4 Reasons to Employ Older Tech Employees

Despite legislation making it overtly illegal, ageism persists in almost every industry.

Being an older technology worker, I’ve seen lots of cases where younger workers are picked over older ones. It happened to me once when I was recruiting a programmer for an employer in Edmonton. After all the interviews, I’d narrowed the candidates down to a 20 something and an individual over 60. Both were very good, both were happy with the proposed salary. I thought the 60-year-old was better and a better fit to our team, but the senior manager tasked with the final selection picked the younger developer.

At times we’re told there’s a staffing crisis, that companies need to import more developers from out of province, but the truth is that outsourcing and downsizing eliminated a subset of viable developers from the market. Those developers, in turn, had to figure out if they wanted to land another job, freelance, or leave the technology industry entirely.

Thinking about how much larger the pool is taking those reasons into considerations, here are four reasons you should consider hiring older technology workers:

1. Availability

In the U.S. and Canada, the number of science and engineering graduates has barely risen in the past decade, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yet the need for developers has risen over the past few years. In theory, that means a lot of older developers out there, ready for hire. The Baby Boomers, who were the first to embrace technology careers are finding it difficult to compete in our anti-age technology work forces. Managers tend to discount their 30+ years of technology work as being “old school”.

2. Stability

As developers age, they generally have less spare time due to family commitments. That doesn’t work for many startups, which expect “death marches” and 80-hour weeks in order to ship products. But older technology workers are often more reliable and stable. They have already gone through the pressures to leapfrog up the career ladder and are more comfortable with their work/life balance. Thus, they often like to stay in the same job for an extended period of time and are not interested in leaving for a “better” position.

3. Specialist Knowledge

The author Malcolm Gladwell wrote, practicing anything for 10,000 hours (that’s 20 hours a week for ten years) is sufficient to master it. That might apply to Roger Womack, CEO of Sportdirector.co.uk, a one-person firm that produces the soccer simulator Football Director for many different platforms. For 30 years, he worked for a variety of game publishers; but in 2007, with decades of experience under his belt, he decided to publish his own game.

“The bar to entry is much lower with technologies like Unity,” he said. “I’d probably make more money now working for someone else than if I was going it alone.” But at 60, Womack has more than enough game-development experience to run a business by himself.

Technology workers need to master more technologies than they did three decades ago. In the early ‘80s, there were very few commercial languages other than COBOL, Basic, and assembly language. Today’s developers, need to contend with version-control systems, build systems, XML, JSON, databases and SQL, not to mention various Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and server-side languages. The tools for technical writers have expanded exponentially as well. In the 80’s, it was Ventura Publisher, WordStar and Harvard Publishing, today it is not just paper documents that need to be created, but you also need to publish documents to the web and create interactive training using numerous softwares, including Visio, Captivate, articulate, Camptasia, FrameMaker, Flash, HTML, as well as the Office Business tools. Project and change management has become part of their work arsenal.

Older tech workers have spent their careers learning new technologies quickly and they all have a system for picking up whatever they need to know; plus there is a growing body of online tutorials helps with that. The biggest roadblock can be in managing one’s time in order to actually learn how the software works.

4. Better at Office Politics

Any tech worker who has been around more than 15 years has probably seen his or her fair share of bad incidents in offices: favoritism, dead-end projects, poor leadership, technical debt, reshuffles, and, of course, the impact of layoffs. They’re adaptable, which is why bringing in a mature team member can anchor a team with a solid core. They also have picked up a variety of skill sets that can “fill the holes” in any team. With older workers, not only do you get a bigger bang for your buck, but you also get a worker who ofter buckles down and gets the job done quickly and efficiently.

Conclusion

I can think of few things as wasteful as discarding technology workers  because of their age. I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has recruited an older person only to regret it. Their skills, particularly in contract work teams can be invaluable. If you’re on the quest for talent, throw the widest possible net and don’t discard the older prospects.