Could it be that your years of experience had nothing to do with it and that you think you did well on the interview when infact you did not meet their expectations?

They probably already knew your age / years of experience when they interviewed you on the phone based on your resume so if that was a problem they wouldn't have even called you in for an in-face interview.

Not suggesting that you suck.. just that different companies have different hiring criteria / cultures and they might not have viewed you as a good fit.

Sure it's possible, although in this case it was only a single engineer I met in person. I've not been hired in every interview I've ever had either. But it did lead me to wonder how often age creeps into people's minds.

I would be glad to discuss working with you. Feel free to contact me :)

I agree that there's a lot of age-related nonsense out there. I'm 47 and a working programmer, about 10 years (or more) older than most of my colleagues -- or my bosses for that matter. I program because I enjoy it, and have turned down a number of 'opportunities' to do other things (like management) which I don't like as much.

That being said, it's entirely possible that the reason they prefer younger, less experienced people is that they feel they can get more out of them. Someone who's younger, with less experience, is going to worry a lot more about a 'black mark' on their resume from a company that didn't feel that they contributed

enough to whatever it was they were working on. Typically, this is the sort of

behaviour you get from companies that try to bully their employees into a lot

of unnecessary overtime because the management can't plan a project to save their lives. If they want to push someone around, they probably feel more able to get away with it with a younger employee rather than an older, more experienced one.

Hey, I once worked for a company that laid someone off a month after he returned to work from having a heart attack because he "couldn't contribute the necessary level of effort" to the project he was assigned to. How stupid is that?

Count your blessings and move on.

I am a 48 year old programmer, I'm coding medical ontology software just now in c# 3.0 writing Linq code to query our object model in ram. I have been contracting for over a decade and my age has never been a factor. BTW I'm in the north of england.

I'm start programming serious only on 26 year olds.Lot of script kiddy age 20 do programming are not same as older age.Sometimes older age got a few problem.I know they are experince but sometimes their knowledger is to low.Age doesn't matter to me only who can do programming and design documentation cleary is the prefect candidate for job.New Come doesn't care of documentation ,they just code like idiot and do again(Same as me before)

Salary expectations because of # years of experience have anything to do with it maybe? In my opinion it usually makes sense to spend the extra $ to get the good guys with more experience, but I'm sure not everyone thinks that way.

We have the same problem in third world countries. Im 32 years old emigrant in a third world country and people say me "you are an old woman"!

They cant think healthful...

But i think that an old programmer (like me :)) must be a boss to . In other way cant find any job at 32...

the main thing is, an older person is much more hesitant to "drink the kool aid", where someone in their 20's can't get enough koolaid; their opinions and notions of the working world are a lot more naive and externally focused, so their heads can be filled with all sorts of unquestioned corporate-friendly priorities. Not to mention they have much less of an eye for politics and can be steamrolled right over. When the project managers under-spec the project and get it all wrong, those of us who've "been there" know they f'ed up, and we shouldn't be the ones who have to pay; the younger programmer has no clue about this and will work til 2AM for weeks in a row, fully accepting that the client's deadline is a life or death matter (its typically some boring website that has absolutely no need to be launched next friday and not say, 3 weeks later).

If this really is a case of you not getting the job due to your age, you should google "age discrimination" and consider contacting EEOC and/or a lawyer. This could easily be that single engineer's unconscious bias rather than an institutional policy, but either way it's insidious and outrageous, and should be stopped.

A more tame first step may be to just contact the engineer who interviewed you and ask for honest feedback about why he passed on you. You may find that he had a legitimate reason, or you may strengthen your suspicions. Do it over email and save the response, just in case.

It's not that big of a deal, I have 4-5 other opportunities. It was more of "I wonder if" kind of moment.

In a meeting a younger manager, male or female, will describe some change or new plan for development to follow and due to your life experience it wouldn't be unheard of to think that the vast majority of the time, you'll have an improvement to suggest or outright disagreement with the approach the manager is descrlibing. Do you keep quiet and just plug along with your programming tasks? Seems to me this is the reason its easier for the person hiring to simply float you to management in the first place.

I'm 40 years old, and I've started looking for a new job last week. Got plenty of offers exactly because of my experience, almost all of the companies I talked to were a) dying to hire someone experience to lead their younger programmers, and b) used recruitment agencies to filter out scriptkiddies from wasting their time.

