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Almost Half of Tech Workers Worry About Losing Their Jobs Because of Ageism, Says Survey (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SiliconBeat: More than 40 percent of tech workers worry about losing their jobs because of age, a new survey shows. Jobs site Indeed also found that 18 percent of those who work in the tech industry worry "all the time" about losing their jobs because of ageism. The release of the survey Thursday comes amid other news about diversity -- or lack thereof -- in tech workplaces. Often when we report about diversity issues, readers wonder about older workers. The Indeed survey offers insight into the age of the tech workforce: It's young. Indeed concluded from surveying more than 1,000 respondents in September that the tech workforce is composed of about 46 percent millennials, with 36 percent of respondents saying the average employee age at their company is 31 to 35, and 17 percent saying that the average worker age at their company is 20 to 30. What about Generation X and baby boomers? Twenty-seven percent of respondents said the average age of employees at their company is 36 to 40, while 26 percent of respondents said the workers at their companies are 40 and older.
What do you expect when you came in in the 90s and 00s and shunned the older workforce, that you would be able to be an older worker later on?
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Save as much as you can while you're young, when eating ramen and living in squalor is still cool. Then when you're older, worst case scenario is you lose your job and you're like, meh, didn't need it anyway. Best case scenario is you keep your job and glide into retirement driving expensive foreign cars and Teslas.
Posting anon,.....
Living in Australia with over 250 to 300k per year immigration, we're seeing an incredible drop / stagnation in wages. If you're not a seriously skilled professional (admitedly, a reasonable percentage of /. posters but certainly in no way, all nerds and geeks) then you're in potential trouble.
We've got more and more and more people, willing to work for significantly less money. These people are accustomed to a poorer quality of life back home, so when they come here and share a house with 5 other people, they think it's a palace, but sounds like torture to us.
Plus you've got people who simply made a couple of bad choices skills wise or job wise, wound up in a role and found themselves simply with antiquated skills. I'm one of these myself. Yeah it my fault but my government is NOT making it easy. Wage stagnation is going on seriously for the middle class across the world.
We're getting boned.
... I've some experience with this.
Competition for IT jobs being what it is, I sometimes had to make a persuasive argument for hiring/keeping me as opposed to a young'n.
In brief, it went like this:
While recent grads know HOW to do stuff that I don't, I know WHY we shouldn't be doing it.
Business is not a good place to be experimenting by being an early adopter.
In skill comparisons, I got my first computer (TRS-80) in 1978. I speak DOS, lived the digital revolution, saw Windows 3.0 fail -- to be fixed by 3.1 -- helped bring in the first network for Mobil Oil, and grew up with the Internet and social media.
I had the experience that entry-level peeps would get later, at the company's expense.
It worked for 30 years.
I've been retired for 3 years, so I don't know if that approach would work today.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Get ready to change. There's lots of roles in IT that tend to prefer more experienced folks, the type of role where "Ya, I've seen that 5 times before, here's what we're going to do about it..." is the order of the day. Architectural roles of all stripes, infosec in general, etc. I've moved roles a few times in the last 25 years, (network monkey -> Mgmnt -> infosec -> infosec architecture) and I always find a new fun challenge every time I have.
You're probably in technology because you can adapt to change, not because you're scared of it. Embrace that.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Give it a few more years... you will definitely start.
#DeleteChrome
I spent years working at a university rearch center. When I got there, they had no direction or plan regarding technology. One system at a time, I built the technology that they used for everything from directory services, storage servers, database, phone system, and even a security camera system. I used tons of open source systems - Linux, BSD, Postgres/PostGIS, Asterisk - and saved the institute hundreds of thousands of dollars. My reward? Shortly after my 50th birthday, and a few months before I finished my doctorate, they eliminated my position. As a bonus, it was also Christmas time too. Just lovely people. Two car payments, a mortgage, and a kid in college. While my wife and I were taking Christmas presents back and cancelling every possible optional expense we could, my former employer was hiring twenty-something business school types to fill seats and firing nearly everyone over 40.
