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?

Comments

Families come first

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Families come first

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Group X deserves Y for any reason Z? How about: 'Fratboys with Ferraris have car manufacturers and dealers, they come first. All those people and jobs depending on them.'

Nobody deserves anything, particularly not for the responsibilities they chose (hopefully) to make. The only person who "deserves" the job is the most capable person for it.

Re:Families come first

[Anonymous Coward]

In reality, neither - older people or the best for the job - get the job. Because if it were the most capable for the job, then new college grads would never get hired, would they?

It takes a couple of years experience to become good and productive.

The truth of the hiring in tech is that its capricious and based on fads - firms are lemmings.

Some big currently successful corp starts basing its hiring on some metric someone pulls out of their ass, and then everyone does it in the hopes of aping the success of that firm.

Google and Microsoft has fucked up hiring for everyone with their idiotic interview questions that they ended up getting rid of anyway.

See, the fact is companies have no clue how to get the best. They make metrics up, buy cute tests, hire consultants with their Ouija boards or whatever, and follow what currently successful companies are doing - who are also pulling shit out of their asses.

The best way to hire? Get a development manager with a long contact list in his smart phone and have him start calling people he knows can deliver and throw money at them.

Never fails.

If you or your company can't get "qualified people", it's because YOU suck - pay too low, having HR recruit or just being lemmings and following the herd on how to hire.

Re:Families come first

[overshoot]

Older people have families, they come first.

Interesting definition of "older." Rather revealing, in fact, that your horizon only extends to those of us with kids at home.

Leaving aside the fact that not all of us ever had kids, the most discriminated-against group are those whose children have moved out. Who, unlike 20-somethings, don't spend their off-duty time trying to get families. Oh, yeah -- that.

Re:Families come first

[gatkinso]

What you say is true. I have left work either on time or sometimes early to take care of my kids.

But my younger colleagues often times show up late (or not at all) with hangovers, my piss will test 100% clean and many of theirs will not, and I spend my time at wok actually working as opposed to a lot of socializing and what not.

So choose your poison.

Re:Families come first

[AchilleTalon]

Very strange reasoning. Since I am one of these older people, I never had so much time to throw at my job. My kids are all working or completing graduate studies. You know, normally, you are young enough to reproduce when you have kids. I mean, usually the mother is less than 35 years old. It is very likely a newly hired young engineer will eventually have family and suddenly shorter nights and all that things which are well beyond for the older ones. Sad to say for you young guys, life doesn't end after 45.

Re:Families come first

[Niris]

They pay you for 40 hours a week. If you're working over that amount, you're just fucking yourself over. I happen to be lucky enough to have a team that acknowledges this at my first programming job, and it leaves a lot of time for me to learn additional things outside of work - and honestly I feel like I'm a far better developer in the short amount of time that I've been out of school than I would have been had I worked somewhere for 80+ hours a week.

Re:Families come first

[sdinfoserv]

100% accurate. I used to work at a company that had horrible time recruiting tech positions. The pay offered was 1/2 the going rate in the city. The company literally only wanted to hire interns and retain them for $15/hr or less after graduation. Of course word gets out and eventually nobody applies so we started distance recruiting. There was one instance where an individual applied who was (imho) clearly incapable yet HR wanted to 'fill the position' - a win for HR, complained to the VP that I wouldn't hire what they were delivering and it was an unspoken 'forced hire'... I left immediately, and the tool they hired lasted 6 months.

Re:Families come first

[greenbird]

Poppycock! It only takes years because the colleges are failing at producing the quality employee and the company ends up having to re-teach what the grad was supposed to learn in school. Worse, they now may have to unlearn bad habits that the student was taught in that rotten school.

Bullshit. No school of any kind is going to teach you how things work in industry. First off in almost every case the instructors have little if any industry experience. Teaching and working in industry are 2 completely different skill sets. Second a college's job should be teaching fundamentals: language theory, programming theory (e.g. L-Values vs R-Values), data structures, algorithms and the like. Those are the types of things that can be taught in a structured graded environment. Because thirdly there is no way possible for any school to set up a program that would represent what you are going to face once you start working in industry: Working on a team of 10 individuals where the work has to get done no matter that 3 of them are incompetent idiots, requirements changing on a daily bases without changes to resources or schedule, balancing supportability vs reliability vs speed of completion, being to do risk assessments on the fly as conditions change radically throughout a project. Because these types of things are radically different for each project you work on these are things that can't be taught in a classroom environment and are only learned through experience.

As someone said further up these are also intangible skills that are almost always overlooked by HR types and managers who haven't worked in the trenches. And as GP said these are the types of skills that when missing cause software projects to fail or to turn out the kind of crap we typically see when they do manage to "succeed".

The bigger the employer, the more scrutiny they come under. Again, you need some metric to weed out the chaff in a way that won't get you sued in any of a thousand different ways. Some metrics work, some don't.

There is no "metric". As has been discovered using "metrics" like these ends in tossing out the good candidates while hiring the idiots.

Again, it is trying to work within the hiring laws that skew the tables with things like affirmative action How many times has /. had stories about the gender gap or other minority in tech? I see at least a story a week including this story. All these lead to a perception that those groups need to be given preference even over better qualified applicants solely to meet the numbers.

Again bullshit. Did you see the recent diversity numbers put out by the big name tech companies? These "metrics" you claim are supposed to be saving them from diversity issues has resulted in an overwhelmingly white/Asian male majority.

