7 ms·

As a developer in my 40's, I see things like this and worry that the software industry will come to rely only on the young because they don't ... I don't want t

As a developer in my 40's, I see things like this and worry that the software industry will come to rely only on the young because they don't ... I don't want to say care ... but put as much emphasis maybe? ... on work-life balance. Developement-wise, I can hang with the 20 something crowd, no problems. I just can't compete with the single/no kids thing.

wslack 10y ago
I think that's the case right now with many jobs in mgmt consulting / investment banking. You can end up with a negative situation where people devote every waking hour then feel all subsequent success is owed to them - not great.
dleslie 10y ago
My experience is similar; it's sad, really, because though I enjoy what I do and am often among the most productive, my unwillingness to forgo time with my family in order to work unreasonable hours, often a result of poor leadership decisions, has become somewhat of a liability. After a career of small companies and the occasional startup, I am eyeing the cubicle-and-collars world of B2B software development with more interest.
gabesmed 10y ago
The youth helped us mostly because we were able to hop up and live in that house for months in order to be close to CMS - know our customers! But even for us those days are over - we have offices in SF and DC and have multiple more established folks on our team. Just like major tech companies, we want to provide a comfortable environment for skilled engineers of any age and family situation.
ryanSrich 10y ago
As a married person with no kids I feel the same way. I'm not 40, or even 30 yet, but I look at my peers and wonder if they'll grow to regret putting in 60 hour work weeks just to make someone else rich. I'm guilty of doing it too, for sure, but it wears you down quick.
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  FWIW, it can be a bit more complicated than that. I spent my 20s working 60 hour weeks to (mostly) make someone else rich, but doing that helped to get me to a better place by my 30s. Having graduated from school immediately after the dot compost, I'm not sure I would have been able to start out in a good tech job from the get-go. What worries me more is when I see colleagues who have children and are _still_ doing the chronic overtime thing. Missing out on getting drunk in the evenings just to make someone else rich is lame. Missing out on the early years of your kid's life just to make someone else rich is a tragedy.
  - zghst 10y ago
    Without kids you have opportunities to network, work on side projects and collaborate as well, etc.
- andyidsinga 10y ago
  Being in my 40s and having been there (in my 20s) I can tell you they will grow to regret it. That said, its up to people like me running teams and businesses to set the tone - encourage balance while not squandering inspired work. Re inspired work: I once made the mistake of telling one of my employees "slow down a little, i don't want you to burn out and hate working here". He had an astute response: "Andy, I'm inspired I have to keep working on this until its done!" He worked weird hours - night and day for 2 or 3 days ..and when it was done I remember him needing some well deserved R&R. The message from there on out to my teams is - if you're inspired, work. When you're done, rest. I'm not watching when you roll in in the morning, I'm watching the team's accomplishment and morale.
  - zghst 10y ago
    You must be one awesome boss
    - andyidsinga 10y ago
      well -- unfortunately not. I have plenty of bad habits and ways I drive my coworkers nuts.
quantumhobbit 10y ago
I'm a decade behind you but having my daughter was a huge wake up call. I was leading a machine learning side project with plenty of of 20-somethings. They were very eager and involved, until my daughter was born. Suddenly half the team quit. One guy admitted he just assumed the project was over as soon as I had a kid, like I was dead or something. I ended up coding a majority of the project by myself.
knorker 10y ago
I see this more as "the people who just show up" vs "the people who actually work when they're at work". Dividing them up like this the typical "just shows up" person is purely stimulus driven. Nothing happens if you don't tell them to do exactly something. They won't tell you they're blocked on Bob sending a purchase order for a month. They won't tell you because you didn't ask. You didn't ask so they just... they just do nothing. Or you have contractors who really don't care[1]. They bill by the hour, and if you don't give them tasks then they can take a second contract and bill more. Most companies I've seen are full of stimulus-response people. You don't need to work more than 40 hour weeks to be productive. What you need is managers and coworkers who understand what your job kinda entails. People who when you say during the two week planning meeting that you'll fix a typo and that's it, will call you on it saying "that won't take two weeks, what else?". I've seen competent people (with children) fall into a comfort zone where they can keep up and "perform well" working just an hour or two a week, because nobody else gets any work done so it's not like they're blocking people. These same people actually perform in better companies. [1] I'm not saying no contractors care. But they have extra reason not to care if they happened to be paid and aren't "stimulated" (in the simulus-response sense).
