When talking with young programmers I too often think "well, you are doing that wrong, been there, done that". They don't want to listen. A couple of months later they notice that the gray beard ones were right. From a company perspective, that's just too late, as the money loss is not recoverable.

There is nothing wrong with being a young one with no experience. There is so much wrong when a company has only a bunch of young programmers and no experienced one who lead them.

I think programmers should reframe the problem. If cognitive decline is real, why would anyone hire anybody over 40? Yet there are plenty managers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, salespeople, engineers, etc. who are over 40.

If you want a culture where people retire at 40, go for it. But please don't pretend that programmers are "special" in that the decline in their skills is worse than decline in skills of anybody else.

The most frustrating thing about being an older programmer is watching organizations make the same mistakes over and over again. Yeah, sure, you might want to hire an older guy because he has experience with the intangible project stuff. But only if you're planning to listen to him. I feel like Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day:

Me: We need to create our security architecture in the beginning. It's always harder to add when we have a bunch of functionality to work around.

Management: But we don't have time. We promised these features by January 1st. Don't worry about security yet - the initial version won't have critical business or customer data.

Me: We'll never have time. Once the users get ahold of this we'll be buried under requests for new features and critical bug fixes. Particularly since the only way we have to test it is to have people poke at it in a browser.

Management: Adding automated testing would take too much time.

Me: ...

How do older programmers deal with coding interviews from companies like facebook / google? i feel like those advantage people who just finished their algorithms class, or have time to practice specifically for it.

This guy assumes that old programmers are not super enthusiast and hard worker but they have experience, while young ones are enthusiast, hard worker and motivated but they know nothing, that's not a very rigorous way to prove something ...

All that is just nonsense !

I would _never_ hire this candidate, based on seeing this.

So - the author says that he has "developed some good communication skills". Great! Moving on, let's look at his linkedin page. Quotes from past jobs: "even after our idiot (now ex) CEO canceled the platform.", "wonky JavaEE stuff.".

So, as a hiring manager, from this post + linkedin, I now know that this guy: 1) can reach large audiences, 2) trashes past jobs and colleagues publicly. And thus, I would be terrified of hiring the author, as there seems a 50% chance that this will end with my employers being trashed in the same way. That's just not worth it.

OP: Come on, give yourself the chance to be hired by removing that from linkedin.

I've worked with old programmers who are great and old programmers who suck. Most of the points in the article are obviously wrong.

"Anyone who is still a programmer in their 40s has to have developed some good communication skills." "Old programmers are dabblers." "Old programmers have judgement." "We can pick up any new language because we’ve used so many over the years."

I've met old programmers who are counter examples to all these points.

A steelmanned version of the article would argue why older coders are more likely to have these skills than young coders. It also needs to talk about the average difference in ability relative to the variance in each group. If old coders are on average 0.1 standard deviations better than young coders you should focus on hiring the good old or young coders. If old coders are on average 1.5 standard deviations better than young coders you should just focus on hiring the good old coders and exceptional young coders.

What a ridiculous assumption. It is not about age! I've seen both young and old horrible coders. Of course you can have a slight advantage from experience if your'e older, but the quality of that experience remains relative to the person in question. You might have 10 years of experience doing things the wrong way!

Growing older doesn't make you a 10x dev, just as it won't make an average musician a superstar.

If age is not a good indicator of someone being a bad hire, then it can't be a good indicator of someone being a good hire either.

To be honest, as a middle aged folk I find it impossible to relate with ping pong culture and open space offices. On the other hand, cubicles here are too often signal of brick & mortar ways to intend business, which ultimately means losing value. That's why I think older folks like me should really get into contracting or external consulting. As an alternative, do with finding a job at utilities or other non-cyclic ventures, they always seem eager to listen to juvenile-but-not-disruptive folks to innovate just a bit, not too much, not too fast.

I know more this year than I did a year ago.

I will know more next year than I do today.

This will never stop.

I don't disagree with anything stated here, but how much of this actually is a function of age?

I feel like a young programmer could aquire all of these traits also, because they're less about age and more about being able to learn from experiences. You can choose to have more experiences to become the kind of person the article talks about.

Or is this a survivorship bias thing? The old programmers are more likely to be this way because the people who would be old programmers who are not this way aren't programmers anymore?

I'm 58, live in the country (UK) and found a programming job almost exactly suited to my skill set (Pascal mainly-i.e. Delphi along with C# plus a few years of C, C++). Add in 5 years of 6502/Z80 assembly (games in the 80s), two years of Ada. The last three years was creating a mobile app in C#/Xamarin. Plus lots of php, html, SQL.

To stand out from other candidates I prepared a 7 minute screen cast (using Camtasia which I bought a couple of years back) showing off programs I'd written and briefly mentioning programming aspects that made each program different. I uploaded it to Dropbox, emailed the link to the recruitment agent who forwarded it on. I got the job after two interviews and have just completed my first week. I was lucky, round here there aren't that many programmers and most jobs are for C#/ASP.NET MVC websites. It's just a 30 minute drive away.

The job interviews included an online IQ test (not a problem), a logic test which was not my finest hour (4PM on a Friday is the worst time for me!) and a 10 minute stand up presentation on the subject of my choice. "A trip to an Arctic Isle."

