Thanks for being honest. I get your point. But in other words, you reject equally qualified candidates just because they are older. So the old guy has to be _better_ then the young guy to get hired.
I just got finished posting about ageism not being as big of a deal as people say it is. But, after reading this, I can see how it’s more nuanced. If your experience doesn’t match what it “should” be for your age, yeah I could see discrimination happening.
I wouldn't call it discrimination. If a company is looking for a principal engineer let's say (very senior in the FAANGs I know). They want to see you have experience showing operating at a principal level based on their expectations. If you worked for 20 years at the same company as a software engineer and never got promoted let's say, you wouldn't be considered. (maybe you're amazing and they are making a mistake, but unless someone at the company who worked with you can recommend you, they will prefer to focus on candidates that look more promising on paper. They cannot interview everyone)
I think the government would call it discrimination.
> The law prohibits discrimination [against people over 40] in any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.
Did I say age? I said they are looking for people who operated in a certain level for at least x number of years. If your resume doesn't show it (regardless your age) you are not qualified for the position. If anything they discriminate against young people since they require x years of experience which young people cannot have.
It seems like he is applying for the same roles that are typically sought after by much younger people. I don’t think he is trying to apply for senior roles. He said that they say he has to be really good or young.
That's a problem then. I already mentioned those places are a bit like the army. They usually don't consider experienced people for junior positions. Academia is the same. What I've seen happening sometime is interviewing someone experienced to a senior position and then giving them an offer to a less senior position since they did well on the interview but not well enough (the thing that changes is the title they are given (less senior level), which affects responsibilities and salary).
I quit applying to youngster-roles (I can now smell them with quite an accuracy) and focused on SRE/Devops roles. They come with a tolerance for grey hair (or at least they claim to) albeit they are so broad and deep at the same time that is insane.
There are lots of reasons why someone who is qualified to be a principal engineer might have worked for a long time without being promoted. Many companies do not recognize or reward based on technical merit. For example, you might need to be buddies with the right manager or luck into the right high-visibility project. Many people also job hop for the sole purpose of being promoted to a higher level because their existing company won't promote. I've worked at several companies where the inside joke was "It's easier to get hired at Google than to get a promotion here."
I think a lot of hiring companies over-index on "what's the candidate's current job title/function" as an indication of potential.
It’s not about title. It’s about accomplishments. I have hopped around working for small companies all of my career. I am actively in the interview process for two of three major cloud providers (consultant not software developer). I have only worked for one company that anyone has ever heard of and only one company that I was anymore than “senior developer”. But working for small companies you get to lead a lot of initiatives if you play your cards right.
>It’s not about title. It’s about accomplishments.
TBH, I don't even know what my official title is. I'd have to look it up in the HR system. And I've been in pretty much the same boat my whole (pretty long) career.
My current job made up some external title for me when I got hired but it didn't actually really parse and was too long so I've just gone through a few iterations that I've basically made up myself for external consumption.
It is, but on a very subtle level. Since there are much less senior positions then non senior (it is a pyramide) there are basically less jobs for older (more senior people). This gets a bit compensated that over time each batch more ppl study CS (although there might have been a bulk 20 years ago, so not sure....) But if the hiring/available position per age group pyramide is narrower than the age distribution for developers, that it is leading to discrimination (although as mentioned very subtle, and with the best definsible intentions)
20 years ago, technology wasn’t as pervasive as it is now. Pre-Covid, in most major cities in the US, senior developers who kept their skills current and knew their market would be swept up as soon as they came on the market. My fastest time going from looking for a job to getting an offer with a subsidiary of a F10 company was 4 days in 2012.
I met a local recruiter for lunch on Monday, he sent my resume to the company Tuesday, I had a phone screen Wednesday in person and offer Thursday.
I was no special snowflake. Just a regular 37 year old Enterprise C# developer.
True on paper I had 15 years of experience. But in reality, I had been an “expert beginner” in 2008.
That wasn’t a fluke. Everytime since then the company I usually ended up working for was one that I was introduced to during the first week of looking.
We're not talking about someone who says they have 20+ years experience and therefore wants to be considered for <Top Wizard Role>.
It's rather that, if you spent the last 20 years building CRUD apps (some even made ppl money and were successful!) and some kid also built a CRUD app, you're fucked, because as you get older you're expected to be some kind of brilliant outlier -- afterall, what have you been doing for the last 20 years?!
