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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.
They go hiring for unexperimented people. I saw a lot of project sink and get stopped, or cost far more than they should have at compeltion, because the "young" devs have no experience, suffer the NIH syndrom, get enthiusiastic doing new stuff rather than limit themselves to what should be done, if you got for service layer concept screw it up, costing you time to refactor.
So yeah. Go ahead. Hire only youth. And lose money.
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visit randi.org
... 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.
Age discrimination or wage discrimination ? the tendency to hire young against experienced is due to two factors : Experienced people are expensive and worst, they are experienced in life, not likely trapped in rat race and quick to detect management tricks.
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.
If you're unwilling to relocate from Indiana to India to find work in the tech industry, you suck at your job.
You want to hire people that are between 30 and 40.
They usually are young enough to be dynamic but old enough to be sufficiently experimented.
Yes, you are.
No He's not.
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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?
Yes, you are.
You'd be one of the younguns, I suppose, and are illustrating his point.
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". You believe that every problem you see has never occurred before, especially to someone as smart as you, and you know that your solution shows your absolute genius. Management loves you because you believe whatever they tell you.
There are waiting lists for janitorial jobs. You can submit an application but the result is the same as not submitting an application.
By severely limiting the type of candidate they are willing to consider, the companies are limiting themselves to a very strict model that will not allow for "star performers" to do well in that company. They will be limited to quickly going through new hires and only keeping the mediocre ones. The bad ones get fired and the good ones move on to greener pastures. This will make the whole group perform below average and recruiting costs will remain high. I don't see a need to regulate this, since the job market tends to regulate itself quite well because of this. By the way, this isn't limited to age, but also applies to gender, education, nationality and ethnicity.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
When I was job searching I saw a lot of requirements:
"must have 6+ years experience in [something]."
This is, of course descriminating against anyone who is not old enough to have worked 6 years yet.
I think those problems are due to poor management, but it could be said that filling a workplace exclusively with inexperienced people is a sign of poor management in itself. That can be seen especially where there is non-technical management and nobody with enough skills to advise them to put resources into quality checking or other items that are not immediately obvious to someone coming in from another field.
Try to keep up there would you ?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/06/20/1450245/judge-324m-settlement-in-silicon-valley-tech-worker-case-not-enough
I'm from the UK which is probably [slightly] less dog-eat-dog than the USA also, I mainly work in a niche, [Perl] and I do contract work rather than permanent.
However I'm still working about as much as I want. I blew an interview recently, but I'm OK with that, since I performed pretty badly in it. I try and keep up and still enjoy computers and computing. So for my younger friends, and they are nearly all younger now:
That's my 2c of a euro, the html is badly formatted, but hey it's almost time for Sunday lunch.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Ãyounger people are (generally) better at thinking up new ideas/paradigms and novel ways to do thingsÃ(TM)
That hasn't been my experience. Sure, young people throw out lots of ideas, but most of those are bad ideas. If you need good ideas, you're better off hiring someone with a bit more experience and world wisdom.
But the real reasons tech companies prefer young people haven't got anything to do with competence anyway. 1) Young people are cheaper. 2) Young people are more easily pressured into working long unpaid overtime. 3) Young people tend to do what they're told, even when futile. Managers want to discover the futility of their ideas by pouring a few hundred man hours into a failure, rather than through a careful explanation by a senior developer.
...it's about pay scales - employers figure recent grads will work for less.
That depends. There are various reasons why someone can be out of work. Lack of skill or a poor fit for the job are definitely in the mix. Yet companies definitely go out of business, companies definitely downsize (where getting axed may have more to do with the businesses priorities than your skills), and a change in management at any level may mean job loss for professional or unprofessional reasons. Then there are people who simply want to change careers, because of job satisfaction or advancement rather than because of their ability to perform the job. The latter is definitely the hardest to contend with since you probably don't have the contacts that recognize your abilities or because the people in one part of the industry may not see your skills as transferrable to their part of the industry.
I still enjoy the challenges of software engineering to solve intractable problems in large-scale systems. I believe I have been the "beneficiary" of agist discrimination, but can't prove it... So, I am currently looking for a new position. My wife, a government scientist (of my age), is still working at her position in a national laboratory.
This submitter(?) promotes age discrimination too! In many cases the "younguns" will be better at the work than you are - just accept that.
Discrimination of any kind is just stupid - look at the individual and don't care of how old they are, how many children they have, where they come from or who they like to fuck. Look at communication skills, willingness to learn, relevant experience, social skills and in general suitability to the work task(s). Nothing else should matter.
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
If you were to compare the avg. lines of code generated by 100 programmers in age range 21 to 30 versus 100 programmers in age range 42 to 50, which one likely to win? The young ones probably, although their code quality may be inferior to the older group's code.
Programming can be compared to performance sports. You don't see many 50 year old swimmers, soccer players, or 100m sprinters. Programming is just the mental athletics version of these sports. If programmers above 50 years age, are not likely to get a decent job (other than management), they should receive a higher wage in their prime years, just like athletes, models/actors.
Managers and middle managers care a lot about output quantity and throughput for the least amount of dollars. Plus the older programmers are not skilled in the latest development tools/languages which change every 5-10 years. These factors are probably some of the reasons for the discrimination.
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?
So you follow up a story about age discrimination with a statement that is clearly discriminatory? lol
I personally think there is a difference between people of different ages, and men and women for that matter. All this posturing trying to pretend the groups are the same is silly. In regards to old vrs young the laws may do some good though. I generally support the notion that Older tech workers 'don't know the new stuff' etc... but now I'm starting to think that may be the industries fault. If you only hire the young to take on the new projects, then move them to maintain those projects after they're done... then eventually they will be 'old' themselves and never have the opportunity to learn anything new because you only hire new employees for new projects.
It's a crisis of their own making. Train your staff. If they refuse to improve, fire them, regardless of age.
Not just willingness to learn, but active interest in continuing learning. ...and I've found a lack of that in older folks, true, but also in kids fresh out of uni.
But, as a 47-year-old Linux guy, with many different positions at companies large and small over the years, I've never *seen* it. Of course, anything I say is anecdotal; makes me wonder if some facet of my experience is keeping me from where it's practiced, e.g., I'm in the northeast; I'm a 100% Linux-head; I've been in senior positions for years, etc. Perhaps it's more prevalent in different locales, outside of the Linux community, or among mid/junior-grade positions?
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?
While wages I am sure do play a factor, as former a hiring manager I can tell you the GP is 100% correct. Older and younger programmers both have their pros and cons. Younger programmers are nearly always more up to date on the latest technologies and trends and have an innate ability to "churn out" fairly good quality code at a lightning fast rate. However, they are nearly always inexperienced compared to their more seasoned peers, and make a lot of what I would call "elementary mistakes" when it comes to architecture. They also have a tendency to *always* want to use the latest and greatest tech instead of the tried and true, which is not always a good thing.
Older workers have the opposite pros and cons. They tend to take a bit longer to finish a project, but that project is usually of higher quality and better architecture because they have been around the block and know how to code for the long term. They also like to stick with the tried and true technology because they know it, and it works.
