Hi all Carmen here. A bit of my story below:

my husband (leonagano) had faced ageism in his job hunting journey, especially because the tech environment sometimes attracts young people and the more experienced professionals are being left behind. Wearing my journalist hat, I started looking for ways to help and fight ageism.

After further research, I realised this is actually a common problem among the IT industry as stated in some articles from the likes of The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/14/women-ageism...), Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-...), Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/marenbannon/2019/04/10/the-bigg...), Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-17/75-year-o...)

That's when I decided to start this job board and hopefully, try to reduce this problem to the minimum possible

Sometimes, the problem happens during the job description, where the "older" professionals feel excluded when words like tech-native, ninja, etc are used, according to Dice (https://insights.dice.com/2018/02/28/employers-welcome-tech-...)

A company I worked with once hired a team of old contractors to do a job. The job was done on time, on budget, no drama, no overtime, and the customer was happy. Each of the contractors received the contractually agreed upon bonus for meeting all the targets.

I asked a manager why they didn't apply this model to subsequent projects, and never got much of an answer.

The only form of ageism I've experienced was reverse. I entered dev professionally in my 40s, and it was frequently assumed because of my age that I knew more than I truly did. In consequence I was often given higher levels of responsibility than my experience merited (regardless of my protestations). This might have been good for someone more brilliant than I, but I found it a problem - it made it very hard for me to learn from other people, and although it's hard to accurately replay history I would say this slowed my skills development. It certainly made working in tech less pleasant for me than it might have been.

At the start of my career in computing, in one two week period I sent some resume copies, went on 7 interviews and got 5 offers. The reason was the high interest in computing around DC for US national security.

I was making in annual salary 6 times what a new, high end Camaro cost. My 2 BR apartment cost me 8.5% of my gross salary.

Then some suits saw the problem, had the NSF have a team of economists estimate computing labor supply and demand curves, and then have the NSF write into research grants that so many students had to be supported and, hint, hint, could get students from Taiwan, South Korea, India, Greece, etc.

So, net, the main reason for the nonsense in hiring in computing is that there's no real shortage. When there was a real shortage, organizations would hire based on indications of talent and expect the employees to learn on the job enough to do the job. Now it appears that the employers have a list of 10 of their most important software tools in their stack and what to hire people with that particular list of 10 tools, with that particular stack -- not promising for either the organization or the employee.

For another, managers want their subordinates to be no threat, just secondary, submissive, subordinate, heads down coding, no bright ideas, no risk of the suit being shown to lack technical competence, etc. And, the more people the manager hires, maybe the more the manager gets paid; so hire a lot of inexperienced people instead of a few deeply experienced people -- empire building, goal subordination.

The non-technical suits need to start to catch on and get the IT departments being more productive and per dollar.

Figured I'd create a throwaway account to chime in here.

I'm 40+, and have to say the last few years (working for Fortune 100 companies) I am truly mortified at the lack of skill in many of the younger folks I've worked with.

Also, generally speaking when I've had a younger boss I would say it's NEVER because they're qualified for the position. Generally it seems they've been able to pull the wool over their managers' eyes. Don't get me wrong, they have no bad intentions. All I'm saying is confidence can only get you so far in technology.

Anyone else just hit their mid thirties and suddenly become aware of agism?

Not something that is affecting me, but something suddenly I've become more cognisant about it.

I am pretty sure "ageism" is just an inadvertent consequence of the wrong belief that years of experience must linearly translate to ability. Not because anyone dislikes older folk per se.

If someone has got 30 years of experience, employers/recruiters think it requires at least senior or manager position, while entry/mid level position appears "unsuitable".

They don't understand that after 3-5 years the diminishing returns flatten the output almost completely and the only thing that years of experience can tell is the arithmetic difference between current year and the year of graduation.

The matters are surely made worse by the current FAANG tendency to ignore whether the experience is relevant. If someone has never wrote a line of Java before, a junior position with quick promotion is the most fair and logical choice. But if their resume shows 7+ years of any coding experience at all it wouldn't even pop up in recruiter's search because of how they set up their filters for junior positions.

My thoughts are that ageism in IT is a natural consequence of not valuing experience.

Rather for many employers what is sought is simply someone, smart, fast learning, motivated, compliant, enthusiastic, loyal, and a good team fit, with perhaps boot camp level knowledge of the latest in shiny framework(s).

Many inexpensive 18 year olds can fit that description well, particularly in regards to their being enthusiastic, compliant and motivated. It helps that these are values that inexperienced managers and interviewers can actually assess, along with (inapplicable to the position) canned answers to questions about data structures and algorithms.

