Ageism in software/IT industry

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Can any experienced software/IT professionals comment on ageism in the industry? Is it really that bad? For example, is it very hard to get a programming job at the age of 50?</p>

<p>Do you constantly have to learn new programming languages? How hard is it to keep up with new technology as a programmer?</p>

<p>I know that keeping up with the times is a part of most professions. My dad works in medicine, and has to do continuing education all the time. My mom works in accounting and has to keep with new tax laws as well. In this regard, is software/IT really any different from other industries? Is keeping up with the times any harder in software/IT as opposed to other fields like accounting and medicine? </p>

<p>If anyone could comment on ageism in hardware engineering disciplines (i.e electric engineers, mech engineers, etc) I'd love to hear about that as well.</p>

2

<p>I’m still a student, but I’ve networked with plenty of older programming folk. They’re hard to find among junior developer positions, but they’re fairly common in senior development and product management. The end product of technology may change, but the fundamentals of computer science ultimately do not. That’s why a lot of tech companies ask you about data structures and algorithms in interviews; they want to know how you think.</p>

<p>Obviously, ageism is illegal and if you have proof of discrimination you can file a lawsuit.</p>

3

<p>@limabrad,</p>

<p>In my opinion and experience, yes. See [The</a> Tech Industry’s Darkest Secret: It’s All About Age | LinkedIn](<a href=“The Tech Industry’s Darkest Secret: It’s All About Age”>The Tech Industry’s Darkest Secret: It’s All About Age) for more background and opinions.</p>

<p>As to your specific questions:</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Possibly. For example, when I was 35, I had to learn Java because I was moved to another group within my company after the previous project was cancelled. Fortunately, I was allowed to learn Java on the job. Others have been less fortunate, and needed to learn new programming languages on their own in order to pass job interviews requiring demonstrated proficiency in that language.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Software is a large field that constantly changes. It can be hard to keep up with changes in a subdiscipline, let alone the entire field.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>It can be. Software tends to be more market-driven that accounting or medicine. For example, consider mobile app programming. Ten years ago, hardly anyone cared about Android, as compared with today. If you were working on Symbian or something like that, you were probably in pretty good shape. In a job situation, people tend to focus on what they have to do for the job, with perhaps a couple of side interests, but don’t have enough time or energy to be involved in all future developments. So you might have dabbled in the emerging iPhone technology, but not in all mobile app technologies. (And keep in mind that mobile app development is but one of many subdisciplines within the computer industry.)</p>

4

<p>I’m in my 50s and work in software development. Back when I started working in the early 80s, age discrimination was a real problem, but now I don’t think there’s any more age discrimination in software than in other fields. Just like other fields, older software engineers who make more money than less experienced programmers may be laid off for cost reasons more than anything else. Also, most programmers are still relatively young, and there’s an unconscious tendency for interviewers to prefer people like themselves. If they interview someone who’s 15-20 years older, the interviewer may to feel less comfortable than with someone who’s of a similar age. </p>

<p>As long as they don’t fall too far behind technically, more experienced programmers shouldn’t have a problem finding work. I’ll admit I don’t keep on top of things like I used to, but that’s because when you get older, you realize there’s more to life than maximizing your salary or hourly rate.</p>

5

<p>What is likely the real issue (not just in tech jobs) is that productivity may plateau after several years after entering the type of job, but there is a general societal expectation of raising pay levels over time until retirement. In other words, there is the expectation that a 55 year old worker is looking for a relatively high pay rate, so even if you personally are willing to work at a lower pay rate, you may still be overlooked because employers assume that you are looking for a high pay rate.</p>

<p>In terms of software development, it is commonly thought that there is an order of magnitude difference in productivity between the best and worst (or that the worst can have negative productivity by introducing more bugs than useful code). But pay levels do not differ by an order of magnitude, so it could very well be that the most productive software developers are a bargain even at premium pay levels, but the least productive are priced out of the market relatively early in their careers.</p>

<p>In any case, a software developer has to be willing and able to learn new things on the job as needed.</p>

6

<p>I agree with other posters about spending time to keep updating skills - I think everyone needs to spend time updating skill no matter what profession in order to be successful. In software or electrical engineering world, it means learning new techniques or new languages or new tools (virtual tools) where as in other professions it could mean more hands on activities. </p>