Ideal teams have a healthy mix of both young fresh employees and older seasoned ones. A good manager knows how to create this team and get them to work together to bring out the best of the young and old, and how to get the seasoned professionals to help teach the young employees about enterprise architecture, while the young employees can help keep the older employees fresh and up to date on the latest technology trends.
This is the IT industry we're talking about. If we could hire illegal aliens with functional illiteracy in their OWN language let alone ours, we'd do it if we could get away with it.
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
HP, Fujitsu, and TI among others. When I turned 42 the pressure to move into marketing or management started. I was not interested in either, so I continued to do engineering. Then the layoffs started. With each layoff, the next job became harder to find and hold. After a couple years and three jobs/layoffs, I saw the writing on the wall and went back to school for 6 years.
Now I am a dentist. My age and gray hair are appreciated as symbols of knowledge and experience by my patients (even though my experience doesn't match my appearance). Most of my patients thank me for the work I do, and I sleep well at night, secure in the knowledge that the work I did that day was valuable and helped someone to have a better life. This is the exact opposite of my engineering work- no thank yous, only the continual justifying of my job, fighting for vacation time, forget about the promised company-paid continuing education, and long hours of meaningless work on "important" projects that do things like let teen aged girls post selfies to Facebook.
Now I work a 40 hour, 4 -day week, and never, ever take work home with me. I have two 3 day weekends per month and one 4 day weekend per month. That leaves me time to pursue my hobby- engineering, of course. Sure, there's some stress on the job, like when an extraction isn't going well, or when I have to work on little kids, but I am compensated for it and it is very short duration.
Screw the high tech industry and the dopes who run it.
Still on top of the coding game at my age. I went into management for about 5 years but that wasn't for me. I was good at it but I found it tedious and I find meetings to be insufferable.
Will probably get out soon, have some other things I may want to pursue.
It hasn't been easy: constantly learning new technology is becoming a PITA. The same old arguments with the youngsters: no - style doesn't matter as long as it is consistent, yes - this is the way we do it (was not even my second choice of style btw), no - we will not revamp the entire code base because you like tabs, thanks for an hour of useless back and forth.
Also staying late at the end of sprints annoys the hell out of me... mainly because these late sprint spikes are rarely the result of my work (in fact, this has only happened once that I can recall and I told the rest of the team to go home while I fixed my own mess). So yeah, I am leaving now - to go see my kids not that it is any of your business as I don't question you when you show up late with a hangover... no, I am not going to stay late to fix your work yet again.
But all of this is moot: the real issue is that I am not doing a better job than many devs with ~15 years of experience. But I probably make more money (not always tho! Some of these late 30's dev are making BANK). Being completely logical about the issue I would definitely get rid the higher pay guy first. It is that simple.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
whatever it is that your developers are producing (other than warm chair seats) then you start talking like management: "Put X engineers on Project Y to get us to the Z man-months required within schedule."
I'm retired now and have never worked for a middle or senior manager who has read Brooks. They live at the man-month metric, and base their hiring on the fact that you can get the man-months you need for less if you get them from fresh-out developers working from a remote site in Afghanistan.
No joke. I've talked to the CEO of a $2B/year semiconductor company and that is precisely as deep as his plaanning goes.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Yes, you are.
No He's not.
Listen, this isn't an argument . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Recently Google and Yahoo released their employee demographics. I found it quite interesting that they left out what the average ages were inside their companies. I can't help but wonder if it was left out by design.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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
Of course they know, because they have done it and got the t-shirt, that you can learn the syntax of a new language by reading a couple of sides of A4. However, they also know it takes a few years to get familiar with the language gochas and the compiler bugs.
Dont expect a job optimising SQL from me! And stay away from my Cobol compiler.
I assume you know the use of a lawn by now,
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
There's no reason for the younger worker to be cheaper. If, at age 30 with 8 years experience, you're not actually worth more than someone age 22 with zero years experience then why in the world would you expect to be paid more?
I'm feeling this. I worked for Netscape back in the 90's. I'm considerig trimming that from my resume simply because it make me look too old-school. There is definite discrimination amongst up and coming companies. It's incredibly frustrating for me, a guy in his early 50's. I know a metric shit-ton of stuff, and especially the shortest path to get to the goal. Do I get hired, or even a reply on sending in a resume? No. My long work history stretching back to 1983 has me handcuffed.
Mod parent +1: over qualified
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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.
At some point, people have so much experience that they stop thinking and just start remembering the correct way to do things. Their minds become less processing centers and creative engines and more retrieval systems for past solutions.
In some professions that's fine because things don't change in that profession and the remembered solution if things don't change is correct.
However, in some businesses things change all the time and simply going to the remembered solution is counter productive.
It is unfair to assume an old tech will do that. However, I personally have seen it happen and it would be hard for me not to suspect it was happening.
So for example, we have older techs that we deal with all the time. And I make a point of going over the way they do things just to satisfy my curiosity. I do this with everyone... not just them. But I'm looking for different things when going over different groups. Its part of my job to make sure things are being done in the most reasonable way.
What I tend to find with the older techs is that they tend to use older software and hardware whenever they have an excuse to use it. And the younger techs tend to use newer software.
Now using new stuff doesn't make it better. In fact, new stuff is often buggy, feature poor, and expensive. The new techs sometimes do this because see an ad or don't know what to use so they just grab the first thing they find.
The older techs don't do that. They use something that was at one time at least very good. But it might not currently be good.
So there are pros and cons of either.
You just have to remember we're all human and we're going to do what makes sense to us at the time.
The old guys are going to pull out an old standard that they trust which could mean we're secure or it could mean we're using some retrograde relics that will just cause problems down the line when upgrade and replacement comes along and the machines or software is so hopelessly incompatible that it requires expensive changes. The new guys are going to take some chances with stuff they might not have as much experience with and that could be great or a disaster.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
I've had this issue myself here on /. a few times in the last 2-3 years.
Here's my current take on it:
People discriminate based on age, in any field or situation. That's simple psychology. You can tip the reactions in your favor, based on how you behave. I'm skinny, move a lot and wear a relatively up-to-date hipster / better-dressed nerd mix of clothing and my basic temper is sanguine, so people usually judge me roughly 6-8 years younger than I actually am. That does help me when trying to get a quick hire in the webshop next door, although that is getting more difficult in certain ways.
In the field you're easier in for a cheap quick hire if you appear young and nimble. Emphasis on cheap and quick. Easy in, easy out, no hurt feelings on either side. At a first glance, getting such a gig is definitely more difficult if you have a deer-gut, are approaching your 50ies and looking it too.
