Devil's Advocate: Opportunity and discrimination

Discriminating against programmers and other IT workers on the basis of age doesn’t make sense, says Martin Brampton. So how might that situation change?

The government is planning to outlaw age discrimination in employment. Should I expect a rush of recruiters seeking my services as a result? Somehow I doubt it but there are some interesting opportunities around. Open source is one of the most interesting.

A positive factor throughout my working life so far has been the apparently limitless ability to absorb software. There is far more of it in familiar places, like centralised computer systems belonging to large organisations. And it has spread into any number of once unfamiliar places, such as every motor vehicle and quite a few domestic appliances.

In fact, software seems to be rather like data, in that we find it difficult to get rid of it. It is clear that many products have become seriously bloated. But tackling this and actually making a reduction in the size of a piece of software is usually a daunting task, the cost of which is hard to justify.

Demand for development people has generally been strong, although it swings between one extreme and the other. When IT loses confidence, a lot of people can suffer. It does not take much of an upturn, however, before the cry goes out that there is yet another skills shortage.

Unfortunately, one of the groups most likely to suffer in the downturns is older people. They can then find it difficult to overcome the curious practice of recruiters who insist on excessively specific skills profiles, ignoring the well established fact that good developers are highly adaptable.

Throughout the years when I needed to recruit software developers, there always seemed to be a significant advantage to going against the flow. Wherever there is discrimination, it follows that there is a pool of talent that is readily available and is being neglected by other hirers.

That is where the open source sector becomes important. By no means all open source development is done by volunteers, much of it is done by corporate staff for a variety of commercial reasons. Most open source projects do, though, need the support of volunteers. Not surprisingly, the demand for high quality free software considerably outstrips the supply.

The project I am personally involved with, the Mambo Content Management System, is developing quite rapidly but we have a constant need for more people with a variety of IT-related skills. When you are looking for volunteers, it certainly doesn't pay to be prejudiced about the kind of people you want. The Mambo team is, disappointingly, currently all male. But that is certainly not a matter of policy.

Nationalities are pretty broadly represented, to the extent that it is difficult to find a time of day that is suitable for virtual meetings because the teams are so scattered around the globe. And on the specific issue of age, we have a pretty wide range. This can be a considerable advantage. Web software may be an innovative area but it still owes a lot to traditional skills.

Web software frequently has to cope with enormous and unpredictable variations in load. That makes it challenging and pushes developers to streamline designs. It also makes for difficult trade offs between object design principles and minimising the overheads involved in persistence through the use of database technology.

All this kind of thing means that there are plentiful opportunities for ageing IT specialists - pushed out of the traditional employment market - to find challenging work. There is often scope to find spin-off paid work or to use the new experience gained in the open source world to return to employment. Or, if the work is interesting enough and financial pressures not too severe, some people may simply enjoy being part of an innovative open source project.