Posted on by johnfx

Welcome to geezer town, junior.

While researching my recent article, “Age discrimination and Programming Jobs” , I discovered a 1998 Op-Ed piece from The New York Times that cited some startling statistics from the NSF and Census bureau about the longevity of a software engineering career.

[S]ix years after finishing college, 57 percent of computer science graduates are working as programmers; at 15 years the figure drops to 34 percent, and at 20 years — when most are still only in their early 40’s — it is down to 19 percent. In contrast, the figures for civil engineering are 61 percent, 52 percent and 52 percent.

I find the defensive tone of the article and the use of dubious sampling of only computer science graduates to support its conclusion undermines its credibility. In a lot of ways, the Government has been very slow to grok the software engineering trade. In this study it completely ignores the significant number of working programmers who either earned their degree in another discipline or never finished college.

Still, smart money seems to concur that the software engineer depreciates only slightly more slowly than the machine he or she toils behind as exemplified in this 1996 comment from Craig Barrett, then President and Co-founder of Intel.

The half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years.

Sure, the guy’s a suit, but more importantly he was (at the time) a 57 year old former engineer publicly reinforcing the discriminatory notion of expiration dates on other engineers. It’s scary as hell to think that such an influential industry insider thinks that a programming career is roughly the same as a professional basketball player’s.

My take on the issue

Considerable accusatory ink has been dedicated to the age discrimination problem in technology, but I suspect it may be an inevitable consequence of the rapid pace of change that defines this field.

Consider the following:

The market value of an employee is primarily determined by experience in technologies relevant to the employer.

Software engineering reliably undergoes a major technology shift at least every 10 years.

While a technology shift doesn’t completely negate the skills of veterans, it certainly levels the playing field for recent grads.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a prospective hiring manager using a newer technology like Ruby on Rails for which nobody other than David Heinemeierhas more than about 5 years of experience. Sure, that extra 10 years of C++ experience is a positive differentiator for the veteran over the upstart with the same 3 years of Rails experience. All things equal you’d naturally hire the guy with more total experience.

However, all things are NOT equal. Those 10 years of C++ experience made the veteran candidate progressively more expensive as they leveraged the value of that experience in jobs requiring C++. The problem is that the marginal utility of that extra experience must exceed the marginal cost of hiring the veteran to justify paying the premium.

Herein is the source of the problem. The more irrelevant experience a candidate has, the more lopsided the utility/value equation becomes, and this presumes that the manager even has the luxury of paying extra to get that experience.

Even if the veteran prices himself competitively with a younger candidate, the hiring manager has to consider the implications of bringing in someone taking a big pay cut. Will they have morale issues from day one? Are they going to change their mind after a month that they really do need that extra cash and leave? It’s a sticky situation.

The unfortunate truth is that unlike other forms of discrimination that are more arbitrary and capricious, age discrimination can often be a result of objective and sound business justifications. I’m not trying to justify it as an acceptable practice, but just trying to describe the pickle it puts the manager in trying to make a sound business decision without compromising the ethical and legal obligations of the company.

So what’s your plan B?

Assuming you aren’t fabulously wealthy, accepted to clown college, or the fatal victim of a Red-bull induced heart attack by 40 a mitigation strategy is in order. Here are some viable options.

Work for the one person who would never discriminate against you.

No. Not your mother. You! If you aren’t the entrepreneurial type, consider a consultancy. For some reason that I don’t completely get, a little gray hair and a smattering of experience in different technologies can create a beneficial bias for companies when they are renting brains instead of buying them outright. It may have something to do with the tendency for consultants to be vetted from higher up in the management chain where the silver foxes live.

Give in to the dark side and go into management.

I’d argue that a career in programming does precious little to prepare someone for management, but clearly management thinks that everyone including technologists harbors a deep longing to “graduate” into their ranks. I think it a fallacy that no one would continue to design and build software for 20 years unless they had no ambition or growth potential. However, people like me that respect such dedication to the craft are in the minority. Maybe it is best to just stop fighting it, but consider the following before taking the plunge:

Mid-level managers often make very little more, if not the same as high level engineers.

It gets progressively harder to keep up with new technology because you don’t work directly with it.

Meetings, politics and dealing with unrealistic requests will pretty much become your life.

You may try to avoid it, but management-speak will creep into your vocabulary (did you notice my “paradigm” comment earlier?)

Even when it isn’t your fault, it’s your fault.

Even when you make it succeed, your team should get the credit.

Being the wunderkind as a technologist is much easier to do in technology than management, you’ll have to check your ego at the door.

You will be forced to make decisions that affect people’s personal life (pay, bonus, firing, etc.) and this is hard to stomach sometimes.

It is very empowering, enjoyable to be able to set the agenda and sometimes say, “No. We ain’t doing that shit.”

Computers are predictable, people are complicated. You will eventually fantasize about robot employees.

Mentoring can be very rewarding, but also very challenging.

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.

-Theodore H. White.

You’ve got a cash cow, milk that sucker!

I know you love programming because you like technology, so this may go against your very nature, but no one says you’ve got to jump every time some snot-nosed kid invents a new way to run byte-code. You have invested a lot of time and energy mastering the technology you use, and your experience differentiates you. Money follows scarcity, and snow-birding on an older technology, if you can stomach it, may just be the way to protect your earning potential. The industry turns on a dime, but is slow to retire proven technology. It is highly likely that you will still be able to earn some decent coin in the technology you know and love even after a few decades.

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Filed under: Careers in Software Development | Tagged: age discrimination, career, programmers |