This is what ageism really is, and it sucks because you can easily spend/waste a decade on some project/startup that goes nowhere, or worse still, some tech stack that's now defunct or deemed archaic.
This is why I like to joke that I'm a Senior Flash Developer with over 20 years experience, hire me please xD
It's a structural problem. If everyone expects 20 years of experience people to be principal engineers, and only 5% of roles are principal jobs, then after 20 years 95% of engineers need to leave the industry.
And so, the industry is mostly populated by inexperienced people and many of its pathologies and adverse outcomes are due to this.
> 20 years of experience people to be principal engineers and only 5% of roles are principal jobs, then after 20 years 95% of engineers need to leave the industry.
I'm not sure I follow your math. 5% of roles are principal jobs, but devs with 20+ years are not 100% of the talent pool. This doesn't hold up if devs with 20+ years are are 5% or less of the talent pool.
Still, given "20+ years of experience" represents all programmers of ages, say, 45-65 - or two decades worth of CS graduates - I feel that cohort far exceeds the market for principals? If you think it is smaller, maybe that's because everyone who wasn't in the top n% had to leave?
Although other commenters have pointed out that the growth of the industry counters that, that won't last forever!
I thought it was an interesting question and found this page[1] . It is a survey of 50k devs on Stack overflow. 3.8% percent of those surveyed were over 50. Cenensus data here[1] gives ~20% over 50
I agree with the sentiment, but in this industry which has exponential growth, the number of people in it doubles every 5 years, I think. So if you've been working 20 years, there are now 16x as many people as when you started...so you are in the most senior 6% of people if you managed to stick around.
I was on an interview loop the other day with a 30-something year old candidate. He had worked for nearly a decade in another industry, but got bored and got a CS degree in his spare time. He was applying as a new grad, and he was treated as a new grad. We hired him because he was pretty darned good- for a new grad. We hired him at a junior level, the same as any other new grad.
It's not about age it's about [growth / years of work]. It's about predicting the future of a candidate and asking if they will grow further.
Like I said, if you've spent 20 years in industry and haven't grown, what have you been doing?
Edit:
A candidate who has not grown in 20 years is not equally qualified as a candidate who just graduated and can do the same things.
Up or out, amirite? Likewise, if they've spent 20 years in industry and haven't saved enough to retire, what have they been doing?
There's a lot of growth that can happen in 20 years that will be invisible to you in an interview loop. Things like patience, humility, perspective, compassion, ability to teach/mentor, etc. Focusing on technical ability at the junior level with leetcoding, and technical growth at the senior level, means you will filter out all but the most exceptional (or one-dimensional) senior candidates.
In your opinion, is it acceptable to have grown for the first 10 years of your career, hit a personal snag (burnout, parental healthcare, medical condition) and then reluctantly chosen to coast on your career and skills for 10 years? If this is not 'equally qualified' as a candidate who has been "only" been working for 10 years, then what are you saying about older candidates? Because this kind of stuff happens to a lot of us--and I might even be as bold to say it happens to most of us.
And as far as "predicting future growth", does this mean you wouldn't hire a 60-year-old who planned to retire in a few years? Keeping in mind that most hires leave before a few years anyway.
> In your opinion, is it acceptable to have grown for the first 10 years of your career, hit a personal snag (burnout, parental healthcare, medical condition) and then reluctantly chosen to coast on your career and skills for 10 years?
God I hope not- that what I've been doing, lol. But seriously though, if you've spent 10 years growing as a developer, you're probably at the level of a senior dev. Those soft skills are also interviewed for- we don't just ask technical questions.
I've been on interview loops where at the end, we've said "This person's soft skills are out of the park good, but they're technical skills lacked. Are there other roles we could consider this person for, like a project manager?" because soft skills are king. I've also been on loops where we said "This person's technical skills are out of the park, but there are too many worrying signs in our soft-skills questions to go forward".
> does this mean you wouldn't hire a 60-year-old who planned to retire in a few years
Hasn't happened to me yet. Most folks with 30+ years in the industry aren't looking for junior level dev jobs.
