I worked at Google and I'm not a fan of the place, but I never felt like it had a strong culture of ageism. That said, I wasn't there for long and I didn't see much. Also, I was in the NYC office and ageism seems to be a California thing. If you had a good manager and team, age didn't seem to matter.
That said, I've only worked in one company that seemed overtly ageist (a piece-of-shit startup where I spent 3 months after Google). Maybe I'm not in-tune enough to see it. The fact that it exists disturbs me, but Google seems pretty good on this issue compared to most California tech companies that make it more obvious.
Having been on the screening side and candidate side... it's rough either way. I just turned 40, and see certain biases even from myself, and tend to think that a lot of developers by their mid 30's simply are less inclined to use or keep up with newer tools. I see the same "Enterprise" patterns used over and over again, because that's the way it is done not because it's even a good fit. And this is from someone in that age group... so I can definitely understand it.
On the flip side, it's been over a decade since I've looked at a lot of things at a lower level (implemented a b-tree or quick-sort) or even really used a fully compiled language; favoring .Net, JavaScript and other scripted languages. The kinds of things that Google/MS and others seem to screen for just don't interest me as much as building a distributed system that can handle scale and load consistently. I've never been a fan of OO and tend to favor more functional patterns. Almost every time I've looked at a Java or .Net solution I cringe as there's always a number of design patterns that don't fit well, and implemented by any number of people who I wouldn't consider craftsmen.
People tend to get too comfortable with a given situation... I think after the bubble burst around 2000 a pretty large divide was created between those before the bubble and those since... Especially given that a lot of people came in and left software development during the early 2000's... I see a lot of people 35+ and a lot of people under 30.. and a bit of a gap in between. It's almost a given that ageism is bound to flourish in the environment.
A lot of attention is given to bringing more women into technology in terms of using "inclusive phrasing", having recently had an interesting discussion following someone come into an IRC channel and asking, "can one of you guys help me with something". I think the younger generation should work on re-thinking about their own ageism.
I've never been a fan of OO and tend to favor more functional patterns. Almost every time I've looked at a Java or .Net solution I cringe as there's always a number of design patterns that don't fit well, and implemented by any number of people who I wouldn't consider craftsmen.
Agreed. See, it's knowledge like this that makes older programmers the best hires. Most people don't realize that OOP's design patters are detrimental until after a decade of programming experience.
Especially given that a lot of people came in and left software development during the early 2000's... I see a lot of people 35+ and a lot of people under 30.. and a bit of a gap in between.
Hm. I'm exactly in that gap (I'm 31) and I never thought about it in those terms. I think that a part of the problem is that 2002-2005 and 2008-9 were terrible years to come out of college, while 2006-7 were pretty good. Even though I've made a lot of career mistakes, the year of graduate school that I did (I was in a math PhD program for a year, before I realized that academia was a declining industry best escaped) actually made me better off by putting me on the market in a much better year (2006) to start a career. 2005 was still awful.
Successful people under 35 definitely seem to have birth-year clusters (obviously, there are individual exceptions): there's a 1984-86 cluster and a 1990-92 cluster. 2002 tanked salaries and job availability, while 2008 tanked job availability but not salaries, so the people who were able to establish themselves in 2006-7 and get on a decent track, before the shit-fan interaction term became nonzero, were able to work their way into high salaries and leadership roles (since leadership roles follow from high salary, and not the reverse, in most companies) during the boom times of 2012-15.
I think the younger generation should work on re-thinking about their own ageism.
I don't think that the younger generation (meaning the people under 30 now) is ageist at all. Most young programmers are as much against ageism as the older ones being affected. I think that the ageism comes from middle-aged businessmen who see middle-aged programmers as not having made the cut to get into management. It's an attitude of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you like me?"
I actually did a brief stint in management and would never do it again... I much prefer being in a developer or architect role. I like to mentor, and don't mind doing some PM type stuff... but never again do I want to be saddled with management or hr type tasks ever again.
Why is that? I tend to agree that middle management is a trap. If you don't get creative control but have to push other people to work on things, it can be worse than being a grunt, because your job is actually to enforce directives that you don't agree with. If it's bad to follow a stupid rule, it's even worse to be expected to make 10 other people follow it and to discipline (or even fire) them if they don't comply.
Middle management can often be the worst of both worlds. I don't know if that's intrinsic to the job, or just intrinsic to how organizations conceive of the job.
The sad truth, however, is that most people have no options other than climbing, because so much of this industry is "manage or be managed". It's at the point where I would generally not take a job without a manager-equivalent title at the VP/Dir level unless it was a small organization or one that I knew well, even though I have no need to be running a team. Ideally, you want to be a programmer in terms of what you actually get to do, but VP-equivalent in terms of being able to get shit done, be listened to when you need something, and avoid undesirable and distracting work being dropped onto you.
That said, I've only worked in one company that seemed overtly ageist (a piece-of-shit startup where I spent 3 months after Google). Maybe I'm not in-tune enough to see it. The fact that it exists disturbs me, but Google seems pretty good on this issue compared to most California tech companies that make it more obvious.