I've seen it spun as a move away from the legacy stack into the new modern architecture. Of course the legacy stack programmers have a suspicious common element.
Also, of course, 2-3-5 years later the legacy stack is still what keeps the business running while all the new shiny toys have come and gone.
I had a boss who came over, asked me what was working on and then looked me in the eye and said, firmly and deliberately, "So you are working on transitioning to the new architecture". I shrugged, said "I guess", and he left. Only later did I realize that he was saving my hide.
It is incredibly unfair to associate older people with legacy stack. Many older people are actually contributors and work on defining and implementing newer (modern) architecture like containerization and automation solutions. I think often younger developers and engineers are often taught on old paradigms and solutions, and then often get out into a position to ignore modern solutions and get vendor kickbacks to maintain long-term contracts utilizing antiquated solutions.
A fellow older classmate of mine and I were looking for work after changing careers.
We were talking about his recent interview when he got a call from the recruiter and put her on speakerphone. She told them they were going with someone else because they thought the other person "fit the culture" better.
He asked if she could give some feedback on what that meant and she flat out said "Some people thought you were too old." Shocked he asked again and she repeated it. I don't think it even occurred to the recruiter that it was wrong.
My buddy chose not to do anything, both of us looking for work and etc really didn't want to get into some legal situation and looking for work.
We tell tradespeople who are 40 years old to hit a bootcamp and get work in our magical software industry. Then, when those same people come to us to be hired our recruiting manager says stuff like "well... they're 40, but have only got 6 months of experience; we can't hire them as a new recruit, but they also don't have enough experience to hire as a senior developer — guess we can't hire them".
It's disgusting. Hire someone based on their experience, not their age.
I wonder if there’s a legal case here? A lot of companies only hire entry-level from new college grads (or even worse, returning interns). How is that not age discrimination?
There is no age requirement on being a recent college grad. They tend to be clustered tightly in a certain age range, but a 45 year old graduating would still have access to that same recruiting pipeline.
Non diverse results doesn't imply illegal discrimination.
Let’s say I only want to hire software developers with buzz cuts. Women are free to cut their hair short and apply. Is this not gender discrimination?
In fact, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seems to agree with me that this is risky:
“For example, a help-wanted ad that seeks "females" or "recent college graduates" may discourage men and people over 40 from applying and may violate the law”
Digging deeper, it looks like Facebook settled a 2008 case where they stated a preference for 2007 and 2008 graduates by saying they would no longer state the exact years they were looking for. At this point I’m willing to bet that hiring only new grads or returning interns is age discrimination but nobody’s brought the case
to court.
I dont blame your buddy for not pursuing legal action, the legal system sucks. That said companies feel confident doing that largely because they know most people will not peruse legal action and even if they did they likely have the money to bankrupt them long before it ever got to a jury
Something that often gets overlooked is how much better older people are than younger people at getting information from others. That is a critical and time-saving skill in software development.
What would happen if you lied about your age (eliminate the first 10 years from your resume), both at the time of applying for the job and after joining the company? How much trouble can you get in for that? It doesn't seem unethical at all.
I basically did this. I mean I wouldn't say it's a "lie" to simply omit things from you're resume that you don't feel are relevant or may hurt your chances. I shortened my resume to a single page and left high school and my attempt at college off of it completely. No one ever brought this up at the interview.
It's also not actually legal where I live for the employer to inquire about an applicant's age. After I was hired, the manager did ask me at lunch how old I was, I just replied, "I can't remember". Yeah, he probably didn't mean anything by it and he could probably look it up with HR. But I just honestly didn't feel like it should be relevant to my role at work.
I don't feel like this was unethical, perhaps slightly paranoid at most. Speaking of which, I didn't even tell anyone I had kids until I was out of my 90 day probation period.
Every job that you have gotten has needed ID for background checks. I've never been asked for ID, age, or gender during the interview process. Nor would I give that information freely.
I recently filled an online application that asked for SSN and I dropped it right there. You only need my SSN for employer taxes, no way is that part of any job interview.
SSN also has an approximate timestamp encoded into it. The prefix can be linked to the time period it was given out, which is typically at or near birth registration.
This is public knowledge, and the prefixes are even used for identity verification at banks.
If you got your SSN at an age other than ~0, you may get flagged as a mis-match when e.g. applying for a new bank account, and it will require a human override to get past.
The one problem might be education on your resume. People can infer age from that generally. If you leave dates off it might also be seen that you are hiding the dates because of your age.
Have the work section chronological (And omit everything >10 years old), and the education section styled a bit differently, as a bunch of bullet points without dates.
It might be a bit weird, but I doubt it'll fail the HR filters. You can even do something like call it 'Education and Skills', in which case dates don't even make any sense to include. (Nobody ever says which year they've learned C#.)
I don't really have a strong opinion though. When I last switched jobs a number of years back a friend of mine strongly advocated for obfuscating age as much as possible. I don't even remember how much I did but it didn't really matter because I knew the person running things and a number of the other people involved in the process. So this wasn't really an HR filtering thing.
I don't work in HR, but I have a hard time imagining that any HR department has a bullet-point checklist they expect from resumes, that includes 'MUST SPECIFY EDUCATION DATES'. ('MUST SPECIFY EDUCATION' is certainly on there.) [1]
And unless these things are explicitly checked for, your resume won't look that weird.
[1] If they do, they should stop, because this sort of thing is great evidence for an age discrimination lawsuit, even if you don't engage in age discrimination.
I don’t specify education because I never even completed high school. I get significantly less recruiter spam vs friends with an education section on their linkedin.
Or do what I did, and drop out of college and go back to finish it several years later, and just put the year I graduated on there. My education makes me seem younger than I actually am for the people that judge by that.
This is the thing that confuses me a little, fresh blood is important too but having people who've gone round the block a few times (especially somewhere else) can be very helpful even just as a second pair of eyes.