- pooper 10y ago
  > Dividing them up like this the typical "just shows up" person is purely stimulus driven. Nothing happens if you don't tell them to do exactly something. They won't tell you they're blocked on Bob sending a purchase order for a month. They won't tell you because you didn't ask. You didn't ask so they just... they just do nothing. I'm sorry but I'd argue that I cared more when I was younger (mostly because I was stupid). I've spent entire days in someone else's cubicle (not so much pair programming as me standing guard against distractions such as business analysts and quality assurance who apparently kept popping in) making sure they finish their part of work. Actual code writing for me was fairly easy once the roadblocks got out of the way. I've told people to shut up in meetings when they start going off in tangents. Clearly, it was not good for my career.
  - knorker 10y ago
    Not sure what part you're arguing with.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
As a fellow developer in my 40s, I enjoy getting as much work done in two hours as more junior people get done all week. Of course this isn't a function of age but two decades in the business doesn't hurt.
- knorker 10y ago
  Do you therefore stop at actually working about two hours per week?
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    Yeah I pretty much roll in at lunchtime and punch out at 3.
    - knorker 10y ago
      Then you are proving my point (other comment), and calling the grandparent comment either completely incompetent or a lazy bum who's upset that he can't keep up using 2h weeks when compete with 20-somethings who actually work 40h weeks. He "worries about the software industry", but my point is that he is worried for the wrong reason. The problem isn't that you can't do the job with a work life balance. It's that it's so full of incompetent people that someone competent can keep up with no effort at all. And they mask the incompetence. And eventually if you do that for 20 years, you too risk becoming incompetent. Or at least only have a tiny fraction of your potention competence.
      - honkhonkpants 10y ago
        I guess we agree then! I think it takes practice and discipline to really enjoy your life _outside_ of work. I take my kids to school, eat breakfast with my wife, handle my personal business in the morning. Then I go to work, WORK WHEN I AM AT WORK, and go pick up my kids from school and go home. Working when I am at work being the key point. If I walk around the floor at my office half the people will be reading Facebook or whatever, which I completely understand and I myself do read Facebook from time to time but I don't understand why you'd want to do that while sitting at your desk at work. Edited to add: and I never attend meetings.
vessenes 10y ago
I'm working on a project now that's all single 20-somethings. On the one hand, they are very smart, very aggressive and put a lot of time in on weekends. On the other hand, I'm crafty, and experienced. Also, I think kids that age do respect the idea of a family life -- I just had a chat this morning and said "have to go, family event" -- it's okay. While some 20 somethings are workaholics, a lot of them are not, they get their work life balance in at other times in other ways, more periodically. I don't think there needs to be a worry about stigma. Different strokes, and good communication are the most important.
godzillabrennus 10y ago
If you haven't gained an edge after working around 20 years in the industry then you might have something to fear. Most 20 somethings know a stack or two but don't have any domain knowledge to understand how to make it useful in the "real world". Check out: https://hbr.org/2014/11/the-best-performing-ceos-in-the-world https://hbr.org/2014/11/the-best-performing-ceos-in-the-worl... Over a quarter of the top CEO's in the world have an engineering background and the median age is 59. The world is becoming more and more flat with globalization. If you are limiting yourself to pushing code and not learning business skills you are probably replaceable.
- devonkim 10y ago
  I think decently smart people are all capable of learning business skills. The problem fundamentally later on is that you need skills and a network that is aligned with your goals for your post-individual contributor career.
  - SeeDave 10y ago
    A huge problem that many smart people face (myself included) is dealing with "average" employees. The sort of person who sees software engineering as "just another job" similar to folding T-Shirts at the Gap or flipping burgers at McDonalds. Very, very few people actually care about the influence their work has on customers, investors, vendors, and other employees... so it's a struggle to mentally understand how self-absorbed wage-earners actually think. To the point of feeling like throwing temper tantrums in response to "normal" behavior.
    - Joof 10y ago