<p>Regarding bias, ucbalumnus is right at least in my company. At my company, we have a few 60+ yrs old who are like yoda, source of knowledge and wisdom and are highly valued. I don’t think any sane manager would get rid of them. Tech companies value productivity more than anything. The only “bias” may be there is no advantage of being older.</p>

7

<p>

</p>

<p>While this is generally true, sometimes divisions or entire companies shut down completely. Older people, especially those who have spent a long time working on the same thing, often have a harder time finding a new job at another company. So I think that everyone who works in tech should try to keep updating their skills.</p>

8

<p>Absolutely!!! The yodas are more “current” on the tools/languages/techniques than a new college grad or any one else because they spend time and effort to stay updated. They have the breadth and depth I guess is the right way to describe them. I admit, they are my inspiration. </p>

<p>Tech companies have to move fast, that means it is easy to become “stale” without effort. Going back to OP’s original question - it is not difficult to stay updated as long as there is consistent effort. The information is all out there unlike some of the older professions.</p>

9

<p>It is absolutely a problem. I work on the project management side of IT as an independent contract PM. Last year I had a heck of a time (for the first time ever) landing a new contact. It took six months – has never taken longer than about 6 weeks before, including during the recession. After I took all dates off my resume and dropped my first few years of experience so no one adding up the length or experience could tell I was over 50, then my phone started to ring off the hook. Ironic that LinkedIn would have a post on this – you cannot enter experience into LinkedIn without giving a date range. Thus giving at a glance information on your age just by seeing how far back your experience goes. I have made a “suggestion” to LinkedIn that they make this optional for this reason, if anyone else feels this should be changed feel free to do the same! Maybe if enough people complain they will change it.</p>

<p>Fortunately I am strong in interviews and keep my skills up to date, so if I can get in the door I am usually fine. But just getting them to consider my resume was crazy hard until I “hid” my age.</p>

10

<p>I am in my mid-40’s and I have yet to encounter this issue. For one, I stay on the technical side. I have done project management role and did the PMP certification and all but there are always more opportunities on the technical side.</p>

<p>Now keeping up with the latest does come with a small price…time. You may have to be bottled up in your home office or mancave/womancave for some nights or weekends trying to learn something…or spending money on training. Right now, I am in the Data Science program at University of Washington to be more prepared for the cloud computing world (as well as prepping for the Hadoop certification).</p>

11

<p>Globaltraveler, I never had this issue until this year when I hit 50. There is something about that age… when they can look at your resume and see over 25 years of experience, that becomes (somehow, seems crazy) not good.</p>

12

<p>

</p>

<p>I should point out that I am now in federal government contracting which is more accepting of older engineers. The number one thing is the security clearance which may be too confining to younger engineers.</p>

<p>…so I will not doubt that the private sector could be more cold-blooded.</p>

13

<p>The only good part about it was that this was the ‘baseline’ year for my youngest kid going to college, resulted in low income and more financial aid than expected for freshman year. But that is a small silver lining. It makes me nervous about how the next 10-15 years of my career will play out if I choose to stay in the contracting business.</p>

14

<p>If you’re 50+ and working as a programmer its time to program your own products and become a millionaire rather than working for the man anyway.</p>

15

<p>Let’s be honest, there are two factors at work here:</p>

<p>1) Software engineering is a rapidly changing field where, like medicine or law, if you don’t keep up on your continuing education you become unemployable after a certain number of years. This is largely because of your abilities.</p>

<p>2) Computer programmers are the whiniest bunch of drama queens on the planet. They want to do everything their way and only their way. They are highly averse to learning new things that clash with their preferences. A UNIX/Linux fan would rather walk across hot coals than learn .NET/VS/TFS/anything MS, somebody who loves Java and C# would rather die than bother with C. From the IDE to the versioning software to the compilers, OSes, languages, languages, languages, engineering methodologies (component vs. object oriented, design patterns, “best practices” debates etc.), we are stuck in our ways and do not like to change. If there is heavy market demand for C# programmers who are skilled in TFS versioning but you are a diehard MS-hater or and old-school OOP-hater, you won’t bother to learn those skills.</p>