I worked with a younger guy, very capable dude, but our differences in ability to talk to a customer and sort of shake out what they really want / need were like night and day.
But that's what working on a team is, I'd step in and help everyone take a step back and realize what we're all doing / can do for them and get back on track / save everyone weeks of trial and error. He'd show me some stuff too that I wasn't good at.
This is a big one. There are arguments for not hiring older experience programmers, then there is a different issue about hiring older people that want to be new programmers. I'd think the second group wont have much hope of getting hired.
A decade or two of 'unrelated' experience dealing with people, solving problems, or hell, even just dealing with administrative and bureaucratic bullshit? And the same amount of 'related' experience? For the same price? All other things being equal, give me the older person any day.
Now every few years I make a massive time investment in an some new tech. I get hired for one thing. When chance comes up I take tech lead position on some something I’m not familiar with.
Keeps me up to date in a very practical manor.
Now I’ve seen lots of older people who learned something 20 years ago, and have barely changed since.
Not surprising. Years ago one of my (gray haired) mentors opened my eyes to ageism in this industry by asking me to pay attention to how many programmers in the office have gray hair. Once you start looking for it, it becomes obvious that age discrimination is rampant. Some blame the young workforce on the industry being young, but the industry is decades old at this point so I don't think that excuse holds water.
Some of the best people I've worked with are those who've been with the company for a long time. IME, the dead weight tends to be phased out over the years, so there's a bit of survivorship bias with the remaining ones.
However, the road certainly isn't easy for them. Despite the utility of these people being totally obvious to anyone whose ever worked with them, with each change of leadership comes another fight to keep their jobs.
The one that stuck with me was when I worked for one of the biggest companies in the world, and they laid off the man who had more patents than anyone else in the company, by a good margin. He was in his late 50s, and he came onboard after getting his Ph.D, leaving once to found a startup, which was acquired by the company after a few years. He was brilliant, humble and could have absolutely been a professor at MIT or a principal at Google. But he loved working for our company.
That's not ageism though. Getting pushed out because they lost the shelter of their patron(s) or because they were on the losing side of a political battle, which is a common cause of the departure of people like that, is a different thing entirely.
I've worked at companies where older people are rarely seen, but I've also worked at companies where older developers are the norm. In fact, I started my career at a company where I was one of the few people under the age of 40.
I don't have any statistics to support this, but I've wondered if workers tend to congregate by age groups at different companies. That is, if employees prefer to work with coworkers around their same age, they'll tend to move to companies that match their own demographic. If you're not in that demographic, you'll see fewer of those people around you. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a factor at some level.
Geography plays a big role, too. If you consider "the industry" to be high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley then people will naturally self-select out of the area as they start raising families and growing older. Move to a more family-friendly city and suddenly it's more common to see diverse age ranges working at companies.
Consulting is infamous for being a "greybeard accumulator" where the stereotypical career path is that they either to to management or consulting. Client expectations seem to play a part in it that they at times seem to feel dissatisfied at a younger consultant who don't prove themself to be an all solving savant while tolerating a broader range of outcomes from an elder one.
I know one attempt to have a sub visibly middle aged programmer local talent maximia who know the local language didn't work out as well compared to a former technician consultant who operated a bit more rote standards familarity.
There may have been conflating other skillsets including social. To put it crudely the programmer was slightly jerkish, the former technician apparently always wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Regardless the bias seemed to reinforce itself from clients.
While I don't disagree with you, there are other nuanced facets to this as well. I am 45 soon to be 46, and I have watched this industry chew up and spit out many of my friends and colleagues along the way. Burnout is a real thing. I have a friend who one day said F'it and bought a worm farm, he is literally a worm farmer now. Others took the elevator to management, one became a DJ, one opened a party store etc. etc. We loose a lot of the old timers to attrition, not many people can do the software grind for 20-30 years straight.
The second nuance is that I and the rest of Gen-X sit one the cusp of the desktop revolution and its transition to the internet revolution. Most of the desktop programmers 30+ year at that time, did not make the transition, they stuck with desktop and rode it into the twilight of their career and that is a big reason you just don't seem to see too many people over their mid 40's in the industry.
None of that negates the fact that ageism does exist in this industry, but there are other contributing factors as to why we don't see many programmers past the 40's cut off.
I'm in my middle 50s myself, been programming for 30 years.
I like the story about the worm farming. It'd be appealing, except there's a slightly creepy feel to it when you're this close to senior citizenship. :)
It's also regional, I started my career at a startup in Kansas City, where the situation is completely the opposite. The average age of the company was 40 or so, particularly in engineering.
I'm not denying that ageism exists, but this proves nothing. There are many reasons why young people outnumber over-40s in programming roles:
1. The size of the field has increased exponentially over time. Far fewer programmers started their careers in the 80s or 90s vs the past 10 years.
2. Many older programmers have transitioned into upper management or other roles - for example, product/project/people management, sales engineering, customer success, technical writing and so on.
3. People leave the industry due to family or health reasons, windfalls/inheritances leading to early retirement, burnout, or career changes. The longer someone has been working, the likelier it is that people from their cohort have left for one of these reasons.
Older workers have experience. Experience is expensive. You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. Age discrimination is rarely punished, and when it is, the penalties are minimal.
The companies I've worked at have been very bad at measuring things like "this is how much that bug cost us in terms of people who tried the app once and then never came back." They're so focused on the data sources that are easy to collect that things like this are basically invisible. They know churn rate is an important thing to track, but look at it much more from a "what about this new feature, or changing the color of the icons" perspective, than from a "what if our software was less of a dumpster fire?" perspective.
If you want to build quickly AND have flexibility AND have some reliability, you're gonna need some experienced employees, but if that's not a thing you've ever seen cause you've only ever worked with people fresh out of school... you're not gonna know what you're missing.
