Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Have You Experienced Ageism? (observer.com)
Friday the Huffington Post wrote that "Ageism runs rampant through Silicon Valley, where older workers are frequently overlooked for jobs." They ran tips from the man who recruited Tim Cook for Apple, who pointed out that it's difficult and expensive to recruit new talent, urging businesses to "stop seeing workforce diversity as a good deed; it's good business."
And earlier this month The Observer ran an article by Dan Lyons, a writer for HBO's "Silicon Valley," who shared his perspective on ageism from his time at HubSpot. Their CEO actively cultivated an age imbalance, bragging that he was "trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y'ers," because, "in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated."
Meanwhile, Slashdot reader OffTheLip writes: Information technology is a young business in comparison to many other industries but one of the few where older workers are not valued for their institutional knowledge... As a recently retired techie I experienced this firsthand, both as an older worker, and earlier in my career [as] one who didn't see the value in older workers. As Lyons states, older workers are good business.
What are your thoughts? And have you experienced ageism?
Meanwhile, Slashdot reader OffTheLip writes: Information technology is a young business in comparison to many other industries but one of the few where older workers are not valued for their institutional knowledge... As a recently retired techie I experienced this firsthand, both as an older worker, and earlier in my career [as] one who didn't see the value in older workers. As Lyons states, older workers are good business.
What are your thoughts? And have you experienced ageism?
I haven't experienced it, but I'm also not a useless old feeb with a foot in the grave.
With the amount of angry whitebeards inhabiting /., we can expect a totally calm and reasonable discussion of the topic.
It's a shit deal for workers if you find yourself unable to find a job for something as stupid as age. And if "companies can be free to do what they want" is going to let them continue to get away with abusing workers - then they shouldn't feign surprise when those workers join together and fight back.
we all KNOW this is a problem.
we all know h1b is a problem.
but the place where it needs to be discussed - the national stage of public opinion, perhaps prompted by news coverage (crickets chirping sound heard) - it is NOT discussed. its swept under the rug.
I'm in the bay area, I'm over 50 and I've been a sw/hw guy since my teens. I'm currently out of work, looking, and its been dead for months, for me, so far. this is typical and usual, sad to say, and I have a little more time left before I'm empty and near bankruptcy again. yet again. I don't know if I'll ever see reliable employment in tech ever again.
I have tons of experience and a great resume. but I'm older, white, male, independant and aware of management's BS; and I guess ALL of that is out of favor for hiring prospects.
I really wish this was made more visible to non-geeks. taking to geeks is not useful, about this, as we all know about it already.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
While I'm sure some small number of companies may in fact try to hire a younger crowd, why would I want to work there anyway? A big part of the reason a company is usually doing that is either to pay less or work people much more, or a combination of both...
The large majority of companies I've seen have older workers, are totally fine with middle age and older technical staff. So a few companies who take age into account do not hurt job prospects.
A big pat of success for me personally has been keeping ahead of technical trends, and making sure not to fall into some pit of technology you cannot escape from and do not enjoy. if you enjoy technical work the keeping up to date is fun and the enthusiasm for your work shows. It also helps a lot to respect co-workers and be someone others enjoy working with, instead of just tolerating.
Another reason why it should be LESS hard as an older worker to find work is the connections and friends you make over the years. That's by far the best way to find jobs anyway, and building up good connections over years is less hard for traditionally more withdrawn technical people than cold-starting a relationship with someone in a company you are trying to hire into.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
in fact I work with a lot of people past retirement age who are usually offered a lot of money to keep working. In some (maybe not so cutting edge where real money is made and results matter) industries, experience is valuable.
I have hired over-40 programmers who were rockstars, and some over-40 workers who just could not deliver.
Age is just one variable among many, but people obsess over it because it is easier to ballpark someone's age in an interview than it is to get a read on other indicators of talent.
The biggest problem is that over-40 workers are universally more expensive than the 20's workers. They all want to jump in at the senior level, and feel justified in this based on their experience. This makes them a bigger risk to take, and ultimately more expensive if they don't pan out.
On the other hand, too much investment in kids results in software that works upfront but absolutely does not scale, and winds up full of ticking time bombs.
You will be. If you're lucky enough.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
InfoWorld ran an article about 25 years ago asking "Can people over 40 work in IT?", that is, can they keep up with the technology. The article, written by someone much younger than 40 answered the question "No, people under 40 can't work in IT." They shouldn't be hired and they should be fired (buy-outs, layoffs, downsizing, firings).
So YES – there is a lot of ageism in IT.
Personally, I hated that article because I started my career in IT at 38 and finished my career in IT. MacOS, UNIX. Windows, Linux. Apple, Sun, HP/Compaq/DEC, IBM, HP/Dell, etc. servers at all levels of the enterprise.
Ageism sucks because I'm more efficient because I'm more experienced.
> Their CEO actively cultivated an age imbalance, bragging that he was "trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y'ers," because, "in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated."
Translation : young people have little to no idea about their true value and I can exploit them with shitty options, bad contracts and bonuses because I can sell them on some startup dream a hell of a lot easier than I can trick someone who has 'been there, done that.'
I see ageism from a reversed perspective all the time. I don't live in a major tech hub but quite a bit of STEM fields are here due to the 2 national labs in my state. Far more often then not I've seen apprehension and aversion to hiring an otherwise more then qualified candidate for a position simply because they are a "Millennial/Gen Y". It's not a lack of experience. It's this expectation that a Millennial will never be a hard worker because of the stigma of the associated stereotype that they simply just won't work hard, they won't stay long enough to make a career out of it, or simply a bias towards "the old guard". It make a job search even in a field that is way under-allocated, as far as skilled professionals go, a very frustrating experience.
The successful people in tech are willing to learn the newest and coolest. I have found that those older types who have the above complaint are often resting on laurels that younger people don't even know exist. Who cares if you are certified in Sun or Novell? It doesn't matter if you have worked with Window NT, your PhD in digital signal processing from the early 90s is worthless. It doesn't matter if you worked for Nortel, Intel, Bell labs, or IBM.
If you are looking at an older skill that is relevant it might be OpenGL. What project did you recently do on your own that didn't involve a white paper? If you want to impress you need to show that you are surfing the most recent wave, not talking about the big one in Y2K.
I find the main difference between younger and older developers is simply the younger ones are pretty much by default using today's technology. So an older worker who knows node.js and redis is far more valuable than one who knows Oracle and Perl. Of course the one who knows Oracle, perl, redis, and node.js is more valuable again.
Am 51, and for the last decade I've experience some, yes. The most overt was for a Bay Area startup position that was going swimmingly until I did a Skype with the (much younger) DoE, and he saw I was "old". (Guess he couldn't read a resume.) But the more annoying ageism is a general assumption by some of the kids that if there is a difference of opinion on an engineering question, it's because the old guy is clinging to his anachronistic ways. Version control? Testing? Even a one-page design doc? Don't be such an old fuddy duddy!! :-)
It has its plusses, though. As an old guy, you realize that there's serious money to be made cleaning up after the kids. And experience can often tell you which projects are sure failures, which can save working on something hopeless for a year.
It's... Erm... Skillism (if we are inventing words I might as well board the bandwagon).
"You are too qualified for the position you are willingly applying for"
Is it ageism when I turn down work because the company wants my experience but is only willing to pay the price of a someone straight out of college?
But yes ..I have experienced ageism in a former company. I once worked for a company that had a president like the mentioned HubSpot CEO. Me and 3 other middle career hires once sat around with dropped jaws during one company meeting when he gushed over hiring people straight out of college because then he could "shape" them into the perfect company workers. Where as he couldn't do that with older hires. Apparently us older workers with all our experience were outright trouble makers.
Fortunately I was only at that place for 6 months.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'll show you ageism, you little shits. If I have to get out of this chair, somebody's gonna cry.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because, well, after a burn-out from working 80+ hours at a software shop I really never recovered and everybody I talked to had like, ew, burnout. And of course: No recent for-pay experience? Then no chance for you!
Older people don't like the unpaid OT and end less 60-80 hour weeks so that is a black flag to HR / PHB.
Discrimination on the basis of age is a federal crime. But just try to prove it. I once applied for a position as a design engineer. When the owner of the company came out of his office to interview me, the first words out of his mouth were "I advertised for an engineer, not an engineering manager!" I did not get the job. On the other hand, my resume is golden, at least in the area where I live. I still was hired by a company after I had turned 65. Six years later, I still get inquiries.
Not without being a mind-reader.
I do know that after a long and very successful career I took two years off to deal with health issues with one of my kids (now happily resolved) and thereafter as an over-50 engineer with an employment gap I was pretty much unemployable.
My experiences in the interviews I got suggest something subtly different than ageism -- at least of the sort that believes older engineers can't do the work. I'd meet with a bunch of people and everyone would seem excited and enthusiastic about my background... except the hiring manager. Whomever I was going to work for would seem distinctly colder, as if they'd decided I wasn't going to get the job before they even met me.
I think what's going on is that people don't like the idea of supervising someone who is older and highly experienced. Maybe they think a more experienced worker would be less cooperative. Or maybe they were afraid we'd be angling for their job. I don't think, given my resume, that anyone believed I couldn't do the work. They just doubted my word that I really wanted the job because of my experience.
Is that ageism?
I think it's very common for more experienced engineers who've reached the point where they've been doing engineering management to want to get back down and dirty, only to be frustrated by the fact that nobody wants you for that kind of work at your age. You hear it a lot -- I enjoyed being a project leader or program manager, it was rewarding and I'm glad I did it, but now I want to get back to the stuff that brought me into the field in the first place. Except once you've taken any kind of senior position nobody wants you for grunt work anymore, even if you've been armpit-deep in engineering on a day-to-day basis.
Is that ageism?
I dunno. But it does suck.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There a lot of tech pro's who don't want to deal with / are not that good all doing all of the Management work and just want to do tech work.
that being 21 and fresh out of university somehow makes you more valuable than someone being 31 and fresh out of university with 10 years of experience in the field as a hobbyist, and 10 years more experience of work, social interactions and life in general. The notion seems to be that people past their 30's are less capable, and people past their 50's are somehow a liability and risk.
Of course I've experienced agism in tech. Who over the age of 40 has not?
My experience is that the tech industry as a whole thinks it's cheaper and easier to file-to-fit and paint-to-match than it is to do things correctly in the first place. Doesn't matter that this has been proven time and again to be a complete and utter fallacy. Tech. firms are notoriously shallow. When the truth comes up against appearance, the truth always looses.
When I "retired" at the rip old age of 46, I was the only guy I knew who had actually turned in a software project on time and under budget. Granted, it was only a two year effort and less than 10 people. But we hit our schedule to the day, and were five figures under budget doing it. In the year that followed, the client called me exactly twice with problems. One we tracked down to user error on the part of a user, the other was because they wanted to expand the length of a bar code used by the system. That's it. Zero bugs. I was astounded that our testing had worked so well.
But that experience, the successful projects, the project leadership track record, couldn't even get me interviews. I was told (when I was told) that I was either too expensive or too high level. Both code for "too old".