Super interesting idea and hope it goes well.

I’m not sure if it’s just a slew of interviews lately with older individuals or a trend but couple of things to avoid when interviewing that maybe are innocent comments but can def get you labeled as disrespectful.

Things I’ve been called or have had said by candidates in interviews the past three weeks: - Kid - “You’re basically a child then” - Youngin - ”You’re too young to know this but there used to be...” — Punch Cards — Mainframes — COBOL - Not taking my questions seriously compared to the older individual I’m interviewing with - A comment about the fact I’m wearing a t-shirt

So, yes, I do think ageism is a problem in technology but also, there’s a growing issue it would appear with older candidates specifically not understanding how disrespectful it is the other way to assume lack of 15+ years experience somehow indicates I don’t know anything about the origins of computer science, that I’ve never touched low level code before and that it’s okay to use phrases like “you’re too young” and “youngin”.

Well I am pretty sure I am facing ageism as well, although I am employed now.

Considering why ageism exists though, I think there are some assumptions that lead to it.

A common one that get trotted out whenever we discuss this subject is that older workers won't put up with as much as younger people do (long hours, pressure, low wages).

On the subject of low wages there are two things - younger inexperienced workers get less money because they are inexperienced, older more experienced workers get more money because they are experienced, that's clear.

Here is a guide on wages in Denmark (in Danish) https://www.prosa.dk/raad-og-svar/loenstatistik-2019/ In the region I am in programming wages for someone with 0-3 years experience is 37420 DKK per month (before high taxes of course) at 19 years experience which is what have it's 57277.

So an employer is paying for this experience, and they might think is it really worth it. I am working mainly with React now, and it is impossible to have 19 years experience in that. As it happens my experience with search solutions and international law garnered from my 4 years at Thomson Reuters is invaluable at my current job, but that's luck.

At some point a manager must think given the changeableness of the IT market, how much of that 19 years should be monetizable? I mean I did a lot of years building XML/XSLT based solutions for web and print - nobody wants that anymore, I remember when Netscape 4.something would crash because you had a nested p inside of a div that was inside of a p, an employer pays a couple thousand for those years, and the argument is that all experience translates to value but what if it doesn't?

Based on what I do on a day to day basis I would say the experience I have that I actually use is from 2009 on - based on the guide that should translate to 48045 of value. I'm not saying my experience before 2009 will never be used or do not inform who I am, but in day to day I have a hard time pointing to something I am doing that anything before that year is really relevant, if I know this I suppose a manager must sometimes suspect it.

on edit: grammar

This is great. I am 40 myself, and hired and lead a strong dev team where about half are older than me and about 30% over 50 years old. In fact we have a father and his son working on the same team :)

Anyway my view is that you can’t beat experience if what you care about is a stable system. Good people get better over time.

Great idea! The best two engineers I've had the pleasure to work with were both 45+ years old. They had a cool head when shit hit the fan, and were generally unfazed about technical problems. "Been there done that, let's do this right." If your company is discriminating against older engineers you're making a big mistake!

Now can we get a "no leetcode" job board? My favorite companies give you a take home, of a real world problem, vertical slice of what you're expected to do day to day.

I think that as the years go by we’ll see ageism reverse. The early 80s is really the first time CS education really started taking off and it continues to be a very popular major. These people are now starting to get old and it’s the first time we’ve had this vast an older software developer workforce. I think it’ll have more effects than just anti-ageism but also the coming into our own in regards to engineering by way of having older mentors.

I see many people here calling engineers to people who are only coders. A software engineer is something else, and guess what? It is not only about coding, is designing a product from concept to delivery. ( and maintenance of course ). By the way, ageism ( at least in the Bay Area ) is real as hell. It’s happening to me right know, and I am ONLY 43 years old. This is the truth, if the interviewer is younger than you, it does not matter how good you are or what amazing skills you have, you won’t get the job. Sorry, but that’s the truth right now.

I wish there was a "no leetcode-ism in tech" job board

Granted I’m only 42 but I’ve never experienced a hint of ageism here in Scandinavia. Maybe it’s an American thing? But to you who complain of ageism, would you be fine working for the same salary as a 22 year old that shares a cheap studio apartment with some mates? Or would you be willing to put in as many late nights as a childless youngster would? If not, I don’t think we are actually dealing with some kind of nefarious discrimination here, just a rational market.