An older employee with experience can often see and avoid problems before they occur. A younger, inexperienced employee will not and will have to find the problem and attempt to fix it, usually three or four times before the problem is actually solved.
So, for six or twelve months, the employer can sail along gloriously, enjoying the benefits of cheaper employees. Until the bill comes due. And at that time no one can really help them except their current employees, who are the only ones who understand the history-dependent system they've built.
Fortunately, the time scales that most employers operate at rarely exceeds six to twelve months.
"A net gain" implies that savings in a youngster's salary exceeds the losses due to their inexperience. You're saying you know how all these add up in the neterprise?
I sure don't. I doubt most employers do either, since IT productivity is notoriously hard to quantify. Generally, it's more important to know what not to do. And that's something that only comes with time -- making mistakes and learning from them.
you have my name, and my views. I don't know how to feel about this. there's some solace in knowing Mike Lyons is an extraordinarily popular name though.
In the context of humanity. People do this even in non-capitalist countries. Or do you think that when a country is not capitalist the people suddenly stop doing things to benefit themselves?
I would argue that this is a perspective of someone with power in the job market, and perhaps that perspective is limited to a small portion of workers' experiences.
I also find "don't like it, leave" to be a very unaware oversimplification of the situation many American workers are in.
Still, one needs to consider the demographics of programmers in general. Even ignoring issues like moving to management, health, etc, there simply weren't many programmers that started in the 1980's.
Could add "... to the surprise of absolutely no one." to that headline :-).
Blekko was acquired by IBM, and as a result I worked there for 18 months as we transitioned from company to being part of IBM. That they were trying to aggressively move the "old guard" out was not much of a secret.
In their particular case I actually felt some sympathy for them because, as a 100+ year old company, a lot of long time veterans had a comfort zone around what used to work but no longer worked. I had a long, largely one-sided, conversation with a senior leader in their "Cloud" organization to try to explain how companies like Google and Facebook use and deploy data centers as essentially very large computers. But this person was so comfortable and confident in the 'enterprise data center' concepts that died with Digital Equipment and Sun Microsystems they just couldn't wrap their heads around it.
I get that, I struggle with it as well, when the world changes as fast as it does, your have to actively re-evaluate what is "canon" and what isn't. If you cannot do that, then it doesn't help you to stay in a leadership position because you will drive right into the iceberg confident in all your decisions.
> But this person was so comfortable and confident in the 'enterprise data center' concepts that died with Digital Equipment and Sun Microsystems they just couldn't wrap their heads around it.
It doesn't help that IBM business leadership signs off on core IBM Cloud product/service attributes that are essentially old-style IBM remote enterprise data center contracts dressed up in new marketing language. Sign up with a variety of IBM cloud products, and you'll find some still have planned outages. In fact, the IBMid infrastructure sometimes still experiences outages. The notion of a "dial-tone service" is recognized by the IBM Cloud organization as necessary to compete, but that consistent lack across the board is one of many reasons they're a distant runner-up in cloud providers.
This happens repeatedly and isn't anything new. This happens because there are a bunch of mentally ill people running tech companies that want jobs to be about "belief".
They don't want older people in tech because they want to empire build with the latest and greatest insecure technology.
They want to create frustration engines with poor engineering practices they older tech workers won't put up with it. The goal is to make technology more difficult so they can slowly re-train you to go to other people and hate all technology. This is a real thing and has burned out so many software engineers you'd be shocked at how many of them don't know their manager was the person who purposely made their job difficult to burn out another software engineer.
They want strange conspiracies about what the software actually does that older workers don't need to put up with (because some of it is illegal). If you're good at reading source code and figure out what they are actually doing in the source code, in some cases companies blatantly selling software that doesn't do anything they are selling their customers on. In some cases people inject code into a repository when no one is looking, so they can run side businesses using the company infrastructure. There are a ton of older tech workers who read every line of the source code and when they start asking too many questions people freak out and fire them to maintain a conspiracy.
Also, it is far easier to pay young folks in lottery tickets. Most of us older folks understand the actual value of stock options having been through the process a few times.
I've worked at a couple of startups that have operated like this. They had vaporware products, and were focused more on getting money out of investors than they were brining a product to market. I arrive and realize that the code quality is absolutely terrible, and worse, the approach they've decided to take is simply never going to work. I report a list of problems to the CEO, tell them they won't be launching in six months, and that the fastest way for them to get a functional product would actually be to throw everything away and start again.
This makes the CEO angry, because they don't care if they have a working product. They only care about having a good story to tell investors. This makes the existing technical leadership angry, because they don't know how to do things properly, so having somebody say they're doing it wrong is obviously a big issue for them. In fact, the only reason they're in technical leadership positions to begin with is because the startup decided to cheap out and hire people with 2 years experience working in body shops as "tech leads". I realize the company can't be fixed so I leave, and the company folds once it reaches the end of it's runway.
Companies like this aren't terribly uncommon, and they exist primarily to defraud inexperienced investors. FWIW, I've seen this play out at every blockchain startup I've contracted at.
It appears that IBM executives specifically told managers to direct layoffs at older workers to make room for younger hires. And apparently they did so in recorded communications:
> The investigation uncovered top-down messaging from Respondent’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the headcount of older workers to make room for Early Professional Hires.
It's interesting to me that Netflix isn't on that list. Maybe because it ruins their stats.
Totally anecdotal but I wouldn't be surprised if it were up there in the mid-high 30s.
I'm having trouble thinking of anyone I knew there under 30 that wasn't in HR, recruiting, support, or facilities. There were just a few engineers under 30, and definitely a bunch over 50. And of course management was almost all 35+.
Netflix will definitely skew higher for one very obvious reason: back when i was looking into them a few years ago (not sure if anything has changed since then), they had no internship programs or entry-level postings.