I've experienced the bias against older tech workers. I've also seen the results of that bias: work that would've gotten a failing grade even in the college courses I took, let alone at some of my employers. There's a considerable advantage to having been there, done that, can see how current problems match previously encountered problems and what methods already exist to solve them. To give an extreme example, traditional Web applications (most logic on the server, Javascript in the client is used primarily for input validation and display formatting) mirror very closely the flow of ancient 3270 workstation "green-screen" applications: the server sends a block of display and validation instructions to the client, the user enters the data without interacting with the server, the client sends the completed form back to the server as a single block for processing. The same flow held for the forms applications I build for DEC VAX/VMS in the 80s. And many of the tricks developed to maintain session data across requests for web application are the same tricks we used for the same purpose way back when. I can see the same pendulum swing at work as well: 3270 workstations gave way to interactive terminals (where the application could directly interact with the user), which gave way to forms applications, which gave way to thick clients (PC applications that accessed remote servers via various protocols), which in turn gave way to Web applications, which are now giving way to thick clients again (this time Javascript framework applications running in the browser accessing remote servers via XML/JSON and RESTful interfaces). That perspective gives me a big advantage in knowing where to go for things that already exist and have had all the kinks thoroughly worked out that I can apply to the current problem, rather than having to work solutions out from first principles or copy-and-paste code from StackOverflow as a black box as many of the younger developers do.
Most of the bias I attribute to a mistaken belief that "old" = "unable/unwilling to learn". Some of that belief probably comes as a reaction to the normal skepticism older people have to the latest "silver bullet" sales hype. We've seen those fail to live up to the hype time and time again, someone who's only been in the business 5 years and who hasn't maintained a single application through many update cycles hasn't gotten the first-hand experience with the fallout. It's not that the shiny new tech isn't good, but the salesman is probably over-promising to try and seal the deal and I'd prefer to find the gotchas in a test project rather than by having production fall over.
serious money to be made cleaning up after the kids.
YES!!! There's also serious money to be made in the support of 40 year old technology running on critical systems whose documentation was lost years ago.`
Just look no further than slashdot. All these young whippersnappers with 7 digit slashdot user id numbers are taking over the place.
Some places are run by people who just want a pool of young ass to pull from or easily intimidated people to boss around. So unless you are the flavor they like and in your early twenties you are not going to get hired. Nor would probably want to work at that company.
After leaving the military the only ageism I get is "you want a job?! Oh thank God I don't have to deal with another fucktard kid that can't bother to show up on time, dress and look professional, follow instructions, and follow up on taskers. Yes oh yes please come work for me."
If you are competent and look the role (not as a dusty over weight fart) you will have no shortage of employment, doesn't matter how old you are.
There is an element of truth to that, but at the same time the older work tends to get more done in 20 hours than the younger ones do in 60. Of course the reward of getting your work done is usually more work, but the older worker is less likely to put up with that sort of bullshit even with a big jump in pay.
Yes, I have experienced it, and it's not just the tech field. ;)
A little ranting about the value of experience is below. Feel free to ignore it.
Though at my previous tech job, I was the secret asset. If a techie had a problem they couldn't solve, they were required to go to the help desk and were forbidden to the senior techs about it. (New and relatively young manager had foolish ideas.) After the helpdesk was unable to help, they'd come by my cube to 'chat'. Usually had an answer for them in a minute or two, or at least a few things to test out to isolate the issue. It's not just that I had more experience with the software than they did, but I also understood a LOT more of how the machine functions as I'd started fooling with computers all the way back in the early 80s. That's not to say that knowing machine language for a 6502 processor is directly applicable, but rather knowing the intimate details of how a computer actually does it's work will allow you a certain insight into the operations of any computer that someone who grew up in a gui world just doesn't get. The greater understanding and experience employing that allows for greatly enhanced options for approaching an issue. The others really didn't like it if I couldn't solve an issue because that almost always guaranteed it was getting kicked to the devs.
40-something with a graduate degree in computing from a top-ranked American university here:
I'm usually not as cheap as a no-experience recent grad, but if I know I won't bring any "value-add" from my decades of experience to the position you are offering AND I'm hungry enough, I'm not too humble to take entry-level wages. However, I will be looking for significantly more responsibility and pay within the first year or two or I will start looking elsewhere.
Know this: If you make me a fair offer that matches the position and I do take it, I won't gripe about the wages I agree to and I will work hard so you will want to promote me to a position where you can take advantage of what I have to bring to the table.
Young people demand less salary is mostly what it comes down to. Programming and IT are not very creative professions, so youth isn't valuable for those professions like it would be for graphic design.
The system of having job based health insurance makes it so that older people cost more to the work place.
They are not the only friends I have. But yes in fact I DO want to the people I work with to be friends at some level. The people in the group I work with currently I spend almost zero time with outside of work yet I consider them friends on some level, and enjoy spending time with them - a good thing too as the people you work with you'll spend far more time with than most "real" friends.
Business today does hiring based on money.
HA HA HA HA HA HO HE HAHA HO....
That was hilarious. You should go on stage with that act. The things business does daily are so remote from real monetary concerns as to be laughable. It certainly does not come into play when hiring technical people as most businesses are simply DESPERATE (and I do not use that word lightly) to find someone responsible who knows what they are even doing.
There are probably a few businesses that hire because "cheap labor" but as I said why would you even want to work there? Such businesses are no fun, and more importantly they will not be around that long anyway so you'd just have to find new work. That's why the few places that are so short sighted simply do not matter in terms of *my* ability to find work, which is what the main article is about (older experienced workers ability to find work).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If workforce diversity were good for business, you wouldn't need to keep saying it over and over. It would be obvious from who is a success and who isn't.
Instead the opposite is true. The most successful companies were started by white and asian men, who continue to be the best.
I work in Southern California for a fortune 500 company and there is an increasing trend toward age discrimination. It's almost as overt as it can be, but senior management tries to prevent lawsuits by using euphemisms instead of "old" or "young". Young workers are more desirable because they cost less and have more future growth potential. Older workers have been subject to layoff at a disproportionate ratio. It's almost impossible for someone over 50 to find a technical job these days, regardless of their skill level.
Ageism doesn't exist? Bullshit
...so what I learned from the workplace about ageism is:
Fuck ageism, fuck the workplace, fuck slashdot, and FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm in the bay area... I'm over 50 and I've been a sw/hw guy since my teens. I'm currently out of work
Get a grip on reality - that is to say, you are NOT LIVING IN IT.
Move anywhere outside and you can find work, and a good life...
The "Bay Area" is an aberration that wrongly colors of discussions around issues. It's a reason why theres such a furor over diversity in tech hiring, because the "Bay Area" is filled with a lot more drama than you will find in any workplace outside.
That said even in the "Bay Area" I know plenty of older SW workers who are quite happily working across a number of companies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Recruiters like it when you shave you beard for interviews in the midwest. They do, they really like it. They prefer if you do it. They can't tell you that you have to do it anymore, but they still very strongly prefer it. I've always felt kind of awkward without a beard. So, one day, about five years ago, and just as my beard started going gray, I stopped doing it. It's idiotic to change your appearance in this way, especially when it's a dishonest representation of what you actually look like most of the time.
I've always had a good resume, I get compliments on it all the time from clients and recruiters alike. The only people that dislike the way I write a resume are college guidance counselors, and people poisoned by their terrible advice, but they're few and far between. So all things considered, that factor in this equation has not changed. But since I've been growing the beard both longer and grayer, the number of successful interviews I've had has gone up. And the way I've been treated on the job has changed, dramatically. Bear in mind that the type of roles I go for hasn't changed since I was 25. I like coding. I intend to continue doing it.
People are more respectful. They ask me for my insights more often. I'm treated like an eccentric code sage, and that's absolutely fine with me. Even when I fly out to work in places like California or Seattle, this does not seem to change. I can only think of one instance where this decision has worked against me. One interview for a very hostile publishing company a few years ago, where they made it a point to ask me how often I keep up with new things, where they refused to believe that I read more books every year than their CEO. That said, I think that one would probably have went poorly no matter what I looked like.
I don't mind being older than my coworkers or project managers.
I don't mind taking orders from people younger than me. This isn't my trip in life.
I'm just there to make better stuff, solve more interesting problems, and keep myself challenged intellectually.
My biggest problem is boredom, so I've learned to be pickier in selecting my assignments.
Getting older, and reaching middle age isn't a bad thing.
You just have to know how to sell it.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I can't even get an interview. Last year I hacked off the first 15 years of experience off my resume in an attempt to get an interview, no joy.
For 30 years I had no trouble getting a job. Now that I'm past the magic 50 I'm toxic.
Not at Google, Microsoft, FB, Amazon and other top tier companies. They hire so much, they can't afford to age-discriminate even if they wanted to. Which they don't.
It's a disaster waiting to happen.
I'm almost in my 50s and I've constantly experienced ageism. It's easy for people to point fingers and say if you're competent you'll get any job no matter what - that would come from people with endless network contacts, but if you're mobile - and have to find new networks all the time then it's not THAT easy because believe it or not - most HR and Recruitment centres ignore you if they see 40+ in your CV. They don't even bother to read it after that, you won't even be contacted.
And this is a freaking catastrophe - because at least Sweden (and Scandinavia) where I live, the government have decided that we're LIVING LONGER all the time and pushes the retirement age up towards 67 - 70yo because the society can't afford to support the pensioners that keep living longer and longer, we're expected to reach 100 nowadays, if your retirement happens when you're 60 years - this means we've got to support you for 40+ more years, no society can afford that.
But you do the Math: Ageism = companies want them younger and younger - Government expect us to live longer and longer = extreme poverty above 40 to you're 70 if you make it that far.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I am guilty of ageism: I prefer to work with older people.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I work in a large(1000+ employee) IT support department where age is valued over skill. The thing I have noticed in my coworkers is if your over the age of 35 your more likely to avoid trying new things, have limited knowledge of the technical specs of what you work with, opt for easier and simpler in the short-term to the detriment of everything else, and absolutely hate anyone who still has faith in humanity, believes we can do things better, or goes out of their way to help. The median age of people in my division specifically is about 45 (23-55).
I have nothing wrong with older IT workers and alot of my co-workers know alot of things I don't that you only learn from being at a place 10-20 years. My problem is that the general trend seems to discourage innovation, collaboration and while making things easier is a goal it's sometimes done to the detriment of the overall institution.
The last time I worked a 9-5, my coworkers used the think I discriminated against older applicants. I said I didn't like when people stopped learning. I was lightly involved in hiring decisions from a technical perspective, mostly "what's your opinion?" kind of stuff. My coworker's opinion was partially because I never recommended hiring someone over 50. Then, I did. I HIGHLY recommended one applicant that appeared to be very old, and his college dates showed that he had to be old, or have started college before he was 10. Everyone questioned me. They said "What's up Brian? I thought you didn't like old people?" and I responded:
This applicant never stopped learning. I can look through his resume - the list of technologies, projects, and jobs he's had, and he never stopped learning. I told you my problem was with ossified people that stop learning. It's impossible to be that way when you're young, but a lot of older people have had the change to chill out, relax, and do a job for 10 years without learning anything new. That is what I discriminate against, people that stop learning*.
Then they believed me and stopped worrying about getting sued because of my obnoxious opinions.
* May not be exactly what I said, i.e. not for use in a court of (employment) law.
Yes, I have.
No, but I have only had one job. I don't have a reason to leave. I've been there 17 plus years and I'll most likely retire their. Maybe I'll become an analyst or something in my ripe old age, but so far hw/sw ain't changed much and I seem to be happy making it work over and over.
I work for a university doing IT and as with most universities, you see a big mix of ages. We have everything from students up to people in their 80s (I'm 35). The most common problem I see with older workers is the lack of willingness to keep up with new tech. IT, development, or any computer field progresses fast, of course. If you are going to be effective, you have to be open to learning new things all the time and changing how you do things. Some older workers have a lot of trouble with that. They act like things should be how they were 10 or 20 years ago, and still try and do things the same way. It leads to inefficient solutions, and inability to effectively help users with problems they have with new tech.
