I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.
Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.
They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
I got an HR meeting a couple of years back where they selected me to be laid off because I wasn't closing as many tickets off as the rest of the team. Every single ticket had been through another engineer first and they had failed to resolve it.
I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.
I knew a person like you, two decades ago, in a laptop repair facility (my boss).
He was hired full-time (at like 4x my hourly rate) simply because he was the last person working there familiar with how the DOS-only headless terminals were installed (simple, but vital infrastructure). I didn't even understand what he was doing, but knew if I learned it I would have a lifetime solid-six-figure tech support job (two decades ago).
Bossman mostly just sat around and played WoW (seriously, half his hours "on the clock," waiting for next disaster)... but whenever a smug new vendor came in pedaling latest & greatest... he was often the saver of many times his salary. Nobody really liked him (I did — we'd smoke weed together and attend irregular heavy metal shows), but everybody knew he was important technically (e.g. no purchase orders could go through without his machine upkeep — multimillion dollar budgets).
People would literally turn away from him in the hallways so-as to not attract his comicbookguy inquisitions — particularly if you were a network troublemaker / idiot.
I miss his expertise / guidance / wisdom. Favorite bossman ever.
so they kept you aroumd then, eh? sounds like someone in HR with half a brain actually looked at the cost per ticket. those type of escalation tickets are ~3x more costly to resolve than non escalations. sounds like the total $$ per day of your tickets was higher than all your teammates.
Great story, and I feel it! A lot of companies, when they hire a senior person, say they want you to be a "force multiplier" but when you actually go and multiply your team's force, they turn around and say "bbbbuut, wait--your individual performance...."
This is why data driven decision making is a trap. Even if the data is correct, which it's usually not, its still not complete just by definition. It's instinctually a dumbed down, distilled, and one-dimensional view of the real world, of meat space, and you gotta treat it like that.
Here's what is scary. I have been looking at many job descriptions for a Developer Experience Engineer or similar positions. About half of them ask for experience with automated tools to measure developer productivity!
It is sad when the people who are in charge can't recognize such an important role. I'm so sorry this happened to you, and if you can, keep mentoring. At a time when juniors are struggling more than in the past you could be the one to really help.
The #1 skill good devs need to develop is self-marketing. Would that all managers could recognize talent by output alone but alas we all know that's not the case.
I can add to this as well. I am 59 next month. I got my current position when I was 55. I was convinced that it was over for me. I was coming off a 28 month, yes, month, self-imposed sabbatical. Somehow the stars aligned and the interviews went my way.
I, too, teach a lot in my position and mentor ~half-dozen younger people at a time. I do not work for a "cutthroat culture" company, thankfully! All of my protégés have moved from Production Support roles into SRE roles in the past 3 years.
My 36 years of experience allows me to see things someone with far less will not, or cannot yet see. My XP is valued.
I hold monthly SRE Learning sessions where I demonstrate SRE-centric solutions using Python and other tooling. I teach brand new developers what it is to be on a development team and how to function more efficiently on a day-to-day basis. I also got invited to sit in on our company's AI Dev Assist working group after they saw the prompts I was writing and using to implement new and maintain existing systems.
I must also mention that, early on, I won a company trivia contest at my company that included 1,400 participants, and 15 questions where speed mattered. After that, I got a lot of respect from the younger crowd. ;)
If you are practicing ageism in your hiring practices, then maybe you are interviewing the wrong older persons.
We mature (<-key word!) folks have a lot to offer back - you just need to be capable of seeing that in the one you are interviewing. Beware the Grousing Grey Beards!
I honestly dont really understand age descriminating against someone in their 50s (even 59) - you've got a good chance to retire within a decade, but most people dont stay at the same job for longer than a few years anyway so why does it matter? If anything it's pretty likely you will stay for longer than average (let's say till 65-67, so 6-8 more years) cause you're less likely to want to find a new job in your 60s.
> discriminating against someone in their 50s (even 59)
I am in my 50's and I think the biggest discrimination I notice is not specifically age-related but cost-related. I am very expensive, a recent grad is not. Lots of companies think (some are right) that they can do well with the recent grads and are unwilling to shell out what it costs to hire me.
That’s not age discrimination. Either you can not work and have an income of $0 or get paid what the market is telling you you’re worth.
For context I’m 51. I’ve made the trade off of making less than I hypothetically could if I worked at larger companies/BigTech (been there done that got the t-shirt for almost four years until 2023).
I have no issues getting paid my rates which is what I am worth (one of the most important careeer things I advise youngsters is to know what they are worth, the sooner you know the better).
while this is certainly not age discrimination I was just making a point that what sometimes looks like age discrimination it may not actually be that.
and most of the good money is definitely not in “big tech” (though too many people in our industry think that…)
This is absolutely terrible advice mathematically for anyone. If you aren’t working at all, every month that you aren’t working, you have to make 1/12 more for the rest of the year to make up the difference. Take any job that will pay you and keep interviewing. I realize this is much easier working and interviewing remotely
Where exactly besides BigTech and equivalent can a college grad make $170K+ straight out of college and easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
Youngsters aren’t “worth” much of anything. They do negative work starting out.
> This is absolutely terrible advice mathematically for anyone.
I apologize if I sounded like I am
pitching people should stay un-employed, I re-read my comment and I don’t think that I did. I would probably take lower paying job temporarily (not at this point in my career but when I was younger). however though, the 1/12 or 1/6 or 3/12 might sound significant but taking below-your-worth will probably end up worse in the long run if you stay long enough
> … easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
I think you are talking outliers and not for majority, not everyone working in “big tech” will make a mill in 4 years. but to answer your question, I made more in my first 4 years (not even inflation-adjusted) and this is 1999-2003. you can do it in several ways, the two I would recommend:
1. government contracting for a year or two (work your ass off and make top govies happy) then going solo or start your own firm when the contract is up
2. find a company that has been in the business for say 20+ years and has been profitable and has no more than 150 employees. in the first 1-2 years work your ass off and specifically volunteer to work on the worst shit most shy away from, the hardest problems, the worst parts of the codebase, ones that say // do not touch this, no one knows how it works. after some time it’ll be you that everyone turns to when hard problems need to be solved and further you will reach a point where you are more valuable to the company than company is to you. there may be a handful of such people in “big tech” (if that). once you get there you can go 1099 and charge just about anything you want.
overall, treat your self as corporation and every employment not as “I am slaving away for ____” but partnership between two corporations and career gets a lot better than working at “big tech”
That’s no outlier at all a mid level L5 software engineer at Amazon will usual get a 4 year package of around $235K-$250K a year total compensation target. Amazon is in the middle of the pack for BigTech. Apple and Microsoft historically paid less and Google and Meta pays more.
The total compensation target at Amazon is based on
Year 1 - base + large prorated signing bonus + 5% of your total stock package
Year 2 - base + smaller signing bonus + 15% of your total stock package
Year 3 and 4 - base + 20% of your stock vest every six months.
Usually around year 3 you get more stock.
Even an intern I mentored when I was ProServe their from 2020-late 2023 got a 600K four year initial package when they graduate and they got promoted to a mid level L5 in year 3 and will make around $750k-$800k depending on vesting schedule and price of AMZN when the offer was made over 4 years. ProServe (the internal consulting division ) and SAs make around 10% less than software developers.
My four year initial package was for $850K as a mid level consultant - I only had two years of AWS experience at the time. It was supposedly a “field by design” and permanently remote. They had an RTO mandate 6 months after I left - and had moved to Florida partially to save on taxes (no state tax)
GCP pays their senior consultants - full time employees around $250k -$280K
As far as “working my ass off” and going 1099, that was never appealing to me. I worked at AWS ProServe like I said for almost 4 years (full time) and now working as a staff consultant (full time) for a third party consulting company - cloud + app dev.
I like not having to worry about sales, accounting, benefits, chasing payments etc.
I like knowing that I can work 40 hours a week and money appears in my account on holidays, when I’m sick, on the bench, on vacation, etc.
As far as taking “any” job. When I was Amazoned in 2023, my goal was crazy enough to get any remote offer that wasn’t at a large company before my paid vacation reimbursement was up (9 days) and well before I started using my 3.5 month severance let alone my savings.
