us economy Despite showing remarkable health, layoffs continue in the tech industry. For people who are unemployed, finding a new job can become a full-time job. And in the tech industry (an industry notorious for always looking for the next hot new thing), your days as a new programmer are long gone, but having decades of experience feels like a disadvantage. Some people say that it happens.
Age discrimination is a long-standing problem in the technology industry. His database startup RelevantDB went viral in 2021 after posting job postings boasting, “We hire older people,” playing up industry stereotypes. In 2020, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that IBM engaged in age discrimination by pushing out older workers to make room for younger workers. (The company denies “systemic age discrimination.”)
A recent ad on LinkedIn in which an elderly woman unfamiliar with technology jargon says her son is selling an invisible cloud has been criticized by people for unfairly portraying older people as marginalized. caused a backlash. In response, Jim Habig, LinkedIn's vice president of marketing, said, “This ad falls short of our goal of creating an experience where all professionals feel welcome and valued. “We are working to replace that advertising.”
Age discrimination is an 'open secret in the tech industry,' says presenter Maureen Clough. It's too late to be late, a podcast about aging in the tech industry. While ageism may not be as overt as in the IBM incident, she says it hides behind common industry hiring ideas such as culture fit. “If you're working in a company that's predominantly young, white, male, it's going to be more difficult to get into it,” Clough says.
Vern Six, a 58-year-old programmer, said he recently encountered blatant age discrimination while job hunting. The recruiter told him he didn't appeal to the employer and opined that at this point in his career he should be a chief technology officer rather than a software developer, Six said.
After Sixx's LinkedIn post about that encounter went viral, he created a LinkedIn group to discuss ageism in the tech industry. He said he has often wondered if his age would affect his job search, but “this was the first time someone had said that to me directly.”
Industry and government data show that the U.S. high-tech workforce skews younger than the overall U.S. workforce, but conclusive data on differences in employment patterns between older and younger workers is difficult to collect. . Joanna Lahey, a public policy professor at Texas A&M University who studies age, says more senior technology workers are moving between companies they know and networking rather than cold-applying. This is because they are employed, and it is difficult to investigate and quantify this. discrimination.
Lahey said older workers may be out of work for longer periods of time between jobs because they are more likely to seek higher pay or be more selective about their jobs. However, older employees are excluded from some positions because recruiters believe they will not accept a lower offer or position, or because they are seen as not fitting into the company culture. If so, she says, that's a problem. “There are a lot of people who have a lot of skills but have been unemployed for longer than they should. It's a loss for them and a loss for society.”
déjà vu
Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 employees in the past two years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks industry layoffs. For older workers, the purge is both a reminder of the dot-com bust and a door to new horizons. The industry's generally consistent growth in recent decades has meant that as the economy becomes more technology-centric, it is becoming more and more of an older workforce (sometimes taken to mean 35 and older in the tech industry, but 40 and older). This includes people in their late 50s, 50s, or 60s), but they have little experience in job hunting.
For decades, technology workers have been able to move easily between jobs within a network, and were often poached by recruiters. And as tech companies boomed in the early days of the pandemic, skills were in high demand and workers were given leverage. As companies look to become more efficient and eliminate overemployment, power is shifting to employers and applicants are running into a wall. Employees need to network, be active on LinkedIn, join message boards, and stand out. With four generations now in the workforce, things can feel crowded.