I was a bit apprehensive at first, looking for a new job at 40, but to my great relieve it was easier then ever before, and even relatively young companies (and companies lead by people significantly younger then me) were eager to hire experienced developers.

In my memory things were a lot different 10-20 years ago, when employers definitely preferred the young and eager. Maybe even our industry is finally growing up....

I'm a 38-year-old woman - talk about a double whammy. But I still find myself taken pretty seriously as a developer - I don't deal with nearly as much gender/age discrimination as I expect to. At the same time, I've known programmers much older who really do get set in their ways, don't keep current, don't keep up with the fast pace of changes in the industry. I believe that continued success as a programmer just means being flexible, being willing and able to learn new languages and theories all the time. If you're the kind of person who can do that, you're fine. And then age can only be a positive - you have more experience with problem-solving, managing workflow, etc.

Hi Codist,

I am sorry that you have experienced this sort of discrimination. However, I have seen this kind of thing happen from the inside of a company, and I would like to explain what I think the reasoning of the company is.

The company I work at expects people to move up in their career; you should always be progressing as an employee, not standing still. After a few years, one should be comfortable stamping out significant tasks on one's own, negotiating the business sides of it without management help, etc.

After 10 or 15 years, the company expects a developer to have "Team Lead"-level skills. This means that the developer should, by his mere presence, have leadership and mentoring capabilities that improves the efficiency of other developers on the team.

The company is only interested in developers who increase their skills significantly over time. Thus, the company is not interested in hiring someone with 15 years of experience in the "just-above-Jr" role, even if he would be a damn good programmer for that level.

The reason why is because the company wants developers who will grow even more in the future. That 15+ year pro in the Team Lead role would be expected to be able to be an Architect in the future, and so on. They would not hire someone with 15 years of experience as a "codemonkey", because it would carry the implied assumption that this candidate will never expand in his role.

So, it's not that the company wants you to be a manager. They just don't want you "off in a corner" developing alone. They want your talents and experience to spread out among the team and company.

I am not saying that you don't necessarily have any of these skills -- I have no idea, I have never met you. But from the essay you wrote here, it doesn't sound like you are selling these aspects of yourself to the company. Is it possible you were exposing yourself as a "lone gunman"?

Hopefully this explains why the "15 years experience" can count against you in interviews. It's because they expect a lot more from you than just technical abilities. This is only certain companies, of course. Microsoft (for example) has a whole career track called "Individual Contributor" for secluded code monkeys to flourish, without having to expand into this type of role. The company where I work now expects all developers to grow into leaders.

Both models have their advantages and disadvantages. My current company (Amazon.com) is not a technology company per se; it uses technology to sell things. This may explain the difference in focus. It is more valuable to Microsoft than to Amazon.com if some hacker codemonkey goes off into the wilderness and produces a novel piece of tech, thus Amazon wants the kind of developer who has business sense, and sees technology as a means-to-an-end.

I would say, consider in the future what more companies want from a candidate with 20 years of experience than just his coding abilities. The huge efficiency gains from experienced candidates can be even greater if they have leadership as well.

Silicon Valley seems to discriminate on age quite a bit. I was shocked to hear Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, openly say the two things he looks for are youth and technical ability.

(http://photomatt.net/2007/03/24/kapor-vs-zuckerberg/)

At another place or a different era, he would be so sued it's not funny. He didn't just stick with the idea that young people have less baggage. No, he decided to pull out the old "greatest discoveries are made by youngins" argument. I would take a 45 year old Einstein over 99.99999% of 20 year olds any day for my theoretical physics, thank you very much. When did a broad indicator like age mean more than the more specific indicators of technical ability?

May I add a data point?

I'm 54, still programming after 30 years. I've been a team lead but I never wanted to be a manager. I've gone from Fortran IV on IBM 360s to DEC's RSTS and VMS to PCs to asp.net and Ajax.

I'm tired. I don't learn new things as quickly as I once did. When I was younger I dabbled in Lisp and Forth for the fun of it; now I look at Python and Haskell and just go "Huh?". I now work in a place which is heavily into CSS, and I Just Don't Get It.