While I'm sure there is legitimate ageism, since there are people who will discriminate, on purpose or not, against all kinds of things, I think some of it is just older workers having a common problem that doesn't gel well with technical work. I personally have zero care about someone's age, what I care about is when someone is trying to do stupid shit from 10 years ago and refusing to get with the times.
I'm going to assume you are willing to move. If not, then you aren't serious. Based on age, I'm also going to assume that you can do assembly and C, and maybe you'd be happy to debug with a JTAG-based debugger or a logic analyzer.
Be willing to tolerate Raytheon's terrible web site. Sorry! Select one of: Indialantic, Austin, San Antonio, or Melbourne. There are also DC area jobs, but selecting the good ones could be harder. Search for CNO, vulnerability, CNE, cyberengineer, exploit, reverse engineer, reverse engineering, emulate, emulation, assembly, assembler, and security.
We can hire lots of people with low-level skills. We want the sort of people who can write emulators, viruses, boot loaders, compilers, self-extracting executables, linkers, embedded OSes, JIT systems, hypervisors, debuggers, disassemblers, and tools that attempt to prove various properties about binary executables. Obscure old skills may be more valuable than you expect; don't leave these things off your resume.
I know this is far from Silicon Valley, but I work with a significant amount of grey hair within my company and alongside our clients. It's not that hard to build a kick-ass profile, working within open source if the job is stagnant, and writing articles. You can't coast in a stagnant job and then jump jobs, not because of age, but because of stale skills. I'm over 50 and the date of my degree makes that obvious, but my skillset is in very high demand. Obviously, I have to continually retrain like a 22-yo or that will change in a couple years tops.
I am 58, but look 15 years younger (partly genetics I guess, but I also lift weights and so am pretty buff - I can beat anyone in my company in push-ups and arm-wrestling). In my most recent job hunt (last year), I experienced what I think is age discrimination for the first time - having an interview with a start-up that went really well I thought, but then got an rejection with the explanation that I would not "fit into a start-up environment" (I had worked start-ups in the earlier tech boom though). But then I got an offer from a start-up a few weeks later, where I am currently working.
I dropped my first decade of experience off my resume years ago, as I thought it was not obviously relevant to the modern tech industry, and harmful in dating me, and so I also do not list my Bachelors graduation dates. I was fortunate to earn my Masters, and do PhD work, mid-career, so that I do list those dates on my resume, making me look more than a decade younger on paper (which is not then exposed upon meeting me since I look like my implied age).
I am concerned though, because I need to work until I am 70 to collect my full SS income, and build up a decent retirement account. The drain of a child with cancer for many years, before she died, and a wife that had serious health issues and an emotional breakdown during that same period set me well behind financially. (A lot of obviously young, and so far lucky, posters here make it sound like saving for retirement is always a piece of cake, and anyone who has trouble preparing is just stupid and lazy; but bad things can happen in life through no fault of yours that can really hurt your savings - there is no safety net to help you out). I am not sure how long my apparent youthfulness will hold out, and whether the industry will become even more intolerant of age. I just need 12 more years though.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
... gray hair and experience are really overrated.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They are many issues at play with ageism.
IT managers want slaves. They want salaried employees that work 60 hours a week. People who have no children or families. Older workers, especially those that have started a family or have learned how to manage a good balance between work and personal life. Older employees may also get more sick. So there's the added costs associated with that as a cost to productivity.
I believe we need a strong national union. I also believe that older workers need to pool resources and create patents and other forma of IP. IMHO the best way to get employed where you want us to march into their business with that form of legal shotgun. A company acts like an ass. Help their enemy. A union of geeks loaded with thousands and thousands of patents willing to decapitate any corporation that does this form of social malfeasance is the ideal.
They want a war. Use the modern day version of a nuke. The patent.
Face it, 100% of the "entrepeneurs" want to project a "young and vibrant" image
and an ounce of Image is worth a ton of performance.
So, Mr. Greybeard, find a new career, along with the other 115,000 former Engineers who "aged out" after 2008
So clearly he never worked 75+ hour weeks on a normal work basis, like everyone else in the industry.
With school requiring > 30 hours week, no one is "always learning" in any formal way
As an older worker with considerable skills, it was hard to even get an interview stateside, but overseas in Asia, they recognized my value and were more than willing to not only hire me, but pay well for what I brought to the table. In the US, older workers are made to feel like dirt. In Asia, they respect age.
Try being over 50 with a misdemeanor on your record - you will instantly become the most overqualified applicant in the sector!
""in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated." "
Translation...
Older employees don't take shit from management happily as readily as the young ones do. Younger employees are a lot easier to abuse so we should have more of them.
Older employees, it's your duty to show the young guys they are being underpaid and abused so they tell management to fuck off and find different jobs. the more we educate the youngsters on how to not be abused the better it is for everyone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have tons of experience and a great resume. but I'm older, white, male, independant and aware of management's BS; and I guess ALL of that is out of favor for hiring prospects.
I would never hire anyone that just blurted out that they were "white, male" without giving an appropriate trigger warning.
What is wrong with you that you would throw that in our faces?
Why can't you understand the horror that the rest of us feel when confronted with your millennia of slavery, homophobism, and misogyny?
HubSpot isn't a Silicon Valley company, they are an MIT spinout in Cambridge, MA.
And if they think Gen-Y employees are better than people with experience, good for them; let them succeed or fail by their credo. There are lots of other jobs.
Think about it: would you want to work for a jerk who only hired you to fill a quota but is secretly deeply prejudiced against you? What chance do you think you'll have for advancement in such a company? Would you really want to work in order to help someone like that get rich? I think it's much better when bigots come out of their closets and voluntarily state their prejudices publicly.
So how many IT related fields are constantly fighting, or being subservient to regulations about code, behaviour and performance? Comparing software with building industry, the building industry projects require so much local institutional knowledge that 20 years experience for the architect for that market is a very good thing for ensuring a fluid project execution. Similar knowledge is required for requirements engineering for a software project for those institutional clients. One has to know the customer, and only experience will provide that knowledge. Scratch that, we are talking apps, Apps, APPS!!11
And it's unfortunate that as I've aged, I can't switch focus as quickly, I require more rest and food breaks, my medical expenses have risen drastically, I'm much more likely to have family or friends need me for medical support, I'm also much less willing to move, and I'm less likely to be versed in the latest technologies taught in school because I've focused on the longer lived, familiar tools which I'm paid to support. My chances of dying or being incapacitated for medical reasons has also gone up profoundly: all of those are understandable, though not legally defensible, reasons to prefer a younger employee
I'm also far less willing to be misled by management promises, to buy into management promises of "this is a contract to permanent role" position, to let a manager lie to a customer about our products, or to fail to create a paper trail if someone if someone is cooking the books. And I've enough of a name in my chosen technology fields to be taken seriously and "call shenanigans" on personally profitable but fundamentally foolish technology decisions. Some managers really do not appreciate technology personnel with enough experience to question their particular "big picture".
Conversely, younger workers are more likely to melt down or switch career paths unexpectedly, especially if they marry. It's illegal in many states to take the possibility of pregnancy into account for hiring, but it's a constant factor for employing young women. And younger technology workers are usually on the upward path of their career, likely to seek more income and more responsibility. They're also more likely to be caught up with the latest exciting technology fad. My personal list of once exciting but now discarded technologies includes Rust, SysV UNIX, BeOS, R, DOS, and Usenet.
I'm about to turn 41 and have been working in tech since I was 24. To my knowledge I have never experienced ageism.
Have you experienced smellism?
My current job is computer security in government IT. When the nation-wide team got assembled two years ago, many were hired based on resumes with 10 to 20 years of IT experience. The youngest in my work group is 33, most of us are in our 40's, and the oldest is 66. As for the local facility I'm assigned at, I'm one of the youngest grey beards in the IT department.
Oh, you wanted details. I'm 66, have been a computer programmer since 1972 and have worked at fortune 500 firms (ATT Bell Labs, Intel) and startups (5 people firms you've never heard of through VA Linux - the dot com bubble, good memories). Sorry but whether I've been the youngest or the oldest person in the department I've always been treated as an engineer, age has had no impact.
Admittedly, I work in a relatively small niche (Unix/Linux kernel programmer) that might have some small part in why this hadn't been an issue.
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
Not only that, ageism is mandated by law. I wanted to earn money when I was 10 years old, and it was forbidden.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Ok, so software engineering is a fairly recent field (or rather, it's recent that it's so "big"...but even in absolute, it's more recent than, let say, law, finance or construction. My orders of magnitudes).
Now, the first big influx of tech worker was pre-dotcom crash, when anyone who knew basic HTML could get a job (we're seeing some signs of that lately as it's happening again, but that's a different topic). Then the bubble crashed...all the tech workers at the bottom of the barel had to switch career, leaving only a small fraction. That weeded out most of the people that today would be 40+
In early 2000s, going in CS wasn't exactly the prestigious career path (because of said dotcom crash). Anyone who went to college then would be around 32-35ish depending on the date range you're looking at and how much education they had. And there wasn't that many.
My wife went to college after that, and it still wasn't a big craze. She's now just over 30.
It's after that it started booming, and it keeps growing and growing. So most of the people available would be 30.
During that time, some percentage of people figure out it's not for them, move to management, etc. That means you have very few older workers left.
On the portion that's left, in a field that changes all the time, you really have 2 groups: older workers who kept up to date, and because of experience, are now Principal Engineers, Architects, Tech leads, etc. And you have those who didnt, or forgot the strong fundamentals that are making a come back (eg: functional programming), refuse to pick it up, etc. Those are becoming less and less employable.
Obviously I don't have any statistics, but as someone who entered the field right before the dotcom crash, that's roughly what I've seen. Essentially, there just can't be that many mediocre or above older workers. And things changed so much in the last 15 years or so, that having 20+ years of experience is just not gonna give you that much unless you're doing lead/architecture/management, and there's only so many positions for those roles (plus, getting the right architect with the right company is hard).
All around, while there's totally some age discrimination, even without it things probably wouldn't be very different.
My company, an anonymous defense contractor, decided that they needed to "bid to win" for a re-compete that included phasing out all of the level 5 to 6 engineers, half of the level 3 to 4 engineers and introduced a new program that tried to replace the losses with summer interns. Most of us that had been top performers were 35+ and saw that the attempt to cut benefits, freeze retirement, remove performance bonuses for high-performing programs and phase out experienced employees re-named this "Graying". Needless to say we lost 20% of our engineers in less than 6 months and 30% of those that didn't initially punt decided to interview to other divisions of the company.
The entire "Greening" effort failed to save money, our end-customer became extremely unhappy with the lack of support due to churn and local management found out they'd need to re-think about long term goals. Now we still have interns just to find good long-term candidates but they've backed out of trying to pre-retire experienced engineers from the program (at least for now).
Well, that was scary. Moreso because it's 35 years old and also aligns with what people old me after escaping from certain countries.
I watched senior technicians, mid-level technical managers, and engineers (male) dye their beards and hair in fear of looking old. They shave their heads rather than show receding hair. There is a dragon king at age and weight, so they starve themselves to stay young looking. Ageism applies to women too.
Intel cannot claim gender equality before sexual equality. Part of that is how women who are over 30 are treated. Being 30 doesn't make you not a woman any more than being white makes one. Age and gender are different creatures, except in the eyes of bigotry.
...I once got "I'm not sure what stage in your life you're at".
I was tempted to say I was about to emerge from my pupal state into a beautiful butterfly.
Here it's technically illegal to ask your age or marital status (and probably a bunch of other things).