I took a full time job at a shitty consulting company, with a 20% pay cut and kept interviewing until I found something I wanted. It took a year to get the job I really wanted at the pay I wanted.
The market is different as far it’s harder to get a job at any of the BigTech companies as software developers. But they are still hiring and the pay once there, hasn’t changed for the worse.
More relevant to old folks - like you and me and the article (I’m 51) - is that with AI and businesses jumping on board the hype train, AWS, GCP and Oracle are still hiring consultants, SAs and sales like crazy as companies are trying to figure out an “AI strategy”.
It’s good to be a shovel seller during a gold rush. Consulting companies and divisions love older people who still have relevant experience and can talk to “the business”
I see it as a coup on the company. You have owners who get a skim off the top who probably set it up well at the start. Then you have Xth generation of job maintainers who now run the company and don't see much good reason to make the company prosper as it could effect their career growth/stability. Politics wins out over engineering when the original visionaries hand over the wheel. Owners are too wealthy to care too much, they can sell and retire at any moment.
There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time.
Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
The most wasteful thing about corporate working life now is the way its incentives push everyone into leadership roles as "progress", when they're many people who do not want it or, worse, are clearly not suitable for it. Less so a problem in tech but still there.
Similar age group, also rather stay IC than management, already hat it as team lead and it wasn't fun.
I try to focus on mentoring and technical architecture stuff, pure coding has decreased quite substancially, between SaaS, iPaaS, serverless, and nowadays AI agents, that just being a plain old IC doesn't cut it.
Then there is the difficulting to get new job offers as IC, because in many European countries there is this culture that after 50y one is either self-employeed/freelancing or a manager.
I had someone like you in my early life as a soft-eng and they made a huge impact on me personally and professionally. You will be remembered beautifully.
I am on the same boat. I left management to go back to a senior IC role in my early 50s. I am perceived as an important contributor in my company, but I am 90% sure that no big company would ever hire me. I am also pretty sure I cannot pass LeetCode these days even though I work on implementing scientific algorithms that actually get used by major engineering/manufacturing companies around the world.
Two or three years I was at a conferance arranged by the "mother" company, a very large (relatively speaking) company with lots of sub-companies. One of the guys I met there was a 64 year old engineer, newly hired. As an engineer.
Weird, I don't recall having an alt-account and posting this. That's old age I guess.
I do the same, try to help the young'uns shooting themselves in the foot. I've always enjoyed that part of the job.
It really annoys me that while I feel having the decades of experience to see through hype and the willingness to help newcomers are possibly the most important aspect of being a senior IC, no-one in the current culture care about that or see it as valuable.
In 2022, I interviewed with a company... in crypto.
I was the oldest in the company by a decade at least. They kept telling me they wanted experience. I have plenty, of experience. I was cautiously optimistic.
They eventually failed me on a test of reactJS. The funniest part was when I asked for feedback, the reason they gave me, were showing poor engineering technique on their end; a lack of understanding of what makes it down the wire.
So they wanted experience, but not the experience that prevents them from making mistakes of their own; not an experience that threatened their views. I realised this later. Young rock-star developers want experienced people around them, maybe, but they want to be free to reinvent the wheel on a whim.
Now when I interview some place and I eerily feel old, I just bow out respectfully. No point wasting everyone's time.
My automatic “red flag” was btree tests. As soon as I saw one of those, I knew I was wasting my time.
I was especially annoyed by recruiters that couldn’t do math. They loved all my experience, but ghosted me, as soon as they realized it came with gray hair. I guess the place is crawling with 35-year-olds with 30 years of experience.
As it turned out, I ended up giving up, and just retiring. I had the means, but wanted to keep working for at least another decade. I really enjoyed adding value. I was especially interested in helping small companies get on their feet, as my particular skillset would have been almost ideal for that, and my “nest egg” gave me a pretty good risk tolerance, along with a willingness to take a lower base.
Turns out that these were the exact companies that didn’t want me, though.
Also turned out that I really loved being retired. I have been doing more work in the last eight years, than in a couple of decades previously. I just don’t get paid for it, and I’m fine with that. In fact, I actively resist pursuing a paycheck, as I don’t want to deal with knuckleheads, anymore.
I just had to have my hand forced. I would not have voluntarily done this.
Basically, any test that involves binary trees (sorry - "btree" is a somewhat different thing).
Realistically, most programmers never see another binary tree, after they leave school.
It's a "youth-pass filter." People right out of college will ace them. Us oldsters are less likely to do as well (unless we cram for them). In forty years of programming, I never encountered a single one, in the wild, and a lot of our image processing algorithms involved a decent amount of data crawling, so they had some relation to binary trees (shows why they teach them), but the way they were handled was much different.
It's easy to get bitter about these things.
"Experience" seems to be code for: "we've spent fifteen years painting ourself into a corner and now we need a guy who will get us out of it in three months or less".
You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc.
Having experience usually means that you've acquired a holistic view of software development. Usually the hard way.
But they want solutions, not advice or opinions.
I've met a few devs that makes a living like that. Get in, solve problems. Keep quiet. Get out. Wait for them to call back in a couple of years.
> You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc.
Ironically, the only people who have social permission to do that are extremely expensive Big Name outside consultants. Who will then do one of two things: either speak to the staff, collate what they have to say, and launder it back to the boss; or produce a thinly veiled adaptation of whatever business book the CEO last read in an airport.
> speak to the staff, collate what they have to say, and launder it back to the boss
My wife is a management consultant and this is _exactly_ what she does in half of her projects. But it is a bit more sinister than that, the management consultant feed the info back to the _top_ bosses bypassing the middle-management hellscape.
For example, she did a project for a big bank where she interviewed 70 or so people her main output was a streamlined virtual machine requisition flow (which included merging a couple of teams together and configuring the ticketing system they already had). It used to take devs 6 months to get a VM. I bet the devs where yelling at their middle managers to sort it out, but their managers didn't have or want to actually bring it up with upper management with a plan on how to do it.
I joke that companies could just do that internally, have some people interviewing the leaf nodes in the org to find out top-down initiatives to help work get done, but companies simply don't do this.
This is a reason why when life pushed me away from product development into consulting/agency work, I hated it at first and eventually I learnt to appreciate the positive side of it.
Usually those kind of companies won't hire old employees, while at the same time will gladly pay for consulting knowledge to solve their problems.
Also while product companies tend to hire folks that the very last thing they worked on checks all bullet points on the HR job ad, agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swimm fast enough.
> agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swim fast enough.
I did a few years at a company which was "product development consultancy", and this aspect of it was really enjoyable. We got a set of diverse challenges through the door, often "virtual startups" (CEO hiring consultants rather than staff in order to do v1 of a product). The company was basically a single room, and we had two senior guys (the founders) to review work and support us. Plus one "smartest guy in the room" who served as mathematician fire-support for things like signal processing or the rare actual DS&A problem.
This seems to be arguing that they should more than showing that they increasingly are.
Also the bit about companies with more older workers performing better, and the bit about older people often losing jobs due to layoffs, sound like they could also fit together as high firm performance permitting long tenure rather than having to show only that experienced employees cause higher firm performance (although of course the examples demonstrate the latter via other means, so it can't be that it doesn't happen at all).
ugh that they have to phrase it in such a way already makes me nauseous.
why start with the 'not as a decline, but as'. its such a stupid way to put it.
i cant beleive marketing ppl still dont realize that you dont sell something by say 'oh its not actually a turd its delicious'. JUST SAY ITS DELICIOUS. NO ONE WANTED TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS NOT.
you dont want to put a bad flavor in someones mouth and then try to wash it out.
even LLM get this basic shit wrong lmao.
sorry a bit unrelated but considering the specific topic this tagline is suppose to address its really triggering.
The article is so comprehensive it’s hard to comment on all of it.
I think the idea of making physical workplaces better accessible for older people also benefits the young as well. So many companies just assume “oh hey our factory workers/laborers are strong dudes they can handle XYZ repetitive task no problem.”
But really, you’re just making everyone less productive.
I also think that companies underestimate the quality loss they get when they refuse to cultivate an environment that employees who have the wisdom of older age and perhaps more options to go elsewhere will tolerate.
