> I really don't understand why there is a bias against age.
I've observed this first-hand while doing interviews. Even in companies that insist there's no bias against age, and even with people who insist they don't have any bias, there is nonetheless a preference for hiring:
* People who don't have a clear understanding of how much their work is worth and therefore have difficulties negotiating a high salary
* People who openly display enthusiasm -- and this is especially true among HR and higher-level managers, who can't really discern technical expertise so they look at things they can assess themselves. Enthusiasm is obviously good to have but it's no substitute for expertise, commitment and discipline, all of which are hard to evaluate if you have little or no technical experience.
* People who have no strong personal commitments and don't mind doing overtime on a short notice
* People who are enthusiastic about new technology, because they enable ambitious team leaders' and managers' experiments and pet projects instead of skeptically cautioning against them.
* People who have no trouble buying into a new company's culture, even when it's of questionable value (i.e. people who can quickly assimilate and integrate in even the most toxic working environments, as opposed to people who can recognize one, understand what kind of damage it does, and quickly go fsck it, this ain't worth it!)
Experienced programmers know their worth and aren't twenty year-olds that you can walk all over if you have a fancy title. So there are a lot of hiring managers who would be okay with hiring a 50-year old candidate, but have difficulty finding a 50-year old candidate that they'd be willing to hire.
This is indeed a good breakdown of things that aren't intended as age discrimination, but look at feel a lot like it.
Another factor is that many large companies have roles and expectations tied to length of experience - so if you have 20 years experience, fine, you're being compared with other candidates with 20 years of experience, and people who have been with the company for 20 years and promoted a few times.
In this situation, it's not the case that a candidate with 5 years experience, and a candidate with 20 years experience that are both qualified for an opening are compared against each other and the more experienced candidate will be preferred.
When comparing candidates with 20 years of experience against each other, there's huge variation. Some have been developing, are well-rounded, and have worked in a variety of interesting roles, others have been doing similar things, piecemeal work, contracting with no overall ownership, and not so much to show for it. It's the difference between 20 years of growth, versus the same year 20 times over.
This is a very good point imo, I've met engineers with 15 yoe I consider worse than some engineers with 2 precisely for this reason.
Related to this is that there are social problems about not getting good enough fast enough. I had a chat at one point with a developer who just hit 40 was struggling to find work and asked for some feedback. I asked him to explain Depth First Search to me and he couldn't do it, he was quite confident he could _implement_ it, but not explain it.
Now, if he were 20 with no yoe, I might chalk that up to inexperience and bank on being able teach him, but at 15 yoe you don't know DFS well enough to explain it the odds of you getting it now are slim.
The inability to answer problems of _at least_ this complexity leads to a social problem in the workplace: the young guys are going to go to this older, experienced employee and ask them to explain something along the same lines of complexity as DFS. In my experience, one of three things will happen:
1. They explain it poorly, the younger employees will believe them, and now I have two employees with a shared misunderstanding
2. They explain it poorly, the younger employees will not believe him, and now they won't respect them
3. They say they don't know how to solve the problem, the younger employees won't respect them
All of these results slowly lead to a dysfunctional team.
Toxic work environments and constant overtime are to be avoided at all costs. But in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area at least, companies are absolutely burying inexperienced hires in money, so I don't think the salary issue is as much of an issue anymore.
As to the rest of those preferences, it actually costs an older worker very little simply to cultivate an enthusiasm for new technologies, or their new companies' pet projects.
Where an inexperienced hire will do anything becuase they think everything will work, and an experienced hire might refuse to do things because they think it won't work, a true wise greybeard realizes most things don't work no matter what, but you might as will get onboard and take the ride. You never know what might end up succeeding.
Fortunately, some of those things can be faked, er..., simulated. ;-) Actually, it's kind of surprising, because a 50+ year old employee, if they've been in the industry at all, has already been faking those things for two or three decades.
All of that rings true to me, but I think there's a corollary that if you're willing to pay people in accordance with the value of their depth of experience, and you can evaluate expertise without being biased by enthusiasm, and you can build a stable team that executes on a plan instead of requiring tons of overtime to scramble from emergency to emergency, and if you value choosing the right technologies for a problem over following trends, and if you don't have a toxic culture, then there is a treasure trove of people out there with experience and expertise, who you have less competition to hire.
Definitely -- but while most places don't actually suffer from all those things at once, a lot of them do worry about most of them, and will bring them up if they're out of criteria based on which to differentiate candidates.
I've seen places where availability for sudden overtime was a big deal, even though it was rarely needed. The reasons were completely stupid but it was a big deal and it played a big role in deciding hires. The projects were well-executed and deadlines were rarely missed, but management quirks meant that every team lead and manager was afraid of not being able to cope with crunch.
Also, a lot of these problems aren't "global" -- a company may actually run into all of them, but not everywhere and not with the same people. Companies that do value choosing the right technologies over following trends will nonetheless have one or two people who would like to be more bold. They may generally aim for building stable teams that executes on a plan and delivers things on time, but they nonetheless won't be devoid of newly-hired managers who don't have experience running things like that, or who might be willing to compromise on this side of things for a volatile, but high-potential project. Even toxicity can be surprisingly well isolated.
I've observed this first-hand while doing interviews. Even in companies that insist there's no bias against age, and even with people who insist they don't have any bias, there is nonetheless a preference for hiring:
* People who don't have a clear understanding of how much their work is worth and therefore have difficulties negotiating a high salary
* People who openly display enthusiasm -- and this is especially true among HR and higher-level managers, who can't really discern technical expertise so they look at things they can assess themselves. Enthusiasm is obviously good to have but it's no substitute for expertise, commitment and discipline, all of which are hard to evaluate if you have little or no technical experience.
* People who have no strong personal commitments and don't mind doing overtime on a short notice
* People who are enthusiastic about new technology, because they enable ambitious team leaders' and managers' experiments and pet projects instead of skeptically cautioning against them.
* People who have no trouble buying into a new company's culture, even when it's of questionable value (i.e. people who can quickly assimilate and integrate in even the most toxic working environments, as opposed to people who can recognize one, understand what kind of damage it does, and quickly go fsck it, this ain't worth it!)
Experienced programmers know their worth and aren't twenty year-olds that you can walk all over if you have a fancy title. So there are a lot of hiring managers who would be okay with hiring a 50-year old candidate, but have difficulty finding a 50-year old candidate that they'd be willing to hire.