I've been a professional programmer for 27 years and I can count the number of 75 hour weeks I've worked on my fingers. A lot of people brag about how many hours they work, but I've never been one of them.
As an old guy, you realize that there's serious money to be made cleaning up after the kids.
My first IT job was a Token Ring to Ethernet conversion project. A real simple job of removing the coaxial cable from between the Token Ring card and the wall plug, plugging in the Ethernet cable between the motherboard port and the wall, and testing the video app that required the extra bandwidth. We had 300 systems. I took 150 on one side, the two fresh out of high school kids took 150 on the other side. When I started overlapping the computers that they did and noticed that the video app didn't work, I checked the cable connection. The kids plugged the Ethernet cable into the Token Ring card that uses either coaxial or twisted pair cabling and not the motherboard port. Because they didn't test the video app, they never found their mistake. All the computers they touched were like that, and none of the computers in the offices were touched. The worse part was that the project let them go for the night without checking their work.
I made an extra four hours in OT that night for cleaning up after the kids. Whenever I get hired on a new job, I look for a mess to clean up. That's where the real money lies.
In fact, after interviewing a dozen candidates, in the Bay area, this guy stood out in a class of his own because of; 1) his vast experience, and; 2) his eagerness to learn new things. I literally ordered the West Coast supervisor (half his age) to hire him and keep him for six months. I said, "If you want to get rid of him any time after six months, fire him and THEN call me."
The guy was a total superstar. It was a technical sales support engineer position on a bleeding-edge graphic composition/full-page makeup system, back in the early 1980's when those cost a couple of million dollars. The supervisor thanked me forever for forcing him to make the hire.
I still look really hard for candidates who've got some miles on their odometers... it almost always pays.
I don't think it is quite Ageism exactly. I think it is the nature of the interview. Most interviews consist of coding exercises and if you can do them fast and accurately in your head, you look like a genius. Younger guys can blaze through this stuff and make it look like a piece of cake. Older guys just take longer and they look like they don't know what they're doing. I could swear that I answered all these questions in interviews correctly before. But now as I am seeing them again, it is taking me longer to solve them as I am getting older.
I also wonder about crystallized vs fluid intelligence. I think older guys have a harder time thinking outside the box than younger people. Lots of interview questions tend toward this kind of thinking.
About five years ago, I was induced to retire from a company at which I had worked for thirty years because of a benefits change. All employees not retired by a certain date would lose a significant medical benefit. I had longevity at the company through many reorganizations, and a manager who valued my work highly (giving me a 10% salary bonus that same year). The corporate powers that be must have thought that their ploy would easily get rid of many highly-paid employees, and it did. It was an "accident" that all those were the older ones who could retire at that time and didn't want to lose the benefit. On the bright side, retiring at an early age was the best thing I could have done, a decision reaffirmed very time I would check in with the ones who stayed behind.
I was thinking of retiring there when I got to about 110 (:-))
Instead I was asked to do a gig replacing for my old director until we chose a permanent replacement, and then went back to a true engineering gig at a very "young" start-up.
In my opinion, old and smart still works. Everything I learned in Simula and Concurrent Pascal applies to Java and the modern scripting languages. I had expected my new, younger, colleagues to be rocket scientists on objects. Nope: the smart folks are smart (Hi, Muhammad!), and the ordinary folks are ordinary.
Some places thing young is good, but old guys do well. Some places think old guys are good, but young guy do well (Hi, Sesh!)
Keep learning and have fun. You'll die before you run out of fun things to learn. P.--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
The dick hole director of engineering hadn't even seen my resume. I look young for my age, so all he had to go on was my face and my answers to his fluff-filled personality questions. The "paired programming" exercise I did with a different engineer (who also hadn't seen my resume) used a different set of libraries than what I'm familiar with, so there was no chance to come off as an expert. The bulk of my interviews had been with the guy who was going to be my boss, who loved me, and met my salary expectations, but after the two dipshits who hadn't seen my resume, the verdict came back that I was "intermediate" level, and they were substantially below both my other offers.
I told the recruiters to sincerely tell the old bastard to go fuck himself. And egg his car.
A shame, as the problem that HR types don't understand that the quality of work falls off as the hours go up. 50 hours is not a problem but 60+ hours can only be done for a week or two at a time before quality falls off and the extra time actually results in less usable output. The older employees know this, the younger ones have to learn it the hard way while the HR types only capture data on hours, not productivity.
Is it ageism when the interviewer remarks "You're a little old" during the interview? This happened to me when I was 40 and still had hair, none of it gray. No offer was forthcoming, but the place didn't rate very highly from my perspective, either. And then there was the letter I received recently from EEO investigating a complaint about a company that hadn't bothered to have me come in after the phone interview despite my having all of the skills they seemed to be seeking.
Now I work for a small company where I am probably the oldest employee., but we all get along well, and I'm having the time of my life.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
A good post. As a mature employee I think we can, to some extent, be broken in to two groups. Those who learnt a technology and have stuck with that for most of their career and those who keep on learning. When looking for new employment the former group will have trouble and will be tempted to blame ageism. The later group will get further, depending on how much real Ageism there actually is.
That's why I came back from retirement. I was there when the system went live, I can keep it running, and help move it to a new, better, wonderful, Corporate-standard environment.
I've worked for an organization that specifically mentioned that they would prefer someone younger (20's), but at the same time they want someone with a Ph.D and 20 years of experience. -= Insert swearing here =-
The smarter places I've worked for realize that hiring experienced personnel that want to learn new things won't need to start with computer 101.
As an older employee, you can't rest on your past accomplishments. You need to respect all ages on your team, and focus on delivering future accomplishments commensurate with your salary. For example if you're getting paid 2x as much as some kid or H1B you better deliver 2x too.
This is especially rampant among staffing/recruiter companies. JobRivet, for example, if you apply on their site and they find out you're over 30, suddenly your profile disappears shortly after being approved.
And many places that you could work at use this site EXPLICITLY to avoid being directly involved in age discrimination. El Torito is one of them.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...was for being too young.
Crawling my way up the corporate food chain, while outperforming people not only 10-20 years my senior, but with 10-20 years more "experience", was a long slog.
Now that I'm the guy with the 10-20 years more experience, I'm noticing that my peers who have been around for the same amount of time, with the same "years of experience" have not really gotten better over the years. Some plateau at around 2 years, in, others at 5 years, but very, very few continue to grow at any appreciable rate.
The big problem here is that there just isn't enough spread in the typical salary ranges to adequately compensate people based on their productivity. Typical rates run from 80k/year to 160k/year, so you can theoretically pay someone for doing twice as much work with twice as much pay, but very often, you've got a small cadre of folks who provide 10x or even 20x the productivity of their colleagues. None of them are making 800k, or 1.6m/year.
Every so often there's an article on Slashdot talking about how 30+ year olds are doomed. I'm almost 40 and am doing as great as ever, and I'm hounded by recruiters more than ever. I work at a startup of about 100 people and I'm one of the younger engineers.
We do have a different style when it comes to how we work, and I'll be brutally honest by saying I've never met a single under 30 developer who knew what the hell they were doing. Most of them appear to be learning on the job.
Then again I'm likely a top 1% coder.....
Yes. Programming is one of the few fields were more than a decade of experience is considered a negative. At my job they are looking for reasons to fire old programmers. They write them up, give them a NI (Need Improvement) and then fire them. These are people who have being working for decades and never had a bad review. Now the older workers are getting them all of the time.
who cares about silicon valley? it employs 0.173638% of the worlds IT workers.
I am middle aged. Got into IT late 90's. I have worked in several roles. I have a wonderful job with an extremely large Global company. When hired, I was the youngest person in my area of the country for my role. Just like with any people, no matter what age, country, language, or environment they come from, there are superstars, mediocre, slackers and assholes. In this case, I can honestly say, that the older IT workers are amazing. You can definitely see how the years of experience helps them. They have seen the latest fads come and go, and the technologies that stick around for years. They have learned interpersonal skills that make them deal with customers extremely professionally. They are calmer and react bettter to stressful situations. The lightbulb went off for me, and shattered every stupid myth that older workers are worse at IT. The fact is, that most are better, and the experience shows.
"in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated."
This would be the tech world that hasn't come up with anything really new or innovative since Twitter?
I suspect it is a bigger issue in the USA than other counties partly for cultural reasons. In the US more emphasis is put on looking after yourself and becoming independent at a younger age. The flip side of this is less respect for age and experience. I'm a 50+ Kiwi and I worked in China for a couple of years. I was the oldest employee there by a decade or two and I was managing a team of young engineers. I enjoyed it, they were respectful of my experience so I was able to effectively mentor them, and they were glad of the chance to learn stuff not taught at University.
Now I am back in NZ where we have a selection of both young and old employees. It works well. We older folk respect the education and enthusiasm of the young ones and they respect our experience. The company fosters a culture helping your coworkers so the young ones seek advise when needed and we mentor them. We trust that they generally know what they are doing so don't push our views unless asked. There is no us and them attitude as the culture is one of getting ahead by getting results as a team, not by shafting your coworkers. I suspect that attitude is lacking Silicon Valley?
The biggest challenge I find in getting a job is finding an employer who can afford the extra cost of the salary I expect for my experience and in that respect the young ones do have an advantage, but to call that Ageism is a bit unfair.
You should have seen the writing on the wall. I picked up a book, and swerved my career into the opposite lane-- I drove right in...to a life of fighting crime!
I don't have to wait for casual fridays to don my costume. I wear my briefs outside my pants, and ask for tips from tourists.
Whenever I need to get into character, I just think of that one guy in Brahmaputra that stole my call center position, so I can beat the pulp out of someone.
1. Learn karate.
2. Be a vigilante, or
3. Pose in costume with the tourists for money.
4. Profit!
Am 51, and for the last decade I've experience some, yes. The most overt was for a Bay Area startup position that was going swimmingly until I did a Skype with the (much younger) DoE, and he saw I was "old". (Guess he couldn't read a resume.) But the more annoying ageism is a general assumption by some of the kids that if there is a difference of opinion on an engineering question, it's because the old guy is clinging to his anachronistic ways. Version control? Testing? Even a one-page design doc? Don't be such an old fuddy duddy!! :-)
It has its plusses, though. As an old guy, you realize that there's serious money to be made cleaning up after the kids. And experience can often tell you which projects are sure failures, which can save working on something hopeless for a year.
Interesting. I spend most of my time cleaning up after the old guys who set up their systems and code back in the 90's and can't for the life of them understand why any of it should be rebuilt/replaced/repaired. If I had a nickle for every script with hard coded IP's and passwords in it I could have retired in my 20's.
If this group of senior-level devs is so unproductive, why does management continue to pay them?
Also, if you really are coding solid solutions but are not getting recognition ($$$) for it, you should be marketing your skills to other employers.
The unspoken reason for age discrimination is the the old people are deemed less able to compete and provide a benefit for the tribe that the young folks are able to provide. My problem with this is that it is not always true. There are plenty of young goof balls that are just not as productive or as fit as some old folks despite being 20 years younger. Yet they get a pass due to the inherent bias and prejudices of the community. There is no OBJECTIVE metric for net worth.
What I would like to see happen is that in order to secure a job you are subjected to armed combat. The weak and feeble (even the young weak and feeble) will be weeded out and killed. While the strong and fit will be allowed to continue to age in the computer field. When they wear out their usefulness they will be replaced with some young gun who can take is cubicle. This is how nature ensures a healthy population. People in the IT industry should adopt this practice.
Just because you are old does not mean you are useless.
Man,woman,elderly, dog.. if it can work well enough and most importantly, work well enough with the team you currently have, that's all you need.
I like how naive are geeks in this space.
