Older IT Workers Left Out Despite Tech Talent Shortage

https://www.wsj.com/articles/older-it-workers-left-out-despite-tech-talent-shortage-11574683200?mod=rsswn

by monsieurpng • 7 years ago

105 208 7 years ago

jakebasile3• 7 years ago

Maybe there really isn't a shortage of tech talent, and that narrative has been pushed by companies in an effort to encourage more people to enter the industry with the promise of easily finding jobs that pay well in order to increase the supply with younger, less expensive workers who are more easily exploited for long hours and poor conditions? It stands to reason that more senior devs would be the ones shafted by this scheme.

Maybe I should get my tinfoil hat checked out, but every time I see a giant tech company with one of those "everyone can learn to code!" pushes, all I see are executives hoping to play the long game and reduce the cost of engineering talent.

mattmar965• 7 years ago

Tech talent shortage is real. We can't find anyone worth interviewing right now, as a 5 person startup. (And no, we aren't age discriminating)

adamnemecek• 7 years ago

Pay more

crazypyro• 7 years ago

The theoretical solution would be to raise how much you are paying.

sundaeofshock• 7 years ago

How many people over 50 have you interviewed?

anm89• 7 years ago

Are you offering a competitive cash salary? I hear this a lot and then it comes out that the company wants people to work for IOUs which unsurprisingly does not generally go well.

aprdm• 7 years ago

I wonder what problems a 5 person startup is trying to tackle that they can't find technical talent worth interviewing... just from the way you wrote it already makes me feel like a place I wouldn't want to work for

layoutIfNeeded• 7 years ago

You’re probably not offering enough money.

jakebasile3• 7 years ago

I truly, honestly doubt that is the case. Are you hiring remotely or only in an expensive locale? Are you expecting more than 40 hours a week or do you have a good work/life balance? How are your benefits?

All of these things matter more the older you get since older engineers tend to already have a home and don't want to move to California, have a more involved personal life, and expect things like medical benefits. You might be discriminating on age without consciously knowing it.

vkou2• 7 years ago

Consider one or more of:

1. Increasing wages.

2. Increasing benefits. (More vacation time, paying for employee education, shorter work-weeks.)

3. Lowering the hiring bar, and spending more effort on mentoring and educating new employees.

4. Hiring remotely.

These all, of course, come with costs, and trade-offs.

If you don't mind me asking, are you looking for FAANG-level talent? If so, are you paying FAANG-level wages, or providing MicroFaceGoog[1]-level work-life balance?

[1] Yes, there are obviously teams at all of those companies that work on death march schedules. They are, generally speaking, the exception.

fiblye• 7 years ago

Maybe try interviewing a few people who you think "aren't worth interviewing." It could be that your standards are unreasonably high and you're dismissing plenty of capable people.

And lets be honest, looking at most job postings, most people have absolute ridiculous expectations of candidates. Most things you can and should be able to train to some extent on the job.

ericd2• 7 years ago

Most startups don't offer nearly enough of an equity stake to compensate for the massive salary gap vs. FAANG. I don't know what your offering is, but I haven't seen an exception to this in a long time.

m0zg2• 7 years ago

That's not talent shortage in the market as a whole, just in your segment of the market. Many people are just unwilling to work at a startup, especially if it pays peanuts. Pay more. Offer more perks that large companies are unwilling to offer. Above all, quit pretending that your equity is worth anything.

lol_jono• 7 years ago

It sounds like you're not looking hard enough

smabie2• 7 years ago

I think you mean: we can’t find anyone worth interviewing interested in the offered salary. I guarantee that if you double what you’re offering, your “shortage” will go away.

rosege2• 7 years ago

Or look for someone with the aptitude that could pick up what you need quickly.

taytus• 7 years ago

You say you are hiring but...

You are posting in probably one of the most fertile places to find talent...and there is no link in your bio to your company or personal email.

No wonder why you can't find talent.

nradov5• 7 years ago

Gold bar shortage is real. I can't find anyone willing to sell at below the market price. Why are gold merchants so lazy and entitled?

thanhhaimai2• 7 years ago

Salary shortage is real. I can't find any startups worth interviewing right now, as a senior SWE. The offers tend to be 50% of what I currently have (despite the "shortage").

Sorry for the snarky tone, but it should be evident by now that the real shortage is for "highly talented souls willing to work for peanuts"--which is kind of oxymoronic. People want to hire "highly talented" and smart individuals, but expect them to be dumb enough to sell themselves short?

semiotagonal• 7 years ago

If I were the sixth person at a five-person startup I'd be forever worried that I was just on the wrong side of the get-rich-if-it-succeeds line.

cgh• 7 years ago

It's pretty regional. If you live in a place that has eg a bad climate or limited outdoors activities, it might be harder to find local people. You should probably consider hiring remote workers, if you haven't already.

If you are willing to deal with a bit of hassle, hire Canadians. Same timezones, same CS educations, same language, probably a little cheaper (sorry, fellow Canadians), lots of interest in US startups.

