Not long after I passed a major birthday this year, the Australian Computer Society's Information Age published an article Too Old to Hire, Too Young to Retire, reporting the frustration of older computing workers feeling ignored by recruiters. Being a software developer myself, I'm going to focus on software developers here, though I believe similar observations apply to computing workers more broadly.
Sebastian Baltes and colleagues (2020) summarise some of the issues facing older software developers in an article for IEEE Software. Most cultures perceive younger people to be better at learning new things, while the experience of older people isn't as valued in software development as it is in other contexts. Many software firms glorify "start-up culture" and long hours that appeal to career-minded young developers but not so much to older developers with families and motivated by internal values. Furthermore, the perception of "old" amongst popular articles that Baltes and colleagues reviewed is quite young compared to the workforce in general: around half the articles regarded software developers in their 30s as being "old" while most of the rest regarded software developers in their 40s as "old", where the retirement age in developed countries is around 65.
One of Baltes' co-authors is a former Masters student, George Park, whose thesis (2020) explored news and blog articles' perception of age in software development. Park says that such articles usually present age as "limiting", but Park cites a number of studies arguing that older software developers in fact both maintain their skills and learn new technologies as they age. Other studies, however, identify various phenomena that push older developers from their career paths: expectations that developers move into non-programming roles; conflicts between work and family commitments; and (inaccurate) perceptions that older developers are more expensive.
Park goes on to identify numerous strategies proposed for older software developers, which include adapting expectations, appearing young, changing roles, and developing new skills. In another recent study of fourteen "veteran" female developers, Sterre van Breukelen and colleagues (2023) report strategies including mentoring younger women, finding a niche, updating their technology skills, behaving younger, and assuring themselves they could switch to another company or start a new business if they had to. Since Park is reporting opinion pieces not based on any robust evidence, while van Breukelen and colleagues are reporting the experience of only a fairly small number of people, it's hard to be sure how successful any of these strategies might be in general, except insofar as the participants in van Breukelen's study evidently succeeded well enough to become veterans.
Alan Stone and Nicholas Harkiolakis (2022) interviewed seven managers and human resources staff at US-based computing firms about why those firms didn't make use of older computing workers. Stone and Harkiolakis themselves accept that older workers have significant potential, but their interviewees gave very mixed views, with some characterising older workers as less "tech savvy" and younger workers as having more "fire and energy", but many also recognising the value of experience. Most of the organisations in the study had no specific policy on age, though the interviewees said that their organisation's culture recognised the value of experience. At the point of recruitment, however, the interviewees observed a number of barriers to hiring older candidates: a perception that their careers were "sunsetting" and the perceived cost of older workers when compared to younger workers.
Aging successfully
In a call-to-arms for business schools in countries with aging workforces, Reidar Mykletun (2022) proposes that older workers of all sorts must (a) be employable; (b) have reasonable work ability; (c) be willing to work; and (d) have opportunities to be gainfully employed. He goes on to paint a dismal picture of discrimination and stereotyping surrounding older workers, but points to academic literature arguing that older workers show greater organisational citizenship and limited declines in performance. Studies of the creativity and innovation of older workers, however, are inconclusive. Whatever the case, Mykletun supposes that countries with aging populations must make do with the workers they can get (not to mention that the workers themselves need employment to pay their bills).
Margaret Beier and colleagues (2022) describe successful aging at work as "the ability and motivation to continue working throughout the working lifespan". They say that researchers increasingly agree that older workers must take active steps to age successfully, and draw particular attention to the "person-environment" fit. Workers (of any age) can in principle influence their person-environment fit by "creating and reacting" to their environment, which I'll say more about below.
Beier and colleagues say that research shows little or no decline in core task performance with age, because declines in general cognitive and physical performance with age are offset by greater experience in performing core tasks. Furthermore, several studies suggest that older workers perceive higher well-being than younger workers, even though objective measures of their physical health decline. Ability to work at all declines only slightly (though the decline observed in studies might be steeper if workers who had already retired due to ill health were included).
Less happily, a number of studies report that older workers have less motivation to undertake training, take longer to train, and achieve lower results at the end of it, probably due to declines in cognitive ability associated with age. Nonetheless, people can and do learn throughout their lives, particularly where new skills are related to older ones.