Where I live the mantra is: "Are you over 35? We fire you because you are too stupid for use a computer", as an excuse for say instead: "Are you over 35? We will hire two stupid kids fresh graduated from University for your same wage and we will abuse of them for the next10 years. We don't care how many titles, certifications or degrees you have. Move on old man and make your own company, good luck!".
THIS HAPPENS IN ALL AROUND THE WORLD, NOT ONLY USA.
So the title of this post really reflects that whoever who redacts the text is a "protege" of some Admin in ./ and live in a protective bubble inside their office.
We have the opposite problem. I think 40 is the youngest programmer on our staff of about 10 people who are programming. I have jokingly told lots of people that my skills are so out of date that they are back in demand. I think it is similar with COBOL programmers. My skills aren't really out of date, they just aren't the "sexy" jobs in languages most people think of. I like my job and the people I work with and we get a lot of work done that drives a thriving business.
Not that we take any old "old" person. We just had a 60 year old on a 60 day "try and buy" and he couldn't stay awake - blamed it on medication. He did a lousy job also so didn't even last the full 60 days. We find it hard to find anyone qualified and the ones we do try aren't young. None the less, it is a great platform.
I was once told by a recruiter that the employer chose not to select me because they didn't believe that I could have had the experience that I claimed to given my young age.
Those sorts of mistakes could just as easily be made by somebody straight out of school. The problem is not the age of the people in question, but rather that only one set of eyes ever looked at the code in question....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Have *you* experienced ageism.
case1: You experienced ageism
(yes) -> relate story
(no)-> exit
----
Yes, I've experienced ageism.
It started in 1985 when I saw good programmers unable to find work once they reached 45 to 50 years of age. I realized we had strong ageism in IT.
It continued in the Y2K 2000 layoffs when I again saw many good older programmers unable to find work while younger programmers with the same skill sets were able to find work. In one hilariously bad example, I recommended one dye their hair. They did. And they were hired at the next job.
It continued again when I was passing resume's of highly skilled programmers to INFOSYS and they *required* the high school graduation date on resumes even when the person had years of great experience and recent college degrees. See, they were calculating the person's age since people graduate from college at various ages but they almost all graduate highschool at age 18.
And it continued after H1B labor replaced united states citizen workers (who were forced to train them) at SYSCO FOODS corporation. Those who were young were able to find jobs. Many of those who were as young as 48 too much longer to find jobs or never found work in the field again so far. The skill sets of the younger and older workers were very similar.
And it's happened blatantly here on Slashdot many times-- the worse being in the discussion on Google's age discrimination against the 40 year old female they recruited 4 times only to turn down once they saw how old she was.. 4 times. In that discussion, young people said flatly "But old people won't fit with our youth culture". Let's do some word substitution there for shits and giggles.. "But women won't fit with our male culture"... "But blacks won't fit with our white culture"... Do I even need to ask if you see my point?
----
In 2009, the supreme court absolutely gutted our age discrimination protection. Age discrimination has increased steadily since then.
What I never understand is that *everyone* gets older. I saw that when I was 24 back in 1985 just starting in IT and as a result I saved very hard and retired at 51. Funny story tho-- they laid me off 1 Day before I was going to give 30 days notice for my retirement, so I got close to $40,000 severance plus unemployment. The senior director never knew why I was so happy and when she asked why I was happy I told her that I really couldn't tell her for legal reasons.
Oh.. P.P.S. Sysco's project using indians from infosys recently failed at a cost of over a billion dollars.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Of course everyone over a certain age in today's corporate culture has experienced ageism. The question is do you realize you've experienced ageism?
Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatible with my token ring ethernet LAN configuration?
Nowadays I'm "too old", usually the term used is "overqualified", but I also distinctly remember back when no one wanted to hire this hydraulic engineer because I did not have the prerequisite 3-5 years experience on specific, proprietary machines... ... ... and that was trying to apply for entry level, basic position; the kind of factory work that's disturbingly close to minimum wage sometimes...
After companies pay a couple times for untangling Bangalore Spaghetti Code that comes in late and doesn't run right they get a lot more practical.
I've seen this time and time again at the SAME frickin' companies. They NEVER LEARN. Or perhaps the few who do learn end up leaving, and then new management comes in and pulls the same crap again. I've literally seen this happen four times in a row at one company and a couple at another.
Things are going smoothly and someone says "we need to cut costs" so they pick teams/products/groups that aren't growing as fast and move them to sustaining status, offshore the hell out of them, and lay off the people who built the thing and actually understand it. Then they get big bonuses for saving lots of money and everything looks great, UNTIL something changes, or something beaks. The cheap offshore engineers do fine with following checklists and making minor tweaks, but have no fundamental understanding of how things actually work and zero ability to re-architect even relatively small parts of it. The whole thing goes up in flames, customers get pissed off, and the then-current management swoops in to fix the situation by (you guessed it) hiring you know, actual, competent, well paid, and often older U.S. workers. Management gets high praise for fixing the horrible problems they've "inherited" and then some time later "we need to cut costs" again and the whole cycle repeats, and management seldom sticks around long enough to see even one cycle of this so is apparently completely oblivious. Frankly, I have no idea how I've lived through so many cycles without either getting kicked out the door or getting fed up and starting my own company by hiring a bunch of the really great folks who tend to get kicked to the curb during such cycles.
Ageism is huge in tech.
What sucks is that most of these whippersnappers can't code their way out of box. They write some bullshit java app that leaks memory, counting on GC, and I could write the same thing in C in half the time, no leaks, and at least 10% faster. But do I even get the opportunity?
Hell no.
Or the sysadmin side... I've built some significant stuff in my career, but management always listens to the young guy- even though I have data and thorough analysis to support my arguments, while the youngsters only have buzzwords and double-speak.
It is maddening.
The current leaked documents posted at oregonlive seem to indicate that Intel will be offering "accelerated retirement" to anyone over 60. Basically they'll give the employee 1 year of pay (and bonuses) and 2 years of health coverage to stop working sometime this June. Its honestly a pretty good deal, but they are trying very very hard to get rid of all the older people at the company. I really do not understand this push to get rid of the senior/experienced people as many of those engineers are the ones who really really know the technology, and the history, and the reason why the spec has A and not B. But maybe that's just me in my late 30s worried that soon I'll be in my late 50s and be one of those guys getting pushed out.
Any company that outsources workers of any kind (including helpdesk staff, programmers, sysadmins, clerical and admin staff, etc) doesn't value institutional knowledge.
This attitude has been fashionable amongst CEOs for decades - they like to see workers as slot-in replacable production units....and they try extremely hard to try to force reality to fit their model, no matter how much in-their-faces evidence there is to show them that it just doesn't fucking work and costs their companies a fortune every year in re-training and the just plain incompetence of new hires and outsourced "contractors" forced into running small-businesses rather than being employees.
Another thing they ignore is institutional loyalty - most employees have some kind of loyalty to their employer (even if only out of self-interest). Outsourced "contractors" have no such loyalty, they're loyal only to themselves, their pay-cheque, and maybe to the contracting company that pays them and finds work for them.
I used to live and work in the Valley, no more
Now you more likely find me in Asia or Europe or Africa
But regarding the issue of 'ageism' it all depends on how you define it
If it's limited to 'job', then no. The decades of experiences that we've gathered under our belt is no match for those greenies
But if 'ageism' is defined more broadly ... something akin to 'social', then it does affect us, all of us, in one way, or another
Not too many 'greenies' like to be around the 50-somethings, and we need to face the reality as the number of the 50+ like us are decreasing (some died, some retired, some just fade away)
As our social circles start to contract, we begin to feel the effects of 'ageism'
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Have You Experienced Ageism?
...I said to my wife. She loves it when I talk formal.
Oh, wait, didn't have my glasses on. Ageism.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I practice ageism daily.
From police and parents. They took a very ageist view about me hanging around that kid's playground
Ageism exists, as I've pointed out here at earlyer occasions - but it works both ways. Some "young punk" won't become senior easyer than me - my age is an advantage here.
People react differently to differently aged people. That's evolution and psychology. And really not that dumb if you think about it. If you're showing grey hair and you come in wearing ragged jeans and a printed sweatshirt people will subconsciously react to you in a different way. That *will* spill over into how they consciously think about you.
I'm in my mid-40ies but come across roughly 5-8 years younger. While I'm well off compared to some wasted people at my age - I ride the bike as main means of transport, I've got 10 years of performing arts under my belt, don't smoke, live frugal, don't drink alcohol and am just 3-5kg above ideal weight which go back to normal after two weeks of consciously eating less. That aside I am quickly moving into senior vibe with my whole physical appearance. Grey hair, increasing baldness and wrinkles coming up on me stronger now, ribcage sinking further, skull shrinking (the main cause for wrinkles btw) ...the whole nine yards.
I have no doubt that I'll run into ageism and that I'll have to deal with it in a change of habbits including the way I dress, move and talk. I'm also pretty confident that that ageism will turn to my advantage if I get myself a tailored suit, some dress-shirts, a few more ties and ajust my speaking to be calmer and a little cooler/low key. It's just last year that I wore a shirt and a tie for the first time. I've also grown a slight hippster-beard in the last half year - the change in reaction towards me is palpable and actually quite positive.
A friend of mine once said: As soon as I'm gettig grey hair in Germany, I'll be getting a suit and become a fraud-schemer. That pretty much hit's the nail on the head on German society.
Bottom line: Modern society is just as tribal as primitives are - and as stupid that may seem for a smart guy like me, it's astonishing how smoothly things go with other people if you play along. Act like people expect a superiour elder to act and you'll do just fine. That's my hope anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm "only" 36, but only now finally coming to a point in life where reverse-ageism isn't so much of a plague anymore. You see, I'm cursed with looking younger than I am. Like, much younger. As in if I shave I can sneak into high school and not look out of place among the kids.
For illustration, the last door-to-door salesman I saw asked me if my parents were home. Also my wedding was briefly interrupted by a nice lady who thought I was underage (I was 30 then). It's been slowing my career for more than a decade now. I'm systematically passed for promotion because I'll "get [my] chance later" apparently. As for leading projects ? It seems people who merely look older than me would object to being managed by someone who is actually older & with more experience but who does not look the part. While working in big corp I got confused for an intern several times (err no sir I'm the on-call engineer who's been maintaining your critical 30M-subscriber services the last couple years).
Fortunately it's happening less often now. I think I'm finally at a point where I look still enough like the "fresh blood" but with the decade+ experience and accumulated references they think they need as justification (or future plausible deniability ?) for hiring anyone.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The youngsters in my department have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for me, mostly because I'm their fucking boss. Heh.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I work for a tech consultancy and at 49 am the second oldest of the 15 engineers that work for us. I have professional experience with technologies that are literally dead and buried for all intents and purposes and technical experience with technologies still actively being implemented as new in a lot of small-mid size organizations.
What I find with younger coworkers is a kind of full-throttled enthusiasm for "new' technologies which aren't really all that new, just rehashes from a different vendor of what had been implemented before. Where I'm prone to some cynicism about them, the younger guys see them as new and exciting. I still learn them when appropriate, but I'm far more calculating in what I think is worth climbing the learning curve. Basically I've seen this movie before and I know how it ends.
There's also situational/lifestyle aspects where the younger guys can more easily do the death march out of town projects for 8 days in a row because they have nothing else in their lives, where those are just more difficult for someone married with a 12 year old son and a spouse with a serious professional job.