As for age discrimination in hiring -- I've not particularly encountered it.

OK, I'm going to tell you what's going on and a lot of people may not like it because I will be talking about the elephant in the middle of the living room. It's about the money. Entire institutions of total B.S. are built simply to make "those who do not know what they are doing appear as if they do". Plug in whatever B.S. you want: extreme programming, UML, Rational Rose, agile programming (whatever that means?!?), and most importantly, object orientation. Real pros don't use these unless they are forced. Many of us have been "agile" for 20 or 30 years before some idiot MBA came up with the term. Institutions would rather implement some of this B.S. and plug in lower paid (and usually younger) programmers. And services firms MUST do this or perish. Why pay you $100K when they could plug in 2 $50K newbies and bill them out at $150 per hour? In IT you don't have to be good; you just have to stay one step ahead of the user. And who couldn't do that?

My suggestion: find someone smart (they ARE out there, but not always easy to find) who understands the value of a professional who can "hit the high notes". Go to work for them. You both be a lot happier in the long run.

One factor is the size of the market place in which you find yourself. If the market place is small with not much movement then that is rather different than New York or London where the value of specific skills is appreciated and sought. Small markets breed small minds and petty thinking. You might have become a threat because of your experience. Suggestion: learn some skills that you can market via the Net. You might find the "long tail" out there.

I am 63, learning python, tangling with SQL Server, messing with hardware devices sending back emails via SMTP, using VB scripting, still having fun and last but not least still dreaming. I used to be a data administor, data manager and an ERP consultant, but at my age you have to be flexible. Being gentle with those who do not know any better because they are younger also helps!

As an older software engineer with a B.S.E.E., I can remember the late 70's when electrical engineers whose experience was with vacuum tubes decided to get out of the job market rather than learn about transistor circuit design. I started with FORTRAN IV and assembly language on the CDC 6000, and now I'm working with .NET and Perl 6 (and looking at LISP and Haskell for inspiration). Although some age discrimination takes place, part of what is happening now is that some companies want you to come in and hit the ground running (already have all the required skills) but never bother to train you to run even faster (acquire new skills that can save the company time and/or money). Such companies will eventually fail, but in the meantime this mistaken attitude causes problems for job seekers.

Ed, maybe I don't understand what you are saying. I'm a big advocate of multi-paradigm programming, which includes object-oriented programming -- encapsulating data with its methods just makes good sense, and is something I never had to be forced into using (an early exposure to Forth may have helped prepare me for O-O programming). Software engineering is a tremendously young discipline compared to civil engineering (millenia) and electrical engineering (120+ years). We are still working out the best & fastest ways to design our systems, and I am grateful for all the recent advances (learning Perl's Test::More in particular was a great awakening moment).

I have been considering in plunging into the development world. I am 36 - fixing to be 37 myself. I used to do a little bit of development about 5-6 years ago and then have moved away to more of infrastructure work. And now i realized how much I enjoyed development work and would love to go back to it. So now I'm pretty much working up the technologies that I have fallen behind on. But the question that remains for me - am I too old? or do the companies want one of those newly fresh college graduates. So, I just hope I am not wasting my time but in time we'll see. But it is inspiring to see those who have gone past the challenge and it is fustrating to see those who haven't made it through. But either way - I am hoping it will all go through not just for myself but every other developers as well.

I ran into the same thing last year when I was out of work. They never come out and say, "Oh, you're too old" to your face, that could get them in legal hot water, but they find some lame HR code phrase for it like, "We like your skills but you don't fit into our team dynamics."

I remember a manager (who programmed for a few years himself and of course thought he was pretty good at it) a few years ago who said openly that programmers over 30 are losers. Can you believe a short sighted jerk like that? This was in Holland, where most people study things like "communication", law or business administration. The same country that has had headlines for years on that people don't do enough beta studies anymore, and that we should 'import' technical people. And we worked for a company that has a hard time finding enough qualified people for technical jobs. As nice as the company was to work with, I absolutely hated the fact that 95% of the techies there had less than 3 years experience. Smart kids alright, but it was really painful to see them make all those mistakes that experienced people typically don't make anymore.

