The article's way of using "ageism" in the lede, and their title, both seem odd, and seem to confuse the real issue of what I think what most people mean by "ageism".

There seems to be a substantial tech industry aversion to hiring developers in 40s (sometimes 30s) or older.

But if you suggest that developers in their 40s expect salary to keep growing without limit, that fuels hairtrigger resentment arguments about how those people are just greedy and unrealistic, and that that's the cause of any "ageism" they perceive.

That would be a diversion from legitimate issues of people getting their resumes illegally screened for age, interview tests targeted at people with CS101 fresh in mind, rejecting candidates for "culture fit" (not just over-20s, but women, certain ethnicities/racial backgrounds, unapproved sex/gender identification), etc.

No this is not ageism. After a certain point, if you are an individual contributor, your value is not worth more than someone with less experience.

A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience. I also believe that the idea of the 10x developer while not a myth, is so rare it’s not worth trying to find for most companies.

I speak as someone in my mid 40s who has been at this professionally for 20+ years [1].

I’m debating whether I want to take the next step of consulting or just stay in development. I see my salary hitting a ceiling in the next two or three years and I think I am okay with that.

[1] well for all intents and purposes maybe 12 years. I stagnated for a few years and became an “expert beginner”.

Honest question: is this actually ageism or is it business cost-benefit analysis in action? You could argue that the benefit to the company of experience for a tech worker is only worth a maximum of X dollars. After that point, the company is better off hiring younger, cheaper employees with lower expectations than it is continuing to give raises, benefits, etc. to older workers.

I would expect a salary plateau to be a natural result of the above + supply and demand in the market. Maybe that’s what the term ageism has come to mean (not its original definition)?

The bigger issue for us Olds is that we have serious financial and family responsibilities that make us highly undesirable employees in today's modern "I've got mine! Fuck you!" society.

Imagine that you have a close family member with Stage 4 cancer. Who wants to have you on their team? Nobody, that's who. And you better be living in a jurisdiction with solid legal protections, or they will fire you in a hot second.

That is a far greater concern than salary stagnation.

Based on the findings I think it is premature to say this is ageism.

There are multiple other factors going on here:

1) As senior developers become more skilled there is a diminishing return in terms of compensation. This happens regardless of age. A developer with 40 years of experience is not really worth that much more than a developer with 30 years of experience.

2) As developers get nearer towards retirement there is less incentive for them to stay at the top of their field.

3) As developers get older they tend to want to find a place they enjoy working at rather than playing the salary game every 2 years.

1. There are diminishing returns to experience within software development, as you get more experience there are fewer and fewer companies that have any use for those extra years of experience.

2. The perceived value of that extra experience is even lower. How many recruiters or even engineering managers can honestly claim to be able to leverage the last 5 years of experience from someone with 20+ years?

3. In most industries your salary stagnates much earlier than that unless you transition to a management role, and I think it is safe to say that developers are much less keen on taking that step than say bankers.

I work with a lot of folks over 40, the two things I've seen that make me doubt ageism studies -- especially in tech, is that older engineers on average seem less likely to consider new technologies, and older engineers are more concerned about day to day stability and are less risk averse to consider another job which may pay higher because they have kids in school, mortgage, etc.

A similar discussion on ageism can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097

Ageism is the consequence of high birth rates. If many young people are available at low prices, why would you pay more for an older worker ? You can't have everything, have three children and then asking for a high salary. There are choices to be made in life.

I think generally current startup hiring discriminates in hiring for post vs pre internet age programmers and that could possibly account for the statistical differences in salary for developers that didn’t spend their entire careers under the current paradigm.

This is why you should always try and save at least 30% from every paycheck. Assuming you start working at 21, you should then have enough invested to live off the passive income by the time you reach 49.

> In Hired’s findings, tech pros were never offered more than $149,000 annually.

I don't know where they are getting their data but that's a lot lower than good developers of all ages make. You can see on https://levels.fyi that large tech companies will pay senior developers 200-400k routinely.

I don't necessarily doubt the analysis but the data is very incomplete if they didn't see a single offer over $150k.

> your value is not worth more than someone with less experience.

I don't think such a general statement (even its direct inverse) can be true or even particularly useful. At a certain point you're playing the odds. We're dealing with X, what's the chance that someone has seen X before or can see a connection to something else? In those situations, 20 years of varied experience can be a lot more valuable than 10 years of varied experience, especially if the 20 includes areas or approaches that have been forgotten/ignored for most of the last 10. (You'd be surprised how often the ebb and flow of tech fashion produces such results.) Note that I said can. Whether that actually happens depends on the exact technology, what experts you already have, team size/cohesion, etc. "Is not" without qualification expresses a more absolute and certain opinion than is warranted.

Don't confuse the current shitshow that is VC flippable social software garbage with actual competence.

I worked with people at IBM and DEC at the point probably just at the peak of their heyday when the average experience was about 15 years.

Oh ... my ... God.

I have never had that kind of interaction again. Being able to just call up and talk to the folks who designed FPU algorithms, x86 emulators that smoked (I think the FX!32 guys knew more about x86 than AMD), BDD analyzers that actually matched circuitry to descriptions (NP-hard problems--solved every day), debugged CPU failures by having 3 old guys light up cigars, put their feet up and think real hard ... I can go on and on.

Yes, those big, sclerotic companies had lots of deadwood. But, there was a 25% that was amazing.

