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Discussion on: What I Look for When Hiring Senior Software Engineers

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Charlie J Smotherman

Thank you Tyler for your response it is very much appreciated.

I can only speak from my own experience, but I've hired people of all age ranges so far.

Yes and that's a good thing, but have you hired anyone over 50 years of age for a junior developers position? I could be wrong but I would venture to say that the answer is "no".

The most important thing is whether or not the candidate has the right skill set for the position and if they can get the job done, so we should focus on that.

Okay let focus on that. Let's discuss just one of my projects. It's a DIY security camera system that utilize's imagenode, imagehub, imagemzq, opencv, tensorflowlite and mongodb. Backend is written in python, and the frontend is written in flutter/dart with plans of using rsyslog, logstash, elasticsearch and kibana for a dashboard to monitor it. Skills aren't the problem age (or more precisely "social fit") is.

This is again just my own hunch, but I hope that ageism will begin to disappear from the workplace now that the nature of work has changed. It seems like it used to be that people worked for the same company for 30 years and then retired with a nice pension. Now people job hop much more frequently. It's common to see software engineers switch jobs every few years (that's been my work history so far!).

I hope you have a good 401k then :) If not it's going to suck when your my age. And one day you will be my age.

If we hypothetically had a 20 year old candidate and a 50 year old candidate with somehow exactly equal job skills and experience, what difference does age make?

My question exactly. It shouldn't make a difference but it does.

(We need to have this whole discussion of course keeping in mind that age is a protected class when interviewing, and it's illegal to discriminate against someone based on their age. What we're really trying to combat here are implicit biases that may be more subtle.)

Yes this is true but is does allow you to answer the very broad simple yes or no question of "Have you hired anyone over 50 yrs of age for a junior developer position".

Once again thank you for your insights Tyler.

Happy Coding

"I have no special skills, just passionate curiosity"
Albert Einstein