There are also many of us who are having trouble finding work. I'm 45, and have a ton of experience. I lost my last job after a few more younger people joined the team (all fresh out of college). They all lived together near the office, went out each night after work -- I'm a single dad with kids so can't do that these days. As much as I liked working with them, there was this growing feeling that they felt that I didn't belong (even though I had been on the team since they were in high school). Code reviews got tougher, I heard complaints from my manager that they thought I took too long on tasks. The final straw was an argument that erupted when I took a day extra than they thought it should take on a particular task. One of them had pulled in OpenSSL a little while back to do some crypto. I needed to make some changes to their code and noticed that the random number generator wasn't being seeded. I wrote some code that I've written before to gather a little entropy from the system and feed it into OpenSSL's PRNG. Even after showing them articles about weak entropy being the cause of security breaches, they collectively felt that I wasn't working in line with the team. At that point I was the only original team member, and I had six team members, all of whom were well below 30 years in age.

I've been out of work for 12 months now. Previously I passed every interview I went to (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) and had the luxury of choosing between multiple offers. I haven't got through an onsite loop with any of these recently, nor with a bunch of other companies. The only thing I believe is different is my age.

BTW, the me/them thing is reflection after the fact, not how I felt at the time.

As a mid 20s guy I have never received an offer from any of the big 4/FAANG companies, though I have from companies that prioritizes work-life balance, and I’m sure that’s come through in interviews. Suppose it’s helped that I was willing to move to major tech hubs but still, could just be a matter of finding the right fit. Everywhere I have worked has had people 40+ years old in technical roles making good money.

Sorry that you're having trouble finding work. It scares me that you went from having your choice of top gigs to unemployed. I guess the safest way to guard against that is to get promoted out of an IC role, not that it helps you now. There are guys your age at my company who work slower and more carefully, and fewer hours than the young folks, but they are directors so basically unimpeachable. They're not judged by volume or velocity but I guess on wisdom and political skill.

Where I work there's roughly one director per 100 ICs, so it's certainly not something that everybody can achieve. I'd also expect that it would be harder to switch companies as a director than an IC.

i'm just a little younger than you. i'm not sure if there's some way to avoid age-discrimination issues, but i've been dreaming of a remote consulting company that only staffs 40+ (or even 35+) year old consultants and markets itself as the ones to call when you just need something that works and is designed extremely well. not the latest trendy fad. i'm sure that a company like this could find lots of super-qualified individuals and put out some excellent work..

I'd start targeting the legacy industries (insurance, boating, auto). Plenty of large software development houses that would (off the record) hire older people who are more serious.

The problem with that work is that it’s “legacy.” Lower paying, less interesting technology, more subject to mass layoffs. It’s basically just like being “streamed” in school.

You can earn a living there, but most non-software industries are bad at software, so your skills will deteriorate and you will have a hard time finding another interesting job.

It seems this fixation on the shiny "interesting" jobs is another problem. I'm not getting any younger and I don't doubt there is some ageism in the industry but if we're biasing the search to only include FAANG and a handful of other darlin companies then that's not really a fair analysis of the situation.

Anecdotal but I've seen >40 year old engineers thriving at non tech-hub software companies. There's plenty of interesting B2B companies that lurk in the suburbs or tier-2 or tier-3 cities.

I did not say that it's either FAANG or not interesting. But the companies doing interesting software work tend to be software companies. There are many counterexamples both ways.

It only takes like a month or two to get your skills back.

What do you mean by off the record?

You can't explicitly base hiring policy on age. That's illegal.

No, it’s illegal to discriminate against someone over 40. You can blatantly put on your requirements that you are looking for someone over 40 and can’t be sued - not saying that’s a good idea.

If you couldn’t discriminate against someone younger, you couldn’t post that you wanted someone with a master degree and 10 years of experience.

That's accurate for federal law, but I think a log of states are more strict. At least New York is:

> The New York State Human Rights Law covers employers with four or more employees. It protects persons 18 and over from age discrimination in employment

> An employer may not refuse to hire or promote an employee, and may not terminate an individual because of age, and must provide the same terms and conditions of employment irrespective of age, including salary.

https://dhr.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/age-discriminatio...