They were only hiring seniors and higher, and it was very explicit on their end, not just that i looked at them during a time period when they have already filled all of their entry-level roles. I just googled and verified that, sounds like it still holds.
With that in mind, of course they will skew higher, since they don't hire any new grads.
I'm not surprised. A few years back IBM started a "back to the lab" initiative to dissuade workers from working remotely. Workers that were unable to commute to a physical office were forced to leave the company. My impression is that this disproportionately affected older workers. It seemed like soon after the dust had settled they no longer enforced the requirement. Note, this was after I left the company, so it's all second-hand knowledge.
I do also recall that they were sued for ageism years ago after a round of layoffs. Afterward they preemptively sent out a list of the ages and titles of all workers prior to layoffs in order to be more transparent. The funny thing is that it was possible in some cases to tell ahead of time who was being laid off based on the age and title. Not a good way to find out about being let go.
> Workers that were unable to commute to a physical office were forced to leave the company.
I was at IBM during this time. As a consultant, my boss fought to keep us remote.
In some cases people were told to go back to the office but physically couldn't unless they packed up and moved. They were hired remote, so they lived in an area that had no office.
This is still going on. In the last half of 2019, IBM in NY got rid of a number of older workers, only to replace them with younger workers. In some cases, a younger worker that was recently let go was rehired to replace an older worker.
The big tech giants have used this marketing ploy that "older workers don't understand new tech" to undercut them at almost every opportunity.
I honestly have no idea why they are allowed to get away with this in the media and public opinion. Maybe because older people don't know new tech, so they think older programmers don't know it either?
It's insane to me that an older programmer with decades of experience and multiple language fluency is somehow "worse" than a 25 year old who has been programming professionally for a few years at best and probably knows fewer languages.
Tech companies think they can get away with it because they do exactly what IBM did, fire all the old hats, then hire back the ones they really do need at cheaper, contractor rates.
It's pretty revolting to me.
Sure there are old people at these large tech companies just collecting a paycheck and really aren't better than the younger guys, but it's clearly not to the extent that IBM would make you think.
Another reason why I won't ever work for a large company again.
I think you are spot on. I run a medium sized IT Team (400 employees plus 600 external contractors) and I like to go against the grain: In the past 12 months I have hired 15 people, and 13 are over 52 years old.
Most have been laid off, got a juicy check that translates into a good nest egg, but not enough to make it their only source of income until retirement. A good job with a steady (but lower than before) income makes them very happy, and provides us with very senior people for key positions.
However, it was hell to get it past HR, as they all saw it meant we were not a “agile” IT department. Facepalm.
1. What does HR know about running an agile IT department? Why would they second-guess your decision on who to hire?
2. One of HR's biggest responsibilities is to protect the company from lawsuits. If HR itself has a bias against older employees, that would indicate that they're not even qualified to perform their own job, let alone tell the IT department how to do theirs.
The companies I've worked with have HR departments staffed by people who are also straight out of college. They have no knowledge or concept of people older than their circle, nor of all the legal consequences of their position. As far as I know, there is no "HR school" that teaches people these things. They learn by failure.
Sorry for the delay. Overall you are correct on both charges, but Corporate Reality gets in the way
On (1): they don’t know squat, but if I don’t have a multi-ethnic and gender-diverse team of people in their 20s, wearing Avengers tshirts, toting moleskines and matcha cups while scooting around on mopeds, we are “not agile enough” (which is corporate for “the pics from our competitors look cooler, everyone says you can’t be agile without Avengers T-shirts, OMG hire someone youngsters or our share prices will drop”. Sorry if I overused stereotypes, but hopefully you get the point. Dilbertian PHB doing PHB things.
On (2), yes but (a) most HR everywhere are work are hypocritical at best and bipolar at worst. Also, (b) in private they will also tell you they need to keep salary volumes in check, streamline pension fund levels, etc. “Resources” is the main noun, “Human” is just an adjective that was passing by.
I don’t agree to all this, but it’s the same in all big companies I worked at (even in some that hide this crap too well)
Yep, my experience is also good with programmers over 50; usually (because of the ageist market) very humble but they understand things just faster. I myself am approaching 50 and I know more and am quicker (which surprises me) than I was when I was 25 (but maybe I was just really slow). I found a 55 year old firmware developer who is simply better (fast arm assembly/c dev shipping with no p1 bugs; this is not stuff you can update once shipped) than anyone I ever met; he was fired from his job a bit into covid and no-one wanted to hire him. It is strange. Even if he retires in 10 years, or worse, young people leave faster for a few bucks/hr more...
> I know more and am quicker (which surprises me) than I was when I was 25 (but maybe I was just really slow).
I think the difference isn't raw speed, it's efficiency.
I know every year I'm better able to stop before I go down too far on the wrong path to solving some problem, because I learned many times in previous projects how that type of solution would end up hurting me in the end.
So less time spent on fruitless efforts, more time spent on fruitful efforts, and in the end usually a better, more maintainable solution, to boot!
Thanks. No matter how much you think you climb there’s always someone bigger on top, so I try to err on the side of humbleness rather than the opposite ;)
So other peoples biases have created an opportunity for your company. If the market undervalues someone for spurious reasons then you can exploit that. Move on to middle aged female minority programmers next.
>middle aged female minority programmers
So you're purposely limiting your market to just a handful of people? I know of 1 maybe 2 middle-aged females who program. None are minority. I know of 0 minority non-greencard holders (in other words Black or Latino). Asian is different, I know several middle-aged female Asian developers.
And I was a manager for a while and couldn't get any resumes of minorities period. They just don't exist or are already happy where they were. It's truly a shame.