Mountain_Skies3• 7 years ago

Move to Georgia. Atlanta has a very low cost of living, a good business environment, and plenty of world class engineers coming out of Georgia Tech. Of course maybe you don't want to live in a state like Georgia. That's understandable but that's a lifestyle choice, not a talent shortage.

zzzcpan2• 7 years ago

We can't find anyone __worth__ interviewing right now

There is enough research in job markets showing that companies get more picky and advertise more demanding and complicated job requirements as more candidates are available. So your claim is empty, since this is how companies behave regardless of supply. And if you were to measure it, how big artificial barriers or filters are for someone to get hired could be the measure of oversupply, not shortage. With shortage there would be no barriers, everyone applying would be interviewed and likely hired. But given current hazing hours long interview practices it's pretty clear that companies are drowning in oversupply.

masonic4• 7 years ago

  shortage is real. We can't find anyone worth interviewing

That's an odd statement. Unless you are flying somebody in, the cost of an interview is trivial compared to broader onboarding costs.

Perhaps a mention of your specialty and location is in order. Your HN public profile is blank.

altmind2• 7 years ago

Maybe you are having a hiring problem? Have you tried testing your candidate funnel?

zozbot234• 7 years ago

Please, let's not blame tech companies for that whole "learn to code" debacle. That was the work of clueless pundits (many of them from a non-STEM background themselves) who used that angle to dismiss the hardships now being faced by many blue-collar workers, chiefly in non-coastal states.

jakebasile3• 7 years ago

I think that like most things, it's complicated. I think both the pundits/media and corporations (aside: the media is a bunch of giant corporations) can be behind this marketing push. Whether they knowingly worked together or it's simply a coincidence is another question although it's very likely to again be a bit of both.

rumanator3• 7 years ago

Maybe there really isn't a shortage of tech talent

If that conspiracy theory had any bearing in reality then we wouldn't see a) tech workers receiving elite athlete-level salaries, or b) candidates with no formal education being paid handsomely to work in entry level/low complexity positions.

astura3• 7 years ago

I don't receive anywhere near elite athlete level salary...

codingslave3• 7 years ago

Google basically only needs a small team to design a completely new distributed system for some kind of database. Or only a team of ten for some autonomous driving algorithms, so their work is highly leveraged and is worth hiring the best in the world for. Enterprise coding is nowhere near as leverageable.

Mountain_Skies3• 7 years ago

Outside of a small percentage of tech workers in a small number of coastal cities, no one gets athlete level salaries. In much of "flyover country" the typical software developer makes mid five figures while other tech workers make even less.

rosege2• 7 years ago

It also makes it easier for them to go to government and say we need more visas to bring in workers because there aren't enough here.

ergothus2• 7 years ago

Maybe there really isn't a shortage of tech talent

That depends on what level of experience you are looking at. In particular, based on my experiences, your premise is the reverse of what is happening:

to increase the supply with younger, less expensive workers who are more easily exploited for long hours and poor conditions

In the U.S. this does not match what I see. Instead, there are a ton of positions for "senior" positions that are filtering on specific amounts of experiences in such a way that there just aren't enough people that match. Likewise, the field is VERY CROWDED with newer devs that lack experience - they fight over a relative handful of positions that have truly absurd entrance requirements.

This also results in some layers -

- The layer of places that abuse their newer developers and get away with it because that initial field is so crowded. This would seem to support your premise, except they aren't the ones pushing the "tech shortage" narrative - they are just profiting from it. Devs that can claw their way of out of this layer are well-positioned for "time", but likely lacking in the specific experiences and breadth that the other layers want.

- The layer of "top" places that want devs with enough experience and mix of skills that they have a hard time hiring for them. These places pay top dollar and work on their reps to help attract talent - they also are trying to resolve their shortages by getting new grads as interns. This layer is the primary cause of the problems, as I'll note below.

- The layer of "middle" places that are trying to use devs to help generate or streamline profits. They want people with enough experience and independence that they are drawing on the same pool as the "top" places. Because they have to compete with the marketing and budgets of the top places, they never have enough people, so they try to make up for it by getting more "senior" people, which only helps feed the scarcity for the "top" and the lack of jobs for the newer devs in the "lower" layers.

What you end up with is a weird divide - the top jobs pay great, but demand you have things like a degree (it's rapidly becoming a requirement DESPITE so many successful pros that either don't have a degree or have an unrelated degree), that you solve increasingly complex algorithm problems despite that rarely being a demand of the job, and wanting a breadth of depth of experience that few jobs will prepare you for. They face a tech shortage and feed it. Meanwhile the lower jobs have lots of supply, so they can abuse their devs, but rarely provide the necessary qualifications for people to advance to the other tiers. And in the middle you have companies doubling down on their chase after the same smaller pool of devs that the top layer has rather than taking in from the huge supply of less experienced devs and growing their own talent.

In the 3 companies I've worked for in the last 10 years (prior to that I had no input/visibility into hiring decisions), each one ramped up their entrance requirements to the point where I almost certainly wouldn't qualify despite being a successful and apparently valued employee at each of them.

executives hoping to play the long game

This is contrary to my experiences with executives both personally and in most companies. Indeed, the "long game" seems to be invoked in words far more often than in actual consideration. YMMV.

monoideism10• 7 years ago

In the U.S. this does not match what I see. Instead, there are a ton of positions for "senior" positions that are filtering on specific amounts of experiences in such a way that there just aren't enough people that match. Likewise, the field is VERY CROWDED with newer devs that lack experience - they fight over a relative handful of positions that have truly absurd entrance requirements.

Are you in SV? It's almost exactly the opposite in the metropolitan area I live in (one of the markets on this list [1]). There are many hundreds of hiring junior dev jobs open at any time, and constant emails about junior or what are essentially junior jobs.

