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A comment left on Slashdot

• jessaustin 10y ago
  In other industries, the the wisdom of experienced workers is the only thing that keeps capital from completely fucking over labor. Why don't experienced workers play the same role here? When I read stuff like this by experienced workers, I sometimes hope to see that question answered...
  • muglug 10y ago
    Because capital keeps telling the young developers that they’re smarter/quicker/more adaptable than the older ones. It's a seductive lie.
    • cwyers 10y ago
      All the other industries have capital. Why doesn't capital tell the younger workers in all those other industries the same seductive lie?
      • shiven 10y ago
        Maturity. Not every industry can sustain a "move fast and break things" mentality. Software is fairly young in terms of capital investment growth. Wait till it becomes as boring and grave as manufacturing.
      • majormajor 10y ago
        Short time frames and code quality being less visible to customers than construction or build quality of physical goods. It's a lot easier to build a (really shitty underneath the hood) app without experience than to design or build an airplane without experience. In most cases you can dump a good chunk of your stake for a massive profit before the poor infrastructure and maintenance costs become an issue (the Twitter "fail whale" and rewrites are the outlier here, I think, where the scale came much faster than the payoffs).
    • Frondo 10y ago
      Yeah, no kidding. Think of how every time unionization comes up here, you'll see dozens of people chiming in with "but we're really well-paid already!" or "I can negotiate for myself!" or whatever. Never even thinking about how much better they could be paid if they worked together to demand a larger slice of that sweet, sweet tech pie. It's crab bucket is what it is.
    • analognoise 10y ago
      It isn't just a lie - they're more impressionable. Tell them they're smart, they're critical! and then work them to the bone until you can replace them with the next batch of the bright-eyed and bushy tailed.
      • alphonsegaston 10y ago
        Which is why technology churn and cultivating ageism are so useful. It's a fabulous cover for the con. That person didn't get death marched into burning out in his closet sized apartment. He turned 30 and couldn't hack React. Hey, check out this Ayn Rand novel...
        • lacampbell 10y ago
          What does anything you have written have to do with Ayn Rand novels?
  • pnathan 10y ago
    A big part of it is that what we do is literal magic to the uninitiated. We wave incantations with our hands upon the keyboards, and the uninitiated do not understand how this turns into the world we have. It's invisible, untouchable, and and the expert wizards have collectively refused to provide a meaningful system for determining what is good vs what is bad. In other industries there are things like certifications that mean something or guilds/unions/associations where membership means something, in the software world, the gurus have refused to build an association/certification system of meaning, citing libertarian ideas against it. Since this helps the forces against labor, our management likes that idea too.
    • Sunset 10y ago
      I would eat my own hat before I let a "guild council" dictate anything that could impact my code style or the way I do things. The lack of centralized control is a good thing. In other industries you can be barred from even working in the field if the "council" doesn't like you. Things like the lawyers' bar are complete bullshit as a concept in themselves.
      • mdpopescu 10y ago
        People who "made it" are always trying to restrict the field. The excuses are many - protecting the poor, the quality, the children... but the reality is always "we are afraid of the competition".
      • pnathan 10y ago
        > I would eat my own hat before I let a "guild council" dictate anything that could impact my code style or the way I do things. That attitude is exactly why we have quality and fad problems. ::shrug::
        • WkndTriathlete 10y ago
          That attitude is also why we have nice things like Linux and AWS.
  • watwut 10y ago
    Assuming that being old makes you wise is as much trap as assuming it makes you stupid.
• seiferteric 10y ago
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WNVCznxKeDMJ:chaosinmotion.com/blog/%3Fp%3D1184+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WNVCznx...
  • muglug 10y ago
    Slashdotted...
    • RandomInteger4 10y ago
      Is this a monthly bandwidth limit issue or an Apache on slow servers issue? How much traffic is required to be considered slashdotted these days when running a simple blog? Tangenting away from the OP, but curious because I'm getting into setting up and running my own web server for the first time, and while I don't expect to be slashdotted, it's something I'd like to prepare for.
