Why more companies are recognizing the benefits of keeping older employees
longevity.stanford.edu195 points by andsoitis 14 hours ago
195 points by andsoitis 14 hours ago
Years ago, I was a sub-contractor on a big contract that was coming to an end. One of the other contractors grabbed all the engineering talent on the floor and pulled us into a conference room. Asked each of us how to build an infrastructure that could handle X capacity with specific features.
I was the only person in the room who had actually built and maintained production infrastructure at scale, let alone at 1/2 the scale they wanted.
One at a time we went to a white board and drew our ideas.
When it was my term to present, I showed them 2 infrastructures that I already built that were more simple to explain, easier to maintain, easier to scale than the other examples. I clearly stated I ran both in a production environment, both easily handled what they were asking and more. I even showed them the websites that they ran on, and said I could provide references. Everything was clearly defined and labeled. Every question they asked I could demonstrate how it functioned.
They took 2 contractors with the most complex diagrams and recruited them. As they stated it was because they put the most thought into their designs. Both candidates were younger by ~10 years and clearly more creative.
I do still take partial responsibility because I had not yet developed my presentation skills.
Their project did fail. Not sure why, but I can imagine. A lot of companies were failing at the time.
I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.
Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.
They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
"Isn't that what you hired me for?"
Great story, and I feel it! A lot of companies, when they hire a senior person, say they want you to be a "force multiplier" but when you actually go and multiply your team's force, they turn around and say "bbbbuut, wait--your individual performance...."
Reminds me of this post: https://dannorth.net/blog/the-worst-programmer/
Discussed here a couple of times as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361947 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452649
I got an HR meeting a couple of years back where they selected me to be laid off because I wasn't closing as many tickets off as the rest of the team. Every single ticket had been through another engineer first and they had failed to resolve it.
I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.
Sounds like the person doing the performance review just relies on metrics. Sounds like a shitty leader.
Not only that, but that person was relying on a totally incorrect metric in the first place. Tale as old as time.
It is sad when the people who are in charge can't recognize such an important role. I'm so sorry this happened to you, and if you can, keep mentoring. At a time when juniors are struggling more than in the past you could be the one to really help.
I can add to this as well. I am 59 next month. I got my current position when I was 55. I was convinced that it was over for me. I was coming off a 28 month, yes, month, self-imposed sabbatical. Somehow the stars aligned and the interviews went my way.
I, too, teach a lot in my position and mentor ~half-dozen younger people at a time. I do not work for a "cutthroat culture" company, thankfully! All of my protégés have moved from Production Support roles into SRE roles in the past 3 years.
My 36 years of experience allows me to see things someone with far less will not, or cannot yet see. My XP is valued.
I hold monthly SRE Learning sessions where I demonstrate SRE-centric solutions using Python and other tooling. I teach brand new developers what it is to be on a development team and how to function more efficiently on a day-to-day basis. I also got invited to sit in on our company's AI Dev Assist working group after they saw the prompts I was writing and using to implement new and maintain existing systems.
I must also mention that, early on, I won a company trivia contest at my company that included 1,400 participants, and 15 questions where speed mattered. After that, I got a lot of respect from the younger crowd. ;)
If you are practicing ageism in your hiring practices, then maybe you are interviewing the wrong older persons.
We mature (<-key word!) folks have a lot to offer back - you just need to be capable of seeing that in the one you are interviewing. Beware the Grousing Grey Beards!
I honestly dont really understand age descriminating against someone in their 50s (even 59) - you've got a good chance to retire within a decade, but most people dont stay at the same job for longer than a few years anyway so why does it matter? If anything it's pretty likely you will stay for longer than average (let's say till 65-67, so 6-8 more years) cause you're less likely to want to find a new job in your 60s.
Similar age group, also rather stay IC than management, already hat it as team lead and it wasn't fun.
I try to focus on mentoring and technical architecture stuff, pure coding has decreased quite substancially, between SaaS, iPaaS, serverless, and nowadays AI agents, that just being a plain old IC doesn't cut it.
Then there is the difficulting to get new job offers as IC, because in many European countries there is this culture that after 50y one is either self-employeed/freelancing or a manager.
There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time.
Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
I had someone like you in my early life as a soft-eng and they made a huge impact on me personally and professionally. You will be remembered beautifully.
not just not care, a lot of companies actively hate what you are doing :-(
as you say, cutthroat
The most wasteful thing about corporate working life now is the way its incentives push everyone into leadership roles as "progress", when they're many people who do not want it or, worse, are clearly not suitable for it. Less so a problem in tech but still there.
thank you & to people like you --
places with older people & people with families i.e dads | mothers etc are a pleasure to work with
less bullshit, less time wasting, less chasing non productive hype
however the industry has been decimated lately, so now those places are rare
however I have discovered -- low-key cities tend to have places staffed with experienced colleagues
What a noble cause good sir. It's inspiring and I shall steal this idea and do whatever I can to move it forward!
I haven't upvoted a story so fast in ages! j/k
In 2022, I interviewed with a company... in crypto.
I was the oldest in the company by a decade at least. They kept telling me they wanted experience. I have plenty, of experience. I was cautiously optimistic.
They eventually failed me on a test of reactJS. The funniest part was when I asked for feedback, the reason they gave me, were showing poor engineering technique on their end; a lack of understanding of what makes it down the wire.
So they wanted experience, but not the experience that prevents them from making mistakes of their own; not an experience that threatened their views. I realised this later. Young rock-star developers want experienced people around them, maybe, but they want to be free to reinvent the wheel on a whim.
Now when I interview some place and I eerily feel old, I just bow out respectfully. No point wasting everyone's time.
My automatic “red flag” was btree tests. As soon as I saw one of those, I knew I was wasting my time.
I was especially annoyed by recruiters that couldn’t do math. They loved all my experience, but ghosted me, as soon as they realized it came with gray hair. I guess the place is crawling with 35-year-olds with 30 years of experience.
As it turned out, I ended up giving up, and just retiring. I had the means, but wanted to keep working for at least another decade. I really enjoyed adding value. I was especially interested in helping small companies get on their feet, as my particular skillset would have been almost ideal for that, and my “nest egg” gave me a pretty good risk tolerance, along with a willingness to take a lower base.
Turns out that these were the exact companies that didn’t want me, though.
Also turned out that I really loved being retired. I have been doing more work in the last eight years, than in a couple of decades previously. I just don’t get paid for it, and I’m fine with that. In fact, I actively resist pursuing a paycheck, as I don’t want to deal with knuckleheads, anymore.
I just had to have my hand forced. I would not have voluntarily done this.
It's easy to get bitter about these things. "Experience" seems to be code for: "we've spent fifteen years painting ourself into a corner and now we need a guy who will get us out of it in three months or less". You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc.
Having experience usually means that you've acquired a holistic view of software development. Usually the hard way. But they want solutions, not advice or opinions.
I've met a few devs that makes a living like that. Get in, solve problems. Keep quiet. Get out. Wait for them to call back in a couple of years.
> You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc.
Ironically, the only people who have social permission to do that are extremely expensive Big Name outside consultants. Who will then do one of two things: either speak to the staff, collate what they have to say, and launder it back to the boss; or produce a thinly veiled adaptation of whatever business book the CEO last read in an airport.
This is a reason why when life pushed me away from product development into consulting/agency work, I hated it at first and eventually I learnt to appreciate the positive side of it.
Usually those kind of companies won't hire old employees, while at the same time will gladly pay for consulting knowledge to solve their problems.
Also while product companies tend to hire folks that the very last thing they worked on checks all bullet points on the HR job ad, agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swimm fast enough.
> agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swim fast enough.
I did a few years at a company which was "product development consultancy", and this aspect of it was really enjoyable. We got a set of diverse challenges through the door, often "virtual startups" (CEO hiring consultants rather than staff in order to do v1 of a product). The company was basically a single room, and we had two senior guys (the founders) to review work and support us. Plus one "smartest guy in the room" who served as mathematician fire-support for things like signal processing or the rare actual DS&A problem.
This seems to be arguing that they should more than showing that they increasingly are.
Also the bit about companies with more older workers performing better, and the bit about older people often losing jobs due to layoffs, sound like they could also fit together as high firm performance permitting long tenure rather than having to show only that experienced employees cause higher firm performance (although of course the examples demonstrate the latter via other means, so it can't be that it doesn't happen at all).
Definitely smells like survivorship bias.
The title is clickbait. This reads more like marketing copy for the author’s consulting firm than any serious research.
