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Age Discrimination In the Tech Industry
Presto Vivace writes: Fortune has an article about increasingly overt age discrimination in the tech industry. Quoting: "It's a widely accepted reality within the technology industry that youth rules. But at least part of the extreme age imbalance can be traced back to advertisements for open positions that government regulators say may illegally discriminate against older applicants. Many tech companies post openings exclusively for new or recent college graduates, a pool of candidates that is overwhelmingly in its early twenties. ... 'In our view, it's illegal,' Raymond Peeler, senior attorney advisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws said about the use of 'new grad' and 'recent grad' in job notices. 'We think it deters older applicants from applying.'" Am I the only one who thinks many of the quality control issues and failed projects in the tech industry can be attributed to age discrimination?
Older people have families, they come first. The young have very little in the way of responsibilities and have yet to learn their many extra hours working for someone else count for very little at the end of the day.
... I've encountered a tiny bit of what seemed like discrimination but then its hard to tell. Perhaps I just was just being a bit precious about it.
But what I do know is its horses for courses - younger people are (generally) better at thinking up new ideas/paradigms and novel ways to do things , older people are (generally) better at the detailed implementation of a system as they'll have encountered a lot if not most of the problems before and have X number of years experience
I can see where the problems occur between ageism vs new people. I'm not going to reveal who I am for fear of backlash, but if you're going to be an unimaginative little shit who thinks learning stops when you graduate college, then you're going to end up with a dead end job or even worse... out of a job for those young kids people keep complaining about.
Let me tell you something, I hit six figures ages ago and keep thinking to myself what my goals are in life. At first my goal was 100k, then 200, etc etc. You don't have to go your whole life before retirement working sub-100k jobs in rural areas, there are plenty of opportunities to get 100+k in any area if you're skilled enough and have the business skills.
To those who are bitching about being too old and getting the boot, grow a fucking pair and stop being fucking idiots.
Most likely, if you're out of work at 30 after working 8 years in the tech industry, you've been replaced by a younger worker who's cheaper and more flexible. IT in particular has no need for talent, know-how and experience, you shovel fresh meat in at one end and shit comes out of the end. That's why computers are for chumps.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
...it's about pay scales - employers figure recent grads will work for less.
Full disclosure: I am 56 years old.
I've found over the years that a lot of smaller, family owned or privately run businesses will hire older personnel for the experience factor alone. Granted, I'm a Sysadmin, not a programmer.
The larger companies are shackled by company policy (written or unwritten) HR, fixed pay scales and so on. I do believe money comes in to play as younger can mean considerably cheaper, but if that person takes 3X longer to accomplish the task, how much are you really saving in the long run?
The company I've worked for the last 8 years has 50 employees, 11 servers, 65 workstations, laptops, phones, tablets, and so on. I'm also involved in special projects which I have time for because all our systems run smoothly. I can take time off without fear of something bad happening, barring hardware failure or user stupidity.
I tried hiring an assistant, but didn't have much luck. Anyone who could actually help me, and was knowledgeable were few and far between. I got lots of kids who "played with computers" but had no clue on AD, Domains, and so on. I was willing to pay 50k to start by the way.
Anyway, of course age discrimination exists, as does other forms of discrimination. It has simply moved below the surface whereas previously it was overt. I know many companies I have dealt with would hire me in an instant because they know my skill level, however I would have one Hell of a time on the open market at my age. I doubt I would make it past the HR drone.
Pete
OOP has never lived up to it's hype. No matter how "object oriented" a system is, it is still just as likely to be late and/or broken as in pre-OOP days. Development, maintenance and modification is not automatically better with OOP.
The lessons of good language design might as well not exist. PHP is a cesspool of bad design and implementation. JavaScript, even though it has some nice features (closures) has an obscure object model that is difficult to understand and is a wreck just waiting to happen. (Any body can overwrite the basic implementation of built in functions. Really? ObjectHasOwnProperty. Really?) C++ finally got a reasonable memory management model after C++03 with RAII/smart pointers. What did that take, 30+ years? Python and Lua are reasonably good, but they seem to be niche players. Java isn't a programming language, it is a self contained universe. Like a black hole, once you go in you never come out. And even if it's OK now, the fact that Oracle in in charge means that it is like Middle Earth if Sauron won. (Yes. Ellison is that bad.)
I can't be certain, but I strongly believe that one of the reason for the lack of progress is that there are not a lot of old programmers still in the profession. Unlike other engineering fields, say civil engineering, chemical engineering, etc careers tend to be short. There are not enough people around to say "we tried a version of that 15 year ago, and it had these pitfalls." The result is that the same mistakes keep getting made over and over again. This fits in with the observation that as a profession we have not improved much on estimating project requirements and being on time and on budget.
