My father is the pinnacle of excellence and professionalism as a plant engineer. Everything that got me ahead of my fellow students and into a Ph.D. program, I owe to his teaching and critical thinking. He walks into a building and immediately notices things that can be improved and will save them money. (And he's not a jerk about it, either.) He worked for a company for 25 years, and others almost as long. And ever since that 2008 recession? He's been out of a job. His plant got bought out and sold off. They kept him on longer than anyone else because he was one of the best employees they had--but the company eventually went away.

And now? Nobody will hire him even with countless references from management to coworkers. "He's too old." And one recruiter literally told him that.

Imagine how depressing that must be, to work your ass off your whole life and doing "the right thing", putting in 110%, going into work at 3 AM because "the line is down!" and what's he got to show for all that extra work? A dwindling savings account that was supposed to be for retirement, and countless rejections from companies who wouldn't know a good employee if it smacked them in the dick.

That's not how you treat the people who literally built the infrastructure you grew up on. It's reprehensible. And I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone (with a brain) would really care about age when all that matters is: "Can you make me money?"

Someone may say, "Well, they can pay a junior engineer less money." Yeah, and a junior engineer is going to have less experience reducing costs, and improving reliability. There's a reason we pay experienced engineers more. Because they add more value for a unit time. It's not like we just go "Oh, you're older now. So here's some more money."

I honestly felt like the token old-person interview and no one had any intention of recommending me for a job.

The hiring people are all younger and looking for fun coworkers to hang out with and definitely don't want to work with people bogged down with experience.

After a couple of decades in industry, I've formed so many professional relationships that it's hard for me to imagine that I might have any real trouble finding another job if I lost my current one. I mean, I guess I could be delusional and find it to be really tough at some point, but it hasn't happened so far. People I've worked with have gone on to start their own companies or have risen to senior director roles. In fact for the job before the one I have now a senior director practically yanked me out of my previous company and shoved me into his current company.

I don't think about recruiters sticking their noses up at me because of my age or buzzwords on my resume and such at all. If I want in somewhere, I just email someone I've worked with previously and ask if they think there might be something at their current company for me. It usually doesn't take long for their hiring manager to be asking me for an intro meeting. Only then does a recruiter get involved, and they're not screening me. They're setting up an interview loop. Often with people hand-picked by the hiring manager.

Look, I know ageism is real and it does happen and has a real impact on people. But on the other hand, if you've been working for 20+ years in industry and have generally left a good impression on your co-workers, how can you not have contacts sprinkled around in your industry who can give you a leg up on the job-finding process?

Granted they tend to be more expensive, but older people have numerous advantages that deliver value which more than offsets the direct costs of salary and benefits:

- More experience (obviously!): not just in terms of work, but in terms of life

- This often means better social skills, and also greater resilience

- Experience means they're often just better at what they do than less experienced staff

- They tend to have family commitments, which means they want to work sane hours, which to me helps set a healthy cultural precedent

- They tend to know themselves well, and are often more settled/content; this can mean less political game playing and jockeying for position/trying to prove themselves. This isn't to suggest they lack ambition, although their priorities are often different, but they tend to be more graceful in trying to achieve their ambitions

- They seem less likely to burdened by an overdeveloped sense of entitlement

All of these are generalisations and there will, of course, be exceptions, but I think it's hard to argue against these characteristics as being more prevalent amongst older workers.

When it comes to tricky pastoral and technical situations, I often find myself leaning quite heavily on the wisdom of my older team members. I really wouldn't be without them[1].

[1] N.B., at 43 I'm no spring chicken myself.

If you're 33, you might get a job using a recommendation from someone who managed you a decade ago. If you're 53, that same person retired years ago and doesn't have any pull to offer. And someone who worked for you 10 years ago can't recommend you easily, because it's hard to "recommend up" to a position above your own.

It's a subtle sort of thing, it's not direct ageism but it's obviously a big hurdle for an older worker.