But there are only a very small handful of senior jobs.

I'm very happy where I'm at right now, but it makes me uneasy. Based on my experience with applying to jobs for which I was "overqualified" as a recent college grad in the 1990s, I wouldn't be able to snag any of these junior jobs regardless of the salary I was willing to accept.

1. https://www.aitp.org/blog/aitp-blog/2018/10/23/tech-town-usa...

jknoepfler• 7 years ago

If you don't have name recognition driving candidates through the door, it can be shockingly difficult to get competent candidates. I'm talking basic senior engineer level (can be trusted to set up a web service from scratch without supervision).

Most of the candidates you see either can't pass fizz buzz (no joke), are very junior (have no practical experience building real services), have severe behavioral problems (need to be told exactly what to do, can't be trusted to own a service, etc.), or are washed up enterprise technicians who need someone to build all their scaffolding for them and can't solve simple problems if there isn't an IDE for it (.NET/etc. lifer).

The "smart" version of those archetypes often do OK at places like amazon, which provides scaffolding and oversite, but they will absolutely gut a small startup dev team.

(source: personal experience regretting startup hires who seemed "ok" when we were desperate, who subsequently left a trail of sadness and surprises in their wake through inattention, stupidity, and general failure to care)

I think this is particularly difficult for companies with non-technical founders that might lack strong technical leadership out the gate.

rednerrus3• 7 years ago

This really puts into words the problems I've seen working in startups.

4ntonius8lock• 7 years ago

Funny how the more capitalist outlets will classify workers as being in 'shortage', but commodities are never in shortage, they are in 'high demand' and there are 'price spikes while the market adjusts to new levels of supply and demand'. It's almost as if they are less about capitalism and more corporatism.

The reality of most 'talent shortages', and this goes for people outside of tech, is the people with capital don't want to adjust their business model to deal with changing market conditions.

Tech companies complain about 'talent shortages' in a time... when you could literally hire any programmer anywhere in the world to work remotely! It's insane.

So it's obvious there isn't a shortage of talent, but a shortage of local talent. But why do they need local talent?

It's like the US military complaining they can't get tech people. But if you work for them you can't smoke weed (even with a medical rec), you have to be in on time, wear a tie, punch in, sit in a horrible cubicle with horrible lighting and comply with a million bureaucratic minutia. So they don't get good candidates.

Somehow the responsibility of of BOTH sides (labor and capital) to adapt to an ever changing environment seems lost on some people. They can see why one side should adapt, but not the other. The right sees that labor should adjust, and they are right, but likewise capital should also adjust when market forces push them, and not cry foul.

I'll believe there are labor shortages when labor is paid the same percentage of GDP as it was in the 1960s, and when compensation packages include greater variety. After all, truly competitive markets will offer greatly different options. For labor, that could include working remotely, offering more days off, more vacation time, the CHOICE of private offices and/or open office, better indoor lighting, etc.

Note: I'm a realistic capitalist who has actually read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

DrScump• 7 years ago

  you have to be in on time, wear a tie, punch in, sit in a horrible cubicle with horrible lighting

I worked as a software engineer in defense (mumble) years ago, and even then nobody punched in and nobody (except management) wore a tie.

We did have cubicles, though... which I prefer immensely to open desk plans. And I'd be happy to bring in my own adjustable-spectrum light if they haven't upgraded lighting in (mumble) years.

dominotw3• 7 years ago

"everyone can learn to code!"

didn't twitter ban people for saying this at one point :D

pacaro3• 7 years ago

I wonder about this, I don't dispute that there is an issue here, but I think that this, and similar analyses, fails to take into account the change in the size of the IT workforce over time. I'm currently 47, I started my first paid developer role (job title "Analyst/Programmer"!) 25 years ago. The size of the job market then was a fraction of the size that it is now. Inevitably there are fewer older people in the workforce.

I'm much more interested in attempts to quantify age-related hiring discrimination, something that I have been fortunate enough not to encounter (yet), but that my brother (50) currently feels like he is running up against.

jrochkind1• 7 years ago

that is a very good point.

reaperducer4• 7 years ago

Age discrimination in hiring is real. Companies get around it by saying, "Oh, we can't possibly pay what someone with your level of experience expects."

Usually even before a dollar figure has even been discussed.

pacaro3• 7 years ago

For sure, I encountered a related issue about 18 years ago, I had been working for a company that was paying well, but that had closed down the project I was working on, as part of due diligence I was talking to other companies in addition to considering lateral moves. Several of the other companies were very clear that they couldn't pay me what I was accustomed to, and that was a show-stopper for them, regardless of whether I was interested in taking a lower income

tdfx• 7 years ago

Well that leaves two possible cases: (1) the company does not value person's experience correctly and fails to understand the value they deliver or (2) the candidate is not going to be able to deliver the value they're requesting to be compensated for relative to younger candidates.

#1 is real, I'm sure, but #2 likely happens a lot, as well, due to the American worker expectation of yearly raises and seniority-based pay, regardless of performance.

monoideism10• 7 years ago

Age discrimination is real, if for no other reason that the older you get, the more likely you are to have had a major health issue.

Try getting hired after being out for 12 or more months after having a heart attack, or cancer, or whatever. Even if you're medically cleared. From personal experience, it can be difficult regardless of reputation.