Men, Women, Fish or anything in between. Same for skin or creed. If they can deliver, I take them as they show up (provided I have room and I can feel a good vibe with the existing team)
We just hired, for what we thought was something of a bargain price, a chap who spent the last thirty years working in a variety of software and hardware development positions. The aerospace industry is shedding people like there's no tomorrow (because for some of the industry, there isn't a tomorrow) so we got a good deal. I'm not ashamed to admit it; I had the budget for a mid-experience software engineer but got a bargain.
I've just had people from other departments compliment me on this new hire's first ticket. Had to check for sarcasm, but they were genuinely SO happy they sought me out to tell me what a great job he did.
The ticket was simple, the programming trivial and could have been done by a fresh grad (everyone's first ticket is deliberately simple so they can concentrate on the process and how to build and test and everything else), but the way he handled all the stakeholders and went beyond the bare ticket betrayed decades of experience. Like some kind of holistic software engineer.
The math is simple: Replace a senior salary with 2 H1Bs for (hopefully) 1.5x productivity. 2 weeks vacation, no family, and no health issues makes for the ideal servant.
Plus the government is in on it. They're effectively handing a subsidy to coporations who can jump the hoops versus those who hire and then train locals.
The pitch goes like this: give the immigrant the promise of America if they just serve the masters for ~10 years (or forever if you're the wrong race of immigrant[1]), keep them subservient by continuously threatening deportation at the loss of employment (short window to rehire). Limit the max number of H1B years to ensure increasing dire circumstance. Don't give them representation (despite taxation) so they can't feedback on the system.
Now, an H1B doesn't have always have all the features of a millenial, such as they usually don't have student debt, but the student visa can fix that.
Yeah this is it in my experience. It looks like they're optimizing for age, but they're really optimizing for cost and ageism is a side-effect.
I've seen this happen at almost every job I've had: Senior engineer with 10+ years experience works 40-50 hours a week and gets laid off. Senior engineer is opinionated about how things are implemented and can come across as "difficult." Two junior engineers are hired for about the same cost and are pushed to 60+ hours a week. They'll do literally anything you tell them to. Non-engineer management sees a win but then eventually gets mad about codebase issues like it's unrelated, and end up churning through juniors trying to fix it.
Another alternative is outsourcing of course, in which you can end up with a small team for the short-term cost of one senior engineer... and a lot of the same problems with the junior route.
It feels like one of those risk problems where people are happy about the short-term gain but fail to look far enough ahead to see the long-term issues.
My first job out of school was as a startup founder (10% ownership) where our new CEO was a sales guy from a healthcare company. Great at raising money, but no deep technical knowledge. We were building a music search recommender using mfcc spectrograms and ML. He decided to fire all the engineers and hire out to cheap overseas hotspot. We weren't especially expensive, being young guys, but nevertheless you could get 3 for 1 overseas...
The company shut down a few months after the local engineers left.
I would argue that the entire corporate structure is designed like this. I've seen it in every industry I have worked in, it's a quarter by quarter slog to see some decrease in cost and increase in profit.
It's part of reason that I feel like everyone is looking for that fabled "exit" and building a sustainable business just doesn't really exist..
> Two junior engineers are hired for about the same cost and are pushed to 60+ hours a week. They'll do literally anything you tell them to. Non-engineer management sees a win but then eventually gets mad about codebase issues like it's unrelated
The “lord of flies” cultures these teams become can be astoundingly horrible and toxic. Imagine a lot inexperienced people trying to one up each other, no one providing any direction whatsoever. I happily left one such team not long ago!
They are in various technology roles, especially at a place like IBM often aligned with some IBM-specific corner of tech. Definitely happens with other companies too. HP used to have an "up or out" policy where they would fire SMEs systematically for some stupid reason. I remember laughing my ass off when they flew some guy in to tell me that they were firing 8 people on one of my teams, which I replaced with the same people employed at a smaller company for 50% of the cost. The employees got a 25% raise in that case. HP lost 100% of the revenue, which probably earned some bureaucrat a bonus somewhere.
> It's insane to me that an older programmer with decades of experience and multiple language fluency is somehow "worse" than a 25 year old who has been programming professionally for a few years at best and probably knows fewer languages.
Simple: the experienced older programmers will call out management for bullshit because they recognize bullshit when they see it.
Fresh, new ones won't object when management says "we're on the NoSQL train now, so that we can attract more fresh talent (and funding sources)!!!", which makes the managers happy, but by the time that the failure modes of new fancy tech (e.g. no ACID compliance, bazillions of edge cases, insecure defaults like MongoDB had) become apparent, the managers have already made their millions in bonuses and went off to ruin another company.
It's all about keeping us programmers as replaceable cogs - and to prevent as many of us as possible from rising in the "chain of command". Simply put, the supply of programmers is way bigger than there is a demand for managers or higher-level programmers. This will bite the whole industry in the ass when all those 20-somethings who make decent careers now after some coding bootcamp suddenly find out that there won't be any pay rises or opportunities...
edit: also, new programmers won't complain if you push them past everything legally allowed - many don't know the laws or don't care, so 80 hour work weeks with no paid overtime (=40 "free" hours of work!) can be done on young people, but as soon as they hit ~30 and want to settle down a bit (especially if they want children) companies get in trouble.
If you mean having a deep understanding of how this stuff works and an ability to solve very hard problems, older programmers are usually better.
If you mean knowing the latest fad language or framework, then no. That's because older programmers have seen fads come and go and have learned to recognize one, and they don't waste their time learning or using them.
Are contractors cheaper than permanent employees? I always thought it was the opposite - that's why so many positions are "contract to hire". They'd rather have a perm employee, but they want to deal with contracting for a few months just to be on the safe side.
Many companies hire contractors because they are seen as a capital expenditure on the finances. While employees are classified as an operational expense.
This has several accounting benefits, and in some jurisdictions makes it easier to dismiss the employee/contractor.