Strategies for older developers
Upskilling and reskilling. Retraining in new and higher skills is so widely recommended as to be trite. While the research noted above suggests that older workers find learning harder than younger ones, they nonetheless can learn, and not learning seems unlikely to be a successful strategy in any event. For all the popular articles and academic literature discussing reskilling and upskilling, however, I've found only a handful of studies exploring the outcomes for workers and organisations that undertake training. My perception agrees with that of Mintaka Angell and colleagues (2021), who say that "while the U.S. spends billions of dollars annually on reskilling programs and unemployment insurance, there are few measures of program effectiveness that workers or government can use to guide training investment and ensure valuable reskilling outcomes." They go on to propose a machine learning algorithm for discovering this information, but the details are beyond the scope of this article.
Shifting roles. Back in 2010, Ricardo Colomo-Palacios and colleagues proposed a model of career development in which software developers pursue either a "technical" or "management" path. Both paths begin with junior developers moving through to senior developer roles, but those on the technical path move on to be solution architect and chief scientist while those on the management path move on to be project manager and director. This model fits the common idea of (high-performing) staff continuing their careers through promotion to higher duties, and I haven't been able to find any critiques or updates to Colomo-Palacios and colleagues' model, but it's hard to see how everyone could make it to Chief Scientist or Chief Information Officer given that there are so few of these positions compared to the number of junior software developers starting out.
Job crafting. "Job crafting" means taking action to improve person-environment fit, which might mean adapting the person to the environment or adapting the environment to the person. Maria Tims and colleagues (2022) identify numerous job crafting strategies that might be pursued workers of any age, including promoting the desirable aspects of a job and preventing the less desirable ones, making work processes more efficient, pursuing career development, and improving work/life balance.
Mentoring. The recruitment company interviewed in the Information Age article says that they've been successful in placing experienced developers in mentoring roles, though most or all mentorship schemes that I'm aware of are either voluntary arrangements made through professional societies, or internal schemes developed within large organisations; I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone holding a paid job as a "mentor". Nonetheless, mentoring younger developers within an organisation may increase the value of experienced developers to that organisation, and voluntary mentoring may help experienced developers build networks. I myself spend a good deal of time "mentoring" as a university teacher.
Conclusion
Contrary to widely-held opinions, older workers (including software developers) retain their skills and are capable of learning new ones, even if learning requires more effort than it does for younger workers. Several studies report strategies used (or at least suggested) by older software developers to maintain their careers, but little or no data exists on how effective these strategies might be, or even on the outcomes of the much-talked-about upskilling and reskilling strategies. Still, older developers have little choice but to try something, unless we're to retire at age forty.
References
Mintaka Angell, Samantha Gold, Justine S. Hastings, Mark Howison, Scott Jensen, Niall Keleher, Daniel Molitor and Amelia Roberts, 2021. Estimating Value-Added Returns to Labor Training Programs with Causal Machine Learning. Preprint available from OSF Preprints.
Sebastian Baltes, George Parks and Alexander Serebrenik, 2020. Is 40 the New 60? How Popular Media Portrays the Employability of Older Software Developers, IEEE Software 37(6), pages 26-31.
Margaret E. Beier, Ruth Kanfer, Dorien T. A. M. Kooij and Donald M. Truxillo, 2022. What's Age Got To Do With It? A Primer and Review of the Workplace Aging Literature, Personnel Psychology 75, pages 779-804.
Ricardo Colomo-Palacios, Edmundo Tovar-Caro, Ángel García-Crespo and Juan Miguel Gómez-Berbís, 2010. Identifying Technical Competences of IT Professionals: The Case of Software Engineers, International Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals 1(1).
Reidar J. Mykletun, 2022. New Insight Regarding the Ageing Workforce: It is Time to Close This Knowing-Doing Gap, in Practicing Responsibility in Business Schools, Elgar Online, Chapter 5, pages 109-144.
G. W. A. Park, 2020. Age(ing) in Software Development. Masters thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology.
Alan Stone and Nicholas Harkiolakis, 2022. Technology Boom(ers): How US Multinational Technology Companies Are Preparing for an Ageing Workforce, Administrative Sciences 12(3).
Maria Tims, Melissa Twemlow and Christine Yin Man Fong, 2022. A State-of-the-Art Overview of Job-Crafting Research: Current Trends and Future Research Directions, Career Development International 27(1), pages 54-78.
Sterre van Breukelen, Ann Barcomb, Sebastian Baltes and Alexander Serebrenik, 2023. "STILL AROUND": Experiences and Survival Strategies of Veteran Women Software Developers, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.