Then again, take that same deer gut 50ies body, dress it in a good suit and a well chosen shirt and tie combo, adjust your behavior and your speaking a little, perhaps take some training or stage classes, print some neat business cards with "Consultant" written on them and your salary instantly rises by 15K per year easily. Try that as a mid-twenties guy - it's going to be very difficult. ... after all, I'm there to help him out if he's in a jam. But forcing yourself to keep your hands off is a bit of a challenge, I do admit. :-)
This only starts to work in your favor once you've got wrinkles and gray hair to show. I call it the 'gray-hair-bonus'. You need one guy from that camp for every contract worth 100k and up. They are indispensable, especially if they can talk and have the decades of experience to back it up. I'm turning into that sort of guy and helping the transition with some extra 'finally-grow-up' efforts. It does magic to my rates. And it's simply that I look the age that make 50% of all that possible. I just have to get used to letting that fat student kid do the setup of the next server, even if he makes tons of mistakes
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Let's be honest here: Technological experience isn't that big an issue. Older people in IT don't know more about their technological crap than new graduates. Usually, at least. The technology moves so quickly that it doesn't really put you far ahead of your younger peers just 'cause you have 20 years more under your belt. 18 of those years are in technologies that don't matter.
That's not your advantage if you're old. And you should not try to stress that in a job interview. It won't stick and (unless you're dealing with HR who don't understand jack of what you say anyway) your partner won't want to hear about your exploits in technologies that are dead and forgotten from his point of view. Your advantage is in corporate culture. You know how to deal with managers, with PR, with marketing, with legal, with everything that new graduate fresh from college never had to deal with. You know how to "talk the talk and walk the walk", so to speak. Even if you dislike it (like me), you know how these people tick and what they want. You can hold your ground in meetings and you'll be able to understand their very un-technical descriptions of what they want, you've heard it before. You've heard it all before.
Your selling point is simple: You're the reason why your boss needn't hire an expensive consultant. You're not only cheaper, you're also highly available AND you can actually do work besides talking bull.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So if I dye my hair gray, would that be akin to "artificial competence"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The industry knows that the very young is much more easy to exploit. That's the whole reason for hiring young, inexperienced people. It's pure greed. People who have been around the block are not easily fooled and they want more money because they deserve it. Their experience has been matured through time time and they can solve problems more efficiently because of such experience. Young programmers can be "squeezed" easily, don't ask for extra pay and they will obsess around a problem even without pay. It's simple exploitation.
But it doesn't matter what you THINK you're worth, and not even what you're worth in theory. All that matters is what the upper management is willing to pay someone who's performing activities that are vague and many times incomprehensible for the said upper management. In other words, upper management doesn't really know what you do and they don't really care. They look at things like this:
#1: Should we keep X?
- Is X being paid $Y for doing Z?
- Is T willing to do Z for $Y-n%?
Yes: Hire T.
No: Keep X.
#2: Is X asking for a raise?
- Can we find T who's willing to do Z for the same amount X gets?
Yes: Hire T, Fire X
No: Tell X he ain't getting nothin'.
#3: X didn't get a raise and wants to leave.
Let him leave, hire someone else even for a higher salary because "we don't negotiate with terrorists".
So what you think you're worth doesn't mean shit. Sad but true.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I've had age discrimination happen during interviews the other direction. I was told I looked too young at 21 and that clients wouldn't believe I had the skills. This was for a consulting company. I also had it happen with another company that was just simple web application programming.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
When I turned 42...
Now I am a dentist
How is this remotely plausible? How the heck this get moderated insightful?
How is it not plausible? Lots of people go back to school, and if he's smart with his money he could afford to take the time to become a dentist. It's not like medical school has a defined cutoff age for admissions. Yeah, he's on the older end of the scale, but so what?
It is.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I'm a normal looking guy, but older than most in the computer industry at ~46. I have some white hair, but otherwise look young for my age. During my Google interview it was clear that the people I was talking to were extremely surprised to meet me. I had to check to see if I had a potted plant on my head or a 3rd arm growing from my chest. I could tell it was the age that put them off. I did extremely well in the interview, but based on the reactions I got I did not expect to get the job, which I did not. No reason was given, but that is their normal policy.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
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.
Age is not the question of willingness to learn new stuff.
For older people the "backpack" of experience and a bunch of well-tested code-snippets is an advantage as well as a curse.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I'm appalled by the fact that folks are somehow astonished by this. Older workers have much more experience and presumably wisdom. That may make them appear to be more difficult to manage and let's face it, no manager wants to have workers reporting to them with more experience. I don't care how good the management team is, if they know they feel threatened by experience they'll want it weeded out quickly rather than leveraging it.
Older workers also have different salary requirements than say somebody just starting out. That's a put off if a company knows they can get 1.7 of young dumb college kid for every older worker. I'm using the young dumb part metaphorically so please don't flame. If' you've been in the service you'll know the last part too.
The sad part about it is just because somebody is older doesn't mean that they're not just as productive. Sure they'll probably not take the abuse that a just out of college hire would and why should they? If the company can't plan and doesn't have sufficient resources to do a task, then flogging the staff only creates burnout and turnover. I'm approaching 53 now and I won't pull all weekend coding sessions as a rule but will if it's necessary to get things done and that's the mistake. That's counter culture to some companies who think that they have to run in panic mode constantly and force everybody on a death march. That's why they think younger workers will fare better. Is it discrimination? Yes. Can anything be done about it? Well how are we about diversity in general? You see that's the rub, if diversity is for everybody then why can you exclude older workers? Maybe if I was female or ethnic then it would benefit me? Naw, judge me on what I can do for you and how it gets done not on how old I am or what race or gender I am.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Note that I didn't say "what you think you're worth" but "what you're worth". If a 30 year old is no more productive than a 22 year old then he should make it clear to potential employers that he's available for a 22-year old's salary. He should broadcast that, in fact, he is no more "expensive" than the 22-year old. If he does this successfully then "22-year olds are cheaper" is no longer a reason for employers to not hire him.
When seeking employment, there are strategies that can be used to help defeat age discrimination.
Remove the gray before an interview. Clairol and Clairol for Men (and other such products) can be your friend; alternatively, visit a good barber or hair salon. Pick a natural-looking color. Men should remember to color their beards and mustaches. This should be done several days in advance so that accidental coloring of adjacent skin can be washed away. DO NOT persist in coloring hair, however; this is suspected of increasing the risk of cancer. Do not wear false hair; it is too easily detected.
When describing education, do not mention in what years your degrees were granted.
When describing employment history, only go back 10 years.
Do not mention spouse, children, and especially grand-children.
Do not mention expertise in obsolete computer languages or hardware.
If you are a victim of age discrimination, however, think very carefully about legal remedies even if you have solid proof. There is a U.S. Supreme Court justice who previously was the head of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). While in that earlier post, he deliberately sat on over 20,000 age-discrimination complaints until the statute of limitations expired and prevented action. (Anita Hill was merely a side distraction.)
I graduated from the Az School of Dentistry and Oral health in 2011 when I was 52 years old. I have a classmate who is a couple months younger than me. Prior to the 4 years of dental school, I did two years of predental studies - all the stuff I didn't have in engineering school- organic chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, anatomy, physiology, etc.- at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo.