I hear what you're saying but you can't tell someone's day-to-day soft skills from an interview. They're either on their best behavior or nervous and/or trying to impress you with their skills within a limited timeframe. This does not inform how they will be able to use their professional relationships that they develop within your organization (over the course of months and years) to get the job done.
For that you'd have to look at their past work and their references. Neither of which were even checked during multiple interviews during my last job hunt in 2018.
I must be totally missing the point here, I don't see the problem at all (as a non-FAANG developer in my mid-30s).
I've read that companies like Google evaluate employees in an up-or-out manner up to a certain level; before level X, if you've been a satisfactory junior engineer for Y years but have not been promoted to the next tier on schedule, your performance reviews will nonetheless begin being judged against the next tier's performance criteria and the "meets expectations" junior level work you've been doing will become unsatisfactory (even though you're still a junior engineer). You either grow according to expectations as you gain experience or you are managed out. Happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood the system.
Given that, if companies require current employees to progress in their careers to stay with the company, why should prospective new hires from outside the company with umpteen years of experience (for which they will be compensated with higher-than-new-grad pay) get a pass on that same expectation of showing growth throughout their career?
If you spent 20 years to be at the same level as a college grad, you are not equally qualified. The ability to grow and improve matters. When hiring you project growth and if someone has proven they have limited upside, they aren't as good of a candidate.
Also the old person probably has higher salary expectations.
No it doesn't. Humans aren't a constant box of skill, your intelligence grows or reduces. A young candidate with X amount of skill is more likely to reach 2X skills in 10 years than an older candidate who has stayed at X for past 10 years. Growth potential is what counts, and you saying that you have been at skill level X for past decade just proves that your ability to grow is reaching nil.
Or, a person is being unfairly passed over for opportunities for any number of reasons outside their control. Bad companies do exist, and not everyone has their pick of jobs.
It was in their control, they could have gained solid skills in those 20 years to set them apart from a college grad. 20 years is a very long time, you could master several disciplines during that time, so if you fail to master even your main occupation it tells us something about you.
How does staying at a single company improve your skills? You can switch 5 companies in 5 years or stick to 1 company for 5 years, the amount of skills you gain is not tied to duration of your employment but your inherent ability to learn and desire knowledge.
It’s a bit more complex than that, in my experience. This is a contrived example, but if someone has 20 years of experience, it’s unlikely that they’ll be willing to accept a job offer appropriate for someone with 5 years of industry experience, even if the interview reveals they have that level of proficiency.
In a FAANG you need to be competitive. If you are junior and 40+, you probably had different priorities and struggles in life, so you might not be willing to have the dedication required.
It also creates problems for both you and your peers - you will have a very ambitious 28 yo giving guidance, from a management or senior position, to a 40+ yo. You might feel bad in that situation and it's not going to be easy for the younger person having to guide you.
It's amazing the amount of prejudice and wrong data being spewed in this one sentence:
> In a FAANG you need to be competitive.
I've worked at Google since 2006 and have done well over 250+ interviews here, competition is assureadly not a quality we select for. In fact, as an interviewer, I tend to bias against that behavior.
> If you are junior and 40+, you probably had different priorities and struggles in life, so you might not be willing to have the dedication required.
"probably" and "might not" are strong words when talking about assumptions and prejudices. What "dedication" are you talking about? The interviews FAANGs use are amongst the most gruelling in the industry -- if a candidate expresses through them that they have the skills and are interested in the job, and the corp needs it filled, it should be filled regardless of age, sex, gender, background, race, creed, or color. Full stop.
I'll also note, most of Google's upper management is 35-40 years old, if not older, and the younger managers are trending closer to 35 these days, and actually not as prevalent as they used to be.
I've managed older folks underneath me in the past -- I never had a problem with guidance or behavior. In fact, they were often the most hands off because they usually already knew what was needed next.
Do either of these two things you’ve outlined come from things you’ve personally experienced or is this theory and speculation? The first seems to preclude the possibility that someone could be pivoting out of one career and into tech, and the other just sounds like that 28 yo needs to jettison their ego.
Actually no wait they BOTH sound like someone needs to jettison their ego.
Anyone remotely woke would realize that they are to ignore the unusual age difference of their manager (rather than feel bad, etc) to precisely the same extent that they are to ignore all other differences of protected classes.
That pretty much confirms what the OP said.