Edit: And yes, I also tried the whole "took some time off to be with my family" thing as well, and that turned potential employers off even more (had one tell me, "we're not really interested in hiring people who aren't driven to work every single workday" regarding my "time off"). Happily, I did find a good company several years ago that pays well and offers a great environment, but it took significantly longer than I had hoped.

sjg0073• 7 years ago

Group health insurance mitigates this... but if it is a major concern then single payer is the way to go.

Frqy3• 7 years ago

I went through this fairly early in my career. I think the career impact is more severe than a mother taking maternity leave (and without the legal protections). Apart from explaining the gap in employment, there is a disruption to the career momentum that is near impossible to regain.

tomjen3• 7 years ago

When asked what you did, just say that you wanted to become an independent contractor, but in the end you realized that you were a much better programmer than a salesperson, so you had really happy clients but not enough of them.

Or maybe you wanted to start a SAS, but again couldn't get enough customers.

Companies die all the time, take your pick.

avgDev• 7 years ago

I feel as partially this happens because older people don't buy into the hype, can read through BS, and won't slave away 70 hrs a week for the same wage.

Younger people are less experienced, have less opinions and in most case less life lessons. Tech companies want to move fast and make money, not question what is ethical.

threeseed• 7 years ago

have less opinions

I find this almost always to be the opposite.

reaperducer4• 7 years ago

His statement could probably be better refined as "largely keep their opinions to themselves and do their jobs."

IME, older workers were raised not to discuss politics or religion at work.

kenhwang• 7 years ago

Younger opinions are easier to influence. Older opinions are pretty ingrained which makes them annoying to deal with when they come up.

kasey_junk• 7 years ago

I’m getting way less opinionated as I get more experience.

allthecybers• 7 years ago

I find this to be true. Some folks fresh out of school, feel like they need to be constantly vocal to have influence and make a name for themselves. They also can bring strong but untested opinions to the table without the experimental data to back it up. Why do I relate this? Because I was guilty of it myself when I was younger and just starting out.

However, as I've grown and gained experience I have become more pragmatic and willing to let my good work speak for itself, reserving my more vocal moments for the times I have most impact.

kazinator• 7 years ago

Part of it is, in my case, is that, for instance, I can take any one of some batch of proposed ideas and make it work. Whereas the less experienced person latches on some aspect of something that seems easy and magnifies the difficulties in the other approaches.

elcaminocomplex2• 7 years ago

Younger people don't have fewer opinions from my own experience. They often have plenty of opinions, and with that comes less experience to back them up.

As I've gotten older I've become far less likely to express opinions unless the issue I am offering an opinion on is one that's important, and one that I am able to offer some new perspective on. I wasn't that way at 25.

sys_647386• 7 years ago

AKA pick your battles.

techsupporter• 7 years ago

and won't slave away 70 hrs a week for the same wage.

I’m not even 40, though close to it, and I’m already here. The company I’ve worked for has routinely offered 4x10 work schedules to its employees but the group I am now in is considering whether to end that practice. I will quit if that happens even though I probably wouldn’t have just five years ago. I have no interest in commuting one more day and losing a day off (and a weekday off, no less, when I can get personal appointments and leisure things done).

With every day that passes, I weight time away from work and time for leisure far more than I do money. Even though I have nowhere near enough to retire and any “low-stress” job wouldn’t pay me enough to live in my metro area, I would still walk away and consider what to do next if that benefit is revoked.

kangnkodos2• 7 years ago

I agree with everything except I would change the order a little. Mentally decide to leave. Consider what to do next. Get that next job, perhaps a very different job. Give your two week notice.

Lendal• 7 years ago

The more experience you have with different technologies the more you realize that there's more than one way to do things in this world.

noicebrewery• 7 years ago

Why pay an older software engineer a high rate for a wealth of experience when you can hire two graduates who won't make a 25 year old trust fund baby tech bro feel inadequate

reaperducer4• 7 years ago

There was an interesting piece on the CBS Evening News, maybe this past Friday, about how some companies are bringing in older (50+) workers to great benefit. The only thing these people ask for is flexible schedules.

save_ferris• 7 years ago

I think this is a huge part of the conversation that is being overlooked. Younger workers are perhaps more willing to grind than more experienced devs.

I’d gladly take 20% pay cut to get Fridays off, but I’d get laughed out of my current gig if I asked for that.

It seems like most gigs are full-time, usually with an on-call rotation, and if those aren’t compatible with your schedule, good luck.

hinkley• 7 years ago

But they have to grind because they lack the experience to fall into those traps in the first place.

mpfundstein• 7 years ago

Honestly, the best devs/CTOs I worked with are older than 45... I don’t get why our industry is like this. Learn from the (old) masters... thats true for art as well as for coding

dboreham• 7 years ago

Odd that nobody is writing articles about how airlines are hiring 25 year old pilots or hospitals are recruiting 25 year old ansetheseologists. Their 55 year old colleagues stuck looking for gainful employment.

keyle• 7 years ago

Youngsters are more malleable to whatever theocratic management scheme you want to shoehorn in. Oldie don't buy in the cult driven bend-over management schemes used in many places.

In short, they outwit their own positions.

rgbrenner2• 7 years ago

There's no shortage of talent. If there was a shortage we would see real indicators of a shortage like increasing average salaries across the field, training programs, etc.