I spent a pretty good chunk of my savings from my first career to get educated for my second at the same time I was financing my wife's run at medical school. It was a financial set back but well worth it. Our combined income is now about 5X what I used to make as an engineer.
I actually know someone who did just exactly this and I know someone else who became a pharmacist. So while this may not be common, it does happen.
Not just willingness to learn, but active interest in continuing learning. ...and I've found a lack of that in older folks, true, but also in kids fresh out of uni.
I'm too old to know everything.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
You say "what you're worth" as though it's an absolute value like the price of gold.
You are worth essentially nothing to me. I wouldn't even accept a résumé from you. Presumably, to your employer you are worth more. Even so, a lot of the "worth" isn't in what you can do as much as it is in how much they like you, and anyone who's ever worked in an office with protected deadwood can attest that tht isn't neccesarily related to your intelligence, talent, work ethic or even what you deliver.
Broadcast all you like. People believe what they want to believe when valuing candidates. The IT profession is full of people whose impact on hiring is considerable, but shaped by the belief that if a 10-year old kid can write a "pong" game, then a 10-year old kid can deliver an enterprise-grade complex web application. Especially if they can make it pretty, even if the backend part is an unstable pile of crap.
Lack of unions and high student loans are doing it.
Older people are have less loans and are less willing to work there ass off 60-80 hours a week with no OT pay. But say you have 80-100K+ loans to pay off you will take that job and work even if the pay rate is low just to try to pay down that loan.
us healthcare system has some blame as well as older people cost more in healthcare even more so if they have a family
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.)
Just "Git 'er Dun! All You Have To Do Is..."
Yeop.
We see a lot of these articles. It is not about ageism or anything of the like. In every industry there are always people willing to work for less, work harder, working with less standards, take shortcuts...
Most other industries, put in some barriers. Those that don't... well... let's just say they're not for most people looking for good work.
Doctors, lawyers, teachers, trades people, nurses, dentists, accountants... all have some kind of union or professional association to enforce working conditions and standards.
Then again, there are two kind of engineers and software developers.
Those that view it as a career. They want to do an honest days work for an honest days pay.
Those that view as greatness or changing the world.
That ultimately determines how you view it.
For me at least, I'm in the honest days work for honest days pay.
despite the fact that anyone who had ever been in an IT project before knows that version control is not just a good idea.
Please tell that to the older cowboy coder I have to deal with who refuses to use git more frequently than once a month and has a hissy fit if I check anything into the mainline branch that he's working on as it will mess up his "merges".
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
If you cant get a job in tech at 30 then your skills are out of date. what the hell have you been doing?
the entire time you are working you learn new or better skills for your next job. I have jumped careers 3 times now and each one takes me higher than I could EVER get by being silly and sticking with what I started at. Became and expert at IT and then learned DB programming, jumped ship to the company's competition as their DB admin, perfected that while learning embedded systems programming, jumped ship to that.
Over the past 5 years I have been teaching myself the bleeding edge of smart building programming and design, I will be jumping to that shortly at age 45, and already have job offers and head hunters looking to hire me.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Actually my old company had a group of former employees who'd been given the boot form an organization to fight the company's obvious age discrimination. They used a two prong approach. One was that 1/3 of your annual review process gauged you for 'new skill development', when many older employees are employing a broad range of skills but not necessarily developing new ones. On the other hand, 20-somethings have to develop new skills because they don't have many. The second prong was to move the 'underperforming' employees who weren't developing new skills as fast as they're younger counterparts into a 'redeployment' group where they could either choose to voluntarily resign with a payout or hang around and wait for a job offer from another department. Nobody wanted to take the older guys because it was a major fight to get them through the annual review process.
When I retired, a new manager took over the group and with HR's advice, put the two oldest guys in my department straight into redeployment, both guys in their 50's. Pretty invaluable employees too. I'd have a room full of young alpha male type A's sitting around arguing over who had the biggest one and it'd go in circles for hours. If I sent one of those older guys into the process, they'd settle it down, shoot down the bad ideas with their experience, get a plan formed and point the testosterone in the right direction to get something done. They were also better at fully forming plans, managing and monitoring progress, writing documentation, and handling senior management issues/politics.
At another job with a major company, I helped out a neighbor by putting his resume in with HR. The HR person told me to have him remove his photo from the resume, because he was clearly over 50 and many hiring managers would just toss it if they saw the picture and never interview him. A fine line between it being okay to not even process someone due to their age but once you interview them, you cross over into the discrimination area.
I had a long career with a dozen companies, mostly large and well known, and the mantra all along was that if you hadn't gotten yourself into a people/project/program management job by the time you were in your late 40's, you were screwed.
I've worked several different jobs and went to college with several older IT people. I can tell you that NONE of them had sufficient IT knowledge to do their job. They simply have too much outdated, incorrect knowledge and they don't keep up. I was hired on as head IT manager of a large company at age 24 and the IT department went from a nightmare run by a 51 year old idiot to a practically flawless system. I wouldn't hire someone over 30 under any circumstances.
Another illogical phenomenon I've seen is managers flat out stating that none of their employees should earn more than they do (indeed such a scenario is ludicrous). As if middle managing is always a harder to fill role than some ace technical person with a much-sought after skill set.
And I say that as someone who recently joined management.
Of course that was until they hired the manager that sucked at leadership/management but was awesome at company politics. End result was they laid the good manager off. (Since he thought it was stupid to use software engineers as tech support and actually tried to protect us from that shit, make sure our computers were up to date so we weren't frustrated, ETC. The rest of the company hated that since they absolutely love using us as their tech support. As best we could figure out the lousy manager considered the good one a threat so the crap one climbed the corporate ladder until they were above him and then used the layoff excuse to get rid of him.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Speaking as a 60 year old with a killer resume who has been programming for below minimum wage for the last 14 years, largely because of discrimination:
All discrimination should be legal in a truly free market. Unfair discrimination results in a competitive disadvantage that a free market will punish in exact proportion to the degree the discrimination is unfair.
However, we don't have a free market. We have a market that subsidizes wealth. The information technology sector -- in particular -- suffers from the free protection of network effect wealth such as that which built Bill Gates' operating system (hence tightly integrated applications) fortune and which is building Zuckerberg's. Network effect wealth is essentially wealth that accrues to the biggest regardless of whether they're the best or not.
There are those who claim this all evens out in the end due to the higher taxes paid on income, capital gains, value added, sales, etc.
Wrong.
The key to understanding the difference is in comparing the liquidation value of the wealth as opposed to the net present value of the projected profit stream. The liquidation value represents NPV of the projected profit stream adjusted for risk as perceived by risk averse financial institutions, such as pension funds, investment banks (that aren't socializing their risk), etc. On the other hand, that same profit stream, as perceived by gifted technologists and business leaders might be substantially higher because they understand best how to manage the inherent risks.