The literal dollars per hour worked is often higher For a contract employee but the company isn’t paying into PTO or other benefits especially healthcare and I think (?) an employer has to pay higher costs in healthcare is their workers are expected to cost more (or older). So hiring older workers back as contractors can save $$$
If you are still subbing for them, raise you rate. IBM was one of my best paying contracts, but I hated the work. I kept raising my rate to make them go away, Finally I had to say you guys are eating up all my consultancy time, I can't take contracts from you, because I am becoming too dependent financially on a single source of revenue. It was a hard financial pill to swallow, given that I was making 4x my rate of any other contracts. We parted ways amicably but I had to make the break, as I was just becoming a satellite around IBM.
> Are contractors cheaper than permanent employees? I always thought it was the opposite
Absolutely. Consider that the average salaried employee’s real cost per hour is around 2 * (annual_salary / hours_in_work_year). So if you get a contractor for less than that per hour, you win.
> that's why so many positions are "contract to hire". They'd rather have a perm employee, but they want to deal with contracting for a few months just to be on the safe side.
Ah, generally speaking no. Yes, contract to full time conversions happen but not terribly often. “Contract to hire” is most of the time just baiting someone to hop into a less desirable circumstance (contract versus full time), with the “promise” of being converted. After six months, oh dear, we couldn’t get funding for that full time position. Would you like to renew your contract?
Not saying there are companies that do a true “probation period” via contract to hire, but most of the time it’s BS.
What IBM really cares about is limiting the older employees’ defined-benefit pension liabilities. That is why it was so important to IBM that these folks were made to no longer be IBM employees. Lower salary was icing on the cake.
The wrong assumptions behind those defined benefit pension liabilities ended up being quite costly, this zero interest rate environment for the previous decade and foreseeable future will wreak havoc on them. I'm surprised they didn't freeze and terminate the plan years ago.
I think it depends on the nature of the work, in biotech, contractors are generally seen as extendible, cheap, and easy to find. "consultants" are usually more expensive and they come on with more experience and more options, so they are more expensive. I think for both roles the flexibility works in different ways.
Individual perception of fairness being mutually exclusive in aggregate probably have to do with it. To the old being paid the same as the young can be viewed as unfair because they do a better job.
Younger workers can see older programmers getting paid more but don't neccesarily see much "better" from them (who is right varies by individual and field of course). It can come across as gatekeeping in "paying their dues" instead of actual capabilities or lack of them holding them back which breeds resentment.
Of course at large there are configurations every which way in practice across varied workforces: underpaying older hires in bias of new, overpaying old in bias, putting arbitrary caps on promption to upper management regardless of prior successes for being too young, refusal to promote elders for fear of their retitement disrupting despite the project being short term and all sorts of dysfunctions at scales small to titanic.
Yeah this entire statement was also incredibly ageist and painting with broad strokes. If your litmus test for good programmer is "number of languages known" you aren't a good programmer. I'm 25, I've been programming for 15 years now and professionally I have more than half a decade of experience and professionally have a senior title. If you want to play that game most older programmers absolutely do not keep up with me and I've worked with a few that should have absolutely clocked out a while ago.
IBM is also a joke, just like Oracle.
Edit: Now that the vein has stopped bulging on my forehead, I agree with your point that experience is valuable. However it comes in many packages and dismissing someone because they're 50 or 25 is equally wrong and you just did the same thing you're ranting at IBM about.
> I have more than half a decade of experience and professionally have a senior title. If you want to play that game most older programmers absolutely do not keep up with me
You sound fun to work with. I agree with you that some old programmers just want to get paid. As I've gotten older I appreciate the reasons more. It still bothers me sometimes but whatever. Work is far from the most important thing in my life these days. When I was younger I was eager to get ahead, now I've realized IC's plateau around the same salary so there's no point to showing off unless you want to be management. And I like to code so no thanks.
Sorry, I just get frustrated being told every 25 year old is a no experience green hack. I've worked with plenty of older devs who are absolutely a treasure to this industry.
I'm quite a bit older and some programmers with fancier titles are still asses. I know a guy that honestly sucks and knows it (he's lazy and just wants $$$). He's got "Sr Staff" from demanding a title bump every time he hops jobs. At most companies titles are meaningless, pay is all that matters.
Programmers are all over the place skills wise. The only time I had a team where everybody was competent was when me and a couple good guys got to interview everyone. Just the way it is
Every time I've interacted with someone from IBM I've found myself questioning how they've managed to continue being a company. Have you looked at their public facing offerings lately? Watson is garbage, IBM cloud is garbage. They're losing ground on pretty much everything that is a modern revenue driver and they're best offering is their IT services.
Ah you see I've interacted with some of their leadership which was enough for me, whether that is enough to be meaningful I suppose is a matter up for interpretation.
Is this grade inflation? In the physical sciences you get a doctorate in your late 20s, and you still are a greenhorn. Is computing really that shallow?
Definitely in some companies, "senior" is just the very first promotion, coming with 3-4 years experience or a MS. Next comes prefixes like "principal and "senior principal".
I was talking about the field, not individuals. You do wonder: at what level of experience is a civil engineer senior? Maybe that explains why bridges do not routinely collapse while large software projects invariably end up being dumpster fires.
Hey, I independently rediscovered the bubble sort algorithm at 10 years old. That should count for something, right? :P
In all seriousness, I wrote my first programs at 7, and, while I don't expect you or anyone else to be impressed about that in the sense of it being a resume accomplishment, having that early intro to programming certainly did help me when I went to college and learned "big boy" programming. Ceteris paribus, I'd probably prefer to hire the candidate who started programming at 10 versus the one who never twiddled a bit until college.
I agree which is why I didn't get my title by leveraging those things. Layering social graces on top of technical capability and delivering solidly on some larger scale projects both by planning, leading and executing them, however, will impress. I've been responsible for projects that have closed multi million dollar deals and lead full team rebuilding and system re-architectures.