<p>I haven’t graduated yet, but so far I’ve done programming projects that would not have been my choice, and learned languages and other technologies that I would prefer not to. But I’m glad I did. Given my own choice, I’d only ever work in C/C++/Python on *nix systems, and yet I’ve done both labVIEW development and C#, XNA, TFS, and .NET in my classes or research. It taught me that it’s not a waste of time to learn a language or technology or methodology even if I’ll never use it again after that class/position/job/etc. And it also taught me that learning things outside my comfort zone (both as a MS-hater and as a person skeptical of graphical programming languages) aren’t so bad and can still include the types of programming challenges I enjoy.</p>

<p>But I had these things forced on me. Had these been potential jobs to apply for rather than classes or necessary research stints, I would have passed and only stuck with what I was comfortable with.</p>

<p>Don’t you think that when OOP became the norm in industry, a lot of old-school programmers who didn’t want to throw themselves into OOP had trouble finding work? I’ll bet the OOP-revolution alone counts for a lot of “ageism” anecdotes. Now, if so many programmers are set in the ways of their generation (I have a CS prof who still likes goto statements), I don’t imagine our generation or any other generation of programmers would be that different. It may not be OOP, it may be a language or something else.</p>

<p>But the point is that if a sufficient fraction of programmers don’t continue to educate themselves, then hiring managers will notice the trend and <em>will</em> use age as a first-order filter for getting rid of applicants.</p>

<p>This analysis ignores the actions of HR offices, which are pure evil and should be completely separated from the hiring process.</p>

16

<p>Rapidly changing? since when?</p>

<p>Today I was troubleshooting some code between my box and ‘the cloud’ and, imagine that, it was all straight Unix/Linux socket code I used aplenty in the early to mid 1980’s… </p>

<p>I spent more time getting the Eclipse icon to show up properly in my VMware desktop (what’s with GNOME anyways?) than getting the sockets code to talk to the cloud.</p>

<p>Not all of us MS lovers are Linux haters or vice versa. I’m equally proficient in both (the cloud is all Windows Azure and .NET)… And graphical languages can be quite entertaining depending on what you’re trying to do…</p>

<p>The key is to use good stuff. Our last few projects are all Linux, and the cubes are full of 50+ year old sages debating D-Bus vs whatever… For most of the .NET stuff we brought in the Indians tho :)</p>

17

<p>

</p>

<p>I’m wondering out loud here - maybe the problem is that the job of project manager is going away. Years ago, I’d see an individual project manager and administrative assistant/secretary for every project. I’m also a contractor who works at lots of places, and most projects now seem to be run by technical leads who report directly to department heads with technical backgrounds. No administrative assistants at all, and very few people with project manager titles. </p>

<p>In the past, project managers were among the last to get laid off. Now they seem to be among the first laid off, and plenty of those are relatively young. I don’t see them getting replaced.</p>

18

<p>Well, I have noticed a trend that more companies have internal PMOs and a staff of their own project managers. It used to be that no one had those skills in-house, even though they needed them. Hence making a heck of a lot of work for experience PM contractors through the 90s and 00’s. Agree that that admin for each project has gone away. But projects still crash and burn all the time (over budget, under delivered, or just plain floundering) without someone in the PM role at the helm to keep them organized so everything gets to the finish line at the right time. It is actually amazing how alike projects are with the same things going wrong, the same mistakes made if no one is making sure the right tasks are done, etc. I have also noticed that more of the calls I get are frantic my-project-is-already-in-the-weeds-with-deadines-looming types.</p>

<p>One good thing from my perspective is that they haven’t offshored a lot of the PM work (yet). They like to have someone onshore to yell at when the offshore work is not getting done…</p>

19

<p>

</p>

<p>Eclipse??? Real programmers use vi.</p>

20

<p>

</p>

<p>Ha, true. Do you blame them? That’s pretty much why I just decided to take CS classes on the side instead of major in it (switched to economics).</p>

<p>The programming itself isn’t that hard. It’s the fact that every job you look at wants you to randomly re-learn how to do something from scratch just to fit into their randomly chosen yet strictly enforced proprietary software bundle that drove me crazy. Even my professors would say “I know you learned this in 201 but this is 202 – forget all of that, it sucks, we’re doing it different here”.</p>

<p>After a while you just want to switch to something where you feel like you’re amassing a permanent knowledge database rather than starting from scratch all the time. Maybe its different once you carve out a niche (front-end, embedded systems, networks, etc.).</p>