Where the network effect is the dominant factor in valuing an asset (as it was with MS-DOS the moment IBM started distributing it as the default OS on their 4.77MHz 8088 PC -- or as it is with Facebook as soon as the social status of Harvard was seen as driving the its growth to dominance over prior entrants such as MySpace) there is less difference between the risk averse valuation and the valuation placed on the asset by the "gifted". If, rather than taxing the profit stream, capital gains, value added, sales, etc. the liquidation value were the tax base for civilization, guys like Gates and Zuckerberg would be taxed out of their stranglehold _very_ rapidly, and more competition could enter the field.
Now, would that mean guys like me get to work for above minimum wage?
That I leave to the fair market.
Seastead this.
More or less, yes. A given candidate will fetch a certain price in a certain market. That's how much he or she is "worth" when it comes to asking for compensation. If you ask for more than you're "worth" then you will likely not be employed. Adjust your asking price downwards and, assuming prospective employers are aware of this fact, your odds of getting job offers increases.
Agreed. Regardless, what I said stand. If your asking price is higher than a 22-year old but prospective employers deem you of equal "worth" to a 22-year old then obviously they're going to offer the 22-year old and not you. If your asking price is equal to the 22-year old's then it's a toss-up. So if you're 30 years old and can't find a job then either you're so flawed as to be unemployable at any price or your asking price is just too high.
In my experience, hiring folks tend to believe what they're told by recruiters when it comes to how much a candidate expects to get paid. If a recruiter tells me, "Joe is looking for $90" then I'll assume that's actually what Joe's expecting. I may not offer him that much, but if I'm not looking to spend more than $60 then maybe I opt not to bring Joe in for an interview because he's out of my price range. Had Joe told his recruiter that he'd accept $60, and his recruiter relayed that information to me, then maybe I'd interview him and maybe he'd end up getting the job.
Years of experience, to me, is at least as important in programming as in any other field. Experience makes you better at your job, not just 25% better, several times better.
Programming is designing. The hard things in programming are design choices, not learning some new syntax. Anyone can learn a language in a matter of weeks. But a designer can keep improving over the course of his whole life. As Steve Jobs said, the difference between an average taxi driver and the best taxi driver in the world is maybe 10-30%. But between average software and the best, ten or a hundred times.
Amazing how many managers think you can save time by cutting quality isn't it?
You absolutely can save time by cutting corners, including quality. You have to cut the right corners and you have to understand what it's going to do to you down the road, but it often is the right decision.
One of the most useful notions to arise in the software industry in recent decades is the concept of technical debt. Cutting corners now means storing up trouble for later, and debt is an absolutely awesome way to think and talk about it -- a big bonus is that it's a concept that management is perfectly able to understand, including the fact that the time will come when it's necessary to stop spending development resources on buying new features and start using it to pay down the debt.
And as I mentioned before, accruing some technical debt is often exactly the right decision. If getting the next version out the door a couple of months earlier is the difference between keeping the company alive and not, then there's simply no question. It's much better to accept the debt (just like borrowing money from the bank to make payroll) so that there's income later to pay it off. On the other hand, if the resources are available to do it right, avoiding debt increases future agility -- and going the other direction, spending development resources on making the codebase more flexible is a lot like building cash reserves, something smart companies do when times are good.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Just to be clear I've seen what you say work if it's along the lines of keep out features that aren't needed and we kept track that those features aren't there.(As you say tech debt or in this case reduced feature set.) What I haven't seen work is "We want all the features, we'll just do a half assed version of it and not keep track of the tech debt." turn out well. (I bring it up a lot but I always have this story of a communications protocol where my company tried to take the toy "proof of concept" version that made no attempt to implement large necessary portions of the protocol. Pretty much that was written under the directive of "Get a proof on concept in a day for a protocol that should have taken a week or 2 to implement." Basically the entire "handshake" portion was written with the idea that it would always work since there was no time to actually implement it. Not true in reality.) They spent weeks after that trying to get it to work and it still has serious issues. (It would have been quicker to just do it right in the first place. Of course now it gets dumped on me so I'm annoyed.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
1. Older, experienced programmers who have made an effort to learn continuously throughout their careers 2. Brand new college graduates (regardless of age), who tend to be like empty heads but with open minds 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Older programmers with outmoded experience who refuse to adapt to contemporary idioms/paradigms.
I'm posting anonymously on purpose. 4-digit slashdot ID. I've been around a while.
I'm over 50. I recently interviewed with one of those Bay-Area companies from TFA that has a median age of 29. Median age. That means unless they are hiring people that are still in high school, a 50-something is shit out of luck. We know they are hiring fresh-outs, say 21 years of age, so if 29 is the median (TFA said median, not mean) that means that if you are over about 37, you are too old.
I did not see a person on the campus over my age, or even near my age, in fact, some of the people that interviewed me were about the age of my offspring. I don't think the oldest person I met was 40. I think I did well in the interviews (which were grueling) but they were definitely set up for somebody right out of grad school. I did get a call from the recruiter and was told they were "not going to move forward with me".
I'm not bitter, I'm not upset, I expected as much. In fact, I told my family before I went on this interview that I was too old for this company. I am disappointed, but that's because I am a human, and I feel. I'm sure that "culturally" I was not a good fit, as I don't have a lot in common with people half my age -- I live much differently then they do. But I don't think that is a good argument not to hire -- diversity is key; having a variety of ideas and viewpoints is useful.
Recently, we saw that the employee population of a lot of these companies was majority white, majority male -- this survey did not show that the employee population is probably majority under 35. They are without any benefit that diversity could bring. (though it is also true that I am in two of those majority groups, hiring me would not help with their reported "problem"...)
While I don't think that these companies practice overt, conscious age discrimination, I am completely certain that they practice unconscious age discrimination. I am also sure that I was not the only party injured by this, I am confident that the company that passed me over would have benefited from employing me.
Right now we''re recruiting some more developers at my employer, and while we're not actively discriminating, we seem to be consistently favouring older applicants. You can only get so far with youngsters who are willing to work all hours - eventually you have to address the debt, both technical and process, that they leave behind. And to do that you need at least some older people to mentor the kids and to rebuild and maintain the relationships between your engineering team and the rest of the business.
There is no algorithm telling you exactly how much you're worth. None whatsoever.
Some companies split salaries by "levels". You are Individual Contributor (IC) or Manager (M). As an IC, you have levels, from 1 to 6, where 1 means "worthless piece of shit" and 6 means "a God in your field". Your value is calculated, roughly, based on some generic metrics, and each of those "levels" has a minimum and a maximum threshold for salary size. Those thresholds vary by company, state, country, etc. A Senior Database Administrator job will have different thresholds based on where they work (employer name and geolocation), which LoB are they in (internal support is usually where the shit salaries are because that LoB doesn't directly generate any income), whether you work remotely and so on.
e.g. a Senior DBA in the SF Bay Area will have a minimum salary threshold higher than the maximum salary threshold for exactly the same job in Alabama, and probably someone from Romania would have to do the same thing for 10% of that.