That goes back to my original example. If I can’t “discriminate” against an 18 year old, does that mean I can’t require someone to have a BS degree in Computer Science and 10+ years of experience?

No, I'm pretty sure the restriction here isn't based on a "disproportionate impact" judgement, but on intent. As long as you have a reason to claim you applied the college degree qualification, you're fine. The minute that a court subpoenas your emails and finds that you added the restriction with the explicit intent of preventing young people from getting the job, you are in for a world of legal hurt.

This is exactly how it works for most other hiring discrimination too. If a court finds an email titled "how we can use a college degree requirement to decrease the number of Hispanics at our company" you have a problem, but requiring a degree isn't itself illegal even though different races currently graduate from college at different rates in this country.

A lot are rich and retired.

A lot are managers.

Most never existed. It used to be a much smaller profession.

Some burned out and work in real estate.

I seriously doubt that the "rich and retired" category is quantitatively all that significant. I think they're in sales and middle management.

Depends on where you are, I guess. Here in Silicon Valley it's pretty significant. Though many of the people I know who could retire keep working. It's truly what they enjoy doing, apparently.

One odd thing about this is that you'll rarely meet the rich & retired in your work life, by definition, so it's easy to underestimate how many they are. That said, I have no good way to count them either, and may well be overestimating.

First, there are few developers with multiple decades of experience (almost none outside of the tech hubs), while there is a bazillion people entering the market every year. Don't expect to find a lot because they are simply few and outnumbered.

You can usually find more in big corporations (cushy work life balance, healthcare and pension), in more traditional industries (defense, finance) and working as contractors or consultants (less corporate bullshit and HR barriers).

Last but not least. A non negligible amount of older workers are semi-retired. If you've worked 1980-2010 in NYC/LDN/SF you could have been doing quite well and acquired 2 homes at a fraction of what they are worth now.

I’ve been in the robotics/embedded software industry for the last 15 years, and I have never experienced a vast majority of coworkers under 35. Either I’ve just been lucky, or this is one of the corners!

Ha, so I work in embedded too, and I was definitely one of the oddballs when I explicitly set-out to land a job in systems out of college. Now I'm a bit older, but I still remember my hiring manager's glum face light up when he asked me what I was "into" at a career fair and I replied with "C and Linux, FPGAs, etc." Now I go to career fairs, and I can certainly empathize - there really aren't a lot of new college grads who have any interest in systems work. In fact, 9 months ago we hired a new college grad and they left after about 6 months to go do some data science thing for an insurance company (sounds boring to me).

Something I've heard discussed in CS education, and experienced myself to an extent (I'm a part-time adjunct faculty teaching Operating Systems), is how the more recent generations of students are, in-spite of the ubiquity of computing in their daily lives, purportedly entering programs "less computer literate" than previous generations. I don't believe "computer literacy" accurately captures the nature of the nascent deficiency - it's really about "_systems_ literacy".

I imagine what's happening to "systems" ownership is a lot like what happened to car ownership between the 1950s and the 1970s - people forgot how to fix them because they got more complex and needed less maintenance. I think for some of us older folks who experienced early home-computing, this isn't all that counter-intuitive of an analogy. In the old days, to play a computer game, it usually necessitated some amount of "tinkering around" under the hood of the "system" - possibly changing settings, maybe you needed to install more HW, maybe you had to manually fix some corner case overlooked by the errant programmer. I've heard that people who were young adults in the early-80s to late-90's were in a "sweet spot" for systems - people had easy access to them, but they also had to "repair" (modify, configure, augment, etc) them a lot.

Today, we're trying to fill-in the sweet spot with things like the RaspberryPi and the myriad of similar educationally-oriented embedded systems / home computers, but somehow I don't feel like most of those capture the "frustration" factor - they're well documented, and pretty regular.

So, while it may be hard to find people in their 50's who can create a multi-platform responsive app using whatever "cutting-edge stack" Medium is swooning over, it's been my experience that it's even harder to find someone in their 20's who can write a device driver, or even a halfway-decent C program.

