career suicide. You are turning down countless promotion opportunities and insane amounts of compensation. All so what, you can continue coding day to day? Seems absurd, code at home as your hobby if it means that much to you. As an individual contributor your value to any company is limited no matter your skill. At a certain point the company is going to ask, is your compensation worth the value you add? Its not a surprise that the answer to that question is often no.
That's a fine thesis, though I do think that software is one of those areas where a maker can under some circumstances, potentially have a vastly more powerful impact on an organization than a manager.
Opportunities are fewer and the competition level is high, though. To really harness this, you probably have to either become a founder who writes an early version of a product (very difficult), or alternatively advance along one of the technical track ladders that exist in some big tech companies (they exist, but far fewer opportunities and intense competition). There's a chance you could pitch a breakthrough product, but many (not all!) organizations seem strangely hostile to this.
So I do agree with you that going into management does offer greater opportunity for promotion and increased compensation. I disagree your value as an individual contributor is necessarily limited though, since a technically talented developer with a strong business sense can produce unreal value, sky is the limit on that combination.
Well naturally everyone on Hacker News assumes they are a 10x dev, are gods gift to programming and will be the next Jeff Dean but that's simply not reality.
It depends. At a lot of companies, manager and senior software engineer are roughly equivalent in compensation. To make "insane" amounts of compensation you've got to make director or better, and that's a completely different job/life than engineering. A lot of people went into engineering because they don't have that in 'em.
This is something different. The suit is not claiming that there's discrimination in the hiring processes, but in who sees the ads for the jobs in the first place.
Should it be illegal to advertise a job or housing in Black Enterprise magazine, because the readers are overwhelmingly African American? Or illegal to advertise in the Wall Street Journal because they're not?
You're declaring voluntary and involuntary segregation to be the same. I can read Black Enterprise or the WSJ. I can't read something deliberately hidden from me.
Facebook doesn't collect explicit race information, it's inferred from user behaviour. You can choose to do the sorts of things on Facebook that black people do, then advertisers will think you are black. Just like you can choose to read Black Enterprise, and advertisers will think you are black.
Using dozens and possibly hundreds of pictures of the user is not inferred information in any meaningful since. They know your race, most likely with higher than 99% confidence on most people from the images alone. I'm sure it gets even more exact when they start doing text analysis, looking at your likes, and using the image data of your friends and family.
And gives you explicit warnings not to lie about it. And limits the total number of times you can change it (so you'd better hope you lied when you signed up 5 or 10 years ago).
Facebook is not real big on the 'ol anonymity.
In practice they can't really stop you from lying, but just telling people not to lie and making the question sound serious can often be enough to stop the average person. I suspect most people put in their correct age.
Odds are also pretty good your friends are going to mention your age at some point while wishing you Happy Birthday. If Facebook's data collection is smart enough it could decide to trust them over you. I kind of doubt that it is smart enough to do that right now, but it probably wouldn't be the hardest thing in the world to do if people started commonly lying.
Media has never been responsible of showing the user all the information, they have control over what and how they say it.
I also think that having such a hard-line reasoning doesnt accept the fact that criterias for discrimination are boundless, and that force will only be able to punish a very small subset.
Have to find an alternate way of dealing with changes of this sort than punishment and state threats.
Yes, there are boundless ways to discriminate. Legally, most of them are irrelevant. We've picked a few well-defined things like race, gender, age, religion, marital status, etc. and said "These things you can't discriminate on". If you want to not hire someone because they wore a blue shirt and you hate blue shirts, you can do that.
Further, these aren't punished by force. The remedy is a civil lawsuit, not a criminal complaint.
You've missed the boat. It'd be akin to White Enterprise magazine checking the race of buyers before a purchase can be made or the ad being seen. That's obviously unlawful.
The question is whether FB is immune from the CDA (depends
I don't know if the rules are different in employment, but yes, selective advertising in newspapers with different demographics is considered evidence of "steering"/discrimination in housing. (in California)
That's apples and oranges. This is a single platform, using a variety of techniques to "disappear" protected classes of people from employment -- it's akin to laundering discrimination. Including companies like Enterprise Rent-A-Car is telling, as their business model has always been built around targeting new college grads to be branch managers and retaining them for <5 years.
If you work in tech, you should be very much against this, as this is yet another example of bad behavior by Facebook that will hurt everyone. They are hiding behind the CDA to pretend that they are just passive conduits, and will ultimately push the government to tighten regulation and weaken non-Facebook sites that publish user generated content.
