Is ageism in tech still a problem?

I experience it differently. As an IC that’s relatively respected it my field, I think my seniority seems like a threat to some leaders. Because my word carries weight and I tend to be less obsequious with little to lose in these interactions. I have less of a problem to saying “the emperor has no clothes”. Younger ICs don’t have this luxury. They go along despite their reservations and often feel they don’t know better. Older ICs suffer fools much less (life is short, and older ICs have a well calibrated BS detector. Some bad leader don’t like that!).

I have no problem interacting with younger ICs and even embrace my Dad-ness and Dad humor. I like mentoring and growing others, and I think it’s important to advocate for less experienced to get the lionsshare of the glory and attention.

For hiring, I just am not open about my age and mostly interact with people virtually. I don’t have my early irrelevant jobs and don’t show my graduation dates. So I haven’t seen it as a problem.

I used to work with a guy that was known for dressing nice, very formal. Back in the 2000s, he would wear button-down shirts, slacks, nice shoes; he stood out for a software nerd. Anyway, when I saw him recently, he was dressed in jeans and flip-flops, wearing a t-shirt. I asked him what's with the casual attire. He just said, "Trying to keep my job." Being an older dude in this field as well, I know what he's talking about.

I would rather work with "old" engineers rather than 25/30 year old "senior" engineers.

Places with older engineers means:

1. things are done properly

2. less to break

3. no need to be on call

4. excellent WLB (no grind n burnout culture)

5. excellent mentoring and learning opportunities

6. sniper / laser focus on business fundamentals / making money rather than making noise on the internet streets

Multiple issues. One of them is reluctance of younger hiring managers to hire older people. At 35 you don't necessarily see advantages that hiring 50 year old will bring you, as you don't have experience to be able to see that.

Not sure if there is a "solution" for that as a 35 yo hiring manager will probably have an easier time managing under-35 individual contributor comparing to a 50 yo one. Different perspectives, experiences, etc. So by hiring younger IC the manager makes a correct decision. Sucks for us older folks but that's life.

I observed engineers at all ages at many levels and roles (manager vs. IC) at Microsoft. To the point of us having retirement parties. I am sure ageism is real but part of the meme of "no software engineers over 40" is just the population curve of developers making them less common. And probably there's something broken with the recruiting pipelines.

I don't think it's age. I think it's energy level and attitude.

I'm in my 50s and had no problems getting hired 3+ years ago at a FAANG as well as a handful of other companies. Granted it was a good hiring environment, but I also took 3 years off and I had to work hard to Leetcode back into shape.

I still have a lot of energy and it comes across in my interviews. I don't have an ego, I know that just because I have >30 years experience doesn't mean that I know more than my coworkers that are 30 years younger than me. I work hard and try to earn my paycheck every day and I'm not quibbling over lunch menus and complaining about the ingredients used at the cafeteria.

I think as long as you not only have the technical skills but can also sell yourself as a good teammate with matching energy, it shouldn't be a problem. I think younger folks respect people that can match their energy and motivation and don't want to be dragged down by know-it-alls or slow workers.

I would wager that it will get better soon. Once the LLM/Agent hype has died down and a few years of junior developers went down the drain untrained and unmentored, the demand for experienced seasoned developers will rise again.

This is not to dismiss LLMs entirely, but they always get touted as “they can do ABC, as long as an experienced dev reviews the output”. And with LLMs hindering the growth of juniors in one way or another, I can definitely see a market for “senior” developers down the road.

There's a huge ageism problem, always has been. I tried to avoid getting into software development because I knew it would be an issue one day.

There's isn't a quick fix or easy solution.

I am a software engineer in his 50s, with stints in big tech, big bank and fintech with domain expertise in payments, risk, performance engineering, and data. In addition I have led global teams of hundreds of engineers with outcomes that have transformed multiple Fortune 500. I have been unemployed for a year and a half with no light at the end of the tunnel. Most of my network of similarly older professionals and C level executives has either retired or suffering similarly. Thankfully I am rich and still getting deferred executive compensation checks from multiple Fortune 500 companies but I am bored and think I have more to offer. I am working on a couple things to allay my boredom, we shall see if something comes of it.