I left that space (writing code to drive biotech instruments) because, frankly, engineers were viewed -- and treated -- as cost centers to be minimized. Software companies ime tend to view software engineers as sources of competitive advantage.

I work in the media industry, which is in full panic mode because of the competition from Facebook and Google. They have viewed software as an investment, we’re hiring more and more devs but we’re slashing the newsrooms and ad-sales departments every year.

I think young people don't go into systems/embedded largely because of the pay. The median pay in those fields is just lower than in web/distributed systems. I for one would love to hack on a compiler (for example), but not at a 50% paycut.

Same here. I focused on embedded systems in school and had a related internship before dropping out to start an embedded systems-related automation startup. When I later returned to the workforce, and every time I looked for jobs afterward, I tried finding any kind of embedded systems job but always end up in web development where the pay is better and the hiring easier.

I like the teams I work with, but if any systems company can match pay relative to CoL and is looking for experienced engineers who know how to understand systems from hardware to human, look me up.

A lot of enterprise/“dark matter developers” who are happy going to work everyday doing our job and going home to our nice big houses in the burbs in lower cost cities.....

Big houses in the burbs is not what life is like for everyone getting worried about age discrimination now.

Imagine this:

You took your university education a bit too seriously, entering the workforce after completing a PhD at age, say, 25, immediately after the 2008-crash.

That means you're too young to have been around in the 80s, inventing the world's first online banking or whatever. You were never part of the dot-com bonanza of the 90s. Your parents are probably still alive and you never got any inheritance. You command a medium-level income with your mediocre career, but having had to move to a tech hub (or a major city at least) has meant that you never got much of a chance for your income to turn into savings, due to not having had a chance to get on the real estate ladder and your income going to the landlord and taxman.

You're now 36 and starting to get worried if you'll be able to find another job in this industry if you should lose the one you have now.

Lucky you.

What would have happened had they spent some time researching and knowing that from a financial standpoint that a PhD does not statistically give you a great ROI?

- most major cities not on the west coast you would be fine with a “medium level” by HN standards salary of low six figures.

- In most major cities not on the west coast or NYC, you can still buy a decent home making low six figures.

By the time I was 36, I had stayed at one job way too long, I was the stereotypical “expert beginner” and was just starting to job hop and my career trajectory from the time I was 35 until now 10 years later looks like that of someone just starting out and moving up for the last ten years.

No hint of age discrimination - only a couple of rejections in the course of five job changes - and since I always use recruiters, my resume has never gone down a black hole.

The last ten years I’ve been a regular old journeyman enterprise software/SAAS developer -> team lead -> architect/principal developer.

Good for you, but the tone you're taking in your comment is not quite appropriate.

Many people still want PhDs for reasons having nothing to do with financial considerations.

Also: I'm writing from the POV of someone outside the United States, specifically from someone based in Europe.

The system in the U.S. is based on a squeezed/dying middle class. In large parts of Europe, middle class is all there is. With high taxes, wealth transfers from the rich to the poor, and many policies that have the effect of keeping people wealthy but cash-poor (mandatory social security of all kinds imaginable), and with super-high real estate prices in basically all areas that will make it possible to work in tech, the ability to get on the real estate ladder is now no longer a given, even for someone with a six-figure-usd-equivalent salary, which are actually much rarer in Europe, even in tech, than they are the U.S.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a PhD for other than financial reasons, but they can’t complain about the well known consequences of their decision. That’s like someone getting a degree in Ancient Chinese Art History and wondering why they can’t find a job.

But, like you said, this is coming from my American perspective - the only one I know. Also, is the tech bro culture a thing in Europe?

Re tech bro: Personally, having worked for maybe half a dozen European-based tech companies, I've experienced two companies where I felt a bit out of the loop socially for not joining them when they played table football or went to the indoor climbing arena after work etc.

But they were always peer groups of people situated below decision-making level. So there was never anyone who could actually decide things that might be bad for my career, leaving me to wonder whether me not being a bro was what it was about.

Jesus do you know me? Everything is accurate except the PhD part.

The usual answer is consulting companies. There the apperance is the opposite - you won't get hired as a consultant unless you have at least a little gray or white hair.

Not in the bay area or other tech centers, I would guess.