October 9, 2000

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Older IT Professionals Struggle With Age Bias

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More on IT labor shortage:

sidebar: Oldies Have To Make Sure They're Still Goodies Training Opportunities Arise For High Tech (9/28/00) TechWeb Finance: East Coast Tries To Ease Worker Shortage (9/14/00) TechWeb: Startup Joins Trend In Offshore IT Services (8/21/00)

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Companies may also assume older workers aren't willing to put in the same hours as younger workers--and in many cases, they're right. "It wasn't a problem working 18 to 20 hours a day when I was younger," Linn says. "But I've got a family now and don't want to work those hours."

Salary demands and the level of productivity of the current U.S. IT workforce--not the IT worker shortage--are the primary reasons companies look abroad in their search for workers, Matloff says. Programmer Bradsher says that until he needed to look for a new job in 1998, he didn't realize that "the corporate preference was quietly going to low-paid imported workers over older, more experienced domestic workers."

The fierce lobbying of Congress to increase the number of foreign workers allowed in the country using H-1B visas has ballooned into a major controversy within the IT industry, and older workers are among those most opposed to the plan. "I never in my wildest dreams ever imagined that such a thing as this could have happened," Bradsher says. "In any other profession, if you flooded the job market with imported workers, you'd have rioting in the streets and burning buildings and all that sort of thing. But we're so addicted to our work that we don't respond."

Linn also has strong feelings about the issue. "Companies can pay foreign workers less and expect them to put in more hours," he says. "But half of the people in my training classes can't speak English, need to be trained in basic computing, and have H-1B visas."

But Susan deFife, former CEO for the defunct site WomenConnect.com, says that companies--especially startups--need qualified workers wherever they can find them. Lack of available IT talent can be one of the pitfalls a company faces; deFife's site was shut down Aug. 31. "In the short term, we need [foreign workers] to grow our companies," deFife says.

Some of those involved with the IT industry say that the argument over age discrimination has been blown out of proportion. "If you have a pulse, you should be able to find a job in this market," says Grant Russell, a recruiter with Management Recruiters International. Older workers "are looking for excuses other than themselves for not getting jobs." Says Russell, "Many older workers have chips on their shoulders--a crappy attitude hurts them more than their age."

In an IEEE-USA study analyzing employers' attitudes toward older workers, only a small fraction of programmers over 45 named age discrimination as a cause for not receiving a salary increase or a job promotion. "This response shows mixed support that older workers are discriminated against," says Chuck McClure, co-chair of the IEEE-USA Workforce Committee that commissioned the study.

For those who feel discriminated against, there is hope. Landstone Group's Heath says more companies are waking up to the fact that older IT workers can offer a lot of value. "In the mid-'80s, no one was going to pay us a fee to hire a 55-year-old, but the barriers are breaking down," he says. Companies now request older workers from the Landstone Group because their age denotes proven management that comes with maturity, Heath says.

He says older workers offer other advantages. They're not as prone to job-hopping as young workers, because they typically have families to support. "The older generation is willing to stick around, saving companies thousands in retraining and recruiting," Heath says.

Some older IT workers say that it doesn't do any good to anticipate that they'll be discriminated against because of their age. The best course of action is to work hard, have a good attitude, and keep an open mind about new ways of doing things. Wilson says age discrimination is "something I don't think about."

Wilson works as a programmer on a contract basis by choice and says age "is not that much of a factor" in information technology. He says a lack of skills, not age, is the biggest detriment to finding a good job. "I compare it to running up a hill," he says. "The hill is getting steeper, and you might have to work harder, but you can still run."

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Illustration by Jordan Isip

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