Even more. The two primary reasons I believe it harder to find tech jobs when you're older are

1) Your salary demands exceed the budgeted amount for the position

2) You probably aren't willing to work insane hours any more

Even if your skill set vastly exceeds that of a wet-behind-the-ears engineer and can work at a far higher level, be more productive, and produce higher quality work, it's almost impossible to make that apparent when interviewing, especially when those doing the interviews are much younger.

If I were to start another company, I'd try to hire only 40+ people.

- I've found junior engineers super resistant to new tech. Very rigid thinking, there is only way way to do something bc that's all they've ever learned, very religious about tech stacks, crazy strong opinions based on crazy limited experience - lack of work ethic, no call, no show, procrastinating right up until the deadline and then expecting code reviews, merges/releases to work on their schedule -tendency to fuck around and play games etc all day (see above) -limited experience with people from different backgrounds, culture etc.

Ageism is looking a one tree in a forest of extremely similar problems. We have a othering at scale issue in the species. It's fundamental. It needs to be recognized as an issue of, a problem with self determinism itself, the othering of those we are not intimate is a serious species-wise issue. There is another science here, waiting for formalization.

I see lots of ads for "Senior Engineer" that want 3 years of experience.

I think most of the ostensible age discrimination is explained by the tech industry's massive growth over the past 50 years (means more young people are hired than old people because they have the skills).

Just wondering, was the issue not enough job hunters using the site or was the issue that not enough companies wanted to post listings. If the latter, I would guess that lots of people in tech recognize the problem, but not many companies (sincerely) want to do anything about it for all the reasons people here will give: worries about salary expectations, worries about availability to work long hours, less experienced people feeling uncomfortable managing more experienced people.

In my sub-field (embedded systems), I don't see it. There are companies that see the value of 40 years of experience. (And there are plenty that don't...)

But the vibe I'm hearing lately is that junior engineers can't get jobs, because AI. I don't know if that reflects the reality (I haven't been trying to find a job as a junior in quite a while), but people are complaining about that these days.

According to statistics and people I met at conferences, young people are also not getting hired in tech. So maybe nobody is?

It likely still exists but the economy for software dev is so bad as to not be a major factor.

In other words, it’s not ageism when one can’t even get an interview in the first place. Assuming you’ve kept your resume concise and removed education dates, etc. Which I have for the last twenty years or so, since the turn of the century! cough

get work done, look younger and slice off the first 5 years of your experience because it is "not relevant". I look about 10-12 years younger so I am able to slip under the radar but it makes me wonder how my peers who look visibly their age fare? The job market is london, sector: Hedge funds, asset mangement tech etc.

The real threat to a senior IC, in my own experience, is losing their edge, especially in a large company. As they grow more senior, they will spend more time in meetings, writing more docs, aligning more teams, drawing more boxes, tossing around more terms, defining more product features, and talking to more customers. As time goes by, they gain more institutional knowledge and getting better at company dynamics. They know which VPs to trust. They know which squeaky wheels to oil, and which buttons to push. They do everything better, except designing or implementing a challenging system.

That is, the senior ICs start to resemble a strong product manager, or an effective director without a team. These are all good - until the company suddenly no longer needs them. Maybe their team has become a cost center. Maybe the project gets into maintenance mode. Or maybe the product has been so stable that the company does not even need more alignment. At that time, the ICs will find that all the institutional knowledge and so-called "leadership" is not that transferrable. And when they go out and interview for a new job, they find that they can't even sketch a solid design.