I will risk a quote by C.S.Lewis:

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”

Hiring is more than the job tasks: there's work culture, politics and external factors. At least here in Mexico, the people usually are very political (we call them 'grillos'): they tend to form groups, brain wash other employees and use the law to their advantage, because in Mexico, the employer has to prove almost everything in case there's a work dispute.

And that's another reason to consider: yes, there are young people that has these traits, but mostly it comes from experience (or as we say here, 'colmillo').

The other big factor is the old saying that old dogs don't learn new tricks, so it's difficult to guide them towards the company vision, and it's worse when they have a boss that could be their son.

Those are my experiences based on Mexico, I know there are better places in the world with different mindsets, I just wanted to include my thoughts on this topic.

If you're trying to get hired please always include your location in your communications so that you don't get rejected out of hand for not appearing to be 'close' and/or waste peoples time.

Be old dev doesn't mean that you know how to write code. I worked with devs with twenty years of experience, and I love it, and I learnt A LOT from them.

On the other hand, I worked with old devs too, and they did a lot of spaghetti code, they didn't make a module and a lot of things are weird for them. Like async/await/yield.

I think that it's not an old programmer, it's about the attitude that they had during his professional career and the attitude that they have now. With a lot of experience and the right attitude, I agree, it's a perk in the team!

as an old programmer I think it would be better if the author said 'I know this, because I hired one.'

2 reasons why you will OR won't be hired as an old programmer:

1- "programmer" is the entry level in a software/hardware company. Rising stars move up in the ranks over the years and take more responsibilities. Manager, sr. manager, director, VP, etc. still a programmer at 40?

2- If you're still programmer at 40, you might really like it! We're looking for programmers and need age/exp diversity in our group. You are rare my friend and valuable.

Consider smartness as "what you can do with what you know," while experience is "what you know"--then, what follows is that having more experience makes up for not being as clever.

    Able to make good choices = Intellect * Experience

Moreover, employers can _try_ to assess intelligence with whiteboard interviews...but the easier factor to evaluate is experience. It's right there on the resume!

Somewhat related: is oldgeekjobs.com still going? I can't tell from looking at the posts if it's really active.

Time does not translate directly to experience, not all experience is equal, and one thing old programmers should know about more than anything else is their personal biases.

I agree with the point- I'm getting older, too- but the reasoning is not strong.

In Polish the title "senior developer" is usually translated into "starszy programista"; the adjective "starszy" means literally "older". So, I ask everybody to call me "old programmer". :)

Thank you. 56 years old, still writing code. I enjoy working with young programmers, they bring energy and ideas to my projects and keep me from getting stale and stuck.

Oh shit, I may have just committed a truly heinous sin, as a "senior developer", by posting this to the company channel.

Ah well, lesson learned. Don't do it, youngsters!

You might want to add to the list that you are required to by law if they are equally qualified.

Is this post not promoting age discrimination?

Isn't age discrimination illegal?

Why would discriminating against younger people be any more fair or legal than against against older?

I expect discriminating by amount of relevant experience is fair, but that's not the same as age.

I like it. Of course, I'm an older programmer. But still.

Reason to hire a young programmer based on the confession from CTO: we like college grads because we can drive them hard and pay them minimal salaries. The only thing is they burn out pretty quickly. And yes they also lamented the quality of their software and how releases were buggy and delayed. Not sure they saw a connection there...

To attract the candidates they optimized non-salary benefits they thought college kids would like such sports tickets, beer nights etc.

The bottom line is companies know exactly what they are doing and just officially​ claim some culture fit thing.

Same with hiring women, minorities,etc.

Even with open space offices. They say it's because they want people to collaborate but more often than not they want to save money and monitor people to see if the are "working".

s/old/experienced

Being sweet-talked into raping the world for other peoples awesome profits comes easier when you're 20. The real problem is the messed up priorities of most companies these days; older coders are more likely to call bullshit and demand a fair share of the cake.

The problem with Old Programmers, is not their work. Thats solid. Its the fact that they have mortgages, pensions, health issues, etc. This costs employers money. And employers HATE giving money because they feel like since you are getting a meager salary they are already doing you a giant favor.

Its a management cultural issue, not an older programmer issue really.

I think, outside of Hollywood. The Tech industry in general is one of the most ageist.

didn't read the article, clearly just self promotion.

the article is interesting yet based. Most notably, it's clearly written by an old programmer.

For hire: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tvaughan

To add a dissenting view, ideally I want more seasoned developers, so older is better. However, I still want to hire the right developers. I have worked with some older/experienced developers who were deficient in various ways, including one who had no concept of separation of concerns or testing code.

I think this goes to the mindset that it is always important to try to prove your skills by example.

If an attorney were building an age discrimination case against a person (or entity, per jacquesm below) involved in the rejection of a younger candidate, posts like this are among the evidence I suspect would be used to point to a discriminatory mindset. That said, I'm not a lawyer.

If someone were to be making hiring decisions, posts like this discovered during the course of casual googling would oblige the person with a robust basis not to hire. Heck, at least one firm on my CV has instructed me to regard discriminatory language involving suspect classification, age included, as grounds to reject.