Brampton Factor: Ageism myths

Ageism in IT is much like other kinds of prejudice, says Martin Brampton - most of what we assume is untrue. And the solutions require the overcoming of deep-rooted ideals.

Prejudice is a strange thing. Hardly anyone admits to it, yet what people say is often indicative of entrenched attitudes. So perhaps ageism is a typical example of prejudice. It is the people who think themselves free of prejudice that alarm me the most.

Data on discrimination is hard to come by. Sending out surveys asking people whether they are prejudiced is as pointless as asking airline passengers whether they are terrorists. Anecdotal evidence is also pretty unreliable. The situation is varied, so it is always possible to find individual cases that support any point of view.

Undoubtedly there will be recruiters who welcome candidates at the extremes of ages. It is sound common sense to buck the trend to find good candidates. Likewise there will always be people who do well despite being part of a group that suffers prejudice. They are fortunate, and perhaps to be applauded for their efforts to overcome prejudice. All the same, none of this means prejudice does not exist.

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One strategy for combating ageism is to have older IT workers deal with legacy systems, of which there are plenty. But would they want to forever work on the first technologies they encountered decades ago?

Moreover, a lot of current technologies are based on knowledge that is not nearly so new as some people imagine. The pace and extent of innovation in data communications or software development is greatly exaggerated. For example, third generation programming languages have hardly changed in the last 30 years. Even object orientation now has a history spanning decades.

Another alarming tendency is to say the problem is with older workers themselves - that they have no experience with current tech, that they are reluctant to travel or work anti-social hours, that they require high salaries.

These are precisely the attitudes that make discrimination so pernicious. It reminds me of prejudice against women, when the touted solution is that they should behave more like men. Or prejudice against foreigners because they may not behave quite like natives. They are blamed for not conforming to stereotypes.

Certainly there are times when we want to mix with people like ourselves but in a healthy society we also have to be able to find constructive ways to confront difference. Older people are different in some ways, and not simply pale imitations of younger people, any more than women are pale imitations of men. The most stimulating working environments are often created by bringing together talented people from a variety of backgrounds.

Skill in older technologies might well be valuable if the worker can also demonstrate learning skills and adaptability. Knowing how problems were solved when the only thing available was a puny computer running machine code can still give insight into contemporary issues.

And is it such a bad thing if some workers question the value of rushing around creating carbon dioxide, when you can communicate worldwide from your own home and probably be a lot more productive? In fact, there are plenty of worthwhile questions to be raised about the role of work in society. Assuming without argument that only young people have the right answer is dangerous.

Attitudes undoubtedly do change as people grow older and this often causes their priorities to change. Yet the combination of experience and giving lower priority to working time per se can be highly productive. It can encourage people to be smarter about the way they work, becoming more resistant to throwing away vast amounts of effort on the latest management fad. Working long hours has become so much a part of our self image in recent times that we greatly exaggerate both how hard we work and how effective it really is.

With experience, people get to understand some basic truths - such as the fact that creativity does not come from working long hours. Perhaps the opposite, as solutions to problems often come to people when they are relaxing, thinking about other matters entirely. Or being aware, as any experienced project manager knows, that adding staff to a late project is frequently counter-productive and wasteful of resources. At the same time, as people move towards the end of their careers they quite often want to adopt different roles, and are only too willing to encourage younger people to take on responsibility.

Yet that does not mean they are happy to be underpaid. There are always conflicts over what counts as fair pay, and there may be distortions such as the effect of changes in remuneration on final salary schemes, where they still exist. But there is no reason why people should not be paid for what they can do, irrespective of factors such as age or sex. Surely that much was established as soon as questions of discrimination were raised.

In the end, we have to confront the long-standing feature of life that people of different ages cannot understand one another.

Despite older people's changing priorities, they may well have high standards of professionalism and a continuing interest in the technologies that have absorbed them over many years. The ideal, hard to attain though it is, is for older and younger people to challenge one another in a constructive interplay of their respective strengths. Certainly, old, established beliefs should be challenged and innovation welcomed. But ideas are often not so new as people think and sometimes experience gives the best answers. Balance has to be the goal.

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