Claims of Age Bias Rise, but Standards of Proof Are High

I am 47. 27 years of professional experience. Got hooked in Basic. Fell in love with Pascal, C, C++, Smalltalk, Perl, and Java. Most new technologies are a re-encarnation of something that I did already the first time or second time around. I don&#x27;t think my resume looks trendy. Still, I feel my skills are better than almost all of my friends and coworkers. They are 21-35. But, I see things that they don&#x27;t. Subtle things like code organization, error handling, readability. I have a better CS background (compilers, networking,theory of languages,operating systems, relational theory, machine language). I know 100 ways in which a project can fail. My code is terse, I have been working on it for a long time.<p>Yet, I am scared to loose my job. I don&#x27;t know if the recruiter will look past my age and lack of trendy technologies in my resume.

I am in my mid-60s and I don&#x27;t feel like I have suffered any age bias either at large companies like Google or small startups I have helped.<p>I sort of grew up with computers. My older brother and I got a mini version of a mechanical difference engine when I was a kid. When I was about 11 my Dad got me occasional use of a time sharing system, so that planted some desire in my brain for using computers. In high school I took a class at a local university.<p>It disturbs me to hear younger people talking pessimistically about their future careers. I advise them to keep learning and working on things that are useful and that they enjoy working on.<p>Edit: I did run into age bias, or at least I think it was: I had done a homework interview assignment and phone interviews for a back end job for Wikipedia and it seemed like they very much liked what I offered. Then, 1 minute into a video conference interview, I was brushed aside. So, I should have said that I have never had on the job age bias.

I still maintain there&#x27;s age-cohort bias (anti boomer, etc.), not strictly age bias.<p>In 2000, I remember most people over 30 being clueless about the Internet (given that the population who were familiar with the Internet in the 80swas so small...that core group was of course super clueful, but was of measure zero vs. people who were learning about it in college every year.)<p>Now, it&#x27;s largely been the case that anyone in engineering&#x2F;tech has had extensive contact with the Internet, even if not a CS person, since the 90s. 30s&#x2F;40s today are a lot different from 15 years ago.<p>In 10-20y, there will be plenty of 50&#x2F;60 year olds who had grown up with the Internet.<p>So while this might be a problem now, it&#x27;s correcting itself with time.

Personally, I worry about this in our industry. I plan to save, invest, and diversify my income. That way I can get out of the sooner, rather than later. I don&#x27;t want to end up being a 50+ year old who can no longer get a job.

In the Standford med school, an IT admin named Can______ was pushed out for the treacherous crime of being older, and no pretext was used to pretend it was anything else because their supervisor admitted it openly.<p>People have to realize this will be them, and that normalized hate is unacceptable and speak up against it.

I&#x27;m 54. I have just over 30 years of experience.<p>I don&#x27;t see &quot;ageism&quot;, exactly. I see the experience bar being set very low. When &quot;senior software engineer&quot; means 5-7 years of experience, then what are you with 30 years? You&#x27;re completely outside the comprehension of most hiring managers.<p>If you want to be regarded as more than &quot;old person with a bit more than 5-7 years of experience&quot;, then you need to use those years to learn how to do harder things than most people with 5-7 years of experience know how to do.<p>Keep asking yourself &quot;What&#x27;s the next thing I need to learn to advance my career?&quot; That probably isn&#x27;t the next web framework (learning that just lets you tread water). It might be Android or iOS, though.

I recently realized that when my son in my age (37) I will be 67 years old, and getting (hopefully) ready to retire. This made me realize that in 30 years there is no way that I will be able to stay competitive in this field, and be able to find a decent job.

Low 40s here.<p>So far the only kind of &quot;age-related&quot; &quot;discrimination&quot; (note the quotation marks) that I faced that I know of have been the &quot;you&#x27;re too expensive for us, we&#x27;ll hire a junior engineer and train him&quot; type deal.<p>I do prefer&#x2F;tend to work for small companies and startups so even though I have a reasonably decent &quot;enterprise development&quot; and &quot;CS&quot; type backgrounds I&#x27;m more or less up to speed on (or at least aware of) the latest developments in the industry so if a potential employer wants to see me hack some homework CRUD assignment using whatever hot-shot stack they are looking to use it won&#x27;t take me long to set it up.

As someone who works at OSU I can confirm that this place is exceptionally backwards, and change can bring people to tears. Due to the severely broken HR system here young people generally leave within 2-5 years, and the older folks are almost always just waiting out the clock on their retirement.<p>Age discrimination might be a serious problem elsewhere, but with OSU&#x27;s chronic issues I&#x27;d be hard pressed to believe these people were discriminated against.

I can tell age stories too. But lets get real: people change as they get old. They have different experiences and different referents. They have seen both more and less of the industry, since its been changing a long time but changes faster these days.<p>Indeed, you get a different employee when you hire an older person. Sometimes that&#x27;s helpful; sometimes not. We can&#x27;t wave a wand and make that go away.

I&#x27;ve found that I&#x27;ve had the best luck interviewing with people +&#x2F;- 5 years of me. This has trumped gender or ethnic differences. (Sample size of just me)<p>I&#x27;ll also say that I only had a handful of non-college interviews before my mid-30s, so I don&#x27;t have a ton of data on if this were true when I was younger.

In the OP, the manager is frustrated with the &quot;extraordinarily change-averse&quot; employees over 50.<p>One of the reasons I love being in tech (I am 44) is that you become so familiar with change your start seeing it as an inevitable force of continuous opportunity, instead of something to fear. That mindset keeps you young at heart.<p>I suspect that age discrimination lawsuits are more likely from slow moving industries, like the academia example in the OP.<p>The only place where I felt concerned about age discrimination is at YC. &quot;How old are you?&quot; is the third question on the application even before the question &quot;What will your company do&quot;.<p>Having been invited to YC HQ twice now (thank you), I don&#x27;t think age discrimination is an issue and I can&#x27;t fault them for asking. But being asked that question upfront still messes with my psychology.

I think this is caused by how heavily age segregated our societies are, from education and child care to nursing homes and elder care.

&gt; The email, from their boss to a colleague at another university, said Ms. Taaffe and her fellow teachers were “an extraordinarily change-averse population of people almost all of whom are over 50, contemplating retirement (or not), and it’s like herding hippos.”<p>This is simultaneously amusing and saddening.

it&#x27;s particularly concerning to see this at a nonprofit, publicly funded research university. we would expect something a bit nobler from an institution of this category. the troubling transformation happening to the american university landscape will, i predict, have significant effects on society at large in the coming decades.

A tech CEO in his mid-fifties once told me: &quot;There is no ageism in the valley - by the time you get to your forties and fifties, you are either a CTO, or you weren&#x27;t very good to begin with&quot;.