9/9/6 burnout shops chase away families with kids and older employees who know the value of time and bias themselves toward inexperience, working harder not smarter, and a general lack of diversity in life experience.
There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind.
For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.
Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).
This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
In my experience, friction is greatly underestimated, both as a tool and as an obstacle. I've been able to pick up multiple new positive habits just by reducing the friction involved in doing them to a minimum.
People really underestimate how even small amounts of friction can discourage you from doing things.
I started using Typst instead of Pandoc Markdown->LaTeX->PDF recently. I had a reluctance to change because I didn't really see the point, it looked like Markdown, and who cares if Typst compiles faster, how much time is really spent compiling? I had a watch script set up to start recompiling on a change and it worked well enough.
But eventually I decided to give it a try, and it sort of changed my entire perspective. Large LaTeX compilations could take upwards a minute, which doesn't sound that long, but similar documents could compile in milliseconds, from scratch, and it also supports incremental compilation. It was categorically faster and it wasn't really any harder than Markdown and if you use the Latin Modern font it doesn't look significantly different than LaTeX. [1]
Suddenly I found myself experimenting with and tuning my formatting way more than I did with LaTeX. I make my documents look nicer, make sure that the spacing look nicer, have better-placed page breaks, move text around more frequently to make my writing flow a bit nicer and better. I keep Evince open to the right, tmux with Neovim and `typst watch` on the left and my changes automatically load instantly, and as such I end up making my documents nicer.
I still use LaTeX for stuff that has a lot of math formatting, but for everything else I use Typst and I find myself doing a lot more as a result.
[1] Before you say "Use MS Word or LibreOffice", yeah you're not necessarily wrong but I really hate "hidden formatting" that you get with rich text. Also I almost never like the way that documents end up looking with MS Word.
It is better to zone out and not bother your mind and soul about completely unimportant tiny details, which you are doing with your Nespresso machine.
We live to dream. That's where the magic happens, the meditation, the relaxation, the pondering of deeper ideas and solutions to the more important aspects of life.
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance" - as misquoted by Jett Reno in Starfleet Academy.
I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!
Because while these new grads and less experienced people maybe quite intelligent, in general they are less capable of dealing with or managing anything properly. I am 54 I go back and forth between an IC and director level management at will.
As an IC, all of my designs just simply work without any drama. What happens in this scenario is that as soon as they learn what they needed to learn from me I am usually out. Also there seems to be some concept of drama and running around like a chicken with your head cut off is "fun" and I am a buzz kill in this situation.
As a manager I spend a lot of my time just making sure that everybody is set up for success as nobody seems to be able to advocate for themselves. Their communication is lacking they don't understand their audience or how to delegate. In these roles I am retained as long as I wish.
Smart doesn't equal knowledgeable and smart doesn't equal efficient. It's that simple. These are things best taught through experience.
I work in a place where we have (former) COBOL developers and the actual mainframe. One co-worker worked here for 25 years until they retired last year (does it sounds like trade union propaganda already?). We also have a lot of 20 years old for whom it may be the first job.
Somehow it's consistently no drama and no nonsense place. Compared to the frat house atmosphere of the usual tech startup, it's really different.
Both my previous and current employer have some long-serving staff. One was incredibly effective because he effectively carried the entire oral history of the software system; it would have been a massive loss if he'd ever quit for some reason. Not even a union position, just has to be a "normal" company doing the normal thing of selling a product and/or service to customers rather than a stockmarket rocketship or a consultancy bodyshop.
That’s why they traditionally want to get rid of older people. More likely to talk back. You hire a fresh batch of 20 year olds and their shut up and do what you tell them.
Yes, that's great. Push back, tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently (with reasons and data, of course). Those are the best team members.
I currently manage an engineering team and all my team members are awesome, but the older ones are better at being informedly opinionated, which is very important.
I don't know how rare they are overall, but you can make them rare for yourself by quitting such places.
In over 30 years of career, I'd say I've spent a total of about 2.25 years (between 3 companies) in roles where I wasn't allowed to do my job and was, instead, expected to just listen. In each case, I left pretty quickly.
I'm an expert, if you hire me it is so you will delegate the decision making of my areas of ownership to me. Otherwise why am I here? If there is no good answer to that, then I won't be there long.
I don't recommend staying in any job where you don't own any decision making.
When I was in my 20s I was an insufferable know-it-all who found fault with everything.
I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.
Works best, if you retain, but most companies aren’t willing to do that. They basically force you to leave, in order to make good money.
Being older is just part of the formula. Being good is another part, and having a good relationship with the company and coworkers, is just as important. That comes from longevity in the job, and also, a sense of security.
Companies love to have workers that are constantly afraid they’ll lose their jobs. That doesn’t really encourage a productive, quality-focused mindset.
There’s a lot of negative stuff, said about older employees. Maybe some of it is true, but I suspect that a lot of it, is an inevitable response to years of being treated like shit.
Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
Nevermind that work has become significantly more precarious, the cost of living higher, the wages lower.
Ageism is just a dick move in general. It's gotten to the point where job candidates in their 30s and early 40s are dropping work history and education to appear as if they're in their 20s to potential employers - and even considering plastic surgery[1]. It's gotten completely out of control, but I'm quite glad to see more of my peers and younger colleagues taking a firm stance against it in any form.
As long as the work gets done, everything else is irrelevant. As long as the idea is successful, it doesn't matter the age of the person who surfaced it.
Stereotyping just gets your ass into legal trouble, and the easiest solution is to just not do it in the first place.
It's also self-defeating. Yes, there are greybeards who are stuck in their ways and refuse to learn anything new. But more often than not, the greybeards are super good team members in ways that the younger employees can't hope to compete with, because all that experience has taught them a ton about what works and what doesn't. But rather than trying to harness that valuable knowledge, companies shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring it. It's ridiculous.
This only works assuming somebody cares what works and what doesn't. Often nobody does. Most organizations do not tend to reward the good decision that made everything easy. They reward things that look hard and projects that take forever as long as they can somehow be spun as successes.
I've been pretty successful but my advice is almost always ignored. Where it matters is the stuff I do or the stuff I have control over (e.g. teams I lead).
This entire comment reverberates deep in my bones of late, and I sympathize with you on struggling to find recognition for just doing good work or having good ideas.
A company I worked at years ago had a devious and exploitative approach to market domination: hiring older super experienced workers and plugging them into teams with young over-eager programmers…
People with deep industry knowledge who were trained up to be decent programmers (middling, but serious, consistent, and quality focused), setting the direction. Those domain experts were working with young dumbasses who would burn 60+ hour weeks to make sales deadlines and keep current with ever shifting platform tech that breaks all the time. SMEs baked into the core development loop, DDD-made-flesh essentially, with cheaper more junior devs supporting scale for less money and maximizing the SMEs vision/contributions.
It’s an obvious and effective strategy. I’d speculate the management skills it takes to setup are what keep it as a rarity.
How much of our labor is being used on activities that improve society's ability to defend itself, even in an indirect way? Isn't most of it being used to, as a schematic, serve coffee and send email?
Waste is abound, but how would you get members of the society to feel like things are "fair enough" if everyone didn't "have to work"? (they are obviously not currently, but I am referring to a more ideal society where obviously some people need to do some work)
With technological improvements, we could work far less than we do and enjoy a nice quality of life. Those excess gains were slurped up by the ruling class instead. And the 2nd question looks like American propaganda where if you don’t spend trillions and trillions on defense, the Chinese, Russian, whatever boogeyman will get you.
>With technological improvements, we could work far less than we do and enjoy a nice quality of life.
The current allocation of who does and who does not have to work and how much they have to work is suboptimal, and one of the reasons for societal decay.
>And the 2nd question looks like American propaganda where if you don’t spend trillions and trillions on defense, the Chinese, Russian, whatever boogeyman will get you.
There are multiple examples of the Chinese, Russian, Americans, and other boogeymen "getting" others in my short lifetime of 40 years.
Either way, there's highly undesirable work that has to be done for many societies, whether it be cleaning sewers, farming in humid, hot weather, and educating one's self for 30 years just to do surgery at 2AM, and clean up the fluids and mess of that surgery. If only some people have to do that and not others, it obviously brings up questions of fairness, so the fair alternative is everyone has to work for a certain quality of life (which is not currently true for those with >$x assets).
if I could retire, raise my kids and homeschool them, and do housework instead I would in a second. Nothing is more interesting, more fulfilling, and more challenging then raising the next generation.