      • kbar13 10y ago
        use static html with a cdn or something like s3. it's probably cheaper, has basically no operational overhead, you don't really have to worry about being overwhelmed by traffic.
        • enneff 10y ago
          None of that is even necessary for text-based content if you just use an efficient web server (that's most of them, today) and static content. If you have a lot of large media files (not the case here) it's another story.
          • kbar13 10y ago
            yeah but using a hosted service gives you the freedom of not spending time running a webserver
      • byuu 10y ago
• sikhnerd 10y ago
  cache: https://archive.fo/aZDJF https://archive.fo/aZDJF
• fujipadam 10y ago
  This perception causes discrimination which is illegal (if you can prove it) This is why there are a host of lawsuits for ageism and a bunch of job portal like https://www.giantsforhire.com/ https://www.giantsforhire.com/ or https://oldgeekjobs.com/ https://oldgeekjobs.com/ poping up
• busterarm 10y ago
  I seriously considered getting an IEEE membership for a long time, but decided after several long conversations with people in the field who had one that it was not worth it.
  • uiri 10y ago
    Like with Linux User Groups, I think a lot of it depends upon your local section. I was an IEEE student member all through University so that I could participate in IEEEXtreme[0]. I did eventually become involved in the student branch and attend some local section meetings. I think that IEEE loses a lot of their student members after graduation. As a "young" professional, I'm not sure if there is much value. Most of the young professionals I met were past chairs of the student branch (within the past 5 years or so). The rest of the section seemed to be much older folk (like 40-50+) - both in industry and in academia. [0] http://www.ieee.org/xtreme http://www.ieee.org/xtreme
• jurassic 10y ago
  I believe the trends the author has pointed out are not just the failings of the tech industry but are part of a larger cultural backlash against expertise. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-0...
  • zigzigzag 10y ago
    There is no cultural backlash against expertise. That's a comfortable fantasy that a handful of self-proclaimed "experts" who have been consistently wrong are telling themselves, mostly people who attempt to predict the future but are not self-aware enough to understand their own biases. I have yet to encounter any obvious or recent drop in regard for doctors, geologists, chemical engineers or indeed software developers, probably because none of those job categories make money by attempting to influence government policy via dubious predictions about the future.
• deleted 10y ago
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• deavmi 10y ago
  This web server just won't have it.
• noonespecial 10y ago
  The problem is that the management can't tell who's any good. They see "the guru" struggle for several months on a "very difficult project" and then finally come through (with an added bonus that only the guru can understand the system afterwards so it MUST be very complicated) and just assume that he's been walking on water. He's young and went to a very good school... But then you find out it's a simple inventory control merging with the UPS API to ship widgets. They took that old saw about only the grandkids being able to make the VCR stop blinking 12 and applied it to the entire frikkin world and they are unable to tell that it isn't even remotely true.
  • epigramx 10y ago
    > the management can't tell who's any good When they don't know what to do, they resort to the basics, i.e. "he will stay alive longer, he is underpaid, get him".
  • scandox 10y ago
    > They took that old saw about only the grandkids being able to make the VCR stop blinking 12 and applied it to the entire frikkin world I see this a lot. Companies where top management are not sure of the difference in skills between a guy they pay 80k and their cousin's nephew who is really smart.
    • bilbo0s 10y ago
      To be fair... if the guy they pay 80K is young and inexperienced like their nephew... maybe there isn't as much difference as we'd like to think?
  • DanielBMarkham 10y ago
    There's a lot of truth there. Much of what passes for "management" in IT is nothing more than black magic guesswork. How many people do you need to do X? The answer could vary wildly depending on the actual people involved, yet you don't know the people when you're planning it. So it's decided that X will take 20 people, and guess what? At a minimum it will take 20 people. Magic. Apply this same kind of problem-solving skills to any other problem you're facing. Is this new program going to involve a lot of difficult technology? The groupthink says we should give it to young 20-somethings. They're naturally smarter than the old dogs. Plus they're cheaper to pay and easier to get to work overtime. Their ego is more involved so they'll kill themselves before they'll push back on us for anything we've done wrong. Sweet deal all around.