Where ageism works for me is my employer actively employing me over younger people in more difficult clients or situations where they need some gravitas. Most often the decision makers and management are people MY age, and sending a guy who's 28 in to that situation is a recipe for failure because of reverse ageism -- clients failing to take the younger engineer seriously because of his age. They see me more as a "life peer" -- someone with experience who is capable of relating more closely to them. I've also been in enough tight situations that I can take the heat and know when it's appropriate push back against bad client ideas or expectations.
In that case, I think it's a case of an employer fairly respecting my age and experience.
. . . . the "Cleared" vertical. No H1b's. Heavy on older workers, because it simply wasn't cool (or, admittedly, half as lucrative. . . .) as purely private-sector efforts.
And, face it, getting, and KEEPING a clearance is something of a chore. Not to mention the PII colonoscopy you get every 5 years, aka "clearance re-investigation".
OUR biggest problem is finding ANY qualified people, especially on the latest technologies. Way back when, I started as a Windows and Netware SysAdmin. Evolved significantly, simply because (1) the needs were there, and the people weren't, and (2) what used to take a bunch of people, now can be done by 1-2 journeyman-level people at each site. Nowadays, I'm dual-hatted, vulnerability assessment and software assurance. Being an older guy helps: I've worked Windows from NT 3.51 on, Solaris from 2.5, and Linux from the days when Red Hat came on 3 1/2 inch floppies . . . .
The problem I've noted with the younger set, is that they know how to code, but generally not how it all works, under the hood. . . simply because they didn't HAVE to.
When I was in San Antonio and arrived at Rackspace with paper resume in hand, as a long time ISP system administrator, linux geek and early customer of theirs... I was met at the glass door by someone who said that they did not accept walk-ins, the only way to apply was to create an account on the website and submit the resume there and wait for a callback. As with every other on-line job application I have ever submitted, I received no callback or human acknowledgement of my existence.
I can only presume that if there was a job to be had, it may have gone to someone less qualified than I because there was no way in hell they could have made a rational judgement without an interview.
Perhaps I was the victim of Ageism, they were too young to understand the way business has been run for centuries.
Goodbye, Rackspace.
Signed,
50+ geezer who watched the Internet go global
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I was going to make a career change. Wanted to become an Air Traffic Controller, but according to them, even mid-30's is too old to hire. The reason given: Because I wouldn't be allowed to work long enough (they have a required out age) to accrue retirement benefits! Geez, how stupid is that. I already could retire.
If you read a job posting saying "Young, dynamic and dedicated team" etc, etc, and you're over 25 and don't plan to stay at work every day until 10..11PM at night while eating a diet of BigMacs, slices of pizza, and Cokes (maybe "generously paid" for by your boss), don't even bother applying.
That is code for "Young slaves with low wages, still living with their parents, but very enthusiastic, this being their first ever real job".
I remember I have been to such an interview... and the manager (he was among the oldest in the company, about 35 yo) told me that the majority of people in the company are very dedicated to their work, and are usually leaving home with the last buses of the day.
Ah, and the pay was.... insulting.
PS. I AM hard-working, and very motivated - if I like the team, and what I'm doing, I'll stay late without ever being asked to do so. But I hate being taken advantage of.
I was once asked which super hero I would like to be.
The office was filled with 20 somethings with toys on their desks.
The WTF look on my face sent me home.
I have not experienced ageism myself, only 37, but my Dad has. He worked for 14 years as an electrical engineer at Applied Materials before he got released in one of their many rounds of massive layoffs. When he went applying for similar work at other companies what he typically ran into was the department manager would say he was the best candidate they had ever seen and was very vocal about wanting to hire my Dad, but then once the paperwork went to HR they would not allow the hiring of my Dad due to his age. He heard from numerous managers the exact same story, that HR would not allow them to hire him.
The closest I have come to experiencing this was an HR department struggle to find an "acceptable" job title to classify my position under that would keep me held back under the particular ranking (I, II, II, IV, etc...) yet still allow my manager to give me a much needed pay raise. As a result, I don't necessarily believe that the issue is 100% the age of a person but the system by which HR uses to classify employees.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
A few years ago I interviewed for a software job. Many companies, I would walk in and see a dozens of cubicles ALL filled with twenty-somethings.
Either twenty-somethings are universally better at doing the work - or alternatively, managers prefer them for the obvious reasons
(lower pay, willing to work longer hours and weekends [ more stamina, fewer family obligations] , more willingless to create a college dorm social culture within the company - with drinking and cameraderie, etc.)
They do tend to shit up the place.
And not in a good way like the APK or moocows dude.
But is it not what opinion-forming psyops by morons supposed to look like?
Since all 'training' provided by Uncle Sam was directly related to our environment, there was no opportunity to stay abreast of industry developments. Unless, of course, you did that on your own time and dime. Having been self-employed for as many years before that, I was accustomed to spending my downtime learning about New Things, and I continued to do that, spending at least half my vacation time most years attending conferences and classes to 'keep up'. For me, that paid off. I was able to move to another part of that same agency, and maintained my grade and seniority. My coworkers have not been as fortunate.
Here is the Complicated part. I can't say it is Ageism. The fact is, pay rates in Government, and many other large institutions, are based on a range for the position, and tend to get nearly automatic increases over time. I had been at the top of my range for 10 years (getting only paltry COLA increases), and when I was replaced, it was with a (wet behind the ears) n00b who is admittedly less competent, but also getting paid 35% less. My co-workers were all replaced similarly, with a net result of a 20% decrease in salary for the department.
In my informed opinion, their productivity is down by much more than that, but that is not something management is graded on. Cutting expenses, on the other hand, earned that manager a ticket onward and upward, leaving the poor productivity and lack of institutional knowledge a problem for the New manager.
As an employer, I would welcome the chance to get the same job done for less by a new worker. The problem lies in the subtleties of what is 'the same job'. How much of an impact do the intangibles of experience, insight, and industry connections have on your efficiency? Does your Boss know that?
The right candidate does not need to go to school to learn something, they teach themselves when tasked with implementing the "new hotness". Stop looking at education and start looking at how long they were employed in a single position during which they oversaw and successfully launched the latest technology.
During my last job search I applied to Sandia National Labs. The job requirements were right in my wheelhouse and I knew several people there who gave good references and even had a good phone interview. But when the decision makers found out my undergraduate GPA was 3.4, the door slammed shut. Even though most of their job postings don't say it, if you don't have a 3.5 or higher, they won't even talk to you. That's not ageism, but it did rattle me that they cared about more about my GPA from 25 years ago than my experience.
I've 39 right now, and I've been lucky enough to work at one company since college. Like a lot of people, I worry about my job, especially since I work at a defense contractor. I've had friends who were laid off and had a bear of a time finding a job, and I worry that in the next couple of years that will be me. Now, at my actual workplace, I haven't seen much of it; I work on a program that has been in active development since at least 1992, so I think we really value the guys who have been at it since the beginning. Of course, right now we don't have a ton of new hires, since they've tended to be the people who have set sail for more stable ground vs the ones with houses, families and inertia.
Most people of average height and/or weight can't or don't see it. Tall people are assumed to be natural leaders despite obvious incompetence. Same with thin people. Ageism in tech does have some basis in that younger people tend to embrace newer tech and tend not to have a that's-the-way-we've-always-done-it attitude. Being short and/or overweight doesn't affect one's ability to create, invent, and innovate.
You could drop me into my line of work and I will do better than the "kids" who have been there for 10 years and have been vendor-trained on the latest equipment. I have the advantage because I understand the systems and the engineering concepts and mentality behind the design, whereas the "kids" are trained merely to respond in checklist fashion to solve problems. I threw out that damned checklist while I was still training and sought to understand instead. As a result not only did I get bad reviews and fired because of "insubordination" but my work yielded the best and most throrough results, which put me in demand. Coworkers hated that cos their own standards made them look bad. Despite training the "kids" they persist in keeping up the fail. I know because I trained them and they never once used what I trained them to do. But now, I never get a chance to prove what I can do. Once they see how old I am, I get the blow off. I know I can do better than these "kids" with their precious degrees. Maybe that's what the problem is? Some crazy old lady just drops in and makes them look like clueless trainee n00bs? Who wouldn't hate that? Besides, how in the hell do you talk to someone old enough to be your great-grandmother? Huh?
No, you need to do your homework instead of reading the spoon feed propaganda.
The average tech job posting gets 100-200 qualified job applications from people out of work. How is this happening if everyone is working?
Out of touch. Seriously.
I was one of the people laid off in one of PayPal's most recent round of layoffs. I am not an "old" worker per se, but I am definitely over the average age of a coder there, which is like 29. After having miraculously survived numerous other mass layoffs, I was hit by this one. They did the typical thing where everyone tells you it's not performance related, but I strongly suspect that's bullshit. The reason why I suspect they let me go for "performance reasons" secretly without saying so was because as I got older, I got more resistant to culture change there. This manifested itself in two ways:
1. Resistance to their adoption of Agile/Scrum, which I still fervently believe is a micromanagement fad. Developers there suddenly went from no meetings on their calendars to one to three meetings on their calendars every day. Daily standups, biweekly sprint planning, retrospectives, demos, plus one-offs adds up to a lot of meetings and I was vocal that this was a dramatic step down from how we did things before. At its worst I had two meetings on my calendar three out of ten business days, with the occasional sprint having three meetings on a few days as well.
2. While I was genuinely enthusiastic about the majority of the details pertaining to the company's move to a new tech stack, I was openly hostile to the company flirting with thick-client JS frameworks like Angular, React, etc. When I joined the company it was big on progressive enhancement; in fact you had to pass a progressive enhancement test in the interview. Nowadays leaders there are firmly convinced that you need JS to display text and forms. It's madness. I think those frameworks have a lot to offer if you're building a desktop application with Electron or something, but PayPal is text and forms served over HTTP, not Slack.
I tried to be as nice as I could about being in the minority on those things, but it's kinda hard to be seen as a team player when you're constantly reminding people "all these meetings are unnecessary" and "we're dropping support for non-evergreen browsers unnecessarily and slowing down our products unnecessarily."
As to how this relates to ageism, I think it's because Silicon Valley companies prefer younger engineers because they're more afraid to question corporate culture when they're fresh out of college. I know I wouldn't have felt confident in questioning any of that stuff when I was 23, but once you hit your 30s your tolerance for bullshit starts to wane. I'd like to this all this is just a big coincidence like the company led me to believe, but I've been reflecting on it for a long time and I'm just not so sure.
The story has a happy ending that is also relevant to the ageism question asked by the article. After being let go, I got a job leading the engineering team at another company which seemed to disproportionately hire older coders. My new company seemed to have the opposite bias: older workers were seen as making fewer mistakes and they were willing to pay a premium to hire them. Good for me and generally I felt it was great that we didn't discriminate against older workers, but also felt like it was the reverse discrimination when I started. We were discriminating against the young. As such, I've breathed new life into the company's college recruiting program and promoted balanced hiring of people of any age.
And we all lived happily ever after.
I do miss my days at PayPal though. I'm not sure if you can call my story an example of ageism or not. Maybe nobody there thought it was. Maybe the people laid off were truly picked at random. But regardless I do think it's true that older workers are more intolerant of change for the sake of change especially when it adds no value and companies are motivated either consciously or unconsciously to replace those malcontents with younger, more pliable workers. And when I think about it like that, it seems like a rational instinct. You want to surround yourself at work with people who agree with your opinions, even if those opinions are dumb, b
And, in today's economy, everybody's selling something. In tech **NEW** is the product. It isn't just tech, though. Madison Avenue has succeeded in inculcating generations with the "new is better" speciousness. Today you don't have a career, you build a brand, and that brand better have "new" in it.