Not to mention that these thresholds overlap through levels, e.g. the upper salary limit for an IC1 is only slightly higher than the lowest threshold for an IC3, so that management could fuck you in the ass by "promoting" you across levels with no salary change whatsoever and laugh in your face because they're covered by "procedures". You wanna quit? Good, they'll finally get to bring that 20-something year old who'll do the job for exactly what you were getting, but will be happy and grateful, unlike you.
So you tell me your value and I'll show you a gazillion counter-examples which make your point moot.
That's why I said "what you think you're worth". And even given two equal people living in the same area, doing the same job for the same LoB in the same company, their value, even if equal in theory, will be different in reality based on subjective factors: how young/old they are compared to their team, how tall they are, how their character is and how does it fit within the team, etc.
e.g. I don't drink, but my former manager used to heavily drink. he never fully trusted me because "I can't trust a man who doesn't drink with me until we both pass out", as he was saying. Yell "discrimination!" all you want, fact of the matter is that there's a huge amount of subjective things you can't prove and which could affect our salary and your prospective salary for that matter.
TL;DR: there is no such thing as "absolute value" for a job.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Do you still do engineering (Which area? Software?) related to dentists?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
When they're the older ones they'll get pushed out in favour of younger workers and then wonder "WTF?"
What I haven't seen work is "We want all the features, we'll just do a half assed version of it and not keep track of the tech debt." turn out well.
I have. It always leaves a mess to clean up later, but it's sometimes the difference between having a product team to clean up the mess or having the whole thing die. I've also seen startups fail because the development team refused to cut corners, resulting in missing the market window of opportunity.
Context matters.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Age discrimination is increasingly common since age discrimination protections were gutted by a 2009 supreme court ruling.
Essentially, unless they say in written form that you are an old geezer so they are firing you or that candidate B was "younger" (and then they get caught by a complaint unrelated to you because you only know you were not hired and probably didn't have grounds to complain) and the email is turned up in a general search than age discrimination can't currently be prosecuted.
Meanwhile- when passing a resume to Infosys for a friend- they returned the resume and said it was fine but they required the candidates HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION DATE.
Not the fact that the person had a high school degree (much less the bachelor's degree and the requisite experience in SQL)-- but the actual date.
Should be illegal.
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The challenge in IT is that the field changes crazy fast. Today's "hot techology" (say Adobe "air"/"flex") only has qualified coders who work for Adobe or who just graduated college. Then three years from now- it's discontinued and you need to be experienced with HTML5. Which will be changed to HTML6 in three more years.
The companies have no interest in spending 12 months training their existing programmers up to speed- so they dump them. And get new college grads or consultants (who don't actually HAVE the experience based on personal experience- but they are allowed to learn on the job if they hide it well enough and their consulting companies helps them and does provide some training- but they do shitty work).
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Then, you add the fact that companies want as one particularly stupid company actually put in it's job ad "young, dynamic, deadline oriented employees" who are willing (and able) to work 70 hours a week for the promise that someday, they'll have experience and get high pay (tho in reality- 95% of them will be dumped for college grads when they turn 40 and only the lucky 5% who chanced into particular skill sets are retained).
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I don't have a good solution but i can tell you this. If you deny people employment you are going to end up paying to support them. Either $18,000 per year for welfare or $31,000 a year incarcerated.
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I saw at 33 the massive age discrimination that was in the IT field for 50 year olds. I saved like hell and never assumed I would be allowed to work until 67. I retired at 51. They literally laid me (and the other 400 not so well prepared employees) off 4 months before my retirement date. They had no idea why I was so happy and not upset but I'd already been mentoring two people as my replacements for 8 months at that point so it was just bonus severance pay and cobra to bridge my medical care til the ACA kicked in.
The difference tho was that the age discrimination today starts at 40 to 45 instead of at age 50. Without going back to trade school or college, it's almost impossible to keep up with the rapidly changing field. Plus you are a cost center- not a profit center.
1st I advise kids to just avoid the field today... but if you must choose it,
2nd I advise kids that they should work for a computer consulting firm with an active training program. -- You are a profit center there --.
If you go to work for any normal company- there is a high risk that your job will be outsourced just when your kids start college.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Wait, you've seen them actually clean it up? I guess I have bad luck then because what happens in my experience is the company just keeps building up tech debt and think they'll never have to pay it down. (You know, like an idiot maxing out his credit card because he figures he only has to pay part of it off at the end of the month. It's practically forever before the whole bill is due:) ) Guess I'm gun shy since my experience is managers abuse it. (IE do the half ass version and then don't get time to clean it up until it collapses on a customer which is of course dev's fault.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Most recently I designed and built a 3D printer using a lot of surplus machine parts. I designed it so I can print full size human skulls extracted from CT scan data.
I have been developing my own design for an extruder for a 3D printer but I am very close to giving up on it. It is taking too much time and there are pother things I want to work on.
Bummer. Wouldn't that project be perfect for dentistry like missing teeth, bones, and stuff?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yes, I've seen it cleaned up. I've even seen (and been on, and led) teams who track their technical debt, measured in terms of estimated person-days to clean it up, and deliberately schedule periods of time focused on debt paydown, both short sprints and longer-term efforts.
I've even seen organizations mismanaged like yours which have turned around and began deliberately managing their technical debt. It starts with the engineers educating management about technical debt. Unless the managers are fools (and most of them actually aren't, they just seem that way because engineers and managers don't communicate well), they quickly grasp the idea and its consequences. Even then, you can still have managers that care only about the short term, because they expect to be promoted and out of the mess before the note comes due, and there's really not much you can do about them except to quietly try to manage it yourself. But given a reasonably-intelligent manager who is interested in next year and the year after, teaching them (gently, non-confrontationally and above all non-condescendingly) about the concept of technical debt will help them to understand and work with you.
One key to making it work is that you must be able to quantify technical debt. That means being able to make reasonably-accurate estimates of its impact and cost to fix. That, in turn, means that you have to be capable of making reasonably-accurate estimates of how long it takes your team to accomplish a given piece of work (feature or debt paydown). And you have to establish a track record with the manager so that he or she trusts you and your estimates.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it absolutely can be done... and it'll make your time at work much less stressful. It may or may not result in any decisions being changed, but when you're sure that management understands your concerns, and considers them to be perfectly valid and important, it makes it much easier to accept when they decide to take the shortcut anyway. And if the team is visibly and conscientiously tracking technical debt (e.g. as a regular part of weekly status reports), most managers will begin seeing it as a variable to manage, including by finding opportunities to pay it down, and by understanding when it impedes new work.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
More useful for planning facial reconstruction surgery for people who have suffered trauma.
Ah, not that useful for mouth/teeth then? :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
How about this: if you have a set asking price and you're unable to find a job at that price (while 22-year olds in the same market are being being hired at a price lower than yours) then your asking price is too high. In that case your joblessness is not caused by your age, but by the fact that you're asking for more money than a 22-year old (while, apparently, being unable to convince anyone that you'd actually provide more value than a 22-year old). Either you figure out how to convince employers that you can provide more value (and thereby merit higher pay) than a 22-year old, or you accept the 22-year old's wages, or you switch careers.