Sadly, I don't have a solution. There are exceptions. I guess it's natural that a senior engineer will gain breadth but also get distracted as they age. What they need is a different kind of depth. They can still be of value to a younger team if they are like a hard-science professor who depends on their PhD students to write papers, yet they can still advise the students as no one else. In industry, my role models are people like Michael Stonebreaker, who can still shape the architectures of modern databases in his 80s. Wernher von Braun of Saturn V rockets, who could come up with new rockets like no one else. Or Kelly Johnson of U-2, who could direct and unblock his engineers with ease. Or Marc Brooker of Amazon, who seems able to go deep into both database and distributed systems to keep coming up with amazing systems. But then, I'm not sure how many people can be talented as those engineers.

Or maybe another way is to get domain expertise, like how payment works, how insurance works, how accounting works, and etc?

After suffering a mass layoff last year, one observation points to explicit and endemic ageism:

All my former colleagues and reports 15-20 years younger than me landed jobs within a matter of months. Those of us 50+ remain unemployed a year later. It isn't about skills; I was at the top of my game when a layoff robbed me of my livelihood. It isn't a matter of pay. One of my former reports whom I mentored when I was a senior IC left right before the layoff hit with a job offer making as much as I was at the time as a manager.

It was even explicitly revealed to me by an insider and former colleague who referred me to one position that I didn't get that the hiring committee wanted to go with someone younger, after which he caught himself and backtracked saying "earlier in their career". I was told on another occasion that I'd make a great addition as a manager or principal IC, but that they were reviewing their needs and deciding to search for someone less senior.

Ageism is 100% real.

The resistance I most often see is that companies are often hesitant to interview older candidates based on their assumptions around expected salary. This completely agnostic as to their actual fit for the role.

I worked for a month at a place where the median age was 27. I'm 38. I felt tired by their wasted energy. They'd fight over tiny details, have arguments about things that don't matter. Hearing Devs with 3 years working experience tell me they can architect anything fatigued me. They talked about their crazy architecture like it was going to change it all. I left in a month, but I'd have left in a week if I didn't need the money.

Yeah ageism is a huge issue, even in early 30s, working as a regular programmer is met with suspicion and looked down upon.

Not only that, young engineers will be build whatever without questioning the value, business people prefer this. They dont want an engineer raising product questions

also, it is true that technology moves quickly, startups dont need experts in tech thats no longer bleeding edge. large old school companies still do, so the number of companies that are viable employers decreases

There's a much bigger cohort of aging programmers than there was even 10 years ago, so a lot more of them are the best programmers available.

Ageism is a cultural issue. Some cultures venerate older people, some shun them. So it will vary. There isn't one "tech" culture. If you're talking about tech companies in the United States dominated by white males, ageism has been (and afaik, continues to be) a cultural norm.

Changing a culture's norms is incredibly difficult. The only way I've heard about it happening is through massive pressure, from either a large social group vocally pushing against an issue (with consequences), or a large industry spending millions of dollars to advertise something (diamonds, washing machines) and exploiting some other cultural bias to do so. Cultural norms can also change temporarily (we all worked remote during a pandemic and productivity went up, but after that it would seem our productivity went down? and women became industrial workers during WW2, but after that apparently they weren't good enough?).

So even if the norm did change temporarily, you need continued pressure to make it stick. I have not heard of any massive cultural pressure to end ageism, so I would not expect it to end.

Ageism is still relevant, and probably will be. I see - and experience - that, if a senior has more experience than the tech department altogether, then it will cause tensions. Also, most of the self-appointed C* level leaders (rich kid or l33tcode warrior) do not process well if someone has more experience and/or does not agree.

As I learned when I rewrote 10+ times my resume, you have to hide your experience and age because anything over 8-10 years is just not relevant anymore, or causes ageism (even ATS/GPT/LLM/AI/BOT give you negative points for the age). I have experienced this firsthand, since I have 20+ YoE.

There is a lot of generalization in this thread. Most of us have very limited experience that's only applicable to a small region, and likely doesn't apply everywhere.

In general, not only in the software industry, people just like younger people more. They're better looking, and they have more energy and enthusiasm. It's a cognitive bias that isn't unlike racism and sexism, it's going to weight the odds in the favour of young people in every industry.

And that's setting aside the fact that older people are closer to retirement and unlikely to spend a long time at the company in question.