You appear to be asking a trick question, disingenuously.
There's a vast continuum between grossly-unequal homeless everywhere like many corrupt, third-world countries with masked, paramilitary disappearance squads and a large, happy middle-class paid well that can afford to buy things, take vacations, and enjoy life where corruption is lesser.
I am 30 and I feel like I get discriminated by age already. Hiring teams are still mostly made up of new grads (<5y exp) who work for cheap and this hasnt changed since 2 decades ago.
When I first started at Big Saas Co i was 42 and most of engineering ICs were late 20s early 30s. The founder, who was at least 65, came over to me and asked how old I was. When I replied 42 he muttered "you're too old" and walked off. Welcome to big SAAS!
Funny thing is I got the job because of my experience with CSS. All the young kids couldn't center a div as the saying goes.
Is Leetcode a way to help weed out older folks? Older folks who have worked in infrastructure (devops/sre where btrees algos mean jack shit) or management (where you haven't coded in a few years)?
For me (40s) my Leetcode skills have gotten noticeably worse over time even though I'm a much better IC than I was. I'm sure I could improve my skills by practicing but I have a family and other responsibilities. I think Leetcode does weed out older folks, not necessarily because of skill, but because of the time needed for practice.
With the age of retirement (in europe) steadily increasing, and the workforce getting older, the typical corporate position of rejecting older candidates will need to change, if only simply to fill the vacancies. For this, the mentality of hiring managers and HR will need to change as well, and business school articles like this should help.
yeah. Long-experienced people (not just plain-old) have grown that feeling called "warm fuzzies" [1]. And although warm-fuzzies are not in the spec, mostly, it is what makes or breaks good product/service.
I liked the article not because I think older people work better but it’s good for society to normalise working when you are old.
Giving a safe, inclusive place where old people can still be productive and feel like they matter is important.
I think the article is correct in that older people can still be productive even at 60+ and it’s a pity that we let them retire. Retiring is not the most healthy option for people!
What are your thoughts on the usefulness of tribal knowledge when older (age-wise) employees change jobs? [0]
Then, the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else. Though I suppose you can make an argument that they might have similar workflows, or tools, or they might just have general experience that would be useful.
But I suppose your comment was more on the under-appreciation by management of existing tribal knowledge in a team.
[0] Perhaps out of necessity, e.g: company went under, or maybe they want a change of pace.
I didn’t read the comment you replied to in that way. I read it as, edge cases can be gnarly and the most thorough of documentation and process will never capture them all.
It’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff.
That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.
> Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge.
they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.
You are being downvoted, but I absolutely agree. Tribal knowledge (institutional knowledge) is a bug not a feature. It is lack of standardized processes and it is ultimately a failure of management to extract this knowledge from employees, any means necessary.
Can't help but feel this sounds like coping. When your country doesn't have a pension system, people don't save for retirement and politicians want to interfere with social care you get the infamous "Walmart door greater".
I just went to a tech social event last week here in Seattle and there were so may older men and women desperately looking for new positions after having been brutally cut by Microsoft and Amazon
Also the calculus that older employees cost companies more in salary and benefits is usually ruthlessly applied
In the tech / startup world I have to lie about my age or hide it as an over 50 year old..
I mean you don’t see any AI commercials with gray haired people do you
Ageism and Sexism is rampant in tech - not to mention the practice or hiring folks of one age , sex and ethnicity or another as culture ‘fit’
It sucks because so many older tech experts with years of good experience have been thrown by the wayside.. to the point where its a cliche
I'll explain the reasoning for why companies are reluctant to hire old people:
You can teach things to an unexperienced person, but you cannot unteach an experienced person. What experience an older person has greatly varies, and this experience could be very useful or useless, depending on what the person has done in life.
Unfortunately there is one experience/wisdom which almost all people learn with age, and that is being a knave. Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately. People seem to think that they have to fight the younger generations with deceit and manipulation. And employers aren't too keen to deal with such persons.
But things might also be changing. The people aging right now are of a higher quality than the current generation of old.
Also, many times your best employees will be old people. But they're harder to find.
“Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately.”
Not really sure where this fortune cookie came from, but in the age of faked resumes, credentials, and AI interview assistants (personally seen this, they’re not even good liars lol), I think we can agree that we’re at best equivalent in degeneracy.
What are your favorite old people deceits?
The ai interview assistant crutch is hilarious because people using it think interviewers can’t tell. It really shows when they are bad speakers. If you train the skill of speaking you’d be much better at getting away with it. Maybe to the point you wouldn’t need it, but that’s their call.
People have to work to survive and afford medical treatment in the US. It’s funny how you can blame the people forced to work to survive and not the system that is setup to force them to do so.
The elite post covid have placed the average worker firmly under their boot. They apply more pressure each day.
Almost every young developer joins the enterprise I work at and spends the first 6 months ranting about how bad everything is and how we could do things so much better with xyz or whatever. We wait, we educate, we leave them to come to the understanding that when you're in a business with billions in turnover, millions of customers, thousands of employees and hundreds of developers, what you learnt at university or building small side projects isn't enough to immediately judge and make changes. After about a year the good developers are proactively contributing good ideas that will actually work. It's not an environment that fits everyone, so we're fine when people decide to leave for somewhere smaller.
I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.
Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.
They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
"Isn't that what you hired me for?"
I got an HR meeting a couple of years back where they selected me to be laid off because I wasn't closing as many tickets off as the rest of the team. Every single ticket had been through another engineer first and they had failed to resolve it.
I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.
I knew a person like you, two decades ago, in a laptop repair facility (my boss).
He was hired full-time (at like 4x my hourly rate) simply because he was the last person working there familiar with how the DOS-only headless terminals were installed (simple, but vital infrastructure). I didn't even understand what he was doing, but knew if I learned it I would have a lifetime solid-six-figure tech support job (two decades ago).
Bossman mostly just sat around and played WoW (seriously, half his hours "on the clock," waiting for next disaster)... but whenever a smug new vendor came in pedaling latest & greatest... he was often the saver of many times his salary. Nobody really liked him (I did — we'd smoke weed together and attend irregular heavy metal shows), but everybody knew he was important technically (e.g. no purchase orders could go through without his machine upkeep — multimillion dollar budgets).
People would literally turn away from him in the hallways so-as to not attract his comicbookguy inquisitions — particularly if you were a network troublemaker / idiot.
I miss his expertise / guidance / wisdom. Favorite bossman ever.
I can be found around heavy metal shows as well hahaha.
I try not to be comic book guy these days. I was in the past. I just want to learn together with people. That is all.
Is your son a drummer, too, H?
so they kept you aroumd then, eh? sounds like someone in HR with half a brain actually looked at the cost per ticket. those type of escalation tickets are ~3x more costly to resolve than non escalations. sounds like the total $$ per day of your tickets was higher than all your teammates.
I would prefer to have someone with a full brain in HR.
Open a ticket for that ... ?
Hahahaha. Depressing but funny.
Reminds me of this post: https://dannorth.net/blog/the-worst-programmer/
Discussed here a couple of times as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361947 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452649
Great story, and I feel it! A lot of companies, when they hire a senior person, say they want you to be a "force multiplier" but when you actually go and multiply your team's force, they turn around and say "bbbbuut, wait--your individual performance...."
Sounds like the person doing the performance review just relies on metrics. Sounds like a shitty leader.
Not only that, but that person was relying on a totally incorrect metric in the first place. Tale as old as time.
This is why data driven decision making is a trap. Even if the data is correct, which it's usually not, its still not complete just by definition. It's instinctually a dumbed down, distilled, and one-dimensional view of the real world, of meat space, and you gotta treat it like that.
Here's what is scary. I have been looking at many job descriptions for a Developer Experience Engineer or similar positions. About half of them ask for experience with automated tools to measure developer productivity!
Many such cases.
I always wonder how productivity is measured
Vibe Managing has long preceded Vibe Coding.
1000% vibes in most tech orgs
Poorly.