As far as I can judge it from living in the US now and talking with lots of US programmers, the US is a healthier place to be a programmer. Part of that is because it seems that US comps are more interested in skills they can tap now, rather than nurturing people who will stay with them for much of their careers (which probably has to do with more relaxed labour laws and a more hands-on mentality). They seem to be more interested in skills and seniority. Illustrative is that the average programmer in Holland will label him- or herself 'senior' with 3 - 5 years of experience.

/end rant, a 36 year old programmer :-)

Is it just the employers in the software industry who think the older people are "obsolete". These "new technologies" that come out everyday shouldn't be a hurdle. If you are well disciplined in software engineering practices and know a language such as C++ and skill such as networking, the "new technologies" are a bit of a joke, really.

I'm a very slow learner, and yes I am crap at programming compared to others at my University. But in the last few months when I actually got serious about it and put thought into what I was doing, my confidence has risen 10 fold. It's not about age not is it about individual ability. Anyone willing to put serious time into learning can become an extremely competitive programmer.

Programming is a craft. The more you do it the better you get. But you have to do it right. Read software engineering books like "Design Patterns" by the gang of four. Read other books like "The Pragmatic Programmer" and the "Practice of Programming". There really are no secrets.

As to why the employer brushed you off, I think too many employers these days are obsessed about particular languages, hypes, and particular technologies that they forget about what it means to be a good programmer.

Hi,

I have worked for 11 years in programming, from COBOL to DOT NET. I have witnessed a lot of age discrimination - both in position wise and pay wise also. Older programmers are harrased a lot just for the reason they can jump as fast as younger programmers. The employer or your boss knows that, an older programmer however experienced he may be will not get an offer easily and hence keeps exploiting. One of the recent experience i had is, I was expected to work for day and night continuously for more than a week and leave the office only after solving the problem.

I feel that DBA career would be more rewarding in this view.

After perusing the letters here it's pretty easy to see age discrimination is a core issue in corporate life... but hey it takes insight to see beyond the pale and that is a simple fact of human history

To David from England: America has a different culture. People in general are not respected as much as they are in England and in particular older people are not respected. On the other hand people have the fantasy of the young whiz kid programmer. As an older programmer who used to resist going into management I now see it's the only way. It's either up or out in the U.S. software business. Sad but true, no wonder there is so much crap software.

are almost guaranteed to need less money than older people. They can have a better life, hands down, than an older person--for the same salary. That translates into a better attitude, a happier boss, and a potential to move up the corporate ladder. The old guy who's never been promoted probably still won't be.

So it would make sense to hire the young kid, even if the older man is technically equal and willing to price himself at the same rate.

FYI, I'm a older guy writing this.

I have seen a lot of programmers in theirs 50+ age. What I liked about them is they write reasonable, balanced code that just works. I do a lot of interviews these days and usually say "YES" only based on candidate skill and mind sets. BTW, in our company a lot of people in theirs mid 30, 40 and 50. So far I haven't seen any discrimination based on age.

I am 25.

Hi all, I am 40 yo programmer. But I was also a PABX Engineer. I used to work for a telephone company as a phone technician but my night life was filled with learning c/c++/asm and windows development.

I took the leap got out of phones and went to the Internet department in the same company where I was a developer (C/php/html/MySQL), database administrator, internal and external customer support.

I got stressed out. I was getting sick and I was not getting time off to continue my studies.

So I quit my job (of 15 years) and quit my degree program.

1 year later I learn't that I was hypertensive and possibly diabetic. I did what I could and slowly my health improved.

This was 4 years ago.

I am now working with a friend as a windows developer (we have a telecoms product on the market). I am much better health wise, I code 13-16 hours a day, I enjoy it. But I am not in the normal 9-5 having to go to and office. I work mainly from home.

Sometimes I get inspired and work from 3am to 6am and go back to sleep and get up around 8-9am.

I always email to my partner whatever I am doing, progress I am making and snapshots of new and improved features and features customer are waiting for.

I am in better shape than I have been in years, still have some lbs to lose. Things are not perfect but not bad either.

Folks if you exercise, eat well, lower your fat intake and meat intake, you will live a youthful middle age with more energy to code than ever before.

Getting old is the illusion that you end up believing because of accepted social engineering and bad health.

Get with the program, get healthy and stay in the trenches.

Colin...

