Thats what this whole article is about. Older people usually have less ability to take a higher risk, due to family concerns, or other reasons. It is classic supply and demand. Younger programmers are more sought after, therefore demand higher pay.
The problem with Old Programmers, is not their work. Thats solid. Its the fact that they have mortgages, pensions, health issues, etc. This costs employers money. And employers HATE giving money because they feel like since you are getting a meager salary they are already doing you a giant favor.
Its a management cultural issue, not an older programmer issue really.
Most older programmers want to be paid more because they are old. Not because they bring added value. That's the issue. I'm over 40. I have no issues getting the compensation I think I am worth. I also am not embarrassed to be paid the same amount as people ten years younger than me. I'm not adding more value than them on a productivity basis ... so I should not get paid more.
Truly excellent programmers in my age group are absurdly well paid as consultants. But it takes courage and extreme productivity to live like that. Most people my age don't have the gumption to do that.
I can relate to this article, but I have to say that not all older people know how to code. I'm pretty much at the age mentioned in this article so my peers are all "old farts" in the tech industry. Some of them evolve into excellent programmers with valuable experience. Others are very change resistant and possibly never had good practices in their career. Some have had cushy jobs at corporations and move at the speed of a snail. Others crank out solid code at inhuman speed.
Basically I think older coders need to be evaluated the same as younger guys. Some are good, some are not. However I do agree that older guys with families are not going to work 24/7 for 6 months in exchange for free pizza.
I am less driven by the prospect of becoming an old expensive programmer, and more concerned about missing out on gaining management experience. I have conversed with many programmers who express concern that they have no management aspirations, and yet the longer they remain pure programmers, they find they have fewer options as they age, instead, as one might imagine, more.
Maybe it's because it's harder to convince a 40-year old programmer to work bullshit hours for a few slices of free pizza.
I often see aged programmers are more tolerant with things they dont like,as they know most jobs are just boring from their years of working experience. Lots of them think job is just for paying the bill.
I think one of the interesting angles here is “the rate [these programmers] expect [the company] to pay”.
Experience has value, but it surely tapers off. If someone who is 50 and has 30 years of experience is no better than someone who is 40 with 20 or 35 with 15, why would the 40 or 50 year old expect to make more? (I think they often do, but I don’t see the basis for it, speaking as someone on the right end of that age spectrum: you’re hiring me for what I can do, not how many candles were on my last cake.)
It doesn’t matter how good you are, a team of 10 well-managed programmers will always out code you. You can hve higher output per hour, if you do the well-managed part.
Or you become a teacher. Make 10 programmers 11% better and you’ve contributed more to the company’s bottom line than you ever could on your own.
Or a consultant. In that one highly specialized area where you are king ... well a team of 10 can’t touch you because your pattern matching solves the problem right away.
Ultimately the older you are the more you understand that hey, maybe if your work is contributing millions to the bottom line, maybe you should be compensated proportionally and that $150k is a joke?
This understanding is a problem for new founders. First of all, they’d like to pay you less moneys and give you kool-aid instead. Team spirit and all that. Second of all, you are likely waaaay overqualified for what they actually need. Makes you hard to keep around and engineering churn is one of the toughest things to work around on a product team. Institutional knowledge is king.
So ageism comes about. Because experienced people are both expensive and unnecessary.
I think a lot of the age-ism has more to do with cost than skill. Older developers ask for more pay, negotiate more, and are less willing to put in uncompensated overtime.
The way to get past this is to make sure you develop skills that are exotic and high-end and hard to find so you can't easily be replaced by a cheaper college grad.
There tends to be a lot more money in management, consulting, and other areas that don't require daily coding. I've heard many non-technical people say that if you're still coding after ~35, you must be lacking important people skills. I don't agree with that kind of generalization, but it seems to be a common viewpoint.
The major problem for older programmers is that people believe that the ability to learn decreases with age. I think I've seen some research to back it up, but it was more about willingness to learn, as well as having to let go of long-held ideas.
For example, few grandparents will figure out how to use a new smartphone as quickly as their grandchildren will. It may just be because the form factor is new, and they have to forget a lot of their understanding of how such devices work. It may also be that they no longer want to invest the time learning something that won't pay them back before they die. (That may sound harsh, but my dad, who is 72, often gives this reason for refusing to learn how to use a smartphone. In his mind, things change too rapidly and the time would be wasted.)
Another problem is that older programmers have higher salary requirements. My company interviewed (and eventually hired) a 60-year-old iOS developer, and he asked us for double what the developers in their 30s were asking for.