I'm 58 and when I left my 'corporate career' position a few years ago I encountered a couple of situations that left me thinking the issue was age. But there was never any firm evidence -- just a lingering suspicion. On the other hand, I have been able to find positions with organizations that needed specific skills and to build out my resume with up-to-date and current marketable skills. If you are selling a specific skill set and find people who need it you can find work.
One age-related thing I have noticed: there are a lot of techies who are highly skilled but are doing essentially the same work as much younger (and lower-paid) colleagues. These people are targets. Managers look at that and see they are paying more for the same work. It looks like ageism and may be in a way. If you are that fat-dumb-happy well-paid senior SW engineer and are surrounded by hard-working youngsters who can do what you do but for less money you should worry.
Ending the H1B program to solve this problem would be a very stupid thing to do.
Ending the H1B program won't solve this problem because there is no magic bullet. Doing nothing sure as hell won't change the direction so we keep driving down. Ending the H1B program is just one of many steps in a long walk.
The H1B program is there for a lot more than hiring tech workers, so it would be a terrible first step! We are not going to solve a culture issue by changing immigration laws.
We all know that Tech is not the only market damaged by indentured servitude, so why do you claim that it's a bad thing to remove? We have 40 years of this bad policy which was denounced by people like Milton Friedman. He won a Nobel Prize for analysis showing how horrible for the citizens of the US our H1B program and lack of border protection was. Turns out we have proof he was right, so your claim of "terrible" is both empty and treasonous.
Much better to look at the issue of why so many companies do not appreciate experience, and why people who are older expect to get paid more, just because they are older.
Companies are not the problem. How about looking at why regulations and laws have been passed which require businesses to screw over employees in favor of overseas "cheap" labor? How about law changes which give foreign entities power over US businesses and interests? Law changes allowing massive land grabs by foreign powers? Hand waving and yelling "look over there!" won't do anything to fix our problems.
The next step for people like you is to claim how anyone who disagrees with open borders and H1B free-for-all policies are bigots and mean, we don't care about anyone or anything. Which is easy to spot ad hominem. The US taking care of the US first is as patriotic as you can get. Demanding that the US Government neglect it's own citizens to take care of Mexico, or China, or Taiwan, or England, or anywhere else is treasonous.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Every worker in America over 50 has been discriminated against. It's not a case of IF but WHEN.
I interviewed at Google and was appalled at their system. I was told that for my 3rd and fourth interview I needed to go watch about 20 hours of Youtube Videos and study some cruft they wanted me to study. Not related to my experience or even the job in general. I was also told that I would be expected to work 60 hours a week, and should enjoy dinners on campus. In other words, I could be treated just like a H1B worker! WOW!
Google found my resume and called me, I never applied for a job. I heard from HR people inside Google that it's not always that way, and even know someone that took a manager job there. Amazingly, everyone I know from the technical side that interviewed there reported the same scenario I did.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Posting as AC because ... well, you know.
I graduated with honours back in 1982 in electrical engineering. I've been chartered since 1993. I've got a ton of experience working on a product almost everyone will have heard of. Can I get a job? No. Is it ageism? I don't know.
Ten years ago when I was 45 I decided to look elsewhere to get new experiences. I wasn't looking for huge pay increases just the chance to do something different. It's true I've been very picky about the jobs I apply for and I think I average at about five applications a year. So that's around 50 applications. So far I've had two interviews and no job offers. I was naive enough to think that my experience would be a valuable asset to prospective employers plus my willingness to learn new technologies in my own time is evident but I just don't seem able to get anyone interested.
Trouble is I don't know what's up, do I interview badly? Have I been pigeon-holed into this one industry? Or is there some ageism going on, I can't say. It certainly feels like ageism. I'm nowhere near Silicon Valley, I live in the UK but getting a job is proving to be very difficult.
47 years old here... I haven't experienced it yet. I know it exists, though, as I personally know some older IT guys who have have difficulty even getting interviews. For me, I think there are several reasons why I haven't fallen victim to that. Not saying I'm immune, as I'm definitely in the age group where one might expect it. First, being female I'll never have the "gray beard" thing going. I do have some gray hair, which someone might notice if they look closely. Also I am in great shape (thanks CrossFit!) and there is definitely something to be said for being healthy and fit, which helps keep me young physically as well as mentally. I really think what we project to others is an important part of it. Also, I'm fairly immature and I like to joke and laugh a lot, so I fit in pretty well with teams where often I'm the only woman. Being a contractor, managers are looking for an experienced developer with specific skillsets who can jump in, learn quickly and get the job done, and not usually as concerned about the whole cultural aspect of it as they would with an FTE. I'm not looking to join a startup (been there, done that) but I love a fast paced environment and learning new things. So I'm not someone who will let my skills stagnate, or get complacent and stay in one place too long. Will this still be the case in 5, 10 years? It's something that I am very mindful of, and maybe I'll start to see some ageism as I get into my 50s. If so, I'll just have to figure out a way to deal with it.
I'm 40, have no network, work full time, and still get calls from headhunters several times a week.
In the last 10 years, the longest delay between starting to look for work and starting a job was 4 weeks.
But then, I've spent my career building tools that solve real world problems, not useless things like games and social networks.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Ageism for me started in the late 20s. (I'm 32.) These companies want large teams of commodity programmers that they can cram into open-plan cattle pens. They don't want actual elite programmers. They want average people with huge egos who think that they're "rock stars" and will work 14 hours per day to prove it: the macho-subordinate type. They don't want people who are experienced enough to spot bad management, much less people who know what to do about it.
Also, both the abuse of the H1-B program and ageism are rooted in an unspoken but powerful fear: unions. H1-Bs are attractive because they can be threatened with deportation and come from countries where unionbusting is a lot more aggressive (as in: in the Third World, you get killed if you're a union organizer, rather than just illegally fired and blacklisted) than here. H1-B abuse is more about union prevention than it is about wage depression. "Culture fit" is code for "we don't want to hire people who know that we don't have our employees' interests at heart". These companies fear that if they hire someone in his 40s, he'll let the young'uns know too much about how the world actually works, and it won't be as easy for employers to take advantage of them. So they put out a bunch of propaganda indicating that 40-year-old programmers "are resistant to change" and "can only write in COBOL". Anyone halfway intelligent can see that this is ridiculous, but it sticks, because a lot of the people in the contemporary startup scene aren't halfway intelligent.
The problem is that technical excellence, in 95 percent of these supposedly technological companies, does not matter. (If it did, these companies would value technical ability and experience, rather than young bluster.) The era when startups were small teams whose technical excellence gave them a 10-100x force multiplier against competitors (and, to be truthful, it often helped that these startups were attacking niches than larger companies didn't care about, but that later proved to be important) is over. These days, startups are VC-fueled built-to-flip insta-behemoths. They're not teams of 15 doing the work of 200. They're sloppily-built 200-person companies that didn't exist two years ago that run on this misplaced middle-class belief that these horrible "tech startups" are the companies of the future. (I mean, they might be, but if that's the case, I want no part in that future.)
I doubt that this particular brand of perversion is sustainable. The reason for technical excellence to be severely undervalued is that the effects of technical sloppiness usually take a long time to have a macroscopic impact, and the managers who impose horrible practices and sloppy hiring expect to be promoted away from their messes before anything happens that could be attached to them. Founders don't expect to be running their companies 10 years from now; they want to be cashed out, diversified, and working 10-to-3 jobs as venture capitalists or executives at Googly mega-corps. The sad thing is that, for several years, sloppiness has at least seemed (survivor bias?) to work. The managers who have shoved the perma-junior Scrum culture down our throats have been able to get promoted away from their heaping piles of tech debt.
I'm betting that, some time in the next three years, the tech bubble will deflate (it may be a "crash" and it may be a slower deflation) and that a lot of the bad actors will have egg on their faces. Right now, there just isn't enough dirt flying around, because even though there's a ton of unethical behavior going on, no one wants to expose it and become unemployable. That'll change when the easy money is obviously gone and people get angry. Y Combinator (also known as, "where founders learn how to be unethical, and how to get away with it") managed to miraculously escape blame for the Zenefits disaster. Very few people have even made the connection. That's easy to do when it's a one-off. When a large number of people realize that they've been lie
Of course I've experienced ageism. In many industries gray hair is seen as experience, here it's a liability. I have been on internal interviews and it was hinted that the interview with me was to check off the "interviewed someone over 50 box". Whining about it does no good. Just as a lot of women claim they have to be twice as good to show they are as smart as a man, I have to work harder and show more flexibility to show I am on a par with younger colleagues.
If I ever lose this job I will probably not get another one in tech in a company this size. I will probably start a second career. I could afford to retire now- but I don't golf.
During the Bush recession, I was out of work for years... and, before you twits get started, I *am* a better programmer and sysadmin than you. Do you *really* think someone with only schoolwork and a year or three of job work knows more than someone who's been in the field for decades? In most other industries, that idea is a non-starter.
Let me assure you that in my career, I've had to deal with plenty of code from you young'uns... and too many have *never* been taught extensive error handling and recovery. I've fixed something where the previous three people massaged the data once or twice a year, the *same* data, as well as new data, rather than arranging to HAVE IT FIXED AT THE SOURCE, so that it wouldn't come back again.
Oh, that's right: the longest term job I had in that dry spell was *after* I dyed my hair, and lo! I got a job!
Then there's a friend: she's in her mid-forties, and was between positions... then she died the few gray hairs in her head, and right after that she got a job.
Friggin' arrogant kids, who already know everything... they think. Y'all remind me of a friend's daughter, around 15 years ago: they were running Win98 *bleah*, and the daughter was 16, and *sure* she knew more than me, and wouldn't let me help... and would get made and think that having to reboot the computer once or twice a night was "normal"....
mark
I was flown at a company's expense from San Diego to Paris, France for a two day interview. My resume was US style, with no indication of my age, and when they met me they openly asked my age. I was simply told that they did not want someone as old as me, despite my extensive skills.
I've been in and around the silicon valley since the late 70's. Hiring engineering talent has been the single biggest issue since then. I have yet to observe ageism anywhere I've worked. What I have seen is techies that fail to keep up with the industry and complaining that they can't find a job. Skills and experience have a short shelf life. 30 years ago Novell CNE was a hot ticket. 20 years ago people with CNE's started complaining about ageism. It wasn't their age, it was obsolete skills that made it difficult to find a job
Nepotism and a bachelor degree in any discipline get you the job, and you can't call it a career unless you are as incompetent as the next guy. Note that your credentials are first checked by the bubbly secretary at the front desk (human resources). You are screened to fit the profile of a venture capital company that is driven by tax evading bean counters, not technology or product. Your dissatisfaction with the company is proportional to your intelligence.
A friend of mine was doing that, until the new CIO decided he wanted a conversion from COBOL to Java that he could pretend went well on his resume. Personally, I hate COBOL too much, and I'd rather make a bit less doing something more interesting.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
InfoWorld ran an article about 25 years ago asking "Can people over 40 work in IT?", that is, can they keep up with the technology. The article, written by someone much younger than 40 answered the question "No, people under 40 can't work in IT." They shouldn't be hired and they should be fired (buy-outs, layoffs, downsizing, firings).
Someone should track down that author. He's got to be well over 40 now. Hopefully he's living under a bridge.
But the more annoying ageism is a general assumption by some of the kids that if there is a difference of opinion on an engineering question, it's because the old guy is clinging to his anachronistic ways. Version control? Testing? Even a one-page design doc? Don't be such an old fuddy duddy!! :-)
Huh?
Are you saying that they do or don't want to do version control?