Thanks for this advise, I have been stress out in my 8 years programmer works. In Singapore, programmer is a no no job, everyone is going for PM. QA Manager will end up get all the credit. It happen in most of the company I am in.

However, Intel in Malaysia and some other company likes MYOB is appreciating programmers. But this is rare.

Think getting better, I believe more managers understand how programmer works. We must enjoy and relax to code.

I am stress out, till one day I got high PSA.. damn.. doctor tell, it will not be harmful for me as young in 30. But real scarely.

Thinking to change, either BA, Test or PM.. no more coding.

Thanks for the advise... but i still like coding the most, i am working on it and no one will border me... :)

Just remember for all the young guys here, that one day you will be face to face with yourself at the age of 40 and beyond. Be careful in the program sector. It doesn't matter who codes in business. The more expenses guy usually looses in the end because all you need to do is zip up the code and email it around the world to let the other programmer to start working on it.

I am 37 years old and in a country where its all the more difficult for a 35+ person to be employed as a developer. I am pretty bad at management and I dont know what is the future for me.

37 is pretty young in the USA. About perfect for IT professionals. It was at about that age that I was worried about needing to move to management, somehow, before becoming an "old programmer". Management pays better but is riskier since you are tied to an industry over a technical environment. I am pretty bad at management also because of my personal priorities. I can't stand reading contracts and I used to love writing interrupt service routines. Now it is manipulating DOM objects with Javascript. I am a 56 year old programmer. It would be nearly impossible to determine if age had to do with how my resume was treated by HR or why nothing would come from an interview. My resume reads "over 20 years experience in..." which isn't a lie even though I have over 30 years experience :-) I also left off the COBOL, RPG, and Z80 work (many would have to google those) since there isn't much call for it. Anyway, have fun with the code, keep learning, and don't touch that 401K. There are a lot of old programmers out there.

I am 43 years old and started programming in 1978. I have never had a programming job (not one that mainly called for programming anyway, although sometimes it came in handy). So pretty much all my career has been in marketing, management, business development, project management.

Now, at 43, I am converting full-time to programming. But my other skill sets come in handy. For example, when and if I come up with a killer app, it would be fairly easy for me to pick up the phone and talk to my VC friends to ask about possibly investing. If they don't want to invest, that's fine. I'll just market it myself.

So, I guess what I am saying is, it's important to be well rounded, regardless of your age, and it's useless to complain that it's about WHO YOU KNOW and not just WHAT YOU KNOW. Guys and gals, it's both.

So as a geek (who also used to be "the whiz kid") I can tell you people, get healthy (LOOK healthy please) and get connected (don't just talk geek stuff; talk about politics and management and marketing, and try not to piss people off with your views).

I think the whole industry is growing up and more accepting of older guys because the guys THEMSELVES are getting older and are worried about THEIR future. So it's important to establish the culture NOW so they can be relevant when THEY are in their 40s, 50s, 60s.

The people who are in their late 20s today should start to get worried (as I was when I was in my mid to late 20s).

Personally I think it's more ATTITUDE that pisses me off about the older guys (regardless of what skill they bring) so I would say, be smart but not a smart ass.

JX.

I was thinking of going back to school to finish a masters SW degree(for people without comupter science undergrad) that I started in the early 2000's and then the market crashed... Now that it has picked up, I see the young generation making very good salaries in start up companies even without finishing the undergraduate degree. A recent friend was making about 80k in a start up company and got fed up with his boss. A week later he goes for an interview and was going to ask for 100k, would have taken 90k but at end of interiew was offered 120k. I am out of work for a while as a project manager for cross functional IT projects and other industries. Also a process engineer for manufacutring and Business process engineering, in IT and other industries. Thinging I have to do something, I thought that SW might be an option and discussed with this 28 year old friend. He at first just said to write programs and put yourself on the market. The converstation eventually progressed where he we were talking about the newer program languages and asked me how much I want to make. I went low for my age and management experience, 80k and he hesitated and did not want to use the word, but indicated that there was a alot of discrimination against older sw developers. This is a real hurdle to overcome His advice was to look for a job that uses C C# C++. I suppose for older people this is the nich market and only the young people can program or are wanted for these newer languages for web site development? I also do not understand. I myself have no idea how to break into this market that has many positions but has its own club it seems.