They “help forward-thinking leaders and organisations see aging not as decline, but as a driver of innovation, resilience, and growth.”
ugh that they have to phrase it in such a way already makes me nauseous.
why start with the 'not as a decline, but as'. its such a stupid way to put it.
i cant beleive marketing ppl still dont realize that you dont sell something by say 'oh its not actually a turd its delicious'. JUST SAY ITS DELICIOUS. NO ONE WANTED TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS NOT.
you dont want to put a bad flavor in someones mouth and then try to wash it out. even LLM get this basic shit wrong lmao.
sorry a bit unrelated but considering the specific topic this tagline is suppose to address its really triggering.
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance" - as misquoted by Jett Reno in Starfleet Academy.
I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!
I work in a place where we have (former) COBOL developers and the actual mainframe. One co-worker worked here for 25 years until they retired last year (does it sounds like trade union propaganda already?). We also have a lot of 20 years old for whom it may be the first job.
Somehow it's consistently no drama and no nonsense place. Compared to the frat house atmosphere of the usual tech startup, it's really different.
Both my previous and current employer have some long-serving staff. One was incredibly effective because he effectively carried the entire oral history of the software system; it would have been a massive loss if he'd ever quit for some reason. Not even a union position, just has to be a "normal" company doing the normal thing of selling a product and/or service to customers rather than a stockmarket rocketship or a consultancy bodyshop.
These places do exist. They are very nice.
For some reason they always seem to be privately owned by one person rather than publicly traded or owned by a corporation. At least in my experience.
I am 30 and I feel like I get discriminated by age already. Hiring teams are still mostly made up of new grads (<5y exp) who work for cheap and this hasnt changed since 2 decades ago.
With the age of retirement (in europe) steadily increasing, and the workforce getting older, the typical corporate position of rejecting older candidates will need to change, if only simply to fill the vacancies. For this, the mentality of hiring managers and HR will need to change as well, and business school articles like this should help.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867010
Only keeping, or hiring too? Need a job HN. Though I don't do MS Teams, haha.
Works best, if you retain, but most companies aren’t willing to do that. They basically force you to leave, in order to make good money.
Being older is just part of the formula. Being good is another part, and having a good relationship with the company and coworkers, is just as important. That comes from longevity in the job, and also, a sense of security.
Companies love to have workers that are constantly afraid they’ll lose their jobs. That doesn’t really encourage a productive, quality-focused mindset.
There’s a lot of negative stuff, said about older employees. Maybe some of it is true, but I suspect that a lot of it, is an inevitable response to years of being treated like shit.
Wisdom is a thing, the longer you spend in tech the more you realize that most engineering work is probably a net negative.
That’s why they traditionally want to get rid of older people. More likely to talk back. You hire a fresh batch of 20 year olds and their shut up and do what you tell them.
> More likely to talk back.
Yes, that's great. Push back, tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently (with reasons and data, of course). Those are the best team members.
I currently manage an engineering team and all my team members are awesome, but the older ones are better at being informedly opinionated, which is very important.
> tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently. Those are the best team members.
those companies are rare. and most of the companies are still 100% top down with no talk back and everyone being a yes man.
When I was in my 20s I was an insufferable know-it-all who found fault with everything.
I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.
Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
Nevermind that work has become significantly more precarious, the cost of living higher, the wages lower.
Ageism is just a dick move in general. It's gotten to the point where job candidates in their 30s and early 40s are dropping work history and education to appear as if they're in their 20s to potential employers - and even considering plastic surgery[1]. It's gotten completely out of control, but I'm quite glad to see more of my peers and younger colleagues taking a firm stance against it in any form.
As long as the work gets done, everything else is irrelevant. As long as the idea is successful, it doesn't matter the age of the person who surfaced it.
Stereotyping just gets your ass into legal trouble, and the easiest solution is to just not do it in the first place.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennia...
> Ageism is just a dick move in general.
It's also self-defeating. Yes, there are greybeards who are stuck in their ways and refuse to learn anything new. But more often than not, the greybeards are super good team members in ways that the younger employees can't hope to compete with, because all that experience has taught them a ton about what works and what doesn't. But rather than trying to harness that valuable knowledge, companies shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring it. It's ridiculous.