As time goes by there is going to be more and more "old" code out there, and generally that will either have to be maintained in its current state or converted to something newer. And to do that you're going to have folks who are both familiar with it and are willing to work on it - except that the young bucks today just really don't want to do that.

I'm hearing from IT employees of local corporations that if their code base is twenty, ten, or even just five years old now, they can't find young folks who are willing to work on it. And even if they do find them, they don't necessarily have the skills to do that work, nor any particular inclination to really learn those skills, nor are they willing to stick around for very long even if they do start the process.

Site got slashdotted. Wayback machine copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20190622083122/https://noageismin...

Also, can some one explain the "diversity link" on a bunch of these?

As the tech industry ages, we will see more and more articles about how maybe old programmers aren't so bad after all. By the time Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, the Google gents, et. al. all reach retirement age, there will no longer be such a focus on youth in the industry.

Are there stats on the proportion of older engineers who can't find work? It would seem most of the "working engineers are young" observation could be explained by most people who have ever entered the field entering it recently.

THANK YOU.

I’m not enough of a dinosaur to need this yet, but this is the right approach. Advertise willingness to hire regardless of age, which works to ingrain acceptance in your own company, and shame those who don’t participate.

This is just what our industry needs.

"Your really over qualified for the job..." I heard that for the first time my last job search. It's so tempting to say back: "So...What dpes that mean? I would do the job too well?"

Age-bias and Agism is real, especially on a job hunt. We have come so far as a society in chipping away at all the various types of discrimination - this one may be one of the last to (hopefully) fall.

I am just adding this for those who can relate.

Here's the kicker: In my early 60's I am better at my job (IT Program/Project Management) than ever. I want to retire at 90 (or never). I understand people better, know more than ever, embrace what's new, know and am certified on the newer ideas and methodologies, I am better at working with a wide variety of people and teams than my peers. Plus, I have far more stamina and energy than people 25 years younger (not a small thing in IT). I even have 2 teenagers (keeps you moving).

All I can do is do it better, possibly start my own company (but I'm actually a much better #2 than an owner.) And hope people get smarter about it. But building awareness (like this thread) can't hurt. Look at how the other discriminated groups have challenged everyone else to question their prejudice.

Ageism definitely exists when company feels someone is too old to join them. There's obviously easy solution to this problem: join companies where people are similar age to yours or older. Because younger people are probably just not able to handle you or appreciate your life experience and are looking for people similar to them. What if you're extremely old and your equals are dead? You should've retired by that time or have alternative revenue streams than salary. If you've failed to have other income streams than salary that's your fault. You've limited your (professional) life to technical excellence which is obviously only one of the aspects of career and life general. I think people should at some point take wider responsibility of what they're doing and become not necessarily managers, but maybe tech leaders, authors, trainers etc. There is one more aspect to that: person may have a mental condition, like asperger's or something like that. Then he probably cannot build his career in a way described above and he needs to seek alternative ways of progression.

It would be more useful if the jobs were searchable or sortable. It's frustrating that I have to go to each company's page to see the jobs.

I sadly had an experience last year with older team members neither having the sage wisdom nor the flexibility to add value to a project, but they were kept on because of diversity reasons. The project was still delivered on time, on par with specs and within budget, but the older people were sent on paid leave after the first month of the project.

While it's a cliche to assume older (or younger) people are never going to work out in a team, it definitely happens a lot where outliers in the age range simply cannot do the work, whatever the reason. (and I'm not talking about not being qualified, that's usually not the problem)

On the other hand, with this anecdotal failure we have seen anecdotal successes as well; but knowing that older members can fail on a project due to what they self-describe as their age does actually happen in just the way people seem to fear; just not as often as they seem to think.

How much is ageism, and how much is it employers feeling like a more senior person will have higher salary expectations?

Thank you so much for this. A CS professor of mine who is currently struggling with her income and her future (even though she is tenured) could really use something like this (she doesn't mind doing boring programming work).

I went through the site out of curiosity . First of all, kudos for taking the initiative. You will hopefully grow big because it seems like a big problem (or soon to be one). I have a suggestion regarding the UX: Can you have a couple of filters (location, skills etc) which will make it easier for job hunters? As of now, it seems ok without the filters but as soon as the job postings increase, you will face issues. Again, good luck with the project :-)

Great initiative. I hope it gets better and better from this point of view.

The way I see it is that we tend to hire minorities but when it’s about people with experience we rather pass... I have the luck to work with 50+ years old colleagues and it’s the best experience you can have, because you can learn a lot and share a lot.