Easy, telemetry to count the number of mouse clicks when working.
It is sad when the people who are in charge can't recognize such an important role. I'm so sorry this happened to you, and if you can, keep mentoring. At a time when juniors are struggling more than in the past you could be the one to really help.
The #1 skill good devs need to develop is self-marketing. Would that all managers could recognize talent by output alone but alas we all know that's not the case.
I can add to this as well. I am 59 next month. I got my current position when I was 55. I was convinced that it was over for me. I was coming off a 28 month, yes, month, self-imposed sabbatical. Somehow the stars aligned and the interviews went my way.
I, too, teach a lot in my position and mentor ~half-dozen younger people at a time. I do not work for a "cutthroat culture" company, thankfully! All of my protégés have moved from Production Support roles into SRE roles in the past 3 years.
My 36 years of experience allows me to see things someone with far less will not, or cannot yet see. My XP is valued.
I hold monthly SRE Learning sessions where I demonstrate SRE-centric solutions using Python and other tooling. I teach brand new developers what it is to be on a development team and how to function more efficiently on a day-to-day basis. I also got invited to sit in on our company's AI Dev Assist working group after they saw the prompts I was writing and using to implement new and maintain existing systems.
I must also mention that, early on, I won a company trivia contest at my company that included 1,400 participants, and 15 questions where speed mattered. After that, I got a lot of respect from the younger crowd. ;)
If you are practicing ageism in your hiring practices, then maybe you are interviewing the wrong older persons.
We mature (<-key word!) folks have a lot to offer back - you just need to be capable of seeing that in the one you are interviewing. Beware the Grousing Grey Beards!
I honestly dont really understand age descriminating against someone in their 50s (even 59) - you've got a good chance to retire within a decade, but most people dont stay at the same job for longer than a few years anyway so why does it matter? If anything it's pretty likely you will stay for longer than average (let's say till 65-67, so 6-8 more years) cause you're less likely to want to find a new job in your 60s.
> discriminating against someone in their 50s (even 59)
I am in my 50's and I think the biggest discrimination I notice is not specifically age-related but cost-related. I am very expensive, a recent grad is not. Lots of companies think (some are right) that they can do well with the recent grads and are unwilling to shell out what it costs to hire me.
That’s not age discrimination. Either you can not work and have an income of $0 or get paid what the market is telling you you’re worth.
For context I’m 51. I’ve made the trade off of making less than I hypothetically could if I worked at larger companies/BigTech (been there done that got the t-shirt for almost four years until 2023).
I have no issues getting paid my rates which is what I am worth (one of the most important careeer things I advise youngsters is to know what they are worth, the sooner you know the better).
while this is certainly not age discrimination I was just making a point that what sometimes looks like age discrimination it may not actually be that.
and most of the good money is definitely not in “big tech” (though too many people in our industry think that…)
This is absolutely terrible advice mathematically for anyone. If you aren’t working at all, every month that you aren’t working, you have to make 1/12 more for the rest of the year to make up the difference. Take any job that will pay you and keep interviewing. I realize this is much easier working and interviewing remotely
Where exactly besides BigTech and equivalent can a college grad make $170K+ straight out of college and easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
Youngsters aren’t “worth” much of anything. They do negative work starting out.
> This is absolutely terrible advice mathematically for anyone.
I apologize if I sounded like I am pitching people should stay un-employed, I re-read my comment and I don’t think that I did. I would probably take lower paying job temporarily (not at this point in my career but when I was younger). however though, the 1/12 or 1/6 or 3/12 might sound significant but taking below-your-worth will probably end up worse in the long run if you stay long enough
> … easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
I think you are talking outliers and not for majority, not everyone working in “big tech” will make a mill in 4 years. but to answer your question, I made more in my first 4 years (not even inflation-adjusted) and this is 1999-2003. you can do it in several ways, the two I would recommend:
1. government contracting for a year or two (work your ass off and make top govies happy) then going solo or start your own firm when the contract is up
2. find a company that has been in the business for say 20+ years and has been profitable and has no more than 150 employees. in the first 1-2 years work your ass off and specifically volunteer to work on the worst shit most shy away from, the hardest problems, the worst parts of the codebase, ones that say // do not touch this, no one knows how it works. after some time it’ll be you that everyone turns to when hard problems need to be solved and further you will reach a point where you are more valuable to the company than company is to you. there may be a handful of such people in “big tech” (if that). once you get there you can go 1099 and charge just about anything you want.
overall, treat your self as corporation and every employment not as “I am slaving away for ____” but partnership between two corporations and career gets a lot better than working at “big tech”
That’s no outlier at all a mid level L5 software engineer at Amazon will usual get a 4 year package of around $235K-$250K a year total compensation target. Amazon is in the middle of the pack for BigTech. Apple and Microsoft historically paid less and Google and Meta pays more.
The total compensation target at Amazon is based on
Year 1 - base + large prorated signing bonus + 5% of your total stock package
Year 2 - base + smaller signing bonus + 15% of your total stock package
Year 3 and 4 - base + 20% of your stock vest every six months.
Usually around year 3 you get more stock.
Even an intern I mentored when I was ProServe their from 2020-late 2023 got a 600K four year initial package when they graduate and they got promoted to a mid level L5 in year 3 and will make around $750k-$800k depending on vesting schedule and price of AMZN when the offer was made over 4 years. ProServe (the internal consulting division ) and SAs make around 10% less than software developers.
My four year initial package was for $850K as a mid level consultant - I only had two years of AWS experience at the time. It was supposedly a “field by design” and permanently remote. They had an RTO mandate 6 months after I left - and had moved to Florida partially to save on taxes (no state tax)
GCP pays their senior consultants - full time employees around $250k -$280K
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/solutions-c...
Again they make less than software engineers
As far as “working my ass off” and going 1099, that was never appealing to me. I worked at AWS ProServe like I said for almost 4 years (full time) and now working as a staff consultant (full time) for a third party consulting company - cloud + app dev.
I like not having to worry about sales, accounting, benefits, chasing payments etc.
I like knowing that I can work 40 hours a week and money appears in my account on holidays, when I’m sick, on the bench, on vacation, etc.
As far as taking “any” job. When I was Amazoned in 2023, my goal was crazy enough to get any remote offer that wasn’t at a large company before my paid vacation reimbursement was up (9 days) and well before I started using my 3.5 month severance let alone my savings.
I took a full time job at a shitty consulting company, with a 20% pay cut and kept interviewing until I found something I wanted. It took a year to get the job I really wanted at the pay I wanted.
Keep in mind the market was completely different in 2023 (especially early in the year) than today.
The market is different as far it’s harder to get a job at any of the BigTech companies as software developers. But they are still hiring and the pay once there, hasn’t changed for the worse.
More relevant to old folks - like you and me and the article (I’m 51) - is that with AI and businesses jumping on board the hype train, AWS, GCP and Oracle are still hiring consultants, SAs and sales like crazy as companies are trying to figure out an “AI strategy”.
It’s good to be a shovel seller during a gold rush. Consulting companies and divisions love older people who still have relevant experience and can talk to “the business”
I see it as a coup on the company. You have owners who get a skim off the top who probably set it up well at the start. Then you have Xth generation of job maintainers who now run the company and don't see much good reason to make the company prosper as it could effect their career growth/stability. Politics wins out over engineering when the original visionaries hand over the wheel. Owners are too wealthy to care too much, they can sell and retire at any moment.
You open to adding a new mentee to the mix? I have 10 years of XP and looking to grow doing DevOps work.
There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time.
Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
The most wasteful thing about corporate working life now is the way its incentives push everyone into leadership roles as "progress", when they're many people who do not want it or, worse, are clearly not suitable for it. Less so a problem in tech but still there.
There’s a name for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Similar age group, also rather stay IC than management, already hat it as team lead and it wasn't fun.
I try to focus on mentoring and technical architecture stuff, pure coding has decreased quite substancially, between SaaS, iPaaS, serverless, and nowadays AI agents, that just being a plain old IC doesn't cut it.
Then there is the difficulting to get new job offers as IC, because in many European countries there is this culture that after 50y one is either self-employeed/freelancing or a manager.
not just not care, a lot of companies actively hate what you are doing :-(
as you say, cutthroat
I had someone like you in my early life as a soft-eng and they made a huge impact on me personally and professionally. You will be remembered beautifully.
