Ageism in the tech industry has been a bit of a sore point for quite a while now.
You only need to visit the career websites for the top tech companies and see a lot of young faces smiling back at you from the photos.
This can often give off the wrong impression that only young people get hired to be software developers. Some industries do seem to prefer younger candidates, such as tech startups, especially when the CEO themselves is under 30.
This could be an unconscious bias for those doing the hiring. They want to hire people they are going to get along with so they end up recommending candidates who are of a similar age range.
In some cases though, the reasons are less innocent.
Young people generally have fewer commitments such as children or a spouse that are going to tear them away from the office. If the company is looking for its employees to be completely committed then staff in their 20s are likely to have fewer distractions outside of work.
If you are on the other side of 30, like me, don’t give up just yet. When you look at more established companies that have more employees and have been around for 10 years or more they do tend to have less bias towards younger developers. You often see experienced developers move towards contracting as a way to get paid more for the same hours.
Not all developers are created equal but in my experience, a capable senior developer can get a lot more done than the equivalent number of junior developers for the same cost.
For example, a £100,000 a year senior developer can often achieve 4 times as much as 2 junior developers on £50,000.
If you add AI tools to the mix then a senior developer can achieve many multiples more. Knowing what to input into these AI tools is half the battle and this is where experience often wins.
Being young has its advantages though when it comes to learning to code.
Generally, you have more free time and more energy to learn things which can go in your favour. As we get older it can be difficult to find the time to learn new things but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Although I vaguely remember reading something about losing sleep killing brain cells, which if true would mean most parents are nearly brain-dead by now.
What if I am over 30 and want to learn to code?
If you are over 30 and want to learn to code it is possible, there is no age limit.
If you want to get a head start I would recommend using ChatGPT as a free mentor to help you learn. You can use it to debug code as well as explain error messages to you.
The downside of the free version of ChatGPT is that it tends to be quite slow and you will occasionally get network errors. To avoid these try using it at times when other people will be asleep.
In the UK I have found that ChatGPT is quite responsive on Sunday mornings, probably because most of the US is still asleep.
Is AI going to change anything?
AI tools are making software development even more accessible to the masses.
I can imagine it won’t be long before an entire working application can be written with a single prompt.
I can only imagine that this is going to make experienced software developers even more in demand. Although it will be our ability to accurately describe what needs to be created, as well as validating and debugging that will be more important going forward.
Things are moving so fast in the AI world and I must admit I am getting a bad case of FOMO with everything that is going on. I am going to be digging into AI a lot more in the common months so you can expect some more posts about it from me soon.
❤️ Picks of the Week
📝 Article - The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it. If you can't tell from some of my recent posts I have been going down an AI rabbit hole recently. It is fascinating so I am trying to follow my curiosity and learn more about it. This is a great article about how they built ChatGPT
👨💻 Latest from me
🎬 YouTube - Backend Developer Roadmap - Everything you need to know in 2023. Half the problem with learning how to code as you progress through your career is knowing what to learn. I mentioned last week that I put together a roadmap. In this week's video, I go through the roadmap and explain each of the topics.
💬 Quote of the Week
Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb). Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far more interesting.
From Keep Going by Austin Kleon. Resurfaced with Readwise.
This post is from my weekly newsletter The Curious Engineer where I share my insights as an engineer turned entrepreneur and the lessons I am learning along the way.
Top comments (7)
I think it's often a lot more cynical than this. Young CS graduates are keen and want to make their mark; so it's easier to exploit their enthusiasm: getting them working long hours for relatively little pay. If they burn out from working 60+ hour weeks there will be another graduate along in a year 🤷
The "distractions outside of work" that we older developers supposedly face is a misrepresentation: we're not "distracted" and we are committed. We simply have the experience; leverage and justification to push back when asked to work unreasonable hours.
What worries me most about this trend is that I've seen a gradual adoption outside of start-ups (where the rewards of success may well justify the hours put in) by larger companies who adopt the start-up mentality simply to squeeze more productivity out of their employees.
As someone who's been coding the last 20 years or so. I didn't get my first job til 16 years ago, but dabbled before that.
Younger devs tend to be more inquisitive and wanting to learn every new thing, and ask a lot more inquisitive questions.
Older devs may know a lot more and have a lot more experience solving problems, but a lot of them tend to not be inquisitive anymore. They want to solve the current problem and that's the end of it. Many don't use new tools or even want to try them, which hurts them as this industry moves very fast. It's only a matter of a few years to fall behind and lose opportunities.
I have to admit that i'm getting slower at picking up new tech and solving new types of problems. I can still go toe to toe with younger devs because i can leverage a mountain of experience against them to solve problems faster, but yea after some years your older brain just can't process as fast as those damn whippersnappers. :)
So starting when you're older is harder, but it's also not hard as our industry has so much "new" stuff constantly, everyone has to constantly be learning to keep up, so i don't think there's much of a gap when someone starts old, within a year or two they can be at the same level as most younger newbies.
The best solution is for older devs to leverage younger devs to solve new problems, and rely on their own experience to help push the younger devs over the humps they encounter. Quid Pro Quo.
We all get older and slower eventually. It's good for the young to acknowledge that and for the old to accept it.
Good points all round. I'd also say that some companies favour younger employees as younger recruits tend to be more towards the junior side of the scale. Being more junior generally means not having as much leverage when it comes to salary negotiation.
No, everyone's a born programmer. Even someone with not knowing what coding/programming really mean has been a programmers themself all along.
In fact every creature can be related with this. Think of someone/something making decisions based on their need and requirement. They/it make decisions at that point based on requirement.
Here's where programming comes into picture. If we want to bring our thoughts or requirements into reality we can use programming as a medium. That’s how powerful these programming languages bringing our ideas into reality.
So, I can conclude that it doesn’t matter how old you’re. All you need is some motivation and the feeling of joy you get after creating something useful with the skill you learn and how it helped the world to become better place and the problem it solved or a personal good feel you get after learning a game/ a musical instrument / a skill that makes you a better yourself. Happy coding!
You can say anyone can code and find a job at any age. But in reality you can feel the presure with big age diffference, it's like walking into the wrong battle, playing with kids.
And realizing these kids gonna crush you and you will have the feeling of being bullied 😂
"I'm too old for this" is real 😂