That's one of the reasons I hate the term "Software Engineering". We are not real engineers because we can't deliver on time with predictable results and a predefined cost. It's not that this happens all the time in other engineering areas, it's just that it rarely happens with software.
Why is Snark Required?
They'll produce superior product, faster - Fact: Younger guys cost less & have LESS experience, thus will produce slower and inferior product.
However - The REAL fact of the matter is payroll being easily controlled (since any business major can tell you that payroll is the single easiest cost-center to control, hence, why offshoring/outsourcing's so prevalent), just so mgt. can get more of a bonus in reality and so stockholders (with bogus common stock that yes, can vote (how many actually do?), but is paid LAST in bankruptcy liquidations after secured creditors and PREFERRED stockholders (e.g. boards of directors)).
When that comes before superior product being produced, which it would be when produced by an older more experienced coder, that company is on its way down.
This all stems from short-term thinking and the stock market as well... quick buck artists abound in an economy of "publicly held/traded companies" (the days of FORD or Microsoft being run by the original family or owners are going by the wayside - & with it, so is QUALITY product).
Show me differently, please... the results out there today back me, so Good LUCK!
APK
P.S.=> I can't put it ANY plainer than that... apk
So this is made worse by the fact that any time anybody has actually checked they've found that long term overtime does not actually work. (IE you don't actually get any more work out of people by having them work more than 40 hours a week for long periods of time.) Us older workers (30+) already know this and don't play this game because it's pointless.(And apparently has been known for about a century so it's not a new concept.) However managers still want you to do that, mostly because far too many managers are completely stupid. (Something I feel justified in saying because I've seen way too many mind bogglingly stupid decisions from managers.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
A lot of the problem is people (PHBs) who do not want to employ someone under them who is older than them, because they are embarassed about:
A) Giving instructions to an older person
B) Giving (probably stupid) instructions to someone who understands the issues.
No one is going to own up to these factors.
Sometimes there is a "good" reason to hire the inexperienced. The company maya ctually require people who have not got the experience to spot mass corruption, When the company collapses, it is often necessary to be able to claim "no one on the team saw it coming" despite the fact that anyone who had ever been in an IT project before knows that version control is not just a good idea. (etc)
If you see an empty barrel - look for pork bellies!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I hope you are better at coding than you are at math...your shit attitude will catch up with you and you are exactly the kind of unemployable 40 year old demanding outrageous money I see every day. And never hire.
The biggest problem I notice with older tech workers (IT in my case) is lack of flexibility and lack of knowledge of how things are done currently. I work for a university so we have a good mix of ages. We have student workers that are 18-22ish, we have staff that are in their 20s, 30s (I'm 34), 40s, 50s, 60, and even 70s. We have pretty good employment stability, being a state institution.
Now you see good and bad workers in all age groups. It isn't like all the young people are good (we get some dopey students sometimes) and the old people are bad. However what I notice is that when an older employee is not as good as they should be, it is often related to being behind the times.
We have a guy who's retiring, thankfully, that is like that. He's a good guy and he's not an idiot, but he's real stuck in his ways, and his ways are about 20 years out of date. He does not deal with new technology and methods very well. He wants to do everything how he did it in the 80s-90s, which just doesn't work so well now. I imagine he would have real trouble finding another job if he tried because of that.
So staying up to date on new trends is a really valuable thing. Doesn't mean you need to jump in to everything with both feet right away, but be up on what is happening, and learn it/use it if it is in demand. If you have the attitude of "this is the way we've always done it and there's no reason to change," then it won't be surprising if you can't find many positions.
Those fresh out of uni have yet to see the executive suite cut back on (or eliminate) quality assurance because it's "too costly" and it "slows down development".
Amazing how many managers think you can save time by cutting quality isn't it? (Because what I see happen pretty much every time is it would have been quicker just to do it right the first time. You end up having to repeatedly fix the half-ass version until you get a working version.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Modded me down for pointing out overtime has a long track record of not working or that managers make decisions so idiotic you wonder how they can't figure it out. (But us "older" workers know all about that.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The problem many companies faces are the will to put something fast on the market cheap, and that means that quality control will suffer. More seasoned (older) people will demand a better quality control department, which costs man-hours - which not all companies can afford, but when the product hits the market it better be good enough or you can't afford not to have a quality control department.
Add to it that many managers have problems with being able to control people older than what they are themselves. The manager may be in his 40's and it can be pretty awkward to be a manager for someone that's in his 50's with 30 years of experience in the matters at hand.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.