I started working in IT in the 90s and I would say "yes" but I realize my observations do not carry scientific rigor. It would require knowing the thoughts and practices of millions of people. Such is the curse of social science.

I do not think most people think of themselves as being "ageist", but it manifests in their actions. Usually a department will be filled with a group of young people, and in the interview process, someone will say, "I do not think this person would be a good culture fit". But they do not realize that they just do not want an old person because they seem different then what is already in the team.

I also have a hunch, that "leet code tests", in the hiring process has a hidden agenda of weeding out "older people". Those kind of tests are usually on knowledge one might have learned in a college course and subsequently forgot about. Or, if you are juggling a family, you may not have time to go do all day knowledge crunch study to get the algorithms into your head.

Companies do not want to come right out and say "we do not want to hire old people", but they selfishly want the most value for their buck. They want to drive down wages and extract value. What is more valuable to a company? A middle aged programmer who has to go home at 5pm to help take care of the kids? Or do they get more value out of a young person just out of college who has something to prove?

I have seen perfectly reasonable people pass over hiring older people because they do not want to hire someone who might know more than they do, or someone who might push back on decisions. They want someone young who will just do what they say.

As a society, I do not think we address such issues well.

Yes, when 50 years old applies as a senior engineer, 25 years old senior engineers get uncomfortable. You might not notice it in any public conversation, but there is still a resistance:

   * will they be on-call?
   * can they work long hours?
   * how do I delegate to them?
   * are they going to resist new tech?

Yup, and it's rooted in reality too. Older folks might have more wisdom, but MOST, not all of them are slower, it takes them longer to figure out things, learn new things, they are more closed minded. I say this as an older folk clocking 50, I was very open minded to hiring older folks as a younger person and have done many, and I have been burned the most by older folks that interview great, can talk the talk but can't back it up with walk. Now, I'm not saying ALL, just MOST. ... this unfortunately will always be a problem, I'm seeing it now with LLMs, most older folks are very closed minded about it, and younger folks are embracing it. Tomorrow they will be shocked when no one wants to hire them. Such is life.

If you're older, keep your skills up to date, be chill, be open minded, and keep hope alive.

I am a senior architect with plenty of years behind me, and I can say that as an IC some senior managers love me and some hate me. I will say there is a skew here and sometimes i think the dogs think it’s a turf war. I provide advice and guidance, advisory and technical leadership and it is interesting how sometimes these aren’t received well and the receiver will do what they want. Which makes it interesting because I give advice and then they don’t actually want it.

I’m also older and stand up for myself. This is not without its own troubles.

I am however thinking about what the next 20 years are gonna look like career, location and opportunity wise as I can see some challenges ahead where I live

This isn't just an issue for software engineers and I don't believe it's an issue just in tech, but is more widespread, although I don't have direct evidence of that. What I do know is that I've been on the job market for 16 months and while I've had many interviews and made it through several rounds for multiple positions, that final offer hasn't come yet. The cynic in me says it's because I'm older, white, male and straight. The optimist in me says someone better got the position. Who knows which is true, certainly not me.

Yes. And also culture-ism. My age is only coincident with the fact that I'm a private person and don't like to do the "company culture" events like dressing up for Halloween or messing around at the office like it's kindergarten. I want to come in, do my work, and go home to my real life and family. I'm not "family" with anyone at work. None of them are related to or depend on me like that.

IMO, it depends. I’ve worked with hundreds of startups over the last 20 years. The most significant trend I’ve seen is cultural cohesion. Some startups have a young, energetic culture. Some have an experienced, veteran culture. Some have a quirky, trendy culture.

But overall many companies seem to value and attract more of the same culture they already have in place. So to a degree, I’d say yes ageism exists in certain companies that don’t value experience as highly as other qualities.

