Report on Business: Technology Careers


Older programmers fight age bias in industry Experienced
coders struggle to find work in a youth-fixated world,
even as high-tech firms bemoan a skills shortage


PAUL DE GROOT


02/18/99
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Metro
Page T9
All material copyright Thomson Canada Limited or its
licensors. All rights reserved.


Every workday, Jan Broekhof tackles the software equivalent of changing
the engines on a 747. Mr. Broekhof , who lives in suburban Toronto, is
one of Canada's few experts in upgrading the operating systems of
mainframe computers.


But if he was a real jet engine mechanic, the Department of
Transportation wouldn't let him touch a jet engine. After all, he's 72
years old. He retired once, in 1991. Did the garden. Read. Was bored
out of his mind.


Finally, he answered an ad and went back to work full- time. He is now
on his seventh or eighth job since retirement. His previous employer, a
government department, asked him to come back. He turned them down. Mr.
Broekhof is, according to his boss at IBM Canada Ltd. of Markham, Ont.,
the oldest systems programmer in Canada. He plans to retire for good
when he gets "fed up with it," which does not appear to be any time
soon.


A former chemical engineer from Holland who switched to a career in
computers in 1969, Mr. Broekhof is a rare specimen: an older programmer
in an industry that thrives off youth.


Many programmers over the age of 40 say they have a tough time finding
work. They find it ironic that the industry is claiming a massive skills
shortage as it imports workers from abroad.


Citing "explosive growth" in the industry, Robyn Gordon of the Software
Human Resource Council says that regional and sectoral studies indicate
there could be a shortfall of up to 50,000 high-tech workers by 2000.
That's more than double the SHRC's previous estimate of 20,000 workers
in 1998.


Statistics like that prompted Citizenship and Immigration Canada to
create a special program to let in skilled information technology
professionals from other countries. The Information Technology
Association of America pegs the shortage of IT professionals in the
United States at 360,000 and has also increased its quota of skilled
immigrants to meet that need.


But some labour groups, technical associations and the U.S. General
Accounting Office, say the ITAA's numbers are flawed. The real problem,
they say, is not that North America has too few skilled people, but that
high-tech companies are biased against older workers, like cheap labour
and are unwilling to retrain skilled people.


"When you hear an employer saying he needs [visas] to fill a 'labour
shortage,' remember what you are hearing: a cry for a labour subsidy to
allow the employer to avoid the normal functioning of the labour
market," says demographer Dr. Michael Teitelbaum, vice-chairman of the
U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.


Older programmers may not be familiar with the latest tools, may require
more pension or health benefits, and may find their experience works
against them when employers are looking for cheap help.


In particular, employers are unwilling to give older programmers credit
for what they know or can do, say critics of the shortage alarms.


"Is there age discrimination in the IT industry? Yes. Is it worse than
in other industries? Yes. Is there firm data to prove it? No," says
Michael Chambers, 37, a contract programmer in Toronto who says he's
already finding his age to be a hindrance.


The emphasis on youth may be subtle. Ads posted on the Internet by
Imediat Digital Creations Inc. of Vancouver say a candidate for a
position in the growing Internet company must be "profit driven, a
self-starter, youthful, energetic and entrepreneurial."


Stan Witkowski, a Toronto programmer with more than 25 years of
experience, says age discrimination "isn't the smoking-gun kind. It's
more like ads that say 'the bulk of your working life is still ahead of
you.' "


Bill Lynch, a Cobol-language and IBM-mainframe programmer from New York,
jokes that when he turned 50 he switched from the decimal system to the
hexidecimal system when referring to his age, because x32, the
programmer's notation for 50 in hexadecimal, looks younger and most
managers "are afraid to ask what it means."


What is so special about young programmers?


"They are cheap and single. Single is very important. You can make them
work 80 hours a week and they won't complain. They are compliant," says
Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of
California in Davis, Calif.


Intel Corp. of San Jose, has even spawned an association of former
employees -- FACE Intel -- who say that the company's emphasis on youth
is destructive.


The tendency of programmers to work long, caffeine- and Twinkie-fuelled
hours is for young people, says Stephen Adamzyck, a 44-year-old
programmer with the Edison Design Group in Montclair, N.J.


Older people are less interested in working under such conditions, he
says, not only because of their age, but "because you have a life
outside of work, and because you know that working steadily on something
while you're well rested usually produces better results than working in
sleep-deprived spurts."


Ralph Jones, a Chicago programmer who at 58 earns $65 (U.S.) an hour as
a contractor, says the long hours that young programmers put in are due
more to inexperience than energy.


"They don't know how to do it right." Between managers, who generally
have "unrealistic expectations" of what can be accomplished, and
programmers, who "tend to be wildly optimistic," roughly 90 per cent of
all new software orders come in very late and over budget, says Mr.
Jones, who has been both a manager and programmer in a 33-year career.


John Backus, inventor of the Fortran programming language widely used in
science and engineering, is less willing to discount the skills of
recent graduates. He retired from teaching in 1991.


"I had a couple of brilliant kids working for me and I noticed how much
more educated they were. They really knew a lot of sophisticated theory
that was very helpful," he said in a telephone interview from his San
Jose home.


Dr. Matloff has studied the issue of age discrimination in the computer
industry in some depth, and says it is "rampant."


Jacqueline Voci, manager of corporate communications with Imediat
Ditigal, denies that the company is looking for people of a certain age
but concedes that "it's fair to say that the Web industry is a youthful
industry, and a lot of people who have the particular skills are often
younger."


Todd Kuipers, a 29-year-old staffer at Calgary software company Merak
Projects, says the skills set his company looks for -- Visual C++ using
Microsoft programming tools -- is more common among recent graduates
than older programmers.


Furthermore, experienced programmers from large companies may not fit
the salary structure of younger, newer companies, Mr. Kuipers adds.


"If the top people in my company are making $60,000 to $65,000 a year it
would be a little tough to bring in a senior programmer and start to pay
them $90,000 or $100,000 because of their experience."


Dr. Matloff says the skills issue is a red herring, because most
programmers can pick up a new programming language in a few weeks, but
technology companies are reluctant to retrain, preferring to hire staff
already trained elsewhere.


Companies will sometimes leave a position open for months while they
look for the "right" candidate, instead of easily filling the job by
retraining an experienced programmer, he says.


Retraining isn't always an option, however, says Imediat president Brian
Liu.


"Because of the speed of our marketplace and the speed of expectations,
we don't have the luxury of training people. We look for people to come
in with the necessary skills." Imediat trains its own staff only when no
experienced people are available, he says.


Besides, retraining is no guarantee of a job, Dr. Matloff points out,
since an older programmer who picks up new skills is still an older
programmer.


"Even people with the skills are being shunned," he says, pointing to
Bill Halchin, a leader in operating-system design who was unable to get
even an interview with Sun Microsystems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.,
when applying for a position last year to design operating-system
software.


Mr. Chambers says the steady flow of Canadian programmers to the United
States proves that a significant element in the Canadian software
"shortage" is not a lack of people, but an unwillingness from employers
to meet U.S. salaries, which are 50-per-cent higher when exchange rates
are taken into account.