Instead employers consistently use bullshit to filter, puzzles without any relation to the job, etc in their hiring. That's a strong indicator that there's no shortage. If employers are making up things to filter candidates, then they have too many options.

If I had to guess, this is probably just more propaganda from the large tech companies to get more people into the field and an increased visa cap, so they can drive down wages.

vsskanth• 7 years ago

If there was a shortage we would see real indicators of a shortage like increasing average salaries across the field, training programs, etc.

Isn't this happening right now in software with coding bootcamps and no minimum degree reqs ?

What's the new grad salary for an engineer at a top N firm in 2019 compared to 2011 ?

filoleg4• 7 years ago

What's the new grad salary for an engineer at a top N firm in 2019 compared to 2011 ?

Fully agreed with you. You don't even need to go as far as 2011. Even compared to 3 years ago, new grad comp is noticeably higher at top N tech companies now than it was back then.

h3throw2• 7 years ago

I don't understand people who say this. Have you ever tried to hire?

I'm 28yrs old and I make ~$400K/yr. That doesn't happen when there's some major abundance of talent sitting around.

rgbrenner2• 7 years ago

I make quite a bit too... but the average developer doesnt.. average US software dev salary is just $100k/year.

sys_647386• 7 years ago

You're more than likely the exception so enjoy it while you're still a youngster as the next generation to replace you will be along shortly. I hope with that amount of finance behind you that you are self-sufficient if it suddenly vanished. It will.

cvhashim• 7 years ago

Are those wages sustainable?

sjg0073• 7 years ago

Where regionally and in what market?

astura3• 7 years ago

As an average employee? Is your company VC funded?

nradov5• 7 years ago

I've done a fair amount of hiring. It's usually pretty easy. The managers complaining about it are just bad at their jobs or work for employers with bad reputations. Don't take their whining too seriously.

halfjoking• 7 years ago

Yes - the 5% of elite devs have seen a dramatic increase in salary recently. You're one of them.

The rest of us do not make that and haven't seen much change in wages in the last 5-10 years. At most in the midwest I'd top out at $150k as a Senior dev and that's if I busted my ass. The exception is if I worked for FANG but just like me, 95% of devs couldn't pass a FANG interview even if they put in some real effort.

Personally my dream is to have a side-business anyway, so I put up with my $100k salary because it's low-stress and I have energy for my own projects. If there was a real shortage I would be paid more. But there isn't a shortage for average devs who get shit done. Google just wants the top 5%.

Google's hiring is like if Google visited a homeless dog shelter and said to the employee (Federal Gov) that there's not enough cute puppies. "We need to import some dogs from Asia. There's a cute-puppy shortage here, let's get some Visas for more dogs."

You're just f-ing picky Google. Those dogs in the shelter are good dogs.

rednerrus3• 7 years ago

Good luck trying to hire someone. We are seeing Devops Engineers with 4 years of experience requesting >$150k (no in the bay).

kangnkodos2• 7 years ago

Yes. This is the key. It is difficult to hire when you are given the two constraints that the person must have high skills, and accept a relatively low wage.

I see it as a matrix with two axes.

Salary: High/Low

Skills and Training: High specific skills/Low skills and require training after being hired

This creates four different quadrants.

1) When companies say they are having difficultly hiring, what they really mean is they are having difficulty hiring someone with specific high skills at a relatively low salary.

2) If the company is willing to pay a much higher salary, then the company will not have a problem finding someone.

3) If the company is willing to hire someone with less skill, and train them on the job, then the company will not have a problem finding someone.

4) If the company does both, pays a relatively high wage, and is willing to take someone with less skill, and train them on the job, then the company will not have a problem finding someone.

purplezooey• 7 years ago

Yes, if you have dumbass hiring processes, it's a business deficiency just like any other, wasteful spending, etc.

mianos• 7 years ago

The 'puzzle' part is the best filter for them. Any professional programmer who has spent many years writing stock exchanges/banks/financial systems has not had any recent practice delving into the intricacies of the most commonly provided abstract data types. They probably have come across concurrency and synchronisation problems for which there is no simple one line answer so those questions don't get asked. I can't recall the last time someone told me 'this std::map or python dict()' is not fast enough, can you delve into it and make a better one. The skill is in the selection considering the big picture.

Some recent graduate will have looked at all this recently and easily pass this barrier, get the job and move on in a short amount of time while they can.

Is there a IT staff shortage? There probably is a shortage of people who don't spend their spare time on hacker-rank or don't really feel motivated enough to spend a day on a bullshit contrived project. There are plenty of you people who don't mind.

skwb• 7 years ago

Bingo! And it's not just in tech/IT, but in other related fields as well. The real answer is that the Fed has been a bit overly skittish when it comes to balancing economic growth vs. inflation, despite real inflation remaining at very low rates over the past decade.

https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18166951/skills-gap-modestino-s...

throwawaybungie• 7 years ago

This is a tough one— a lot of hiring & “diversity & inclusion” initiatives very rarely discuss age

Is that others’ experience?

t34543• 7 years ago

In the companies I’ve worked: yes.

sethammons2• 7 years ago

Age has been explicitly called out in every D&I initiative I've been party to, just not as loudly as some other segments, namely gender, sexual orientation, and race. But definitely mentioned.

robotburrito• 7 years ago

I'm 38 and a relatively new dev with ~3 years of experience in a wide variety of tech. Live here in SF and have been doing the whole job hunt thing.

