Why do so many companies refuse to hire older programmers?

Taking my own experience and those of my current and former colleagues as examples:

Me: After graduating, I bounced around for seven or eight years before finally catching the tail end of ByteDance’s last big growth wave. The money I made from cashing out my stock options was barely enough to buy an average apartment in a decent school district, but at least that took care of my child’s schooling. To avoid getting laid off, I’m still grinding away. As long as the grind doesn’t kill me, I’ll keep grinding myself to the bone. My PHQ-9 result indicates moderate depression.

Colleague A: He worked briefly at ByteDance for a few months in 2015. After leaving, he joined two startups, but both eventually more or less went under, and his stock options became virtually worthless. In the end, he returned to ByteDance. His team is insanely competitive, with everyone constantly trying to outdo or undermine one another. His PHQ-9 result also indicates moderate depression, though somewhat more severe than mine.

Colleague B: He has both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from a top-three university—I won’t name it, because that would make it too easy for him to identify himself. After graduating, he mostly worked at startups, usually with the title of Technical Director, though he also spent two years at a major tech company. Almost every company he worked for eventually went under. He joined ByteDance at the end of 2018, came in at a relatively high level, and received a substantial number of stock options. He left in 2023 after all his options had vested, though they have yet to be bought back and converted into cash. He is now a VP of Engineering at a startup. He works extremely hard and is very fond of frameworks and methodologies.

Former colleague C: He has both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Tsinghua University. He rose to the director level at Tencent before joining an online education company as its Technical Director. Before China’s “Double Reduction” policy, his net worth was reportedly in the high tens of millions of RMB. After the policy was introduced, it was basically wiped out. That said, both of his parents are university professors, so neither money nor housing is an issue for him. He is fairly intense and competitive, although he tends to focus more on high-level ideas than practical execution. He is now working on his own startup. He has not disclosed exactly what it does, apparently because of some kind of confidentiality agreement.

Former colleague D: He earned his bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University and his master’s from Tsinghua University. He worked as a technical lead at an online education company. Before the “Double Reduction” policy, his net worth was a little over RMB 10 million; afterward, it was basically wiped out. Fortunately, he married and had children early, and he bought an apartment in a good school district before the previous surge in housing prices. He now rarely works overtime and has essentially chosen to take it easy. He is calm and at peace with himself.

Former colleague E: He is a Beijing native with a bachelor’s degree from a Project 985 university. He started working in 2004 and had already bought both a home and a car before the Beijing Olympics, so he faces little financial pressure in daily life. After spending 15 years at his original company, he left for a startup, only to return six months later. The company was subsequently acquired by Tencent and incorporated into it. He is now Level 11 at Tencent.

Former colleague F: He is a Beijing native with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Tsinghua University. He was admitted without taking the standard entrance examinations for both his undergraduate and graduate studies. While he was still at university, his family bought him a large three-bedroom apartment inside Beijing’s Third Ring Road. After his company was acquired by Tencent, he took the compensation package and left to start a business. He is diligent and responsible, but also extremely laid-back.

Former colleague G: Starting in 2015, he spent nearly ten years working at several startups. He lived through the collapse of the P2P lending sector, which effectively killed the business. Fortunately, the company did not pull any shady moves, so he came out of it unharmed. He is now the Technical Director at a startup in the cross-border e-commerce sector.

We share several things in common:

• None of us has taken on much leverage.
• Our mortgage payments are manageable, and we could pay off our mortgages early even if we lost our jobs.
• Housing and access to good schools have already been taken care of.
• When it comes to our children’s education, the only question is how hard we want to push them academically. At the very least, they all have a school to attend.

I am still in touch with all these colleagues, and we have reached several shared conclusions:

1. Choices matter more than hard work.
   We earn reasonably good incomes today because we chose computer science at university and then happened to enter the industry during more than a decade of rapid growth. Our individual abilities played a role, but not a particularly large one.

2. Joining a growing company at the right time will probably generate better returns than struggling to build a startup yourself.
   Again, choices matter more than effort.

3. The codebases at major tech companies are all mountains of spaghetti code.
   Their leaders’ management philosophies may be less effective than the methods Chan Ho-nam of the fictional Hung Hing triad uses to manage his underlings. Fundamentally, a major tech company is just an amateur operation on a much larger scale.

4. Whether your leader approves of you is not that important. The point of working is to make money.
   You expect someone in their twenties, only a few years out of university, to manage a group of seasoned veterans like us? People like us are difficult to motivate with corporate hype. We are not under much financial pressure, and we may be even more familiar with manipulative PUA tactics than our managers are. So yes, we are difficult to manage.