Thank you for doing the thankless work, sensei!
I am on the same boat. I left management to go back to a senior IC role in my early 50s. I am perceived as an important contributor in my company, but I am 90% sure that no big company would ever hire me. I am also pretty sure I cannot pass LeetCode these days even though I work on implementing scientific algorithms that actually get used by major engineering/manufacturing companies around the world.
Two or three years I was at a conferance arranged by the "mother" company, a very large (relatively speaking) company with lots of sub-companies. One of the guys I met there was a 64 year old engineer, newly hired. As an engineer.
What a noble cause good sir. It's inspiring and I shall steal this idea and do whatever I can to move it forward!
Steal the idea of helping younger employees?
LOL, making a note of usernames of likeminded and situated people. Where's the old people's YC?
(continue to) be the change you want to see in the world.
thank you & to people like you --
places with older people & people with families i.e dads | mothers etc are a pleasure to work with
less bullshit, less time wasting, less chasing non productive hype
however the industry has been decimated lately, so now those places are rare
however I have discovered -- low-key cities tend to have places staffed with experienced colleagues
Weird, I don't recall having an alt-account and posting this. That's old age I guess.
I do the same, try to help the young'uns shooting themselves in the foot. I've always enjoyed that part of the job.
It really annoys me that while I feel having the decades of experience to see through hype and the willingness to help newcomers are possibly the most important aspect of being a senior IC, no-one in the current culture care about that or see it as valuable.
I haven't upvoted a story so fast in ages! j/k
In 2022, I interviewed with a company... in crypto.
I was the oldest in the company by a decade at least. They kept telling me they wanted experience. I have plenty, of experience. I was cautiously optimistic.
They eventually failed me on a test of reactJS. The funniest part was when I asked for feedback, the reason they gave me, were showing poor engineering technique on their end; a lack of understanding of what makes it down the wire.
So they wanted experience, but not the experience that prevents them from making mistakes of their own; not an experience that threatened their views. I realised this later. Young rock-star developers want experienced people around them, maybe, but they want to be free to reinvent the wheel on a whim.
Now when I interview some place and I eerily feel old, I just bow out respectfully. No point wasting everyone's time.
My automatic “red flag” was btree tests. As soon as I saw one of those, I knew I was wasting my time.
I was especially annoyed by recruiters that couldn’t do math. They loved all my experience, but ghosted me, as soon as they realized it came with gray hair. I guess the place is crawling with 35-year-olds with 30 years of experience.
As it turned out, I ended up giving up, and just retiring. I had the means, but wanted to keep working for at least another decade. I really enjoyed adding value. I was especially interested in helping small companies get on their feet, as my particular skillset would have been almost ideal for that, and my “nest egg” gave me a pretty good risk tolerance, along with a willingness to take a lower base.
Turns out that these were the exact companies that didn’t want me, though.
Also turned out that I really loved being retired. I have been doing more work in the last eight years, than in a couple of decades previously. I just don’t get paid for it, and I’m fine with that. In fact, I actively resist pursuing a paycheck, as I don’t want to deal with knuckleheads, anymore.
I just had to have my hand forced. I would not have voluntarily done this.
You mean implement a b-tree live or whiteboard? That is insane.
Basically, any test that involves binary trees (sorry - "btree" is a somewhat different thing).
Realistically, most programmers never see another binary tree, after they leave school.
It's a "youth-pass filter." People right out of college will ace them. Us oldsters are less likely to do as well (unless we cram for them). In forty years of programming, I never encountered a single one, in the wild, and a lot of our image processing algorithms involved a decent amount of data crawling, so they had some relation to binary trees (shows why they teach them), but the way they were handled was much different.
You live the life.
It's easy to get bitter about these things. "Experience" seems to be code for: "we've spent fifteen years painting ourself into a corner and now we need a guy who will get us out of it in three months or less". You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc.
Having experience usually means that you've acquired a holistic view of software development. Usually the hard way. But they want solutions, not advice or opinions.
I've met a few devs that makes a living like that. Get in, solve problems. Keep quiet. Get out. Wait for them to call back in a couple of years.
> You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc.
Ironically, the only people who have social permission to do that are extremely expensive Big Name outside consultants. Who will then do one of two things: either speak to the staff, collate what they have to say, and launder it back to the boss; or produce a thinly veiled adaptation of whatever business book the CEO last read in an airport.
> speak to the staff, collate what they have to say, and launder it back to the boss
My wife is a management consultant and this is _exactly_ what she does in half of her projects. But it is a bit more sinister than that, the management consultant feed the info back to the _top_ bosses bypassing the middle-management hellscape.
For example, she did a project for a big bank where she interviewed 70 or so people her main output was a streamlined virtual machine requisition flow (which included merging a couple of teams together and configuring the ticketing system they already had). It used to take devs 6 months to get a VM. I bet the devs where yelling at their middle managers to sort it out, but their managers didn't have or want to actually bring it up with upper management with a plan on how to do it.
I joke that companies could just do that internally, have some people interviewing the leaf nodes in the org to find out top-down initiatives to help work get done, but companies simply don't do this.
This is a reason why when life pushed me away from product development into consulting/agency work, I hated it at first and eventually I learnt to appreciate the positive side of it.
Usually those kind of companies won't hire old employees, while at the same time will gladly pay for consulting knowledge to solve their problems.
Also while product companies tend to hire folks that the very last thing they worked on checks all bullet points on the HR job ad, agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swimm fast enough.
> agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swim fast enough.
I did a few years at a company which was "product development consultancy", and this aspect of it was really enjoyable. We got a set of diverse challenges through the door, often "virtual startups" (CEO hiring consultants rather than staff in order to do v1 of a product). The company was basically a single room, and we had two senior guys (the founders) to review work and support us. Plus one "smartest guy in the room" who served as mathematician fire-support for things like signal processing or the rare actual DS&A problem.
This seems to be arguing that they should more than showing that they increasingly are.
Also the bit about companies with more older workers performing better, and the bit about older people often losing jobs due to layoffs, sound like they could also fit together as high firm performance permitting long tenure rather than having to show only that experienced employees cause higher firm performance (although of course the examples demonstrate the latter via other means, so it can't be that it doesn't happen at all).
Definitely smells like survivorship bias.
The title is clickbait. This reads more like marketing copy for the author’s consulting firm than any serious research.
They “help forward-thinking leaders and organisations see aging not as decline, but as a driver of innovation, resilience, and growth.”
ugh that they have to phrase it in such a way already makes me nauseous.
why start with the 'not as a decline, but as'. its such a stupid way to put it.
i cant beleive marketing ppl still dont realize that you dont sell something by say 'oh its not actually a turd its delicious'. JUST SAY ITS DELICIOUS. NO ONE WANTED TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS NOT.
you dont want to put a bad flavor in someones mouth and then try to wash it out. even LLM get this basic shit wrong lmao.
sorry a bit unrelated but considering the specific topic this tagline is suppose to address its really triggering.
The article is so comprehensive it’s hard to comment on all of it.
I think the idea of making physical workplaces better accessible for older people also benefits the young as well. So many companies just assume “oh hey our factory workers/laborers are strong dudes they can handle XYZ repetitive task no problem.”
But really, you’re just making everyone less productive.
I also think that companies underestimate the quality loss they get when they refuse to cultivate an environment that employees who have the wisdom of older age and perhaps more options to go elsewhere will tolerate.
9/9/6 burnout shops chase away families with kids and older employees who know the value of time and bias themselves toward inexperience, working harder not smarter, and a general lack of diversity in life experience.
There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind.
For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.
Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).
This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
In my experience, friction is greatly underestimated, both as a tool and as an obstacle. I've been able to pick up multiple new positive habits just by reducing the friction involved in doing them to a minimum.
People really underestimate how even small amounts of friction can discourage you from doing things.
I started using Typst instead of Pandoc Markdown->LaTeX->PDF recently. I had a reluctance to change because I didn't really see the point, it looked like Markdown, and who cares if Typst compiles faster, how much time is really spent compiling? I had a watch script set up to start recompiling on a change and it worked well enough.
