[socrates1998]

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.

[freetanga]

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.

[greenyoda]

Two things surprised me here:

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.

[reaperducer]

I find neither of those things surprising.

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.

[freetanga]

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)

[tluyben2]

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...

[geerlingguy]

> 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!

[Aperocky]

'Medium sized' lol, I think you're being very humble.

[freetanga]

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 ;)

[jkoudys]

I thought my team became "medium" when I went from managing two people to four.

[tonyedgecombe]

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.

[stuff4ben]

>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.

[freetanga]

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)

[EliRivers]

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.

[driverdan]

Get them a raise ASAP and pay them what they're worth.

[tolbish]

What are you going to do with all the extra cash he's making you?

[kevin_thibedeau]

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.

[maerF0x0]

Incoming rant.

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.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/the-employment-gr...

[rcurry]

What could possibly go wrong?!?

[asdasfasdfasdf]

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.

[state_less]

Some anecdata to add to the case.

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.

[Avicebron]

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..

[marktangotango]

> 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!

[Spooky23]

Most of these workers aren't programmers.

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.

[biztos]

> just collecting a paycheck...

If anybody thinks there aren't a lot of young people at large tech companies just collecting a paycheck, I have some bad news for them...

[znpy]

I've seen this, and can confirm that.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[api]

It depends on what you mean by new tech.

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.

[commandlinefan]

> cheaper, contractor rates.

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.

[josho]

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.

[hellisothers]

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 $$$

[johnward]

I left IBM by choice to become an IBM sub-contractor. I was paid better and had better benefits. I don't really see how IBM is saving money here.

[kls]

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.

[xienze]

> 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.

[mc32]

It depends... if you need someone for a year a contractor is cheaper even at a higher prorated rate. You can terminate them at will as well.

[crmd]

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.

[lotsofpulp]

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.

[dyeje]

No, contractors are significantly cheaper because no payroll taxes, benefits, time off, etc.

Contract to hire is typically through staffing agencies. The company can go through various contractors and hire the ones they like full time.

[JoeAltmaier]

I've taken a cut each time I sign on vs contracting. Only done it when equity or length of engagement make it attractive.

[x87678r]

Roles I've seen pay the same, but FTs benefits of healthcare/401k/vacation are worth 50k/yr.

[Consultant32452]

I found this helpful rule of thumb to estimate the cost of benefits:

https://beebole.com/blog/how-to-calculate-the-real-cost-of-a...

>...the real salary of an employee ends up “being 18% to 26% more than a worker’s base salary.

[greenyoda]

Also, for an on-site employee, the company would need to add the cost of office space, equipment, IT support services, etc.

[Avicebron]

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.

[Nasrudith]

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.

[Grimm1]

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.

[throwaway189262]

> 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.

[Grimm1]

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.

[throwaway189262]

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

[Frondo]

I felt this way when I was 25, like I'd been programming since I was 7 and I was hot shit.

I'm approaching 40 now and only in the last year or two does it occur to me that, even at 25, I was really only middle-grade.

I wonder what you'll think if you look back in 15 years, about your skills now.

[reaperducer]

IBM is also a joke, just like Oracle.

A 100-year-old company with $80,000,000,000 in annual revenue operating in 177 countries is "a joke?"

I don't even know what to say, other than you're simply proving the points the graybeards in this discussion are making.

[Grimm1]

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.

Their strategy and execution are quite poor.

[reaperducer]

Every time I've interacted with someone from IBM

What percentage of IBM's 362,000 employees have you interacted with that is statistically meaningful?

Have you looked at their public facing offerings lately?

Only two of them. They were impressive. But you and I are looking at different offerings, probably in different market segments.

They're losing ground on pretty much everything that is a modern revenue driver

And yet, its income was up almost ten billion dollars last year. Seems like IBM knows very well how to drive revenue.

IBM has hundreds of products. I suggest you expand your view beyond the very few that are critiqued on HN.

[Grimm1]

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.

Fair point otherwise.

[HarryHirsch]

I'm 25 and have a senior title

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?

[unishark]

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".

[Grimm1]

No, I have 15 years experience in computing. I assure you I am not a greenhorn and you are insulting.

[HarryHirsch]

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.

[Grimm1]

Apologies. Food for thought.

[reaperducer]

"I'm 25, I've been programming for 15 years now"

No one is going to look at your resume and be impressed by what you did when you were ten years old.

[pmiller2]

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.

[Grimm1]

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.

[olalonde]

> 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.

[xienze]

> 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.

[olalonde]

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.

[LostTrackHowM]

If it was that simple, why don't they use that strategy with young workers as well?

Because the young workers are already cheaper. Hard to out-cheap them. (Obviously not their fault.)

[wolco]

To hire back young people on contract would cost more than the entry level salaries they hold.

[KKKKkkkk1]

> Another reason why I won't ever work for a large company again.

Sounds like you're claiming there is less discrimination at startups?

[socrates1998]

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.

[acruns]

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.

[itronitron]

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.

[mattmanser]

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.