> Tech companies think they can get away with it because they do exactly what IBM did, fire all the old hats, then hire back the ones they really do need at cheaper, contractor rates.
If it was that simple, why don't they use that strategy with young workers as well? It would be even easier to make up justifications (e.g. lack of experience).
To me, it seems plausible that you would find a correlation between people laid off and their age, absent of systematic ageism. And if there really was systematic ageism, IBM is just shooting itself in the foot. It's possible but not a given.
> If it was that simple, why don't they use that strategy with young workers as well?
Two things.
First, there’s a lot more money to be saved cutting older employees (more senior positions, much higher pay, almost certainly grandfathered into either a pension [particularly in the case of IBM] or a higher 401k match, more vacation days).
Second, the industry has been trying its damndest to offshore as much as possible. This hits younger employees mostly in the form of “there just aren’t enough viable candidates in the US!” keeping wages down. It’s only through the grace of India being many many time zones away and persistently not-so-great code quality that younger employees aren’t as bad off as they could be.
> To me, it seems plausible that you would find a correlation between people laid off and their age, absent of systematic ageism.
Yes, it’s aaaallll just a coincidence until it happens to you and your friends. Patience, young one.
That was sort of my point. If the goal was to cut costs, it would make sense that the more costly employees, who are usually older, were let go first. To me that's not evidence of ageism even if it did impact older people more.
No, I wouldn't know. I haven't worked for a company in a long time, big or small. I would imagine there are similar problems at start-ups, but the smaller scale would at least give you the chance at a fair shake.
For me, the bigger an organization is, the more these problems arise.
I am months from being 50 and I am a cloud architect/eng/admin. I am a former Microsoft MVP (rMVP) in System Center, I have co-authored books on the subject, spoke at conferences, blah, blah, I was a pretty big deal in the space, so much so that competitors would routinely try to hire me. I can still recall the moment when I thought 'I need to get out of this space and into cloud' At the time I was part of a sales team for a gold partner standing in an AMEX building talking to a developer who needed to secure Azure bc there was nothing more than a network and VM functionality and 'some VP had decided all new dev work was going to be done in the cloud'. This was the tipping point, not some revelation, I had been thinking about it for about a year. So I started spending my weekends learning cloud, eventually transitioned to a new job that was 50/50 cloud and system center. Did that again in the hopes of moving to 100% cloud, but it's hard when you have a huge reputation to not be utilized for that skill. Eventually I landed with a small firm that worked exclusively with the Azure team at MSFT on difficult customer use cases the MCS couldn't handle. 10 years later....I have tons of peers/friends who still do system center and I have talked to a lot of them about moving to cloud and almost all of them give me push back on it. These are ppl with ~20 years left working. And not that their skills are irrelevant, system center does Windows 10 deployments, patching, config management, inventory, so on. But it is going away as far as a need. They of course disagree, maybe it will always be around but it's not going to be adding features.
I also see a lot of resistance when I go to customers for cloud migrations, the IT teams will lie to me or withhold information, some even refuse to attend meetings. Which leaves me in a very awkward position because I know the project sponsor, typically a VP or Cxx, who is paying $300/hr for my time but I don't want to say anything bc I know the IT ppl are just afraid they are going to be seen as irrelevant and lose their job, as much as that isn't usually the case, if I say something about the resistance it could be a resume generating event for them. My point being they don't want to embrace the technical direction the company is headed too. The younger ppl in IT don't typically react this way and often times want to spend as much time learning from as they can and have some previous experience with cloud.
My real point being that I can point to several customers ranging in size from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand where the 'old guard' doesn't want to get with the new technical direction or does their best to drag their feet doing so. It's too bad, there is a ton of tribal knowledge that can be lost - or hidden - in these situations, and years of experience that still applies to cloud that is lost too.
I've worked among people that share those sentiments. I would characterize them as being wary of hidden risks and I can't disagree with their position.
Like everything else on a hype train a lot of the people talking don't communicate essential details, or even the basics.
"There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer."
It makes complete sense that experienced IT teams would be hesitant to move their employers' stuff onto another company's infrastructure which they have no control over.
You're talking about 'IT', but it sounds more like sysadmins. And in my experience sysadmins have always been like this. I saw this 15 years ago even when I first started and was taken on consultancies.
Programmers are not like this and are generally quite excited to be working with something new, then and now.
The penalty for IBM: "the Commission now invites Respondent to join with it in an effort toward a just resolution of this matter" and
"If you decline to enter into conciliation discussions, or when the Commission’s representative is unable to secure an acceptable conciliation agreement, the Director shall so inform the parties,advising them of the court enforcement alternatives available to aggrieved persons and the Commission."
Not exactly, but ageism is probably a welcome externality. The value of leetcode is mostly in helping hiring-people wash their hands of some responsibility.
Another externality - if not an intended effect - is that it selects for people who are willing to accept an abusive relationship with their employer.
Why do I call it abusive? "Study this stuff, that isn't actually related to your job, on your own time, for free, for months, and we might give you a job." Even if you do get a job, they still abused you.
Would you prefer a system of strict credentialism, a system of lotteries, or a system that optimizes for hiring the most eloquent bullshit artists, instead?
Those are your three alternatives to the whiteboard interview.
Which would you prefer? (I'm perfectly willing to admit I've missed one[1], but it's probably a subset of these three.)
[1] Life-long German apprenticeship/Japanese salaryman arrangements don't work in the fast rise/fast fall tech environment. Also, Japanese salaryman culture is horrific.
You can do a whiteboard interview without doing leet code. Do an actual coding interview (whether whiteboard or not). Don't do credentials-only. Don't do a lottery. And make sure you don't fall for a BS artist.