Ageism is a huge problem, especially for some groups. If you have a disability, you might be stuck at non-terminal levels. This causes the hiring managers to question why someone with over 10 years experience, greying hair, and good creds (masters, multiple certs, etc) is applying for a mid-level role. There must be something wrong if you're not a senior. Well, yeah, that's kind of the definition of a disability.

yeah, you can’t exploit old people as easily as young people

There is still a problem that engineering is often seen as a "young persons field", and once you get some experience you will then move to management. Nothing wrong with management - we do need it, and a lot of what we have is really bad (if engineers make good engineers is debatable...), but that means there are less older engineers around which will skew data.

When the 20 something 'senior' engineers and 'consultants' don't know how to test network connectivity by using openssl, telnet and ping, you don't won't to work there. It's more like a day care than college or high school ;)

How can a 20 something with very little experience actually consult? Based on what experience?

There is all kinds of ‘isms in tech. Pretty much the only people who don’t have to worry are young straight white males.

I suspect before ageism disappears it will first swing the other way where older tech workers snub young people entering the industry writing them off as vibecoders who don’t know anything and are easily replaced with an AI.

It isn't really a solvable problem as long as there is no standardized/regulated tech industry. Companies want coders who will fit into the "culture" – work whatever hours they need to, be on call 24x7, chase the newest fads, accept fantasy money, "move fast and break things" etc. There is an unlimited stream of new grads who will happily accept all this. Older people meanwhile don't have the patience or have other responsibilities in life.

Go into companies and industries where this culture isn't the norm, however, and you'll find teams full of 40-50+ year old software engineers. Defense, aerospace, government, construction, medical tech, research labs, education.

I'm 53 (physician) and would like to pursue a second career in programming but realising it's really hard.

Job boards aren't the problem. The problems begin and end within the boundaries of companies. ATS, recruiter, hiring manager, 6 30-60 minute interviews. Those things are the problem.

If I had the money I could go hire a half dozen solid software engineers and at least 2 solid DevOps/SRE types today. I'm betting people in other fields could do the same.

And yet, good people remain unemployed and scared.

some say "wisdom comes with age".

Though I don't completely agree but won't completely ignore.

I see this applies to tech as well.

When you start as junior you tinker with boilerplate code. everything seems magical. As you grow learn and becomes wiser, things what seemed magical before become logical

After 10 years, surface level saturates. You will start to dig deeper. Things will again start to become magical and then slowly fades into logical.

Then you go deeper and again process repeats.

More deeper you go, you will find the luxury to shake the surface level toys. Some innovation happens at surface level, but you are deep down still going.

There is not end line. You retire when you want to stop. Your choice!

But much more still to be explored! Humanity continues!

In short, As you grow, go deeper, become wiser, shake the status quo, innovate, repeat. Surface level people will Go gaga. But you don't react because you are still going deeper...

I'm in the UK and I don't feel ageism. Never did. I'm usually the oldest person in the team (49), and I've worked with people older than me. I'm a freelance contractor so I move around a fair bit. I do feel like my experience is appreciated.

One of the things that I think gets overlooked is sample bias. People in their 50s who are engineers often started coding in the 90s. And back then it was a much less common career path.

We (Boomers) really don't get credit for the really tough problems we've solved with no cloud, no GPU, 8 bit CPUs and a meg of RAM. We did that when we were young and no one seems to appreciate what we've learned since then. I'm a TPM and there experience is everything if you are horizontal (i.e. silo busting).

A potential resource is this Podcast/Site: https://www.itgetslateearly.com/ I fast forward some as the host has a chip on her shoulder but her guests have nuggets. I really need to work out feeding the podcast to an AI Agent to extract those tasty bits!

Yes absolutely it is. Especially with the whole "vibe coding" - only a youngster would come up with that.

I think we as humans will always have ageism or other biases.

Ageism is universal and blatant - nobody's even bothering to disguise it.

yes

A lot of it involves masking and blending in by the candidate

You can easily find an older person ranting against the idea of using full stack javascript, unaware of the V8 changes while still having some valid criticisms

But then wonder if their rejection is ageism, instead of the rant

just one example

>I launched a job board [...]

Weird, it says there your wife did.