This article stresses me out and makes me feel like if I don't get my next good job in a year or so I am basically locked out of a career...

I hope this is not true!

scarface749• 7 years ago

Honestly, while I don’t see much discrimination for older devs in general. If your experience doesn’t match what you “should” have for your age, it might be different.

colechristensen• 7 years ago

When you job interview around the bay area one thing which is absolutely striking is the diversity of the companies you visit. Sometimes it feels like you're in different countries on opposite sides of the planet. There's no way that is accidental, agism and racism is absolutely rampant, but not necessarily along traditional lines.

masonic4• 7 years ago

I don't see true diversity. There is little ethnic diversity off the white/asian axis and little age diversity beyond age 35. There isn't usually much gender diversity in technical roles, either.

nine_zeros• 7 years ago

There is definitely ageism but thats because younger unqualified employees are asked to evaluate older candidates.

Younger employees (especially single ones) are usually subconsciously also looking for buddies to have fun with. Which eliminates a lot of older people who just want to work and go home.

Further, younger employees also expect older candidates to be some super goddamn geniuses. Even if they are, the interview process never looks for that genius. Also, not all old candidates are genius and its hard for young kids to acknowledge because they just dont know any better.

On the other hand, old farts sometimes think too much of themselves. Also, some older candidates just dont want to relocate. Which reduces options A LOT. Very few old candidates want to relocate from rural Indiana to SF bay area.

The jobs exist, the talent shortage exists. But the demand isn't meeting supply and when it does, the evaluators are usually incompetent.

gleenn2• 7 years ago

One problem is that some older IT workers who get too comfortable with their skills risk falling behind, especially in the era of artificial intelligence, said Michael Solomon, co-founder and managing partner at 10x Ascend, an advisory firm for senior technology job seekers.

Um, what? AI isn't taking any tech jobs. Maybe once we figure out how to have the robots program themselves...

jimbokun3• 7 years ago

But it could take the tech jobs of programmers that don't know how to utilize ML/AI technology stacks.

ecnahc5153• 7 years ago

I definitely read that differently than you. They’re just saying AI is a newer field and that older people tend to have less experience here.

gleenn2• 7 years ago

The "era of Artificial Intelligence" doesn't seem like it's a new software stack to learn when phrased like that to me, but to each their own.

Iv2• 7 years ago

One problem is that some older IT workers who get too comfortable with their skills risk falling behind, especially in the era of artificial intelligence

I am 38, I am in the gap they point out, and I almost fell in it because for too long I thought deep learning was a hype that would eventually die out. I had to have a client force me to look into it to realize that half of my skillset in computer vision became obsolete almost overnight, and the other half is eroding quickly.

We think we know better than the youngsters and in several fields, that's painfully obvious, but let's not be oblivious to the fact that tech still evolves and that half of our job is catching up with it.

ecnahc5153• 7 years ago

Would you mind elaborating? As a young developer who wishes to remain a in the engineering track long term, Id like to understand more about how you realized your skill set was no longer “up to par”. I’m surprised computer vision is becoming less relevant, is it because the techniques have shifted from known algorithms that work to using machine learning to develop better algorithms from training?

mikekchar3• 7 years ago

Not the OP, but this is incredibly common. I will say that if you wish to continue working as a programmer for your entire career it is a mistake to specialise in a particular technology. It doesn't matter what technology that is. The more you specialise, the less versatile you appear to employers. It just doesn't matter what you are working on. It could be a website, or it could be a computer vision system. You use a handful of languages, frameworks, techniques, etc and 10 years later these are no longer in vogue.

I think the most important thing to keep reminding yourself is that your career will hopefully last 40-45 years! The pace change of technology is increasing, rather than decreasing. If you think the flavour of the month JS frameworks are hard to keep track of now, wait 10 years when there are 4 to 5 times as many programmers working and what's hot changes practically every day.

You are not "safe" with any technology. Even ML techniques will change completely an absurd number of times in the 45 years of your career. Your only hope of staying employed as a programmer for the entire time is to build yourself as someone who can pick up and work on anything at the drop of a hat. Similarly, you need a "story" that explains why you are worth more money than a person with 2-3 years of experience that has specifically trained for the flavour of the month that the company is using now. They will happily chew up and spit out those young programmers and pick up new ones when they go with the new technology. Why would they spend a premium on you? You need an answer (and a good answer) for that question. (I was going to try to answer that question for you, but it's probably better for you to figure it out for yourself... Plus any answer I give is undoubtedly piss off a bunch of people who will identify overmuch with the group I'm marketing myself as "better than" ;-) )

Iv2• 7 years ago

My skills are still up to par :-) But that's because my skills are not in using a specific library or in a specific technique. I was lucky to have engineering teachers who were very adamant that engineering was about understanding, learning, problem solving and the ability to adapt to new tools.

It is almost reluctantly that they taught us a programming language, knowing it may become obsolete by the time we finish our curriculum. But they spent a lot of time explaining notions in algorithmics, architecture, mathematics and electronics constraints that I could easily get into the new techs as they arrived.

Maybe I was not clear in my previous message. No, computer vision is not less relevant, quite the contrary. But a lot of the techniques we used to have, and where I was kind of pretty expert, were replaced by much better DL models.