      Finding a job where you're a good fit isn't easy either. I'm somewhat temperamental; in a job where I'm uninterested, it's easy to be the worst performer. In an interesting job (for me, these are often what others consider difficult), it's easy to perform several times as well as most others and be the top performer by a wide margin. Admittedly, my ADHD may give me a higher spread than most people, but I imagine it affects everyone to some degree.
Fiahil 10y ago
Well, I work way more than I should, because I have no other occupation outside of work. That's all. I'm not seeing myself competing with more experienced people for one thing or another. I'll take care of my work-life balance when I'll have a life, but in the meantime I'm happy to have something to occupy my brain and people to talk to 8h per day, otherwise I would definitively go crazy.
- jcrawfordor 10y ago
  I find this quite sad. There are a LOT of worthwhile organizations and purposes that need your time - badly - and would add needed balance to your life. I volunteer with the American Red Cross which needs volunteer personnel for all kinds of purposes ranging from two week deployments to disaster areas to occasional help at blood drives. You'd develop all kinds of new skills and meet a lot of great people, all while having a very tangible impact on the world. And that's just one random example from what I personally spend my time doing. Look around your area, community, and industry, and find more things to do. If nothing else you'll get a lot of good stories to tell. You might just find your purpose on life.
  - pm90 10y ago
    While this advice is good, I would resist from giving it when it isn't asked for. A lot of people need to discover it for themselves.
wcummings 10y ago
I'm a twenty-something and I see this everyday in my peer group. Most twenty-something's have way too much of their identity and self-esteem tied to their career. I would encourage other people my age to go in at 9, leave 5, work at a comfortable pace and take an hour for lunch. If you're good at your job and your employer is well run, that shouldn't be a problem.
notmyemployer 10y ago
I'm working on a contract tangentially related to this work and it's really not about young people working long hours. There are plenty of older people emailing me at 10 or 11 pm after the kids are in bed that don't know what's going on. This is solely about the quality of the talent. I encounter people and teams that are just unwilling to adopt contemporary development and deployment practices. The article notes that Hipchat was a struggle to get approval for, yet I often run into people at CMS that never log in to it and prefer tons of emails. Deployments aren't automated and still happen for some teams on calls during maintenance periods once a week. I've had people in technical capacities ask what GitHub is. The problem is institutional, it really has nothing to do with young people working 10 hour days. I care about my work-life balance -- I'm too old to crash on the couch at my startup's office like I did at past jobs in my 20s -- but I also keep up with contemporary development practices, make a point to study a new language every year, read academic papers, and care about my work. I don't think I can say the same about most devs I've encountered in government. The consulting firms are incentivized to build walls and protect the way they do business in order to keep getting that contract money. If you're an older dev that is intellectually curious in the practice and art of software development I think you'll be fine.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- optforfon 10y ago
  You might be fine，but I'd be ready to make a lot less money as we move into a more freelance oriented market the problem is that labor doesn't scale very well. 2 talented young programmers working all-out 12 hours a day on one project will generally be more productive than 3 talented folks with family working all-out 8 hours a day. (Agile, git, etc. all try to fix this to a degree... ) The current economic situation is that startups have very very deep pockets and will pay an insane premium to have stuff ASAP - which will mean very small, very overworked, very talented "rock stars". If you want to fix healthcare.gov and the president's reputation is on the line, you'll get the rockstarest rockstars you can find and slave drive them till it's done If you want a good work life balance I recommend the defense sector - but again - expect a pay cut. (like $120K end of career in SoCal vs. $250K in SF)
nnain 10y ago
As a developer in my thirties, I see this more as flexibility and exposure to adopt new technology, instead of sticking with old tech stacks. It's clear that the earlier contractors didn't know enough about user-centered design, responsive sites, mobile design, online login systems, modern web scalability requirements, benefits of cloud hosting and much more; which is where the younger developers now start. Also a minute to thank Stackoverflow, for the amazing work it has done in uplifting software development work.
serge2k 10y ago
> they don't ... I don't want to say care ... but put as much emphasis maybe? ... on work-life balance. or they just have a different view of it. You have no need to be home at any particular hour, and your social life is more evening/night based then why not work 10 hours a day. It's dumb, since you risk burning out, but otherwise I'm not really missing out on anything.