(It's also a lot more expensive to pay for health benefits for an older person, but it's not that much compared to the salary issue.)
I hope that a solution could be provided by the anonymity of the internet. Perhaps older programmers could truncate their resumes and remove the years they earned their degrees, and then they could find contract work. I personally have had many contracts where the client had no idea how old I am. Toptal might be a good option.
The article focuses on the fact that as programmers age past 30 their salaries grow but they have roughly the same skills. But that is not the main dynamic here. The main dynamic is that as a person's brain ages, it improves in some ways and gets worse in others. The improvement is that you have more depth and experience. The loss is that your brain gets slower and less flexible.
Unfortunately, in computer programming you will run out of experience and depth that you can accumulate after about 8-10 years of work (say ages 22 - 32). Every new technology is just a variant of the previous 999 technologies. But you still keep getting older every year, and incurring the downsides of getting older!
Compare this with, say, being a doctor. A doctor at 32 is just finishing residency, so he or she has just finished formal education. At 42, she has 10 years of experience, and a doctor with 10 years of experience is better than one fresh out of school. The doctor keeps getting better at 52 (20 years of experience) and 62 (30 years of experience).
The big picture is that computer programming is a field with low barriers to entry and where young people have a significant advantage. Staying in a field like that for the long run is going to lead to a brutish brutish existence.
There are many posts here along the lines of "I'm 39 and still doing ok". That's beside the point, because in the future you will be 49, then 57, then 65. Remember, Social Security full retirement age is 67.
It doesn't make sense to wait until you are 40 to switch. Every career field accepts young people easier than old people, which means that the time to start planning your switch is today.
Yup. It's pretty common for a 60-year-old to be 10 times as productive as a 25-year-old in the long run (counting bugs, rewrites, "oops, we built the wrong thing", "oops, this doesn't scale", "oops, this incredibly fragile when we try to extend it") even working 80% of the hours (40 hours to the youngster's 50).
And even the highest salaries for the most senior engineers are less than 10x an entry-level programming salary these days.
IME it's not pure 'ageism', but salary and workplace dynamics. Having had the privilege of working with many older devs, who played a big role in shaping my career...
After the first 2 decades your worth as an individual contributor (or at most, team lead) stagnates. You're probably at the top of the pay grade already, and the older you get the more you'll have to work with more junior people, as 'equals' despite having substantially more experience. It's very hard to give you any sort of career progression. You may be a lot more productive, but your 'multiplier effect' is small compared to a manager, or someone who deals with a lot more stakeholder complexity.
It's even more pronounced in current times where a 25 year old makes 100K (a lot in the UK). They're very unlikely to double their salary over the next 10 years in similar positions. Whereas most people start at 25K.. work their way up to 100K... exec level etc is 200K.
Successful 'pure' programmers who get jobs usually have an infra flavour of the month skillset, or make it clear that they're happy to get paid the same as someone with say 10 years of experience.
Most of them though go into strategy or become contractors.
Pay bands. Loss of the love/age discrimination. Hours/screw your stress.
Sorry... we don't understand what you do enough to warrant paying you 2x-3x what we pay the grads and we pay grads more than other starters. Pay the programmer more than execs or non-tech with big degrees?
There are also a bunch of folks that ride out the tech that they rode in on when they started. PHP? Classic ASP? COBOL? If you don't love to learn and adapt in both tech and culture, you won't know what the cool kids know nor will you fit well with their group to tell stories about pointers and punch cards.
At 40, those kids of yours are just getting better and better and you might be feeling guilty about missing out on parts of those first years. You might have also done the math on how much of your surplus value you, as developer, are pouring into the sales guys' gas guzzler... You are there when something fails. You are there cashing the checks that the sales people write beyond scope, budget, and/or time. You see that gals' work-life balance compared to yours and say, f-it.
Also, as the guy notes... StackOverflow is a self-selecting group. Which of these highly-paid, older programmers are trying to build up virtual street cred or answering surveys?
Based on the findings I think it is premature to say this is ageism.
There are multiple other factors going on here:
1) As senior developers become more skilled there is a diminishing return in terms of compensation. This happens regardless of age. A developer with 40 years of experience is not really worth that much more than a developer with 30 years of experience.
2) As developers get nearer towards retirement there is less incentive for them to stay at the top of their field.
3) As developers get older they tend to want to find a place they enjoy working at rather than playing the salary game every 2 years.
I'd imagine that even if there's a opportunity there, it's still hard to separate great older devs from mediocre older devs, and older people have higher salary expectations.
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