You’ve probably heard the stories. Developers that can’t get their resumes read… until they lop off their old work history. Uneasy relationships between coders and the hip managers that are a couple of decades younger. Developers being sidelined by young teams when they don’t commit to red-eye coding assignments. Skilled programmers moving into management just to protect their careers. Plastic surgery (!) to hide the evidence of life’s vicissitudes.

But take away the hysteria, and what’s left — an expansive problem that spans the entire tech industry, or just a small subset of ordinary human politics and bad behavior?

The big picture

It’s hard to answer the question without first narrowing it down. After all, tech work cuts across a huge range of careers and nearly the entire business world. It’s a brush so broad that it’s often almost meaningless.

That said, the big-picture data doesn’t support the idea that tech workers face a sudden cliff of declining career prospects when they hit 40 or 50 years old— or at least the effect isn’t stronger than it is in other parts of the corporate universe. Consider this chart from Visier Insights that shows how tech salaries change with age:

There’s a clear plateau and decline, but it isn’t obviously different in tech than non-tech careers. (Incidentally, the Visier report is focused on large U.S. companies and includes anonymous data from over 300,000 employees, making it one of the best surveys of its kind.)

Of course, the chart can’t tell the story of workers who’ve left, weren’t hired, or switched tracks to contract work or management. But the Visier report digs deeper into these issues as well. It finds that:

• Newly hired but older tech workers don’t suffer an obvious salary disadvantage versus their established peers.
• Tech and non-tech workers resign at a similar rate as they age (roughly 10% per year leave after reaching age 40).
• Tech managers don’t face the same salary drop-off as they age.

While these findings suggest that older tech employees are treated well enough, there a few hints that older programmers aren’t a company’s first choice. Consider the following chart, which clearly shows that the tech industry hires a disproportionate number of younger people. The inflection point hits around the 38 year-old mark:

This could reflect the lack of skilled candidates. But the Visier report argues that isn’t the case, because the ratio of tech hires to tech candidates goes down as the age goes up. There are many possible explanations—perhaps older candidates are less likely to have the needed skills, or more likely to ask for a higher salary. Or maybe tech companies suddenly become a lot more picky when they see an applicant with a few grey hairs.

The culture fit

No place better demonstrates the clash of programmer age than small tech startups, with their emphasis on endless coding marathons and stock options over salary. Startups are notorious for preferring young employees to senior talent. There’s a clear bias, but is it always discrimination? After all, wanting to pay less is the perfect motivator to keep companies hiring younger. And in an industry where technologies change rapidly, newer companies are all-too-ready to discount the value of long-term experience. They’ll pay for concrete skills in specific technologies, but sacrifice the intangibles — like design wisdom and deeper product vision — almost without realizing it.

But while certain tech companies might not value older workers, it’s a different problem than issues with gender and minority representation. That’s because there’s no shortage of old tech representation. Yes, CEO wunderkinds skew young, but the industry it full of highly visible senior-status developers that have worked on industry-changing technologies and can deliver conference talks with near rockstar status. Excited developers won’t stop lining up to hear a talk from “Uncle Bob” Martin, Anders Hejlsberg, or Brendan Eich, to name just a few tech luminaries that continue working past the 60-year mark.

Are skills the final word?

Compared to other careers, tech (in general) and programming (in specific) make some heavy demands. As you become established in a career, a kind of sorting process process takes place that gradually separates developers into two camps: lifelong skill-builders and job-fillers.

In this thread on Hacker News, dozens of older developers tell the same story. Those who are happily and productively working into late middle age are those who take an interest in exploring their field beyond work. They’re programmers with a job, rather than programmers because of a job. Here’s a selection of some of their most telling comments:

“It’s probably an arrogant assertion, but if you are exceptional at what you do, none of this nonsense about age will matter at all, so one should always strive to be exceptional in their careers.” — jawngee

“The most important factor for me has been to keep coding. It gets harder. I have noticed a definite drop in my long-term memory, concentration, and general cognition, but I compensate by being better at picking important problems, being able to pattern match a large library of experiences, and not panicking.” — Kent Beck

“I’m almost 57 and still write real code that people use and employers make money from. The trick is to continuously learn new stuff.”— coldcode

“Software is a craft. Why would we stop practicing our craft as we get older? Do cabinetmakers stop making cabinets? Not as long as their hands can hold the tools.” — markbnj

Some senior developers make the transition to work as team leads and managers. For some, it’s an escape from the daily grind of coding — a way to gain salary and protect job status against new hires. But for others, it’s a kind of metaprogramming. Instead of grinding out code on your workstation, you direct the specifications that guide that code, the architecture that scaffolds it, and the developers who will build it. In other words, you’ve just followed the canonical rule of programming, and stepped up to a higher level of abstraction.

There are too many different paths, companies, and personal experiences to make a final generalizing conclusion. But if I were to attempt one, it would go something like this.

Every day, and in every business environment, people are overlooked or bypassed for trivial reasons. Interviewees are hired not because they’re excellent, but because they look like the interviewers. Tech is not immune to these human failures. But for companies that live or die by engineering excellence, there’s a great penalty to those that reward shoddy or work or turn talent away.

These constraints do a lot to keep the tech world more honest than some other corners of human endeavor. They also make me — a programmer pushing 44—confident enough to say that if you keep your enthusiasm, ageism can’t end your career.

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