• lkrubner 10y ago
  About this: "I’m not bitter; I just believe we’ve fallen into a bunch of bad habits in our industry which need a good recession and some creative destruction to weed out what is limping along." A recession might actually make things even worse. At least part of the problem in the industry is the growing power of monopoly. Firms are increasingly protected from competition, and therefore bad habits can thrive because the bad habits are not enough to bring down the firm. That is, there isn't enough competition for the firm to be hurt by its own bad habits. And this lack of competition goes back to the declining rate of new company formation: http://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-businesses-economic-innovation-group-study.html http://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-businesses-economic... Also, see this chart: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-decline-of-usa-investment-since-1964 http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-decline-of-usa-inve...
  • polotics 10y ago
    Well the Google Apple non-poaching secret agreement demonstrated who's a filthy communist. Right?
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • deleted 10y ago
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• unsayable 10y ago
  Throwaway account here... but I think the real reason for this is because I've noticed two distinct types of developers: 1) Hackers that grew up with technology that are typically very proficient and employable before entering university or having much work experience. 2) People who went to CS school in order to get a job as a developer because the pay is pretty decent and they were always kind of good with computers. I'd much prefer to work with people that grew up as hackers than people who learned later in life. It's a cultural thing more than an age thing, but I feel like it's very hard to see the big picture if you weren't indoctrinated into it on IRC or forums when you were a teen. I'd imagine it's sort of like growing up on a farm vs going to agriculture school. Because of this, it's very hard to tell as people get older which camp they came from. If someone is young and knows a ton, it's clear that they grew up in hacker culture and likely have a breadth of knowledge. If someone studied hard for years and never was part of the culture, IMO they will be harder to work with and not have as much general knowledge. As a bonus, if you grew up in the culture and you're applying for an entry level job, you probably already have a decade of hacking under your belt, and that's work experience that's totally unaccounted for on a resume. The result of this is that if you see someone young and surprisingly knowledgeable in many computer related areas, they probably grew up steeped in hacker culture and have tons more useful general knowledge than someone without that extra decade of experience. BTW, I'm not advocating for age discrimination, but it may actually be more of undocumented experience discrimination than age discrimination.
  • lkrubner 10y ago
    From what I've seen, it is always the other way around. It's the hacker who learned the culture on IRC who is the most likely to get swept away by fads. Circa 2004, they think everything should be Ruby On Rails. Circa 2008, they tell you that SQL databases are obsolete and everyone should use NoSQL databases. Circa 2012 they tell you that Ruby on Rails is obsolete and everyone should use NodeJS. They consider themselves "plugged in" and up-to-date, and they are the most vulnerable to the fads. Meanwhile, I knew a woman who first became a nurse and only second took up computer programming, to write software to track maternity progress, and she has no interest in the hype cycle, instead she just writes good, simple code that gets the job done. And I know a guy who started as a statistician, and who later became a programmer so he could do serious data analysis. He doesn't get distracted by the flavor of the week. He sticks with good Python tools and he writes the code he needs to get the job done.
• 11thEarlOfMar 10y ago
  One factor that I think plays into this dialog is that we learn quite a bit over time without realizing it. As I grow older, I sometimes find myself thinking, "I know this, but I know I didn't intentionally learn it." What I realize is that I know it because of life experience and there is no way I could have learned it (or maybe it's a realization, not a learning) without having lived through all those winters. The impact of this is that as we gain experience, we can be more deliberate and selective about where we focus our talents and energy, entering into fewer endeavors, but have a higher success rate per endeavor.