This only works assuming somebody cares what works and what doesn't. Often nobody does. Most organizations do not tend to reward the good decision that made everything easy. They reward things that look hard and projects that take forever as long as they can somehow be spun as successes.
I've been pretty successful but my advice is almost always ignored. Where it matters is the stuff I do or the stuff I have control over (e.g. teams I lead).
This entire comment reverberates deep in my bones of late, and I sympathize with you on struggling to find recognition for just doing good work or having good ideas.
A company I worked at years ago had a devious and exploitative approach to market domination: hiring older super experienced workers and plugging them into teams with young over-eager programmers…
People with deep industry knowledge who were trained up to be decent programmers (middling, but serious, consistent, and quality focused), setting the direction. Those domain experts were working with young dumbasses who would burn 60+ hour weeks to make sales deadlines and keep current with ever shifting platform tech that breaks all the time. SMEs baked into the core development loop, DDD-made-flesh essentially, with cheaper more junior devs supporting scale for less money and maximizing the SMEs vision/contributions.
It’s an obvious and effective strategy. I’d speculate the management skills it takes to setup are what keep it as a rarity.
> Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
What is the alternative ?
A little over 100 years ago women were only 20% of the labor force. [1] Which is to say, most women did not participate in wage employment.
Now they're ~47%. Which is great! But it also hints that society doesn't need most of the labor for the system to still function.
Rather like subsistence farming, everyone got out of housework as soon as possible and into a far less onerous office.
You appear to be asking a trick question, disingenuously.
There's a vast continuum between grossly-unequal homeless everywhere like many corrupt, third-world countries with masked, paramilitary disappearance squads and a large, happy middle-class paid well that can afford to buy things, take vacations, and enjoy life where corruption is lesser.
>Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
How does a society that allows not working function? How does it defend itself against attacking societies?
With technological improvements, we could work far less than we do and enjoy a nice quality of life. Those excess gains were slurped up by the ruling class instead. And the 2nd question looks like American propaganda where if you don’t spend trillions and trillions on defense, the Chinese, Russian, whatever boogeyman will get you.
I liked the article not because I think older people work better but it’s good for society to normalise working when you are old.
Giving a safe, inclusive place where old people can still be productive and feel like they matter is important.
I think the article is correct in that older people can still be productive even at 60+ and it’s a pity that we let them retire. Retiring is not the most healthy option for people!
I Appreciate the sentiment and yet in spirit of balance:
"Science moves forward one funeral at a time" - Max Planck
yeah. Long-experienced people (not just plain-old) have grown that feeling called "warm fuzzies" [1]. And although warm-fuzzies are not in the spec, mostly, it is what makes or breaks good product/service.
anyone hiring such? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873028
[1] https://en.svilendobrev.com/1/MeetingtheSpecandOtherSoftware... (a copy because it's gone from web)
The article is so comprehensive it’s hard to comment on all of it.
I think the idea of making physical workplaces better accessible for older people also benefits the young as well. So many companies just assume “oh hey our factory workers/laborers are strong dudes they can handle XYZ repetitive task no problem.”
But really, you’re just making everyone less productive.
I also think that companies underestimate the quality loss they get when they refuse to cultivate an environment that employees who have the wisdom of older age and perhaps more options to go elsewhere will tolerate.
9/9/6 burnout shops chase away families with kids and older employees who know the value of time and bias themselves toward inexperience, working harder not smarter, and a general lack of diversity in life experience.
There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind.
For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.
Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).
This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
In my experience, friction is greatly underestimated, both as a tool and as an obstacle. I've been able to pick up multiple new positive habits just by reducing the friction involved in doing them to a minimum.
People really underestimate how even small amounts of friction can discourage you from doing things.
I started using Typst instead of Pandoc Markdown->LaTeX->PDF recently. I had a reluctance to change because I didn't really see the point, it looked like Markdown, and who cares if Typst compiles faster, how much time is really spent compiling? I had a watch script set up to start recompiling on a change and it worked well enough.
But eventually I decided to give it a try, and it sort of changed my entire perspective. Large LaTeX compilations could take upwards a minute, which doesn't sound that long, but similar documents could compile in milliseconds, from scratch, and it also supports incremental compilation. It was categorically faster and it wasn't really any harder than Markdown and if you use the Latin Modern font it doesn't look significantly different than LaTeX. [1]
Suddenly I found myself experimenting with and tuning my formatting way more than I did with LaTeX. I make my documents look nicer, make sure that the spacing look nicer, have better-placed page breaks, move text around more frequently to make my writing flow a bit nicer and better. I keep Evince open to the right, tmux with Neovim and `typst watch` on the left and my changes automatically load instantly, and as such I end up making my documents nicer.