I saw that in a very direct way. In a previous job (I am a freelancer) I had to make a classifier to judge if a robotic gripper worked correctly. Did not look too hard. I got a few hundreds of OK/NOK cases, fired up my OpenCV custom program and started hacking. I found some good parameters, found that by extracting some blob and computing the diameter/area ratio I could make a good classifier for most cases and managed to get a decent classifier for a huge class of the remaining samples.

After 3 days of work, I had a classifier with a 80% accuracy. That's pretty good for that amount of work. But in the end the client decided to go with deep learning. "Oh, they'll be back" I thought, pretty sure they would find out it is just hype and they did not have enough data. They did not come back.

Two months later, a client asks me to evaluate some deep learning techniques and pays me enough so that I can spend two weeks getting up to speed in it. I fire up all the tutorials I can find (FastAI classes are very good for people in my case) and one of them is doing transfer learning using VGG. I thought about the previous problem I had and thought that I would give it a go.

First run, no tweaking of parameters, no normalization, ugly scaling, no change in the model, I got 87% of accuracy. Using a tutorial anyone can do in 3 hours outperformed what I did in 3 days with (what I thought were) valuable and hard-earned skills.

I know specialize in deep learning but still retain a lot of very useful knowledge from classic computer vision and robotics.

CS is a field were experience is less automatic than in others. Experience can actually be a drag for an old engineer who stops to learn. We are in a Faustian pact with technology: we are surfing the wave a bit in front of the others but the day you stumble, you are going to fall back-first on the cutting reefs.

My main advice would be to always learn and read new things. Reading tech articles, trying new libs, new frameworks while at work? This is not procrastinating, this is staying alive.Take time to understand new tech in details. To go deeper than just "going by" requires. Don't understand why SSDs require new kind of databases with different constraints? Well maybe you need to take a dive into database design and IO bottlenecks. Don't understand why Facebook pushes for a new type of float for parallel computing? Time to dive into IEEE 754 and brush up your maths skills.

And yes, this is engineering work. Your employers will often see engineering like a bit of black magic. They are not sure how it works, but they want it. Staying up to date is a part of this magic that they need without knowing they need it. But at one point, you'll be the one your boss turns to (trying to hide his confused look) when asked by a client if you can support Kulisch accumulation and will be very happy that you read about it during your work time.

codingslave3• 7 years ago

As has been mentioned in here, the "Talent Shortage" was made up to get an increase in H1B visa workers to drive down wages and get more for their money. It has always been about flooding the developer job market.

Case in point are the interviews at many big tech companies that require leetcode/algorithms interviews. Companies are ready to reject any candidate that makes even a small mistake on one of their solutions, or misses the exact optimal solution. If they really needed top talent and couldn't find it, they wouldn't be so careless in their hiring rejections.

Another issue is also that its really difficult to quickly shift tech stacks on a dime. As much as people like to claim it to be possible, even just upgrading from Hadoop/MapReduce/Older big data technologies to Apache Spark is a massive time investment. The paradigms are the same, the technology when used in practice is different. Workers can see their whole knowledge base become useless in the span of two years.

As an individual worker, if this happens three times in 8 years, I think burnout would be expected. Anyone who is capable of constantly updating their technology knowledge to a T is probably already CTO of a company somewhere. Maintaining the ability to memorize and understand inane minutia over a few decades span is rare, and is probably coupled with severe disabilities in other areas of life.

kundiis• 7 years ago

Management can hire 2 fresh grads, roughly same cost as 1 senior candidate. There are companies where headcount is important for managers to become and grow their org. In addition, fresh grads usually have exposure to latest stuff and are eager to make their way in, work 60+ hrs, have fresh perspective, can crack academic style company interviews. Overall good for the company for less money.

sys_647386• 7 years ago

The counter to this is those fresh ideas are built on their limited knowledge of some buzzwords connected to a framework in python which is only in alpha quality. The number of kids who think new is better because they used it on their final year team project so must apply it to production servers is scary. It needs older, experienced workers to say the magic word: No.

MrMorden• 7 years ago

Two fresh grads working 60 hours a week are about as productive as one fresh grad working 40 hours a week. That may be good for someone, but not the company.

masonic4• 7 years ago

  Management can hire 2 fresh grads, roughly same cost as 1 senior candidate

Then 18 months later, both cheap, fresh grads would be gone, chasing the first shinier bauble dangled by a competitor.

hanoz2• 7 years ago

Interesting to read that "the largest gap occurs among workers ages 35 to 44”. This is the first wave of internet professionals, the people who built the web as we know it. Above that age range and you're getting into old school IT territory, and below you've got the new wave of web developers with different ideas who might regard the old guard as being stuck in their ways.

skybrian• 7 years ago

That range is too young for "people who built the web." A 44-year-old was 20 in 1995 (just after Netscape came out), so probably still in school, and a 35-year-old was 11.

hanoz2• 7 years ago

I knew I was going to get picked up on that. I mean brought the web out of academia and made it the universally recognised platform it is today.

gonehome6• 7 years ago

If this is a real thing then it's something I'd want to take advantage of if I started a start up.

American age discrimination laws only protect people over 40 from discrimination, they don't protect people under 40 from being discriminated against.

This means you could advertise roles only for people over 40. If these people are being excluded for age and not for real reasons like ability then they are undervalued by the market.

It'd be interesting to have roles that are explicitly only for people 40+. I'd want to do this and pair them with younger kids out of college who are just learning how to be effective SWEs as part of the role.