But eventually I decided to give it a try, and it sort of changed my entire perspective. Large LaTeX compilations could take upwards a minute, which doesn't sound that long, but similar documents could compile in milliseconds, from scratch, and it also supports incremental compilation. It was categorically faster and it wasn't really any harder than Markdown and if you use the Latin Modern font it doesn't look significantly different than LaTeX. [1]
Suddenly I found myself experimenting with and tuning my formatting way more than I did with LaTeX. I make my documents look nicer, make sure that the spacing look nicer, have better-placed page breaks, move text around more frequently to make my writing flow a bit nicer and better. I keep Evince open to the right, tmux with Neovim and `typst watch` on the left and my changes automatically load instantly, and as such I end up making my documents nicer.
I still use LaTeX for stuff that has a lot of math formatting, but for everything else I use Typst and I find myself doing a lot more as a result.
[1] Before you say "Use MS Word or LibreOffice", yeah you're not necessarily wrong but I really hate "hidden formatting" that you get with rich text. Also I almost never like the way that documents end up looking with MS Word.
It is better to zone out and not bother your mind and soul about completely unimportant tiny details, which you are doing with your Nespresso machine.
We live to dream. That's where the magic happens, the meditation, the relaxation, the pondering of deeper ideas and solutions to the more important aspects of life.
You're trading that for something unimportant.
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance" - as misquoted by Jett Reno in Starfleet Academy.
I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!
Apparently Luke Kaiser is the originator of that form, though there are antecedents:
<https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/06/04/age-treachery/>
The danger is turning into a gerontocracy.
Given the plummeting birth rates, that may be inevitable.
Because while these new grads and less experienced people maybe quite intelligent, in general they are less capable of dealing with or managing anything properly. I am 54 I go back and forth between an IC and director level management at will.
As an IC, all of my designs just simply work without any drama. What happens in this scenario is that as soon as they learn what they needed to learn from me I am usually out. Also there seems to be some concept of drama and running around like a chicken with your head cut off is "fun" and I am a buzz kill in this situation.
As a manager I spend a lot of my time just making sure that everybody is set up for success as nobody seems to be able to advocate for themselves. Their communication is lacking they don't understand their audience or how to delegate. In these roles I am retained as long as I wish.
Smart doesn't equal knowledgeable and smart doesn't equal efficient. It's that simple. These are things best taught through experience.
I work in a place where we have (former) COBOL developers and the actual mainframe. One co-worker worked here for 25 years until they retired last year (does it sounds like trade union propaganda already?). We also have a lot of 20 years old for whom it may be the first job.
Somehow it's consistently no drama and no nonsense place. Compared to the frat house atmosphere of the usual tech startup, it's really different.
Both my previous and current employer have some long-serving staff. One was incredibly effective because he effectively carried the entire oral history of the software system; it would have been a massive loss if he'd ever quit for some reason. Not even a union position, just has to be a "normal" company doing the normal thing of selling a product and/or service to customers rather than a stockmarket rocketship or a consultancy bodyshop.
These places do exist. They are very nice.
For some reason they always seem to be privately owned by one person rather than publicly traded or owned by a corporation. At least in my experience.
Wisdom is a thing, the longer you spend in tech the more you realize that most engineering work is probably a net negative.
That’s why they traditionally want to get rid of older people. More likely to talk back. You hire a fresh batch of 20 year olds and their shut up and do what you tell them.
> More likely to talk back.
Yes, that's great. Push back, tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently (with reasons and data, of course). Those are the best team members.
I currently manage an engineering team and all my team members are awesome, but the older ones are better at being informedly opinionated, which is very important.
> tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently. Those are the best team members.
those companies are rare. and most of the companies are still 100% top down with no talk back and everyone being a yes man.
I don't know how rare they are overall, but you can make them rare for yourself by quitting such places.
In over 30 years of career, I'd say I've spent a total of about 2.25 years (between 3 companies) in roles where I wasn't allowed to do my job and was, instead, expected to just listen. In each case, I left pretty quickly.
I'm an expert, if you hire me it is so you will delegate the decision making of my areas of ownership to me. Otherwise why am I here? If there is no good answer to that, then I won't be there long.
I don't recommend staying in any job where you don't own any decision making.
When I was in my 20s I was an insufferable know-it-all who found fault with everything.
I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.
Insufferable know-it-alls are easy to steer too. Just look at the DOGE team.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867010
Only keeping, or hiring too? Need a job HN. Though I don't do MS Teams, haha.
Works best, if you retain, but most companies aren’t willing to do that. They basically force you to leave, in order to make good money.
Being older is just part of the formula. Being good is another part, and having a good relationship with the company and coworkers, is just as important. That comes from longevity in the job, and also, a sense of security.
Companies love to have workers that are constantly afraid they’ll lose their jobs. That doesn’t really encourage a productive, quality-focused mindset.
There’s a lot of negative stuff, said about older employees. Maybe some of it is true, but I suspect that a lot of it, is an inevitable response to years of being treated like shit.
Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
Nevermind that work has become significantly more precarious, the cost of living higher, the wages lower.
Ageism is just a dick move in general. It's gotten to the point where job candidates in their 30s and early 40s are dropping work history and education to appear as if they're in their 20s to potential employers - and even considering plastic surgery[1]. It's gotten completely out of control, but I'm quite glad to see more of my peers and younger colleagues taking a firm stance against it in any form.
As long as the work gets done, everything else is irrelevant. As long as the idea is successful, it doesn't matter the age of the person who surfaced it.
Stereotyping just gets your ass into legal trouble, and the easiest solution is to just not do it in the first place.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennia...
> Ageism is just a dick move in general.
It's also self-defeating. Yes, there are greybeards who are stuck in their ways and refuse to learn anything new. But more often than not, the greybeards are super good team members in ways that the younger employees can't hope to compete with, because all that experience has taught them a ton about what works and what doesn't. But rather than trying to harness that valuable knowledge, companies shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring it. It's ridiculous.
This only works assuming somebody cares what works and what doesn't. Often nobody does. Most organizations do not tend to reward the good decision that made everything easy. They reward things that look hard and projects that take forever as long as they can somehow be spun as successes.
I've been pretty successful but my advice is almost always ignored. Where it matters is the stuff I do or the stuff I have control over (e.g. teams I lead).
This entire comment reverberates deep in my bones of late, and I sympathize with you on struggling to find recognition for just doing good work or having good ideas.
A company I worked at years ago had a devious and exploitative approach to market domination: hiring older super experienced workers and plugging them into teams with young over-eager programmers…
People with deep industry knowledge who were trained up to be decent programmers (middling, but serious, consistent, and quality focused), setting the direction. Those domain experts were working with young dumbasses who would burn 60+ hour weeks to make sales deadlines and keep current with ever shifting platform tech that breaks all the time. SMEs baked into the core development loop, DDD-made-flesh essentially, with cheaper more junior devs supporting scale for less money and maximizing the SMEs vision/contributions.
It’s an obvious and effective strategy. I’d speculate the management skills it takes to setup are what keep it as a rarity.
Try telling this to the baby faced MBAs that run the org.
>Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
How does a society that allows not working function? How does it defend itself against attacking societies?
How much of our labor is being used on activities that improve society's ability to defend itself, even in an indirect way? Isn't most of it being used to, as a schematic, serve coffee and send email?
Waste is abound, but how would you get members of the society to feel like things are "fair enough" if everyone didn't "have to work"? (they are obviously not currently, but I am referring to a more ideal society where obviously some people need to do some work)
With technological improvements, we could work far less than we do and enjoy a nice quality of life. Those excess gains were slurped up by the ruling class instead. And the 2nd question looks like American propaganda where if you don’t spend trillions and trillions on defense, the Chinese, Russian, whatever boogeyman will get you.
>With technological improvements, we could work far less than we do and enjoy a nice quality of life.
The current allocation of who does and who does not have to work and how much they have to work is suboptimal, and one of the reasons for societal decay.
>And the 2nd question looks like American propaganda where if you don’t spend trillions and trillions on defense, the Chinese, Russian, whatever boogeyman will get you.
There are multiple examples of the Chinese, Russian, Americans, and other boogeymen "getting" others in my short lifetime of 40 years.
