Programmer/Developer getting old

[debonair]

I was out looking for a new position recently, though I did eventually find one, I found that its not as easy as it was a couple of years ago.
The sentiment I got was that I am now too old for the position I was applying for... is there such a thing?

 

[biometrics]

Ageism

 

[froot]

I was out looking for a new position recently, though I did eventually find one, I found that its not as easy as it was a couple of years ago.
The sentiment I got was that I am now too old for the position I was applying for... is there such a thing?

Ageism is indeed a thing in the programming world.

Friend of mine said there's a 32yo dude sitting next to him at work, he moved from cobol into C# and is sitting with 6 months experience and earning just short of peanuts.

Why offer a 30yo a job that a 22yo can do just as well, knowing that the 22yo will be a huge asset to the company at age 30?

 

[biometrics]

Ageism is indeed a thing in the programming world.

Friend of mine said there's a 32yo dude sitting next to him at work, he moved from cobol into C# and is sitting with 6 months experience and earning just short of peanuts.

Why offer a 30yo a job that a 22yo can do just as well, knowing that the 22yo will be a huge asset to the company at age 30?

Erm, what?

 

[froot]

Erm, what?

A 22yo would have understoor that

 

[semaphore]

Ageism is indeed a thing in the programming world.

Friend of mine said there's a 32yo dude sitting next to him at work, he moved from cobol into C# and is sitting with 6 months experience and earning just short of peanuts.

Why offer a 30yo a job that a 22yo can do just as well, knowing that the 22yo will be a huge asset to the company at age 30?

As harsh as this may sound i have found older people tend not to grasp things as fast as younger developers.

 

[Avenue]

As harsh as this may sound i have found older people tend not to grasp things as fast as younger developers.

This is all a bit odd to me- yes maybe a 22 year old vs a 70 year old, but in your thirties you are more mature and stable. You're there to work and are less likely to jump ship than you were when you were younger with no responsibilities. If anyone thinks a 22 year old is going to be more of an asset, they're living in a strange kind of reality.

 

[semaphore]

This is all a bit odd to me- yes maybe a 22 year old vs a 70 year old, but in your thirties you are more mature and stable. You're there to work and are less likely to jump ship than you were when you were younger with no responsibilities. If anyone thinks a 22 year old is going to be more of an asset, they're living in a strange kind of reality.

Odd to you or not, its what i have seen. 22yr olds are still wet behind the ears. Im talking aroudn 40 for devs.

 

[kripstoe]

Ageism is indeed a thing in the programming world.

Friend of mine said there's a 32yo dude sitting next to him at work, he moved from cobol into C# and is sitting with 6 months experience and earning just short of peanuts.

Why offer a 30yo a job that a 22yo can do just as well, knowing that the 22yo will be a huge asset to the company at age 30?

Nonsense. Maybe in that specific scenario where the guy has 6 months experience. I work with devs from 23yo to late thirties. There's a big difference in maturity, understanding, thinking bigger than the problem at hand and quality of work. Give me names of 22yo devs with the experience of a 30yo devs that'll stay with a company for the next 8 years.

 

[cguy]

Ageism in South Africa's Software Developer industry is a big problem. The idea that most developer of 40+ years old can't grasp things as fast as a 22 year old developer, because of their age is complete drivel. That said, I can see how this perception is prolific in South Africa: Good developers quickly (~8-12 years) hit a salary ceiling (500k-700k/year depending on sector), which means that they have to move into management or the "business" side of things in order to earn more. This means that a lot of good developers land up on on a different ladder, leaving those who are less skilled behind, creating a skewed selection of older developers. Of course there are still very good developers who either didn't want to change their career for more money, or are so skilled that the salary ceiling doesn't apply to them, however, I expect that these samples don't constitute a majority of the space. The net effect is that there may be some age related correlation in SA, but it's the result of an implicit sample bias in developers, and is certainly not causation.

To the OP: Any competent, non-ageist hiring manager should give a candidate the benefit of the doubt (specifically, that they're still doing what they're doing because they are good at it and enjoy it vs still doing that because they weren't good enough to find anything better). What you may be finding is that you've priced yourself out of the market i.e., they can find a 22 year old to do the job for half the pay - meaning that they don't actually need your experience, and hence don't want to pay for it. You should try isolate the opportunities that actually require experience: lead positions, positions requiring an in depth understanding of the technology and processes, etc.

On another note: I've worked in multiple countries, and for large multi-nationals, and I have found that there is a much larger stigma tied to older developers in SA than anywhere else I've experienced (in fact age is largely equated with experience, not incompetence, elsewhere). The average software dev age where I've worked (overseas) over the last 10 years, has been in the 40-45 region. The reason these guys are still doing dev, is because they're all damn good at it, and are paid accordingly.

 

[kripstoe]

Good post cguy

 

[DominionZA]

Good post cguy

+1

I am 41 now and finding it easier to land contracts as time marches on.

I tried management and did not like it. Way prefer lead dev roles.

Old dev with 6 months C# is just a lazy dev or dev with no exposure. Nothing to do with age.

My wife is a program manager at a large corporate. Devs there range up to 60! Again, no probs.

This thread is

 

[HavocXphere]

One of the reasons why I switch from IT to finance at the last minute.

The idea that most developer of 40+ years old can't grasp things as fast as a 22 year old [...] is complete drivel.

Pretty sure there is solid proof that cognitive ability declines with age...