So do I. Do you remember dropping a box of 2000 punched up but with no sequence number on them?! They really need to get off our lawn NOW!
On y va, qui mal y pense!
And the tech companies have the gold. The is age discrimination in IT jobs because younger workers are cheap and full of enthusiasm and energy. I remember back in the 1970, I didn't care what my income or perks were -- I just wanted to work, screw a home or social life. The tech industry depends upon this as must as the education industry depends upon dedicated educators willing to work for a pittance.
Those that make the economic decisions have decided that disaster rollouts followed by many cycles of repair because of inexperienced personnel and insufficient quality control combined with low salaries beats paying larger salaries to those who would refuse to put oot finished code until it's ready for release. I believe this strategy will fail in the long run, but who is in software development for the long run anymore.
I have seen from working in Europe that seniority is valued by some companies but the American short-sighted strategies are taking hold and the Americanization of the European continent continues apace.
Strictly from a mathematical point of view, yes, what you are saying is correct. With that being said...
Companies value soft skills at ZERO. You can churn code just as fast as a 22-year old, but you are more experienced from a team player perspective, you have finished more projects in the past and bring a set of recommendations the size of a bible. hence you are asking for 20% more than the 22-year old. Then, your resume goes to some HR manager who only looks at how much code can you churn and thinks "bah, we can teach the 22-year old the soft skills in time" so you're fucked.
Not to mention how much can you sacrifice from a personal perspective, aka life-work balance. There are things a 22-year old would do for free but a 35-year old wouldn't or couldn't unless he would be okay with his work-life balance being screwed big time. A 22-year old will have the stamina and naivete to work in shifts, be on call and stay late for 0% increase from what he's asking, whereas a 35-year old with family, kids and other obligations would find this sacrifices a lot harder for objective reasons.
I am 35, have a family and my work-life balance is fucked because I have to make sacrifices to stay competitive. I work from 5 PM to 2AM, my soft skills are valued at zero by the company, my work doesn't bring direct revenue and if "switching careers" would not be needed if companies would account for factors other than simply "can he produce more of THIS". my biggest disadvantage in the line of work I have is that pretty much nobody from my LoB understands exactly how much effort is behind the end result of my work, despite my attempts to explain. And other companies which I interviewed for appear to have the same lack of understanding on the matter. Also, the fact that I really enjoy what I do also has zero value, but in practice it translates to high quality results. It's the kind of outcome nobody cares about unless it's missing. To make a stupid analogy, it's like realizing what your wife does for your home only after she leaves and your house becomes a mess.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
While I admit some companies are just horrible but sometimes this is the by product of doing things right. The company I work for hires 2/3rds employees with under 5 years experience most of which are recent college grads. With in three years most of these employees have been fired or promoted and the need for more entry level positions exists and the cycle starts again. Promoting from with in rewards employees for hard work and boosts company morale.
I remember reading about this problem 30 years ago when I was a young programmer.
It seems that the tech industry is not the only place this is happening. Journalism, too, seems to be hiring only young and inexperienced people and paying the price.
Then why would you expect to be paid 20% more than the 22-year old based on your soft skills? This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The 30-year old who's unemployed because he's asking 20% more based on skills that employers don't actually value is out of touch with reality. He doesn't understand what employers actually want and/or are willing to pay for.
That said, your description of how hiring works doesn't match with my experience in small companies. My current employer doesn't even have an H.R. department per se. We have no idea how many lines of code a given candidate can or can't churn out. Our recommendations are based almost entirely on three things: 1. how well does this person seem to know the things we need them to know, 2. how likely does it seem that he/she is a quick learner who can pick up new skills as needed, and 3. does this person seem like he/she might be kind of a jerk, or is he/she someone I'd want to work with? Age doesn't really come into it, except insofar as it affects the above three criteria. On our app dev. team we have three ~40-year olds, one ~45-year old and one junior guy who's probably ~30 or late 20s. We used to have another ~45 year old until he left a couple months ago.
In theory I can see this being true. In practice I haven't seen it work that way. On every team I've been on where there were junior guys (e.g. 22-year olds) and older guys, it was never the case that the junior guys worked crazy hours while the older guys worked normal 40-hr weeks. I've never been willing to work crazy hours like that and I've never had too much trouble finding work.
Can I ask what do you do? I've never had to work shifts. At the risk of sounding harsh, it seems like you've chosen a field where it's more-or-less impossible to differentiate one's self based on the quality of one's work. Every employee is viewed as approximately equal and more-or-less fungible. Moreover, there's no willingness to accommodate employees' desire for work/life balance. That sounds like a terrible field to be in. That's not a criticism of you; I'm just giving an objective assessment of what you've described. I'm also sensitive to the fact that career-switching is difficult, time-consuming and often expensive.
Then why would you expect to be paid 20% more than the 22-year old based on your soft skills?
Because they exist, are valuable for the job and it's a proven fact. It's not as if I ask 20% more because my garage band can rock the 'hood. I bring extra stuff that's valuable to the company in the first place and indirectly saves thousands of dollars per year. The problem is that the hiring process members don't see that value because they are blinded by "OMG 20% more fuck it" fallacy.
That said, your description of how hiring works doesn't match with my experience in small companies.
That's because small companies can't even be measured in such a way. There is no algorithm applicable there. The hiring process is raw and unfiltered (e.g. you talk to the CEO directly and he's usually your direct manager as well). Small companies were never the problem and yes, age discrimination is never a problem there (unless the owner is a stupid dick which is a different discussion entirely). Age discrimination is visible in large companies which are a different kind of animal.
Can I ask what do you do? I've never had to work shifts.
That's because I live and work in Europe and my customers are all located in the USA.
I build reports and analyses (Business Intelligence), big data stuff. Currently looking to expand into realtime analytics using big data stuff as well.
At the risk of sounding harsh, it seems like you've chosen a field where it's more-or-less impossible to differentiate one's self based on the quality of one's work. Every employee is viewed as approximately equal and more-or-less fungible. Moreover, there's no willingness to accommodate employees' desire for work/life balance. That sounds like a terrible field to be in. That's not a criticism of you; I'm just giving an objective assessment of what you've described. I'm also sensitive to the fact that career-switching is difficult, time-consuming and often expensive.
It's not the field per se, it's the fact that the field addresses almost exclusively to very large companies, and very large companies are horrible when it comes to taking care of their employees. It's the way it is. I tried small companies but they're either not needing big data analyses (they don't have big data to speak of) or they already have established analysts who don't leave because life is good there.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Never had an occasion to say I have been biased against. Here's the real fact. I am tired of the bullshit of people claiming age discrimination in the tech industry. There simply are not enough people to do the jobs that are available. If you doubled the number of people in the world writing software write now twice over there still would not be enough people writing software to cover all of the possibilities of software that need to be written, or hardware that needs to be designed, or problem that need to be solved. We've got the worlds smartest people sitting on Wall Street trying to figure out how to make Millionaires and Billionaires wealthier and if they simply turned around and said, we will only work on trying to make the world a better place by trying solve problems or just by legally making the Billionaires maybe a little more accountable for the wealth, they too would create even more demand for software writers and tech workers.