Either way, there's highly undesirable work that has to be done for many societies, whether it be cleaning sewers, farming in humid, hot weather, and educating one's self for 30 years just to do surgery at 2AM, and clean up the fluids and mess of that surgery. If only some people have to do that and not others, it obviously brings up questions of fairness, so the fair alternative is everyone has to work for a certain quality of life (which is not currently true for those with >$x assets).
> Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
What is the alternative ?
A little over 100 years ago women were only 20% of the labor force. [1] Which is to say, most women did not participate in wage employment.
Now they're ~47%. Which is great! But it also hints that society doesn't need most of the labor for the system to still function.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/about/history
Rather like subsistence farming, everyone got out of housework as soon as possible and into a far less onerous office.
People didn't get out of housework. They're doing housework and office work.
if I could retire, raise my kids and homeschool them, and do housework instead I would in a second. Nothing is more interesting, more fulfilling, and more challenging then raising the next generation.
Housework isn’t as onerous now as it was 100 years ago, though.
"Work" does not exclusively mean "work full time for a wage".
yeah but carrying and raising kids?
You appear to be asking a trick question, disingenuously.
There's a vast continuum between grossly-unequal homeless everywhere like many corrupt, third-world countries with masked, paramilitary disappearance squads and a large, happy middle-class paid well that can afford to buy things, take vacations, and enjoy life where corruption is lesser.
The disappearing middle class in America is becoming the upper class.
I am 30 and I feel like I get discriminated by age already. Hiring teams are still mostly made up of new grads (<5y exp) who work for cheap and this hasnt changed since 2 decades ago.
When I first started at Big Saas Co i was 42 and most of engineering ICs were late 20s early 30s. The founder, who was at least 65, came over to me and asked how old I was. When I replied 42 he muttered "you're too old" and walked off. Welcome to big SAAS!
Funny thing is I got the job because of my experience with CSS. All the young kids couldn't center a div as the saying goes.
Is Leetcode a way to help weed out older folks? Older folks who have worked in infrastructure (devops/sre where btrees algos mean jack shit) or management (where you haven't coded in a few years)?
For me (40s) my Leetcode skills have gotten noticeably worse over time even though I'm a much better IC than I was. I'm sure I could improve my skills by practicing but I have a family and other responsibilities. I think Leetcode does weed out older folks, not necessarily because of skill, but because of the time needed for practice.
With the age of retirement (in europe) steadily increasing, and the workforce getting older, the typical corporate position of rejecting older candidates will need to change, if only simply to fill the vacancies. For this, the mentality of hiring managers and HR will need to change as well, and business school articles like this should help.
yeah. Long-experienced people (not just plain-old) have grown that feeling called "warm fuzzies" [1]. And although warm-fuzzies are not in the spec, mostly, it is what makes or breaks good product/service.
anyone hiring such? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873028
[1] https://en.svilendobrev.com/1/MeetingtheSpecandOtherSoftware... (a copy because it's gone from web)
I liked the article not because I think older people work better but it’s good for society to normalise working when you are old.
Giving a safe, inclusive place where old people can still be productive and feel like they matter is important.
I think the article is correct in that older people can still be productive even at 60+ and it’s a pity that we let them retire. Retiring is not the most healthy option for people!
I Appreciate the sentiment and yet in spirit of balance:
"Science moves forward one funeral at a time" - Max Planck
Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge. Even the best documentation doesn't cover every edge case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_knowledge
If you've not read it yet:
Programming as Theory Building: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
What are your thoughts on the usefulness of tribal knowledge when older (age-wise) employees change jobs? [0]
Then, the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else. Though I suppose you can make an argument that they might have similar workflows, or tools, or they might just have general experience that would be useful.
But I suppose your comment was more on the under-appreciation by management of existing tribal knowledge in a team.
[0] Perhaps out of necessity, e.g: company went under, or maybe they want a change of pace.
> the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else.
It cuts both ways. It pays to listen when someone goes 'We tried that at my last workplace, here is what happened..'
I've been lucky enough to have a few examples of that in my career.
There are different kinds of tribal knowledge. Some is company-specific, some is role-specific or domain-specific.
While I'm not sure that we should encourage the continuation and growth of tribal knowledge, it is incredibly unwise to not recognize that:
I didn’t read the comment you replied to in that way. I read it as, edge cases can be gnarly and the most thorough of documentation and process will never capture them all.
It’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff.
That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.
> Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge.
they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.
You are being downvoted, but I absolutely agree. Tribal knowledge (institutional knowledge) is a bug not a feature. It is lack of standardized processes and it is ultimately a failure of management to extract this knowledge from employees, any means necessary.
It's not just the management.
Younger workers as well.
I speak from my own experience from both sides of the table, now of course at the receiving end of the under appreciation.
The article has both positives and negatives--what I think is going on is both factors are relevant, just to varying degrees in different situations.
- Young people to innovate and grow
- Old people to stabilise and ensure sustainability
Fire one group and you get problems on the long run.
The hard part is to keep the balance between each group's influence. They don't have the same needs, desires, agendas, and flaws.
It's almost like rusty'ol wisdom and youthful energy are actually a good combination to have!
Can't help but feel this sounds like coping. When your country doesn't have a pension system, people don't save for retirement and politicians want to interfere with social care you get the infamous "Walmart door greater".
Interestingly there is no statistical correlation between worker performance and experience. Maybe the poor lighting is holding them back?
Except, there is correlation.
You're holding the statistics wrong - the chart you're looking at is upside-down.
WTH is this article on about?
I just went to a tech social event last week here in Seattle and there were so may older men and women desperately looking for new positions after having been brutally cut by Microsoft and Amazon
Also the calculus that older employees cost companies more in salary and benefits is usually ruthlessly applied
In the tech / startup world I have to lie about my age or hide it as an over 50 year old..
I mean you don’t see any AI commercials with gray haired people do you
Ageism and Sexism is rampant in tech - not to mention the practice or hiring folks of one age , sex and ethnicity or another as culture ‘fit’
It sucks because so many older tech experts with years of good experience have been thrown by the wayside.. to the point where its a cliche
I'll explain the reasoning for why companies are reluctant to hire old people:
You can teach things to an unexperienced person, but you cannot unteach an experienced person. What experience an older person has greatly varies, and this experience could be very useful or useless, depending on what the person has done in life.
Unfortunately there is one experience/wisdom which almost all people learn with age, and that is being a knave. Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately. People seem to think that they have to fight the younger generations with deceit and manipulation. And employers aren't too keen to deal with such persons.
But things might also be changing. The people aging right now are of a higher quality than the current generation of old.
Also, many times your best employees will be old people. But they're harder to find.
“Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately.”
Not really sure where this fortune cookie came from, but in the age of faked resumes, credentials, and AI interview assistants (personally seen this, they’re not even good liars lol), I think we can agree that we’re at best equivalent in degeneracy.
What are your favorite old people deceits?
The ai interview assistant crutch is hilarious because people using it think interviewers can’t tell. It really shows when they are bad speakers. If you train the skill of speaking you’d be much better at getting away with it. Maybe to the point you wouldn’t need it, but that’s their call.
"Experience is the name men gave to their mistakes" - Oscar Wilde (b. 1854)
OK, boomer.
The other side of this is old people desperately hanging onto jobs because they can't afford to retire. So slots are not opening up for young people.
People have to work to survive and afford medical treatment in the US. It’s funny how you can blame the people forced to work to survive and not the system that is setup to force them to do so.
The elite post covid have placed the average worker firmly under their boot. They apply more pressure each day.
Yet another side is arrogant little babies coming on board and making a big steaming mess of things because they thought they could do things better.
Waaaaahhhhhhhh
Almost every young developer joins the enterprise I work at and spends the first 6 months ranting about how bad everything is and how we could do things so much better with xyz or whatever. We wait, we educate, we leave them to come to the understanding that when you're in a business with billions in turnover, millions of customers, thousands of employees and hundreds of developers, what you learnt at university or building small side projects isn't enough to immediately judge and make changes. After about a year the good developers are proactively contributing good ideas that will actually work. It's not an environment that fits everyone, so we're fine when people decide to leave for somewhere smaller.