I'm not trying to be critical but genuinely curious? How do you convince companies to post on a job board that is new like this (or any other marketplace type product)? Is this a fake it until you make it type of product?

As a 50+-year-old, I like the idea of this site. I think it would be even better if people could search for specific skills (e.g. Elixir, Erlang, Rust, etc.) and see more detailed job descriptions.

If age discrimination is illegal should not the age profile of companies be tracked the same way race and gender are, at least I think they are.

You don't want to be within the system which actively rejects you. Accept the gift of warning and walk away, search further.

School seems to be a mandatory field and I couldn't find some schools on the list.

it doesnt make sense to stay in tech (as an individual contributor) long term - especially working for someone else

And - Thanks for this forum!

How can people not blame the infanticised offices with food, toys and gym which signal latent expectation that you spend most of your time in the office and you've no family.

Lack of private cabins and too much noise in open offices and feeling that you are always being watched.

Coding interviews which make you feel as if you are applying for a competitive top tier university which often require days of prep. Then the interviewer who pulls out some weird special case and is shocked to see that you spent years in industry yet you don't know about this case.

And startups whoes purpose is market disruption by often undermining rules/regulations, how can anyone who is not naive will not be worried about that? Who wants to be part of a racket who deliberately breaks rules/regulation and it isn't 100% guaranteed how government is going to react to that and feel mostly like a gamble which experienced people won't like making. No wonder younger people commit more crimes.

With age comes experience and wisdom and desire to not be taken advantage of and to not be manipulated by any dark patterns.

Sorry but I think most tech companies are optimized for certain kind of people and will find it increasingly hard to attract, keep and get best work out of the aged ones.

This has likely a lot to do with a wave of 'new' experiences in tech that possibly required a whimsical and specific curiosity, and of course a degree of 'nativism'.

When someone said something about 'digital natives' - I think he had a point. I'm 'not quite digital native' and I've never liked FB, or anything 'social media'. I think that kind of disqualifies me for such work.

Instagram, FB, Snapchat, Kik - these are as much 'social' as they are 'tech' - they are more like media shops than tech shops in many ways (or were).

So for the same reason MTV etc. (ha ha, dated reference!) are mostly young and hip, it might make sense that some companies have the same.

There's something to be said for 'doing things in a new way'.

Now, as many have noticed "there's nothing new under the sun" for the most part, and as the heady bubble bursts a little bit, I'm hoping that things become normative.

I started my career in the Valley, in Telecom, surrounded by 35-50 year old people, so brilliant, so experienced, I could barely keep up and I felt 'junior' on a daily basis.

Contrast that with my 'dot com' SF friends who were 27 and the 'oldest, most senior' folks at the company.

For the issues that I face in my work, I actually loathe to have to deal with 'fresh grads' because there's so much grindy material in the work, that one needs 'a couple of years' of experience just to be useful. For example, almost anything done in C++ ... there's so many ways to 'do it wrong', it takes some failure and good habits.

I think things will probably change as the materiality of experience becomes evident in some ways and managers catch on to that. I suggest there are probably enough companies around that do value experience.

One issue is however that 'experience' shouldn't be an excuse for complacency, nor should it excuse bad habits, not does it mean 'massive dollars' at every job. The pay scale probably starts to plateau at 5 years, maybe inching incrementally after that.

The link is redirecting me back to HN post. How’s this on the front page?

I guess because most new cool companies are startups and who was the guy over 40 in the movie "The Social Network" other than probably the investor/lawyer.

Most companies homepage is filled with younger folks and also why would anyone 40+ is going to listen to a 20 something CEO?

We're fixing the glitch

Ninja is one of the oldest professions in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja

There are three themes driving ageism in tech.

First, upper management and investorship doesn't understand engineering or technology. Accountants understand cost and risk, they do not understand oppertunity or business process. MBA's understand cost and risk, as well as any non-iterative business process with a defined start and end that is quantifiable; they are suited for running a company, not growing a company, and religous application of skills within that spectrum of capibility only creates tragedy and torture chambers (e.g. open floor plan offices). Any R&D process is by definition unquantifiable; you have 10 million workcenters infront of you and have to figure out the right routing, which may be iterative and require adjustments to the workcenter, to produce the widget. Figuring that out requires knowing where the bottlenecks are to constrain the problem, and that requires specialized knowledge and experience.

Accountants and MBA's are taught, religously, to view those things as "key man risk", and because of the ability of people to leave to go elsewhere to work for more money, that training staff is just a waste of money. It is vital to our industry that we take on interns as journeymen for a few years and guide them; the results are much better for all when they are taught how to think. This is antithetical to most organizations.