wslack 10y ago

I think that's the case right now with many jobs in mgmt consulting / investment banking. You can end up with a negative situation where people devote every waking hour then feel all subsequent success is owed to them - not great.

dleslie 10y ago

My experience is similar; it's sad, really, because though I enjoy what I do and am often among the most productive, my unwillingness to forgo time with my family in order to work unreasonable hours, often a result of poor leadership decisions, has become somewhat of a liability. After a career of small companies and the occasional startup, I am eyeing the cubicle-and-collars world of B2B software development with more interest.

gabesmed 10y ago

The youth helped us mostly because we were able to hop up and live in that house for months in order to be close to CMS - know our customers! But even for us those days are over - we have offices in SF and DC and have multiple more established folks on our team. Just like major tech companies, we want to provide a comfortable environment for skilled engineers of any age and family situation.

ryanSrich 10y ago

As a married person with no kids I feel the same way. I'm not 40, or even 30 yet, but I look at my peers and wonder if they'll grow to regret putting in 60 hour work weeks just to make someone else rich. I'm guilty of doing it too, for sure, but it wears you down quick.

bunderbunder 10y ago
FWIW, it can be a bit more complicated than that. I spent my 20s working 60 hour weeks to (mostly) make someone else rich, but doing that helped to get me to a better place by my 30s. Having graduated from school immediately after the dot compost, I'm not sure I would have been able to start out in a good tech job from the get-go. What worries me more is when I see colleagues who have children and are _still_ doing the chronic overtime thing. Missing out on getting drunk in the evenings just to make someone else rich is lame. Missing out on the early years of your kid's life just to make someone else rich is a tragedy.
- zghst 10y ago
  Without kids you have opportunities to network, work on side projects and collaborate as well, etc.
andyidsinga 10y ago
Being in my 40s and having been there (in my 20s) I can tell you they will grow to regret it. That said, its up to people like me running teams and businesses to set the tone - encourage balance while not squandering inspired work. Re inspired work: I once made the mistake of telling one of my employees "slow down a little, i don't want you to burn out and hate working here". He had an astute response: "Andy, I'm inspired I have to keep working on this until its done!" He worked weird hours - night and day for 2 or 3 days ..and when it was done I remember him needing some well deserved R&R. The message from there on out to my teams is - if you're inspired, work. When you're done, rest. I'm not watching when you roll in in the morning, I'm watching the team's accomplishment and morale.
- zghst 10y ago
  You must be one awesome boss
  - andyidsinga 10y ago
    well -- unfortunately not. I have plenty of bad habits and ways I drive my coworkers nuts.

quantumhobbit 10y ago

I'm a decade behind you but having my daughter was a huge wake up call. I was leading a machine learning side project with plenty of of 20-somethings. They were very eager and involved, until my daughter was born. Suddenly half the team quit. One guy admitted he just assumed the project was over as soon as I had a kid, like I was dead or something. I ended up coding a majority of the project by myself.

knorker 10y ago

I see this more as "the people who just show up" vs "the people who actually work when they're at work". Dividing them up like this the typical "just shows up" person is purely stimulus driven. Nothing happens if you don't tell them to do exactly something. They won't tell you they're blocked on Bob sending a purchase order for a month. They won't tell you because you didn't ask. You didn't ask so they just... they just do nothing. Or you have contractors who really don't care[1]. They bill by the hour, and if you don't give them tasks then they can take a second contract and bill more. Most companies I've seen are full of stimulus-response people. You don't need to work more than 40 hour weeks to be productive. What you need is managers and coworkers who understand what your job kinda entails. People who when you say during the two week planning meeting that you'll fix a typo and that's it, will call you on it saying "that won't take two weeks, what else?". I've seen competent people (with children) fall into a comfort zone where they can keep up and "perform well" working just an hour or two a week, because nobody else gets any work done so it's not like they're blocking people. These same people actually perform in better companies. [1] I'm not saying no contractors care. But they have extra reason not to care if they happened to be paid and aren't "stimulated" (in the simulus-response sense).