Filth. And doing this on the governments nickel down!
You open up a different can of worm with population sets. Of course by skewing their employees younger, software companies can often make their employees more gender diverse faster than if they did not do that...
Older engineers are going to be more likely male. If you want to fix a "gender-diversity" problem in tech simply with new hires, you will likely find it to be pipeline limited. Interestingly, if you wanted to make faster progress than being pipeline limited, you can simply reduce the fraction of older engineers (who are more male dominated compared with the younger pool).
Sadly, that's two strikes against companies keeping older engineers, generally more expensive and generally more male.
My last layoff was at age 57 from a pretty large tech company. The severance package was reasonably generous. Then, in addition, there was the "Promise not to sue us for age discrimination" add-on severance package, which was... pretty dang good. And, it came with about an inch thick stack of statistics about the ages of those laid off, which kind of established they were more than ready to defend themselves against any age discrimination suits.
I signed. It was a pretty good chunk of change (three months' pay, I think I recall) paid extension of benefits ... and there was an email from recruiting from another company in pretty much the same business in my inbox when I got home, which is where I'm working now.
I'm 61, writing code, and having fun. My advice:
First, find a company that lets you do what you want. In particular, find one that doesn't push you into management (unless that's what you really want). Many companies will push you in that direction, but unless you're really good at it, it's a dead end.
Second, don't get stuck on the same project forever. Being the old fogey who knows everything about that important legacy system isn't a good place to be when the old system is finally retired. It isn't enough to "keep up with new technology". Knowing it and doing at are different things and are judged differently.
Third, don't expect that your superior wisdom is enough. Be wise, but be productive, and help other people be productive.
Haven't even been able to get an interview since then. I've played all the tricks like shaving off the first 20 years experience from your resume, whatever. But when it comes to "when did you get a college degree" you can't lie, cuz the college is going to give the real year.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying I interviewed and didn't get hired. I can't even get a fucking interview nowdays.
Mid 50s here, and I work in C and embedded systems. So it's hard to find qualified candidates for the jobs, plus I'm good at it, and get a lot of recruiter spam. So I'm not worried about ageism for me. There are people that definitely are dismissive of older workers but I haven't bumped into any for some time.
People say old people don't keep up on the skills, but that will apply to everyone. The problem is not about age or skills, it's about cost. If you're 30 you're NOT old, but even if you know 50 programming language you're still going to be compared to the cheaper worker who only knows the one language that the company wants. Those are dumb companies to be sure, they value quantity over quality, so maybe you're better off not getting a job at those places.
An even bigger concern than ageism, especially for those with moderate skills, is outsourced. No matter what your age in the US, they can find someone that costs less overseas. Not good workers mind you, but if they can hire 5 incompetent people for the price of one qualified person then many companies will do that. And there are countries where it is routine for the manager to lie our their asses about how awesome their workers are and how they can do anything you can possibly ask. Being young won't protect you there.
Here the other side. We had difficulty finding people. We did not want people who just left school, but where a bit more mature.
So we looked for older people from 55 and up. The fact that we would get extra money fro; the government in Belgium was a nice plus, but not the deciding factor.
Worst. Decision. Evar. It was almost impossible to get them to do anything they already knew. Let alone learn them anything new. Just not flexible enough and easily double the time to be somewhat productive (a year, instead of standard 6 months). And we really tried over several years. At a certain moment you just give up. They where just too expensive, even if they got the same pay as others.
The plus side? They are less sick on Monday and Friday. Less moaning about stuff. Much less drama. Yet the thing that remained was that learning new things was hard. Be it procedures or skills.
I now also see it with myself. I know that if I got fired now, getting a new job would be near to impossible. Too set in my ways, even if I WANT to be flexible and WANT to learn, it will be extremely hard if not impossible. Because I would feel as if they do not want to use my expertise.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.