I Googled around looking for more rigorous data, and found that there seem to be a decent number of studies of various kinds that detect ageism in the tech job market. One report (https://www.visier.com/clarity/four-common-tech-ageism-myths...) says it debunks four myths about ageism in the tech job market, but even that one affirms that hiring practices in the tech sector discriminate unwisely against older workers.

So I guess we can tentatively conclude that, yeah, there's probably some ageism in the tech job market, and it will probably tend to affect most tech workers as they age.

My own experience tends to agree. I was in high demand through my thirties. That demand began to dry up in my forties. I'm 61 now.

I remain happliy employed as a consultant, but the people who employ me have shifted over time from mostly strangers to mostly people who already know me, or who know someone who has employed me before.

To put it another way, as I've aged, my employers are less and less likely to be strangers who hired me in a typical tech-industry hiring process, and more and more likely to be someone who has seen my work before, or who knows someone who has.

Maybe that suggests a workable strategy: take care to cultivate lasting constructive working relationships as you go. Look for people you work with well, and consciously choose to work with them, and to maintain friendly relations after each of you has moved on. Those relationships may become increasingly important to your work, especially if you begin to experience the ageism that many are reporting.

Hiring involves a lot of "People Like Us" evaluation, consciously in many cases. And if you're over 40, you're probably not like "Us" in SV.

1) Some people with a mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation think that just because some programmers have let their skillsets atrophy implies that one should stay away from older programmers.

2) Older people by virtue of experience, skillsets are pricing themselves out of the job market. I have an older friend who is a phenomenal hacker but doesn't like going into management. He found himself either being offered VP of Engg type roles which required way more management than he was willing to do or being given Engineering roles with way less money than he was prepared to accept. Also, once you get a family, the amount of leeway you have in accepting a tiny fraction of what you are worth in exchange for money and stocks becomes quite limited.

and I've worked with terrible ones who bellow like angry walruses (AGRGRAGRAH) and declare things to be done which are impossible. Including one who fell asleep in a meeting with our mutual client, snoring with his subnotebook on his belly, then woke up long enough to demand I make it so the web site "copied the data to the email in a table" when somebody dragged a "picture" from "The browser to email". After back and forths of me explaining that it couldn't be done, he eventually demanded, "WHY NOT?" and I, exasperated and having exhausted all my other explanations, said, "Because the internet doesn't work that way."

And yet, one of us got hired as CTO and the other got fired from the project. (Hint: the young person got fired.)

I think that in this, as with all questions of skill and desirability, the answer probably lies more in the worker themselves than the outside environment.

That said, many of these companies want green young people because they will work for peanuts, can be manipulated, and don't know any better. Older workers tend to have a better sense of self, perspective, the need for work-life balance (because they have families, etc) and are less likely to sleep under their desk. This is the money line:

"Brendan Browne, who heads hiring at the professional networking site LinkedIn, said his firm wanted every new hire to be entrepreneurial. Mr. Browne said that approximately 25 percent of LinkedIn’s new hires came from the company’s recruitment efforts at colleges and universities."

So is this:

'Lori Goler, the head of human resources and recruiting efforts at Facebook, said her company was looking for the “college student who built a company on the side, or an iPhone app over the weekend.”'

This is code for: you have some skillz but no actual prospects (or you wouldn't want to work for us), so we'll label you "entrepreneurial" so you feel good about coming and working for the man right out of college, and we'll squeeze & overwork you as long as you don't realize that it doesn't have to be this way.

To be honest, the old people who are obviously fading might be an easier sell to bosses than the ones who are 50, 60, 70+ and still rock solid, because with them, you really have to wonder what went wrong that they're still in the running for subordinate positions. (I mean, there could be—often are—a million reasons why an excellent person's career might go sideways, but bosses aren't usually the forgiving type. They still want to believe the system works, because they are the system.)

Bosses want to feel young again, but they also know that workplace subordination is humiliating and that older people are likely to have figured this fact out, while young people still think they're going to be invited to join the execs within 3 years (which the vast majority of them won't).

The funny thing is...as the developed world’s population ages they’ll have to unlearn that bias.