pooper 10y ago
> Dividing them up like this the typical "just shows up" person is purely stimulus driven. Nothing happens if you don't tell them to do exactly something. They won't tell you they're blocked on Bob sending a purchase order for a month. They won't tell you because you didn't ask. You didn't ask so they just... they just do nothing. I'm sorry but I'd argue that I cared more when I was younger (mostly because I was stupid). I've spent entire days in someone else's cubicle (not so much pair programming as me standing guard against distractions such as business analysts and quality assurance who apparently kept popping in) making sure they finish their part of work. Actual code writing for me was fairly easy once the roadblocks got out of the way. I've told people to shut up in meetings when they start going off in tangents. Clearly, it was not good for my career.
- knorker 10y ago
  Not sure what part you're arguing with.

honkhonkpants 10y ago

As a fellow developer in my 40s, I enjoy getting as much work done in two hours as more junior people get done all week. Of course this isn't a function of age but two decades in the business doesn't hurt.

knorker 10y ago
Do you therefore stop at actually working about two hours per week?
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Yeah I pretty much roll in at lunchtime and punch out at 3.
  - knorker 10y ago
    Then you are proving my point (other comment), and calling the grandparent comment either completely incompetent or a lazy bum who's upset that he can't keep up using 2h weeks when compete with 20-somethings who actually work 40h weeks. He "worries about the software industry", but my point is that he is worried for the wrong reason. The problem isn't that you can't do the job with a work life balance. It's that it's so full of incompetent people that someone competent can keep up with no effort at all. And they mask the incompetence. And eventually if you do that for 20 years, you too risk becoming incompetent. Or at least only have a tiny fraction of your potention competence.
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
      I guess we agree then! I think it takes practice and discipline to really enjoy your life _outside_ of work. I take my kids to school, eat breakfast with my wife, handle my personal business in the morning. Then I go to work, WORK WHEN I AM AT WORK, and go pick up my kids from school and go home. Working when I am at work being the key point. If I walk around the floor at my office half the people will be reading Facebook or whatever, which I completely understand and I myself do read Facebook from time to time but I don't understand why you'd want to do that while sitting at your desk at work. Edited to add: and I never attend meetings.

vessenes 10y ago

I'm working on a project now that's all single 20-somethings. On the one hand, they are very smart, very aggressive and put a lot of time in on weekends. On the other hand, I'm crafty, and experienced. Also, I think kids that age do respect the idea of a family life -- I just had a chat this morning and said "have to go, family event" -- it's okay. While some 20 somethings are workaholics, a lot of them are not, they get their work life balance in at other times in other ways, more periodically. I don't think there needs to be a worry about stigma. Different strokes, and good communication are the most important.

godzillabrennus 10y ago

If you haven't gained an edge after working around 20 years in the industry then you might have something to fear. Most 20 somethings know a stack or two but don't have any domain knowledge to understand how to make it useful in the "real world". Check out: https://hbr.org/2014/11/the-best-performing-ceos-in-the-world https://hbr.org/2014/11/the-best-performing-ceos-in-the-worl... Over a quarter of the top CEO's in the world have an engineering background and the median age is 59. The world is becoming more and more flat with globalization. If you are limiting yourself to pushing code and not learning business skills you are probably replaceable.

devonkim 10y ago
I think decently smart people are all capable of learning business skills. The problem fundamentally later on is that you need skills and a network that is aligned with your goals for your post-individual contributor career.
- SeeDave 10y ago
  A huge problem that many smart people face (myself included) is dealing with "average" employees. The sort of person who sees software engineering as "just another job" similar to folding T-Shirts at the Gap or flipping burgers at McDonalds. Very, very few people actually care about the influence their work has on customers, investors, vendors, and other employees... so it's a struggle to mentally understand how self-absorbed wage-earners actually think. To the point of feeling like throwing temper tantrums in response to "normal" behavior.
  - Joof 10y ago
    Finding a job where you're a good fit isn't easy either. I'm somewhat temperamental; in a job where I'm uninterested, it's easy to be the worst performer. In an interesting job (for me, these are often what others consider difficult), it's easy to perform several times as well as most others and be the top performer by a wide margin. Admittedly, my ADHD may give me a higher spread than most people, but I imagine it affects everyone to some degree.