I still use LaTeX for stuff that has a lot of math formatting, but for everything else I use Typst and I find myself doing a lot more as a result.
[1] Before you say "Use MS Word or LibreOffice", yeah you're not necessarily wrong but I really hate "hidden formatting" that you get with rich text. Also I almost never like the way that documents end up looking with MS Word.
Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge. Even the best documentation doesn't cover every edge case.
If you've not read it yet:
Programming as Theory Building: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
What are your thoughts on the usefulness of tribal knowledge when older (age-wise) employees change jobs? [0]
Then, the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else. Though I suppose you can make an argument that they might have similar workflows, or tools, or they might just have general experience that would be useful.
But I suppose your comment was more on the under-appreciation by management of existing tribal knowledge in a team.
[0] Perhaps out of necessity, e.g: company went under, or maybe they want a change of pace.
> the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else.
It cuts both ways. It pays to listen when someone goes 'We tried that at my last workplace, here is what happened..'
I've been lucky enough to have a few examples of that in my career.
There are different kinds of tribal knowledge. Some is company-specific, some is role-specific or domain-specific.
While I'm not sure that we should encourage the continuation and growth of tribal knowledge, it is incredibly unwise to not recognize that:
- it exists (and will always exist)
- knowing it is *vital*
- maintaining ways of spreading it is *also* vitalI didn’t read the comment you replied to in that way. I read it as, edge cases can be gnarly and the most thorough of documentation and process will never capture them all.
It’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff.
That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.
It's not just the management.
Younger workers as well.
I speak from my own experience from both sides of the table, now of course at the receiving end of the under appreciation.
> Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge.
they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.
You are being downvoted, but I absolutely agree. Tribal knowledge (institutional knowledge) is a bug not a feature. It is lack of standardized processes and it is ultimately a failure of management to extract this knowledge from employees, any means necessary.
- Young people to innovate and grow
- Old people to stabilise and ensure sustainability
Fire one group and you get problems on the long run.
The hard part is to keep the balance between each group's influence. They don't have the same needs, desires, agendas, and flaws.
It's almost like rusty'ol wisdom and youthful energy are actually a good combination to have!
Interestingly there is no statistical correlation between worker performance and experience. Maybe the poor lighting is holding them back?
Except, there is correlation.
You're holding the statistics wrong - the chart you're looking at is upside-down.
WTH is this article on about?
I just went to a tech social event last week here in Seattle and there were so may older men and women desperately looking for new positions after having been brutally cut by Microsoft and Amazon
Also the calculus that older employees cost companies more in salary and benefits is usually ruthlessly applied
In the tech / startup world I have to lie about my age or hide it as an over 50 year old..
I mean you don’t see any AI commercials with gray haired people do you
Ageism and Sexism is rampant in tech - not to mention the practice or hiring folks of one age , sex and ethnicity or another as culture ‘fit’
It sucks because so many older tech experts with years of good experience have been thrown by the wayside.. to the point where its a cliche
[dead]
OK, boomer.
The other side of this is old people desperately hanging onto jobs because they can't afford to retire. So slots are not opening up for young people.
People have to work to survive and afford medical treatment in the US. It’s funny how you can blame the people forced to work to survive and not the system that is setup to force them to do so.
The elite post covid have placed the average worker firmly under their boot. They apply more pressure each day.
Yet another side is arrogant little babies coming on board and making a big steaming mess of things because they thought they could do things better.
Waaaaahhhhhhhh
Almost every young developer joins the enterprise I work at and spends the first 6 months ranting about how bad everything is and how we could do things so much better with xyz or whatever. We wait, we educate, we leave them to come to the understanding that when you're in a business with billions in turnover, millions of customers, thousands of employees and hundreds of developers, what you learnt at university or building small side projects isn't enough to immediately judge and make changes. After about a year the good developers are proactively contributing good ideas that will actually work. It's not an environment that fits everyone, so we're fine when people decide to leave for somewhere smaller.