Any company that thinks this way is doomed to a slow death because nobody who is capible of managing the bottlenecks is going to work there; they will reverse engineer the company, find the bottlenecks, propose them, come across as pompous, then move on. Devoid of the experience of working with talent, the management, often coming from non-engineering management backgrounds, assumes programmers are factory, retail, logistics, or any kind of manual laborer and due to that, equates youth with maximum ROI.

They build torture chambers and hope to capture a few young geniuses then force out golden eggs. Think of MSP's that have no intellectual property or investment in technology, but hire IT folks and force them into bogus non-competes and other slaver working arrangements. Can't tell you how many times I've been look upon as the "whiz kid saviour" by some imbecile in their 50's or 60's coming from a non-engineering background who happens to have money. It's really patronizing, demoralizing, and absolutely disgusting. Nobody wants to work with that, and especially in a company that creates situations where the staff feel the only way out is bankrupting the place.

Second, you have highly levered\financialized companies. Facebook has almost no real world value aside from social entertainment, and nobody knows how to valuate the company. Because of this, goals cannot be clearly defined by the top brass of the organization; there's no long-term vision. Anyone who's seen a Zuckerberg press conference will call him a visionary; he comes across as a man-child trying to make sense of his dumb luck. Old engineers know, most importantly of all, how to have heated debates like an engineer and to discuss like an engineer. That threatens the management in these orgs because engineers, if left to their own whims, will form their own vision and experienced people know what works and how to be successful. They'll do things that can clearly be seen as progress and that reduces the importance of everyone else at the org in the eyes of the investorship. That too, becomes an engine for drama.

Finally, there's a severe shortage of good technical\engineering management around right now. Some of that is the above two reasons, but a lot of it has to do with things like IRS exemptions against allowing IT Staff to bill on a W11 obstensively because too many people were working as FTE at multiple companies working as specialists without benefits. Remember, one of the driving factors behind Austin Stack driving a Cessna into an IRS building was that very thing. Technology changes society drastically, and when you see management and leadership turning the nails on people, it's a response to this.

Feminism, for example, is a response to technology; first wave feminism was a response better materials science producing pressure vessels that created hard alcohol. Men ended up in the gutter escaping hard lives rather than dealing with them and it's no wonder when universal sufferage was passed, the first thing the ladies voted for and demanded was prohibition. Second wave feminism, e.g. equal pay for equal work, was driven by the obsolescance of muscle in manufacturing. That produces a discussion on what gender roles in a relationship are and ought to be (which by the way, the only people qualified to make that decision is the couple). Third wave feminism is a response to contraceptives and social media. GAO Does retirement security studies and did one in 2009 on the impact of fertility rates on retirement security and ended up publishing, then redacting, the fact that men with an 80th percentile income have a 50\50 shot, back in 2009, of procreating. You have lots of women inundated with too much selection via social media, and throwing everything they've got after it using contraceptives. It's logical, then, that intelligent hard-working men with money being given access to any women they want for anything they want would be demoralized about relationships and the quality of the breeding stock. The old addage of "building a family" or "building a man" has stopped being a concept and instead you have Maybelene, Gucci and Pornhub engaging in psychological warfare against young people to sell sex, hand bags, eye shadow and sex as a mental illness.

Government has been far outpaced by tech, and the key realization here is, it can take advantage of anyone irregardless of how smart you think you are. We really do not know what we're doing and it is total chaos out there.

Aside from the Zuckerberg "young people are just smarter" quote, I suspect a lot of this is more side-effect of businesses (especially large ones) wanting interchangeable, easily-replaceable parts rather than overt ageism.

Having a core business system done right the first time by an old-timer or two kind of puts you at their mercy. Using the infinite monkey theorem to grind out a bunch of python and javascript is much safer from a managerial perspective.

I found myself applying for jobs recently.

One of the startups that contacted me was founded by three 2015 graduates.

I am 41. I cancelled the interview. There was no way in my mind that I could work with these three folks. It was as good as being from different planets.

What I am trying to say is that maybe ageism is a two way street, and maybe it’s just normal. Generation gap and all.

I would rather keep ageism. It keep my competitive advantage intact (25 years C++, 20 years java.). I can easily code much faster than a team of 10 younger developers, not because I can program faster, but because I know WHAT to program, as oppose to how to program. I.e. they are running faster to the top of the wrong hill.

Kind of strange that you will judge your MD by its age, but when it come to mission critical systems you prefer young people.