Point is, there is always demand, always. My whole life I have been hearing about age discrimination in the Tech industry and it was going to happen is just a few years from now for me.
I have never had a problem getting a job or keeping a job. What I have noticed is in overwhelming demand is skills discrimination, as is brain discrimination. People in out industry do not put up with other people's dumb BS. If you don't know your stuff they will shun you, and then they will eject you, and they will make it very hard to ever work again in the industry.
So, new rule. Don't ever claim to be something you aren't. People will forgive an awful lot, even ignorance and stupidity. They will not forgive being lied to, and not learning your lessons.
I think the difference here is that you're basing your expectations on the ideal in which hiring managers correctly understand what's valuable to the company and I'm basing mine on what is (apparently) the reality in your field, where they are oblivious to the value of soft skills. If you know that going in and yet insist on being paid 20% more then, when you find yourself unemployed, it's by choice. You could be employed if you'd accept 20% less, but you won't. Ergo you're not employed. You can't change hiring managers' ability to appreciate soft skills. You can change your personal asking price.
It sounds like you're just in a bad spot. As you point out, big data analysis is mostly a big company thing, and big companies are the one who are most blind of the things you bring to the table that would merit higher pay. I wonder if you'd be treated better in a full-time on-site role where there's more direct face-to-face interaction?
A good friend, in her mid-forties, was "between positions" a couple years ago. Oddly, when she dyed the few gray hairs she had, she got a job shortly after that.
In my early fifties, "between positions" (due to the Bush Depression), I started dying most of my hair and beard. First job, right after that, my manager turned 30 while I was there....
The other *real* problem are HR departments. 25 and more years ago, they knew their companies, they knew the business, and may have actually had some people who specialized in different departments, and so could know who to send to the hiring managers for an interview. These days, I'm amazed if one in 100? one in 500? has the vaguest idea of what anyone in the organization does, other than HR. At a guess, I'd say 50% or so of recruiters, what we used to call headhunters, do specialize, and so know what applies (he knows Oracle, so yeah, he can do Sybase), and have "special relationships" with the hiring managers, and they get around HR that way,
HR, and upper management, are the ones who think all work is like the old assembly line, and they can hire someone right out of school, and don't *have* to pay real salaries, and who don't know any better, and so they can work them for 60 and 80 and more hours a week, and the kids, the suckers, think that's because they/re "important", rather than, say, they don't know what they're doing, or that management's specs are suitable for lining birdcages.
I had a boss once who told me about someone who used to work for him: the guy would put his feet up on the desk, think for twenty or thirty minutes, and code something that worked the first time, and solved the problem. On the other hand, I'm not aware of *ANY* college course that teaches *how* to spec out real world problems, and they *certainly* never teach *real*, production-quality error handling. Or how, as part of the job description on the first programming job I ever had, decades ago, read, "must be available at odd hours, when the original programmer is out, or no longer employed here....", and how to comprehend self-modifying spaghetti code....
"I KNOW THE LATEST BUZZWORD TECHNOLOGY!!!" is *not* a replacement for quality.... but it's a lot cheaper, and easer to take advantage of.
mark
We want to hire a bunch of try hards that don't know any better than to work 80 hours a week because our aging management doesn't know it's as from its elbow.
You are spot on - I would add that most software on the Internet is what I call "consumable software". It only has to just barely work, because it will be replaced in 8 to 12 months. It only has to be good enough to work. Elegant? Who cares?
If the software is complete crap - and it makes the company money.... it's a success. This is a bitter pill for developers to swallow, generally, but it is true.
Murphy was an optimist
+1: For giving a non-elitest, truthful answer. Wish I had the points.
To you face, I was always treated well (OK, one company was so flagrant that I should have reported to EEOC, but that is another story - and it was a large company that knows better).
Such is life. My suggestion is: stash away all the money you can so you can plan on living on 3% to 5% per year of you invested capital (not counting home, cars, etc). Once you get enough available ($50K or so) get some professional help to make it grow. Money isn't everything but life without it is the pits.
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Even as a young IT recruit in my 20's, I saw how having a diverse staff (racially, gender, and age) added to the abilities and the capabilities of the staff. Rather it gave different perspectives and abilities to the team. I saw discrimination as an anglo when living in ElPaso and wasn't welcome to go to a public restaurant in downtown near the building where I worked. When living there, I didn't see discrimination except at that one place but even that was disturbing.
When growing up in the '60s I never understood how the folks that said they discriminated against felt. With that little taste, it helped me have more empathy. Now aging, I find it as reprehensible as ever, no matter what form it takes. I just pray I didn't discriminate against others, and I taught my kids not to be a perpetrator of this psychological disease.
Yes, age discrimination is illegal and, IMHO, immoral, but it is the fact of life. Just decide how you will deal with it when the time comes.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Were you a SW engineer? What tech stack were you in?
If the software is complete crap - and it makes the company money.... it's a success. This is a bitter pill for developers to swallow, generally, but it is true.
Heh. It's too bitter a pill to me to be able to express it quite that baldly. Doesn't make you wrong, though, at least in some contexts. I prefer not to work in such contexts.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I am on-site, full time role. That means I am in an office and have physical colleagues around me but we support people based across the pond.
The irony is that although we're 5-10 times cheaper than an US-based similar position, the management is still tightening the crew on salaries, totally unjustifiable if you ask me but hey, I'm not calling the shots so there you have it.
My expectations are based on what should be fair, and of course that contradicts reality, but that doesn't mean reality is fair. After all, this "reality" we talk about is imposed by human beings who have the power to shape it to their advantage.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
That's the problem with /. Almost everyone here thinks that all engineers do is write software. I did various engineering activities when I was working- communications systems design for Motorola, RFIC apps for HP, analog RFIC design for Fujitsu and a startup called Stanford Microdevices, Back to apps for high speed SERDES and hypertransport chips at TI.
I used to have a doctor who, rather than actually examining me, would quiz me about software engineering. That was all he was interested in. He eventually left Kaiser to start a small programming business. So, I guess it goes the other way as well. He wasn't very good at being a doctor. This was the late 80s, so he is probably a billionaire venture capitalist by now.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
... How the Power of Diversity Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/Differen...
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all."
An aspect of that is also that humans are adapted to argue together in small groups and find creative solutions together:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
http://lifehacker.com/can-rati...
Of course, then to keep a group of such people motivated, they need autonomy, challenge/mastery, and purpose, like Dan Pink outlines here:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
And until we get a basic income for all, at least enough money to live a decent life in our society so money is essentially off the table as it has reached the point of diminishing returns for people who like their work:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Employers prefer to hire a "highly skilled wage slave" in Globalization.
Casteism
I feel exactly the same way, but sadly many of the great successes (from a financial perspective) have been complete crap (from an engineering perspective).
Twiiter
Tumblr
Come to mind...
Murphy was an optimist
Thanks. I'm trying to learn from those who share.