But in your coding interview, don't do leet code. Just give a regular coding problem. Not a big one, not a long one, not an especially tricky one. Then watch them code, and listen. (Ask them to think out loud - it's important to understand how they think.) That's all it takes.
How do you do that when you have 1000+ applications for each job posting? It has to be automated in some way so you can review a more sane 50 or so resumes. lol. Now if there's a less-dumb version of leetcode for hiring, I'm all for it.
> But in your coding interview, don't do leet code. Just give a regular coding problem. Not a big one, not a long one, not an especially tricky one.
This limits the signal of the skill ceiling that you can pick up from the interview. Give an easy whiteboard problem, and both a great candidate and a good candidate will be evaluated to be roughly the same. (No red flags, both solved the question)
It's a bit like hiring a plumber, by giving each prospective contractor a two question quiz: "Which way does crap flow?" [1] and "When is payday?" [2]
At that point, you are just going with a lottery system.
We in general don't need great. Good is OK. We just need to avoid bad or terrible.
But we still knew when great showed up. I was one of the interviewers. I remember that the interview switched, from us asking questions to find out how much the candidate knew, to us asking questions so we could learn stuff.
Now she's a principal engineer. In her spare time, she's also my boss.
Actually credentialism could make sense in this case. Let someone study all of the Leetcode once, on their own terms, and use the same results for every company for the next 5-10 years. A credential has issues of access and privilege, but I think it’s clear at this point the lack of a credential is also posing serious problems.
Doctors don’t have to relearn everything on the boards every time they talk to a new job, and that definitely helps combat ageism in that field.
Isn't that "abuse" fundamentally how the whole job selection labor market works? You must attempt to ferret out vocational demands to fuffill to get paid and junp through all "selling" hoops. I can see only a few otber broad alternatives.
1. Gatekeeping "Do you have the credential for X from the system? If so first come first served for defined pay bracket.". While lower friction once done it is an informational organizing nightmare even before dealing with perverse incentives in who can work as what. Choice of credentials vs demand would still be an issue.
2. Defacto Corveé system of "You work at X and live at Y or else." Obvious issues with lack of freedom and inefficient use of human potential.
3. Agent Dynastic: Less formalized gatekeeping where the sales must be handled by an intermediary to seperate non-job relevant skills. If you can sell your own labor then it is just labor market capitalism essentially as the non-relevant skills are tautologically now job related.
I get how it sucks but I am not sure how to improve upon it without leading to the problems of the other approaches.
This is of a piece with how various forms of discrimination are laundered through neoliberal meritocracies.
Instead of engaging in direct forms of discrimination, you build systems of arcane hurdle-jumping, whose outcomes produce the intended discrimination. That way, you always have a story about how this or that person “just didn’t measure up.”
I think the decision on whether or not a company chooses to have a presence in urban centers vs suburban office parks reflects the age of people they want to hire (or have currently hired). Office location/style choice can be a subtle way to implement ageism one way or the other.
Probably breaks down in Silicon Valley. But, yes, in general, if you're in downtown, a lot of people with families will have a horrible commute from the suburbs. Conversely, if you're an hour away from the city in an industrial park, 20-somethings will be a lot less interested (in general, even if you have some sort of bus.)
We don't have a rabid pro-worker EEOC, we have an EEOC that is notoriously hard to convince of anything and that process itself requires production of evidence, so when the EEOC makes a determination, that is not just "an accusation", it is the result of a fact-finding process by a third party expert. It is true that an EEOC finding of fact is not the same as a judicial process and it will be ultimately decided by courts, but let's not minimize what has been accomplished here.
Health care. The actuarial cost of gold or platinum health plan for a 25 year old single man is about $600 per month. The cost for a couple in their 50's, with two college age children, is about $3,000 per month.
It's almost like a for profit health care system creates a bunch of really bad downstream effects that are a net negative to the total long term economy.
I get it. I understand that it is hard for a big company to avoid thinking and optimizing for all the costs associated with older employees versus a younger employee, especially H1Bs.
But, why not use the pulpit that comes with tech prestige (is it now all gone?) to lobby for universal healthcare, and other ways to socialize those costs? If things like healthcare and a sane social security system were in place, wouldn't that even the playing field and be a win for everyone? I'm surprised I don't see more US companies arguing for changes that would help them.
I read recently that a survey showed most people don't want companies to get into politics. Not sure how true is what I read, but the numbers were around 82% of the respondents being against political activism from companies.
Others can argue that socialized healthcare is not as good as one may believe, knowing the problems in Quebec region, UK or other Western Europe countries where access to the services is free, but highly unavailable (wait times measured in many months).
This is another form of discrimination that should have stricter laws against.
IBM is so morally bankrupt I c\don't even know where to start. All their products are geared towards having IBM professional services make money. They purposefully do this by making sure the manuals they provide leave out important steps on how to install and configure their software.
Also while they discriminate they should start with their CEO who is 58 years old and their ex ceo who is 63 years old.
IBM's (and other tech company) lawyers have been holding this decision off for some 40 years. Late coming; too bad there's no punitive damages chargeable against upper management bonuses.
Fast growing industries tend to hire like there is no tomorrow. Eventually they hit a growth barrier. After a while the age structure of the company is a problem. Could not happen in the social media industry...
These threads always fill up with people banging on about how they’re 82 years old and still get plenty of work. But I still think you’re better off trying like hell to make your money before you’re old, before you even have to engage with these jackals.
Our work is not dignified work, our line of work does not have status in the organization nor in the society. Ignore this reality at your peril.
Also, of course, 2-3-5 years later the legacy stack is still what keeps the business running while all the new shiny toys have come and gone.
I had a boss who came over, asked me what was working on and then looked me in the eye and said, firmly and deliberately, "So you are working on transitioning to the new architecture". I shrugged, said "I guess", and he left. Only later did I realize that he was saving my hide.