Yet when government does that you get upset??? Throwing money at a problem isn't only foolish it is a quick way to the poor house. What you are calling for is cronyism or nepotism where the only way to get a job is to be in that one person's contact list. That's no way to hire someone and you really don't know why that person may be in that contact list.

You sound like HR or a clueless hiring manager. Throwing money at the highly skilled personnel who will get the job done is exactly how to get the job done and make money. Paying a lot for three highly experience highly skilled people will payoff far more than hiring 10 much cheaper inexperienced college grads who don't have a clue about risk evaluation, supportability, performance, etc... And the people are on the contact list because they are the types that have a history of getting things done and bailed out projects that started with those college grads working on them who cocked them all up.

Way to put your head in the sand and ignore the fact that the universities and colleges are failing in their task of producing qualified student

Re:Families come first

[serviscope_minor]

This is why you negotiate your salary based on a 50 hr work week.

Or negotiate based on 40 hours a week and the nwork 40 hours a week.

Well yeah good luck to them

[aepervius]

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.

Speaking as a guy in his 40s...

[Viol8]

... 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

Re:Speaking as a guy in his 40s...

[Runaway1956]

It really is best to have a mix of young and old. Youngsters come up with the new ideas, older people kick those ideas around, turn them upside down, examine them for flaws, toss them back to the kids. The kids then modify, improve, or even flush the idea down the toilet.

I've never had a job in which youth and experience weren't both valuable.

The manager who dismisses either youth, or experience, is setting himself up for failure.

Re:Speaking as a guy in his 40s...

[AmiMoJo]

It has nothing to do with the relative merits of experience or fresh ideas, it's just about wages. Older people demand higher wages to pay for their mortgages and families. Younger people will work stupid ours on unpaid overtime because they want to get to the same position as the older ones.

Most companies don't value experience or things like code quality and architectural elegance. They just want some crapware churned out at the lowest possible cost.

Re:Speaking as a guy in his 40s...

[Trepidity]

I'm young-ish (~30) myself and have also not seen a discernible creativity/novelty advantage among younger people. Among people I've worked with there's no clear trend with people in their 20s being more creative and coming up with more good new ideas than people in their 50s. A lot of great stuff comes from people who have enough background to actually spot an opportunity for innovation.

You can see that even at big tech companies. New ideas coming out of Google largely come from their older staff. There are a ton of 20-somethings at Google, but the major projects tend to come from people like Rob Pike (age 58), Peter Norvig (58), Ken Thompson (age 71), Lars Bak (age 49), etc.

Re:Speaking as a guy in his 40s...

[PolygamousRanchKid]

"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience" -- Ronald Reagan

Re:22

[JockTroll]

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.

I'm 63, I still work

[hughbar]

This seems to come up a great deal here.

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:

• - It helps to enjoy computing, not be in it 'just' for the [increasing illusory] big money
• - Flexibility helps, the UK has a smaller square area than the US though
• - Soft skills help, I'm a pretty medium programmer but an approachable person
• - Niche skills often make a difference, everyone [except me] is an 'OK' Java person, for example
• - It helps to look ahead to up-curve trends [as long as not hypeware], I learnt a lot of Javascript/Jquery quite 'early' for example
• - The soft skills will help with the next job too, many of my 'new' contracts involve people I know somewhat, at least

That's my 2c of a euro, the html is badly formatted, but hey it's almost time for Sunday lunch.

It's not really about age...

[rcharbon]

...it's about pay scales - employers figure recent grads will work for less.

Re:As a guy in his 60's

[Anonymous Coward]

And FWIW, I have learned multiple new programming languages and tools (PHP, Javascript, Hadoop, AWS, etc) over the past 3 years to where I was able to build a cell phone emulator in PHP, design and write code to capture and store 10 billion data points per day in a Hadoop HBase database in the Amazon cloud from 5000 servers world-wide, and reduce the time for QA to generate performance reports from days to hours. I was still fired for "performance issues"... And I was a 1-person band, with no backup or help. All the other developers in my group were in their 20's to 30's. Looks like a setup for failure to me!

Wheres my walker?

[QA]

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

Software fails the test of time

[Required Snark]

As someone with 45+ years of software experience I can personally verify that software development has not improved significantly over the last 25 years or so. The two most important changes are that there is much less assembly programming (outside of imbedded systems) and each hardware vendor does not have their own completely incompatible operating system. Most of the rest of the "improvements" are pretty much moot beyond that.

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.

That is not the whole truth

[brunes69]

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.

Who gives a shit about quality?

[gelfling]

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.

I used to be an engineer. I worked for Motorola,

[mark_reh]

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.

When you can't measure

[overshoot]

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.

Re:I keep *hearing* about age discrimination...

[gatkinso]

It depends. Having a security clearance helps insulate one from this. Having left such work for pure commercial work I definitely see it, whereas I never saw it in the government space.

Which is of course made worse

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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.)

Re:makes no sense to me

[Anne Thwacks]

I can't even imagine ruling out older candidates.

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!

30 and hit 100k "ages ago"

[Maxwell]

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 learning new trends is big

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:You are the only one.

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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.)

Hey look! we got a manager doing modding.

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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.)

Age discrimination exists, but it works both ways.

[Qbertino]

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.
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 ... 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. :-)

My 2 cents.

Google Interview

[Tiger Smile]

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.

Re:You are the only one.

[Z00L00K]

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.

Strategies to Defeat Age Discrimination

[DERoss]

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.)