About once every couple of years now I bump into someone genuinely as good. It's really rare now.

> A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience

As a developer with 20 years experience ... I'm a lot better at what I do than I was ten years ago. Better at seeing how it relates to the business I'm working with, more productive in ways that are not just LoC.

I'd be OK if I can sustain my current income... but I'd still like to take the step to being more of a consultant. I'm dancing on the edges of it now, between contractor and consultant.

"I also believe that the idea of the 10x developer while not a myth, is so rare it’s not worth trying to find for most companies"

The problem with the 10x myth is that it assumes a single dimension of productivity, and that no-one is ever negative so there's some sort of sensible, positive "minimum" to talk about.

Senior developer leads a team of three other medium-experience developer, and completes the project in six months. Junior developer leads a team of 5 other even more junior developers, after six months they've got nearly nothing, so we pull in another 4 semi-skilled developers and 2 contractors who are drowned under the mess and don't know what to do, and six months later, the project is cancelled entirely.

How many times better is the senior developer?

There's nothing even remotely skewed about those numbers, either. Both are totally realistic. And yes, senior engineer can fail, and junior engineer could succeed. (Although the range of projects where a junior can succeed and a senior can fail assuming adequate initial knowledgebase for both is fairly narrow; generally if you find one, you've probably got a strawmanned "senior" engineer who isn't actually senior but just a collection of stereotypes in your head.)

If you're still offended:

A generally senior software engineer who knows nothing about the domain and his team of three develop furiously for a year and eventually deliver the first iteration of what was asked for, with another year to go on the project to finish it. A generally software junior engineer who is deeply familiar with the problem domain listens to the customer's problem and after a day's thought realizes what they really need is a very different, but also much simpler, solution, which they deliver in two weeks by themselves. How many more times valuable is the latter?

(I've actually advised someone like that in the construction industry. They were switching into a programming career in their 40s. I said, look, there's no realistic chance you're going to outprogram me in a really academic, isolated sense of the term. But you've got contacts, the ability to pass the shit test with other people in your industry which I and/or generic software engineer have no chance of, and a deep understanding of the problem domain. Don't worry about trying to outprogram a 20-years-experienced software engineer, take advantage of the facts that you know what your customers really need, and... you're there! and I (standing in for generic software engineers) am not! Life's about playing what you're dealt, but people are generally dealt more cards than they realize, I think. Not necessarily better cards, but they have more cards than they think.)

I tend to agree there isn't a such thing as an engineer who is 10x more productive than another, in the sense that they will do the same thing as that other engineer, just 10 times faster. The key comes from doing things differently, most of the time.

There's other differences as well, such as being aware of the pitfalls. I recently got myself put in charge of a billing system, and as a senior engineer, I at least have the good sense to be suitably terrified, for instance. "Move fast and break things" has its place, but "careful, paranoid engineering" does too. Almost by definition, your really junior employees don't really know how to do the latter. (They'll often be able to cargo cult it, which can be a start, but they won't really understand it.)

    > The problem with the 10x myth is that it assumes a single dimension of productivity...

I think the number of years in your post is off a bit. In San Francisco, you become a senior engineer within 2 years, and after 5 years you're either expected to go into management, or retire to southeast Asia with your IPO money.

That's not an unreasonable view, but there's a big problem with how people measure the value of experience. The value of a younger programmer's work is relatively easy to measure. Not quite lines of code, but something reasonably close to it. As one's focus shifts - e.g. organizing, mentoring others, guiding technology choices, flagging code that works now but will break next year - those results become harder to measure. Just because it's harder to measure doesn't mean it's less, but that's a common kind of error. Under-valuing the contributions typical of older workers vs. those typical of younger workers is still ageism, but of a less conscious sort. As with most kinds of discrimination, people don't usually discriminate in a direct way. They do it with their assumptions, priorities, and assignment of value which just happen to produce disparate (but "rational") outcomes.

Note: I'm not saying that older workers (I'm 54) deserve everything they get. There definitely are and have always been some older laurel-sitters whose friends pay them more than they should, and I was acutely aware of that when I myself was younger. I'm just saying "but they don't give proportional value" is often less true than people think.

I would believe it if that would apply to other positions. Why is it the case for us but not regular businessmen, lawyers, etc?

Alternative reading: folks in Silicon Valley who've gotten used to FANG-level compensation have inadvertently developed a very skewed view of what average salaries in their industry are, because FANG compensation has climbed dramatically in the last decade. Anecdotally, $120–130K was a reasonable mid-level engineering salary in the valley in 2009 (I had more than a few friends at that level, which I admittedly hadn't reached myself); if that wage had increased more in line with inflation, we'd expect it to be $145-160K in 2019 -- and that $120K would have been hard to match for tech talent in most other parts of the country a decade ago. (Not impossible, just not easy.) The soaring valuations of tech companies, especially in the Bay Area, led to a loop of equally soaring costs of living and frenzied talent competition which just hasn't been reflected in most other places in the country.

It does seem strange that they wouldn't see a single offer over $150K, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if the median level was considerably lower.

What percent of people are employed by the large tech companies, and what percent are employed in the rest of the world?

Those numbers are already pretty outrageous outside the US.

Googling "Senior Developer Salary" you'll see 120K +- 10K on average.

Are you seeing over $150k anywhere other than SF?

In context, I read that as "At no age is the mean pay more than $149k" which is much more believable.