The old fuddy-duddy way is to NOT use version control. It's actually a somewhat new concept in software, which was mainly only used on larger machines (such as VAXen which had it built into the filesystem, sorta, and Unix's RCS). What we have now with everyone using git for software version control is a new phenomenon. Before about 15 years ago, CVS was about it as far as free version control, and for really serious firms, they used shit like ClearCase which cost an absolute fortune and requires a full-time administrator now matter how small your team. It's only been recently that we've had a plethora of extremely effective and free (and FOSS) tools for doing version control. Go back to the 80s and look at how microcomputer programmers worked; they didn't use version control at all.
There's still a lot of places where older engineers aren't using version control.
And how many of those HR workers ever work 80-hour weeks anyway?
So far, my experience in life is that anyone who seeks out a career in HR is scum.
You want job discrimination? Try going into a tech interview in your mid 40s while using a wheelchair. I'm 46 and have been doing this work for almost half my life. I'm familiar with current technologies (i.e. I don't need to work on an AS-400 or a Vax to get the job done) - but I recently interviewed for a job where I had everything in the job description in spades - plus other stuff that was brought up in said interview - yet was passed over for a guy who was a month or two away from finishing his CS degree ... and wasn't even a zygote when I started working in the software industry. It's frustrating, to say the least. Like someone mentioned on this topic earlier, I'm getting close to bankruptcy and a Top Ramen diet. And I'm far too old to eat Top Ramen.
My disability affects neither my mind nor my ability to write good code, my age doesn't either. I refuse to believe that it does.
I have found if you have an open mind and are willing to learn and don't think you know it all.
Younger people will see as a mentor and frequently ask for advice. To me this is very satisfying, I come from a long line of educators anyways. And the thing is you even as a mentor will pick up knowledge from your "students".
I am soon to be 57 years old.
I entirely switched careers, and have no regrets. It did take about two years for management to see what I had to offer and establish trust. It is a great company to work for, very little pressure, reasonable pay, no required retirement age, plenty of overtime (only if you want it not mandated), it's all here.
https://www.facebook.com/weilpump/
Ageism can only be experienced during certain rites at their temples.
And you have to be initiated. Like Pastafarianism or the Cargo Cult of John Frum.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Clearly you overlooked the fact that the system in question worked well enough to stay in production for about 20 years.
Now, hard coded anything is bad, even back then it was poor practice. A proper code review in 1997 would have generated the same criticism.
So you "refactored" something to not have hard coded values... wonderful. As you should. But did you stand up the system from scratch? When we come back in 20 years will we see YOUR work in production... or will it be a cleaned up version of the original developers work?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
When I clean up messes I get told that's not what sells the cars.
I think this happens to most individual contributors in Silicon Valley's less mature companies. I recently interviewed for one of the hottest startups here. I met 5 reports and two directors. The reports were all in their twenties and the directors were a few years older than me. I'm 38. Needless to say, I performed all code examples satisfactorily if not really well, but I guess they didn't like the "fit". Which likely means that I was percie ed as old or a threat to their status quo. Same thing in my current company. They gave a lead postion to a 24 year old with less than two years of industry experience. I've been working full time in the Valley for 15 years. My resume is stellar. I get recruiters calling me up all the time and then their companies bail out on me when they find out I'm actually an older American guy. I think they also expect me to be foreign too because of my name. Their loss.
It's just a cost savings tactic disguised to look hip. Younger workers work for less wages, require less health benefits and often aren't smart enough to understand when they are being exploited. Older workers have families, heath problems and are smart enough not to be manipulated.
The reason the CEO's go for the younger workers is the cost savings and their ability to exploit a subset of people. Young people typically aren't smart enough yet to realize that in a few years they will be old too. They often aren't smart enough to realize that all of those snacks in the office aren't there just to be nice. They eliminate a reasons for you to leave the building when you are expected to work late. You eat and then you go put in an extra few hours for the company for free.
For a brief stint I was a hiring manager. I resisted the temptation to hire someone just because they were older. I was tempted because I wanted to sort of get back at the industry for its age-ism.
...
We only had 1 older dev apply, and my boss was DEAD SET against him. (We're a C#, small company, gov contractor). The way he put it was that we were only going to hire younger workers (but not "age wise"). I'm 100% sure he meant age wise. He only said that to cover his bacon. The CEO demoted everyone and he ranks people by their seniority (where older is sort of better).
I worked at a company once where they fired a lady the day after she turned 40. At the same company my boss bragged about they way they fired people for being old. (And this guy passed a bar exam!).
I got demoted because I wouldn't estimate all projects at 30% of their effort and am happy to be coding again. Hopefully I'll have a clearance soon. Not sure that will pan out as a strategy to keep my job. Also learning mobile stuff on the side and trying to put together a portfolio to start my own thing someday. Not sure how to get clients
Anyway, not sure how bad age discrimination is, but it keeps me up at nights. I'm in my mid 30s.
I guess you mean every time I find they want someone with 5 years current experience in a language that hasn't been taught in an American College in 30 years. Or put the term "energetic" in the job add. Or when I reply to a recruiter and he offers me a bounty on a COBOL programmer who has just a little less experience than me, because the client will say I am "over qualified". How about being told to train my replacement, so I can be freed for other projects, only to find out the other projects were a myth and "freed" was "allowed to seek other opportunities outside the organization*"
*one company didn't layoff older workers, they cut off their accounts and access with the idea they should quit before they were fired for their sudden drop in productivity. Layoffs of older workers while hiring younger replacements had to be explained. But locking their accounts out and then firing them with cause because they hadn't written a line of code in weeks didn't.
No...never seen ageism.
Hired gave me a form letter when I submitted my resume, it says that "my skill set isn't need at this time." My skill set is a list that's a paragraph long. I said "escalate this" and the guy said that companies want people who have more like 7 or 8 years of experience, not 16. I'd be willing to work at an 8 year salary or wage. How the hell am I not a bargain?!? Carnegie Mellon, Corporate technical level in IBM. It's been a year and I still can't get a job. (I'm in NYC, fyi.)
-Michael Krier
There's ageism all right, but its not what you think it is. Its a refusal to hire the young. Setting up arbitrary requirements for 'experience' that have no connection to the job itself. I've watched as jobs that previously required "0 years" of "experience" and would have been given to a bright high school degree holder with some computer knowledge, now "require" a Masters and 5-10 years of arbitrary "experience". The result being that the Silicon Valley is largely devoid of US citizen talent under the age of 37 or so, as 1999 was the peak of hiring.
Back in 1997, I lost a very lucrative contract. I was 56 at the time. I went looking for work and not a single one of my efforts was responded to. I finally found a job for less than half of what I'd been making. The job entailed web design and development. I was an expert in network design and development at the time. But, any port in a storm is better than not working.
I had a new boss that let me figure it all out, i.e., he valued experience, even if not directly related. Then he resigned for a better position. The second new boss didn't think old guys were worth anything. At one point during a meeting he said, and I quote, "Why should we listen to you? You're retiring soon." Then he quit too. The third boss was another old guy. He let me do what was needed to get the project complete. As far as I know, it's still running.
11 years ago I retired at 65, and am now completely obsolete.
In my opinion, there's two sides to ageism. One, if the old guy (that's a gender neutral term if anyone is offended) keeps his skills current, and is willing to learn, then that guy is a good candidate for whatever job being offered, even if the guys current skills aren't relevant (I stand as a good example). On the other hand, someone who's just waiting to retire and not keeping up with technology, is a waste of time and money.
We did version control. With a bunch of subdirectories, XCOPY and DIFF. It sucked, but was still necessary.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I worked 50 hours once, but my manager scolded me and gave me a day off. I've only been out of college for 10 years now, maybe I'll have a 75 hour week.
Surprised I lasted that long. The company was in one of the few industries that are currently having major economic problems. So It is hard to legally claim harm. Besides anyone in my industry knows to be finally independent by their 50s.
... would be to outlaw having age or date of birth on employment forms, and disallow asking about either during interviews. It's no different from having a rule that disallows asking about somebody's cultural heritage, or religion.
Workers with a sense of professionalism will already not ask other people's ages, or volunteer their own. They don't need a law to tell them this is the right thing to do. The laws are there for those too inexperienced or too clueless to figure this stuff out (most engineers and programmers would definitely fall into the latter category).
Similarly, this information does not need to be on most applications, or even on identification cards or driver's licenses or passports. An icon on id papers can be used to indicate whether one is considered an adult, and a checkbox (adult/minor) can be present on applications.
Similarly, age or date of birth should not be available in public records, or freedom of information requests, and should not be on a census. If social scientists wish to do studies based on age, they can ask people for that information, and take appropriate steps to protect it. The government can keep dates of birth, but only with very limited access on a need-to-know basis, and only for those things where the public generally approves the sort of things for which need-to-know exists.
The military can use physical fitness tests, with no exceptions allowed, to determine retirement. Similar tests can be used for those civilian jobs that require fast reflexes.
Several years ago I had this experience.
At the end of the second interview I was asked the question how did I feel about having a younger person as my boss, the idea that I might have any issue with that had never even occurred to me and I said there was no issue.
I didn't get the job, the boss who was an Asian female in her (I'd guess) early thirties was the only one with an issue, my guess is its a cultural thing.
Now days I run a team of folks of various ages, my boss is younger than me though, not by that much mind you.
As usual YMMV
Be wary of strong drink, it can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss.
Expel Brahmin from USA http://wh.gov/iyhMK
Casteism
Here's the NO side... I'm 55 and work with an older team, the team ages are 45, 55, 56, 58 and 63. We hired a 64 year old as a PM a few years back, he turned 69 recently and retired. Our manager was trying everything he could to keep him from retiring because he was a great asset. This is probably not your typical IT team working on cutting edge technologies. But, its my current situation.
Here's the YES side... I would very much like to get back to a Java/Weblogic/Oracle world. The leading edge technology we chose is extremely green. Its frustrating using new technologies to solve problems that could easily be solved with more mature technologies. I've had some interviews, but definitely feel that age is a problem. I'll most likely be stuck here until retirement.
It's easy to see that you're lying. If you had any of the confidence and self-respect that comes from accomplishing useful work, you wouldn't feel the need to try to impress the Internet with such sad attempts at edginess.
fuckism your cuntisms
Some years ago (remember 2008 any one?) I was job hunting for the first time in many years as my contract with IBM (a bit of name-dropping to show I'm not in the Little League ;-) was not renewed. I could not understand I did not get any responses to my applications despite an impressive CV. A friend suggested that I removed all dates from the CV (like year of graduations and such) ... Guess what? ... Suddenly I got responses/interviews, so ageism? Ya betcha!
In my experience and what I have gleaned from talking to other people, it seems that large companies and public organizations are less prone to ageism than smaller companies. That could be due to the fact that larger and public organizations normally have anti-discrimination policies that support dinosaurs like me.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Right. Confident people hide their successes. Idiot.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Confident people don't throw up strawman arguments in response to criticism.
There is an element of truth to that, but at the same time the older work tends to get more done in 20 hours than the younger ones do in 60
That's because we're busy working in those 20 hours and not spending it playing ping pong, having Nerf gun wars, or taking 2 hour lunches at the trendy micro brewery up the street
No, they stalk people on the internet and accuse them of lying every time they express themselves.
Go fuck yourself, loser.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You've never been stalked. Having comments you make on a public website replied to via that same public website isn't even in the same timezone as stalking. And you know it.
If you want to complain about being accused of lying every time you express yourself, you should stop lying every time you express yourself.
Strongly recommend Ashton Applewhite's new "This Chair Rocks" for a well written and vigorous refutation of arguments against full rights for older people: http://amzn.to/1TuHAjq