[winestock]

>Older programmers are sometimes being enticed out of retirement to maintain legacy systems (this is rather hit or miss as there appears to still be some age discrimination here).

Dear Lord. The one area where age discrimination should rationally favor older programmers and they still get the shaft. How does that conversation go in HR?

"Here's a candidate who knows COBOL... but wait, he's over 60. Ewww, it's so depressing looking at old people [i.e., those over 30] who aren't management track. And we'd have to pay him good money to do something that isn't focused on giving orders to underlings. How yucky. Welp, guess that mission critical piece of software can wait."

Perhaps I've been channeling Michael O. Church a bit too much for my own good, but sometimes it looks as though he's nailed it.

[vorg]

> The one area where age discrimination should rationally favor older programmers and they still get the shaft.

The reason older workers are employed only grudgingly for vacant Cobol jobs is most of those jobs require after-hours standby support that older people generally don't want to do. Not wanting to be woken up at 3:00am anymore was why I left my last job doing such stuff. Younger workers are less likely to get a doctor's certificate saying they're no longer able to do standby work, soon after they're employed.

[kanzure]

> but wait, he's over 60.

But he didn't say which way the age discrimination works. Are they only taking ancient programmers because "young people can't possibly have any experience on COBOL/Fortran-loving mainframes" or is it the more familiar form of age discrimination?

[mindcrime]

Perhaps I've been channeling Michael O. Church a bit too much for my own good, but sometimes it looks as though he's nailed it.

I'm a big fan of MOC's stuff as well, but just to give you one different datapoint... I'm pushing 40 (will be 40 in July) and I haven't seen any evidence of age discrimination yet. I did get laid off from a programming job about 2 years ago, but, to be quite honest, I had mentally "checked out" a good year or so before along with about half of the other stuff, most of whom left voluntarily or also got laid off. It was a shit job with shit management, and we all groused about it and start making it clear to management that we felt that way, so no big surprise there. OTOH, I had a new job lined up within < 8 hours of the layoff announcement. That goes mostly to the fact that I network a lot and knew exactly who to call, but still...

Now, working in a slightly different role as a traveling consultant type, as opposed to a "sit in the same office day after day after day working on the same product" I find that my age sometimes actually helps. I've been sent to help some of the younger consultants because, as my boss put it, the customer "wants to see somebody with some grey in their beard". And, unfortunately, a little bit of grey is starting to show in my beard. :-(

Anyway, it's just one bit of anecdotal evidence, and I don't mean to claim that age discrimination doesn't happen. But it's definitely not universal. At least in the Raleigh / Durham, NC area.