The real question is whether experience will offset that decline. I'm inclined to say yes, but labour laws etc screw over people. The ice cold & financially sensible approach would be to hire old devs, use them for a couple of years and then fire them. Company gets mad skills. Dev gets another few years of employment (@solid compensation). ZA conditions make this impossible though - labour laws & overall mentality is stacked against employers so heavily that they'll rather hire a 22 y/o and train than buy the 52 y/o's mad skills. Hell you might get CCMA'd for discriminating against age.

 

[AntiThesis]

Another aspect of this is that if you're 40-odd and haven't kept your skills up, you're far less likely to be a good hire. Nobody's really looking for Fortran developers anymore are they?

That and being closer to retirement than a 22 year old could certainly count against you. It shouldn't make a difference but it does.

 

[cguy]

Pretty sure there is solid proof that cognitive ability declines with age...

Sure, but Firstly, most studies suggest that the start of CD is around 60 years old, and that this is only the start. It it unlikely to be a real factor for many years after. There was one controversial study that indicated that it may begin at 45, but this was just the discovery of a very early measurable delta, not a significant delta. Also, the test was done on British Goverment workers IIRC, hardly a representative sample when we're comparing it to people who do mental gymnastics every day.

Secondly, (and not disagreeing with you here, just pointing out that their are two facets to experience) there is a wide gap between cognitive decline, and the ability to grasp concepts. Experience does not just provide knowledge, but it also primes the brain to be able to learn certain types of concepts faster. Sure, a 60 year old may have more trouble matching up certain shapes to another set of related shapes, or possbily cannot memorize as many words in a fixed set of time, but the fact that the older person may have spent 10 years working on compilers, 10 years on quantitative programming, 10 years on research, etc. would mean that they are still primed to learn new computer science, programming, mathetmatical, business, etc. concepts much more easily.

 

[HavocXphere]

Sure, but Firstly, most studies suggest that the start of CD is around 60 years old, and that this is only the start.

No, cognitive peak is generally recognized as being late 20s/early 30s (google cognitive peak & look at results). Hell some people are throwing around claims as low as 22 (sshhhttt). Now after peak, comes decline...so you can see why I must object to your claim of CD *starting* at 60.

Secondly, (and not disagreeing with you here, just pointing out that their are two facets to experience) there is a wide gap between cognitive decline, and the ability to grasp concepts. Experience

idk to be honest. In my industry experience & seniority kicks ass, but programming is trick imo. That same thing that makes an _intelligent_ 25 y/o programmer invincible, makes a 50 y/o programmer weak. Programming leverages your current state imo. As a reference point, my idea of invincible is [this]. Said link causes me endless doubts btw, because its something idk whether I could match even if I had committed to IT 100%. /shame

 

[rorz0r]

idk to be honest. In my industry experience & seniority kicks ass, but programming is trick imo. That same thing that makes an _intelligent_ 25 y/o programmer invincible, makes a 50 y/o programmer weak. Programming leverages your current state imo. As a reference point, my idea of invincible is [this]. Said link causes me endless doubts btw, because its something idk whether I could match even if I had committed to IT 100%. /shame

That is awesome. Just to understand it you need a firm grasp on math and computers. To come up with it in the first place though is genius. Computer graphics / rendering is very heavy on math though. I think that's where something like photoshop has a lead over other packages.

 

[cguy]

No, cognitive peak is generally recognized as being late 20s/early 30s (google cognitive peak & look at results). Hell some people are throwing around claims as low as 22 (sshhhttt). Now after peak, comes decline...so you can see why I must object to your claim of CD *starting* at 60.

There's one paper that talks about this, and it only claims that perceptual speed peaks at 22 and starts to decline at 27. Cognitive skills such as inductive reasoning and numeracy only start to deteriorate much later. See this blog entry that gives a good meta overview, and links to the relevant references: here. Also, here is the article about the 45 year old start of decline (which contrasts it to the previous findings of approx. 60) - note that apart from the non-representative sample, and that subject health is not accounted for, this is just the start of measurable decline, although the rate is still relatively low until much later. As far as I can tell, no one thinks that dev skills could conceivably decrease (due to cognitive decline at least) until mid-40's, and even then, not significantly for a while. If you are a professional FPS gamer, you're probably sh%t out of luck though.

idk to be honest. In my industry experience & seniority kicks ass, but programming is trick imo. That same thing that makes an _intelligent_ 25 y/o programmer invincible, makes a 50 y/o programmer weak. Programming leverages your current state imo. As a reference point, my idea of invincible is [this]. Said link causes me endless doubts btw, because its something idk whether I could match even if I had committed to IT 100%. /shame

That's a smart hack, but it's really not that magical - the only reason it's famous is because the reason for it's behaviour is so obfuscated. It requires a good understanding of Newtons method, floating point number representation and basic computer architecture (the last, just to know that it would be faster). I was actually asked this during my last job interview - I could answer it, and also pointed out that it is now much slower than using the builtin rsqrt opcode (I got the job ). I'm a little puzzled by why you think that a 25 year old would be better at this sort of thing. I've developed similarly smart code long before I was 25 and still do (at 37). BTW, it looks as though William Kahan, the likely inventor was probably over 50 when he conceived of it and implemented it.

 

[xrapidx]

I really hope by the time I'm 40 I'm not doing dev.... 7 years to go.

 

[cguy]

I really hope by the time I'm 40 I'm not doing dev.... 7 years to go.

As a matter of interest, can you tell us why? I personally have found it good to move between dev and management, I've now gone dev -> magement -> dev -> management -> dev in my career. I found it very useful to see things from the management side, but I really like the fact that I'm not locked there by salary requirements (by virtue of working outside SA the last 10 years). I've found management to be a good break from dev, and dev to be a good break from management (for entirely different reasons ).