Seems like a big potential hiring advantage if the ageism is a real thing.

monoideism10• 7 years ago

American age discrimination laws only protect people over 40 from discrimination, they don't protect people under 40 from being discriminated against.

Are you sure about that? Do any lawyers want to weigh in?

Explicitly hiring only 40+ for any given role seems like it would be a lawsuit magnet.

gonehome6• 7 years ago

"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity to favor an older worker over a younger one, even if both workers are age 40 or older."

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

masonic4• 7 years ago

  This means you could advertise roles only for people over 40.

True, but I have never seen this once in practice.

rinchik• 7 years ago

Are they really being left out though? I understand the notion of ageism, and not at all saying it doesn't happen in software development, the point is, what if there are other factors also in play here? What if this "trend" is just a natural phenomenon?

Software Development is one of the most aggressive industries that are out there. Tech evolves daily with major trends shifting monthly. It's extremely hard to keep up!

And it's extremely easy to become "part of the road" if you don't invest heavily in your professional development by studying the "steamroller". What if older software developers are just the road, modern tech "steamroller" is rolling over? There are quite a few percent of the bright and knowledgeable older software engineers, but what about the "average" ones? Ones who got tired, have families and just don't want to be bothered with making themselves uncomfortable by trying to "keep up"? What about those who were sitting comfortably a decade with the oldest tech you can imagine that was "current" in early 2000, and now wind has changed? It seems logical to assume that a job search for those is gonna be tough!

Also about bootcamps, Erik Meijer makes an interesting point about "amateurs in our industry", that people who live, sleep, and breath code for 20+ years should be able to comfortably retire near 40, meaning this problem we are discussing here should never be a problem to begin with.

sys_647386• 7 years ago

There are a whole slew of issues related to this. Managers often feel that older employees don't take them as seriously as younger people. Younger folk are less likely to have seen it 'all' like older workers. There's also the age dynamic of an org. Some companies hire young because of the culture of 'work hard play hard' where younger folk buy-in but older folks skip it and go home to their families. Older people are more experienced and more expensive in general. Younger people are also more likely to be willing to work to burn out as they've not done it before and managers know that.

My two pronged approach to getting older in the workforce is to make sure there are people older than me at my work place, and have an exit strategy for when the jobs dry up completely.

marcoseliziario2• 7 years ago

I am over 40 right now, and, frankly, I don't see too much of this problem right now.

As you get older, you need to understand that you need to adapt. It's easier to get in the trap of thinking that the old ways are better (and sometimes, indeed they are), but it doesn't matter. You have to go with the flow.

Another important thing is that you shouldn't get too attached to technologies. Move with the times, be aggressive with learning.

Appreciate new languages, new paradigms. Yes, it sucks when you spent hours honing your skills with Hadoop and then one day you find out that all the cool kids are doing spark. But, the thing is, the people that are doing spark now are the people that were doing Hadoop yesterday, some of them even older than you. It was you that got in the comfort zone and didn't see that the field was evolving. While you were satisfied doing Hadoop, some people were thinking of how the job could be done in a different way. And I am not telling here that you should be doing open source, but you should have kept yourself on the loop. It is not unfair, and it's not unique to our profession. there was a time where lobotomy was the hot thing on psychiatry, people probably spent hours honing their skills on it, and then, someday, science evolved and we figured out that those skills were not only useless but also dangerous. Maybe this happens way faster in our profession, but also it is a lot easier for us to keep ourselves current on the state of the art than for a surgeon.

scarface749• 7 years ago

I’m 45 and I share your experience - no age discrimination.

But, I did hear my manager (50+), who is very technical and often gets so sick of the process to get things done, he will pull up an IDE and do a POC himself, bemoan the fact that older developers are good for backend development and architecture but not as good at modern front end development.

I’m not taking any chances. I’m moving more into cloud architecture but hopefully I can stay more in the professional services/development/consulting than the Visio creating/Project Management/Solutions Architect role.

But, I’m definitely not spending the energy keeping up with the latest $cool_kids front end stack.

marcoseliziario2• 7 years ago

Funnily enough, I love React. Maybe because I am old enough to have worked with Borland's Delphi in the past. The feeling I have is that React and UI frameworks put programmers with no design background back in the User Interface game. Because, for the love of God, I hate CSS with a passion. I enjoy doing side projects not only for the money, but also because of the good feeling of owning the whole stack of the product.

jmkd• 7 years ago

I'm mid-40s, Xoogler, Program Manager, Startup founder & failer, UK-based. 130 applications since March, 4 interviews, no offers.

Previous blue-chip job history with 100% application success rate, through my 20s and 30s.

Have now left the industry due to what I and various recruitment professionals had to conclude was age discrimination.

It exists.

cpeterso• 7 years ago

I now omit my university dates on my resume and sometimes drop older jobs LIFO. The tools and experience from those jobs is less relevant to my current work anyway.

frogperson• 7 years ago

have you considered consulting? Companies love to pay extra for experience, but only in small doses.

ThrowMeAwayOkay• 7 years ago

I just want to say: read these threads if you value your software career. There is golden advice from those who’ve seen it. Done it.

altmind2• 7 years ago

There is no IT talent shortage. IT companies circulate this myth to get access to work visas and broaden the workforce market, optimizing the salary budget. The universities reaffirm that to get more applicants.

Older IT Workers Left Out Despite Tech Talent Shortage

Related Stories