Fiahil 10y ago

Well, I work way more than I should, because I have no other occupation outside of work. That's all. I'm not seeing myself competing with more experienced people for one thing or another. I'll take care of my work-life balance when I'll have a life, but in the meantime I'm happy to have something to occupy my brain and people to talk to 8h per day, otherwise I would definitively go crazy.

jcrawfordor 10y ago
I find this quite sad. There are a LOT of worthwhile organizations and purposes that need your time - badly - and would add needed balance to your life. I volunteer with the American Red Cross which needs volunteer personnel for all kinds of purposes ranging from two week deployments to disaster areas to occasional help at blood drives. You'd develop all kinds of new skills and meet a lot of great people, all while having a very tangible impact on the world. And that's just one random example from what I personally spend my time doing. Look around your area, community, and industry, and find more things to do. If nothing else you'll get a lot of good stories to tell. You might just find your purpose on life.
- pm90 10y ago
  While this advice is good, I would resist from giving it when it isn't asked for. A lot of people need to discover it for themselves.

wcummings 10y ago

I'm a twenty-something and I see this everyday in my peer group. Most twenty-something's have way too much of their identity and self-esteem tied to their career. I would encourage other people my age to go in at 9, leave 5, work at a comfortable pace and take an hour for lunch. If you're good at your job and your employer is well run, that shouldn't be a problem.

notmyemployer 10y ago

I'm working on a contract tangentially related to this work and it's really not about young people working long hours. There are plenty of older people emailing me at 10 or 11 pm after the kids are in bed that don't know what's going on. This is solely about the quality of the talent. I encounter people and teams that are just unwilling to adopt contemporary development and deployment practices. The article notes that Hipchat was a struggle to get approval for, yet I often run into people at CMS that never log in to it and prefer tons of emails. Deployments aren't automated and still happen for some teams on calls during maintenance periods once a week. I've had people in technical capacities ask what GitHub is. The problem is institutional, it really has nothing to do with young people working 10 hour days. I care about my work-life balance -- I'm too old to crash on the couch at my startup's office like I did at past jobs in my 20s -- but I also keep up with contemporary development practices, make a point to study a new language every year, read academic papers, and care about my work. I don't think I can say the same about most devs I've encountered in government. The consulting firms are incentivized to build walls and protect the way they do business in order to keep getting that contract money. If you're an older dev that is intellectually curious in the practice and art of software development I think you'll be fine.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
optforfon 10y ago
You might be fine，but I'd be ready to make a lot less money as we move into a more freelance oriented market the problem is that labor doesn't scale very well. 2 talented young programmers working all-out 12 hours a day on one project will generally be more productive than 3 talented folks with family working all-out 8 hours a day. (Agile, git, etc. all try to fix this to a degree... ) The current economic situation is that startups have very very deep pockets and will pay an insane premium to have stuff ASAP - which will mean very small, very overworked, very talented "rock stars". If you want to fix healthcare.gov and the president's reputation is on the line, you'll get the rockstarest rockstars you can find and slave drive them till it's done If you want a good work life balance I recommend the defense sector - but again - expect a pay cut. (like $120K end of career in SoCal vs. $250K in SF)

nnain 10y ago

As a developer in my thirties, I see this more as flexibility and exposure to adopt new technology, instead of sticking with old tech stacks. It's clear that the earlier contractors didn't know enough about user-centered design, responsive sites, mobile design, online login systems, modern web scalability requirements, benefits of cloud hosting and much more; which is where the younger developers now start. Also a minute to thank Stackoverflow, for the amazing work it has done in uplifting software development work.

serge2k 10y ago

> they don't ... I don't want to say care ... but put as much emphasis maybe? ... on work-life balance. or they just have a different view of it. You have no need to be home at any particular hour, and your social life is more evening/night based then why not work 10 hours a day. It's dumb, since you risk burning out, but otherwise I'm not really missing out on anything.