  • abraae 10y ago
    I agree. As a 50+ programmer/CTO I freely admit I'm nothing like as quick as I used to be at pure coding. I marvel at what some of the youngsters at work can do. I took a good long time out in management but even so, age catches up. YMMV. But I'm way better at knowing what to do, and recognising how not to approach things. My belief is that as you age, more and more of your brain is turned over from processing to pattern recognition. If only my communication skills had advanced apace, so that I could convince others with less effort )
• hackuser 10y ago
  The marketplace always seems to fail in situations like this one. There are always groups that are discriminated against, based on race, gender, age, etc. Therefore a business seeking talent should view those excluded groups as a goldmine of available talent. For example, imagine if most baseball teams started excluding non-white athletes again. If I owned a team, I'd immediately start hiring those athletes; I'd have by far the best team in baseball in short order (EDIT: To be clear, I'd have the best team because I'd have the market cornered on a large portion of the talent; it wouldn't be because of some imagined (and false) racial differences in performance.) But in business (and in sports) it never works out that way. Certainly some executives have discriminatory attitudes, but that doesn't account for all. Certainly some will give into and/or are more exposed to social pressures, but not all. With the very high demand for talent, why aren't there businesses snapping up the older developers? (There also is another problem: Excluded groups tend to avoid that marketplace. They are discouraged by their parents, teachers and peers, and they may not want to have to deal with discrimination every day for their whole careers. But that shouldn't apply as much to middle-aged developers; that labor supply is already in the pipeline.)
  • watwut 10y ago
    If there would be such a lack of talent, salaries would be going up and working conditions would be getting better and better. So I bit doubt the lack of talent narrarive.
    • flomo 10y ago
      The problem is being addressed both supply-side (H1B body shops) and demand-side (salaries and working conditions are broadly better than they used to be IMO). So it is hard to say. I do think there is some truth in "ten years of experience" versus "one year of experience times ten". There are a lot of jobs in this industry where you only have to know so much, and that's all you have to know. CRUD forms are CRUD forms, at least until they change the technology stack. Software is a fad-driven industry, but I think the underlying reason for continual new-stack fetishism is to shake-out the 1x10 people, rather than say the 5x2 people.
• monkmonk 10y ago
  Except most of the design patterns you're caught on are wrong too. Programming just keeps getting more nuanced, making it harder for new people to learn about what is considered "the right way!"
• thriftwy 10y ago
  Being a Software Developer, a "socially invulnerable" person, I won't be bothered by people saying something as misguided as "all your experience is obsolete". I'll have a good laugh. I think some of us take themselves a bit too much seriously. As a programmer, you have not just First World, but actually Zeroth World problems. In the world of struggle we are having a guilt-free easy ride.
  • sillysaurus3 10y ago
    Implying no software developer has financial problems.
    • thriftwy 10y ago
      But you know who has worse financial, employment, work-life balance, motivation problems? Almost everybody else. These posts read as "please somebody solve it for us." But we are the solvers. Think we have problems with older developers employment? Influence a hire of a team of them. Who will do that for you?
      • sillysaurus3 10y ago
        These posts read as "please somebody solve it for us." Not really. They were pointing out a problem. Highlighting a problem isn't the same as pleading for help. This reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1232/ https://xkcd.com/1232/ At what point is it ok to talk about your own problems? Only when no one else has worse problems? Think we have problems with older developers employment? Influence a hire of a team of them. Who will do that for you? I can't figure out what you mean. Could you clarify?
        • thriftwy 10y ago
          I'm all for pointing out problems. I do it all the time and probably bothered a good amount of my friends. I just find this problem reported massively more than it is worth. Everybody who cares even a bit is long aware. Today, I will appreciate posts on "what we did about this problem already". And I have already seen one just recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13194074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13194074
• deleted 10y ago
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• hergin 10y ago
  I believe much of the problem mentioned in the article is about us not being software engineers but only programmers/coders. If we, as an industry, would have adopted engineering discipline instead of producing systems in light speed by just coding, what we are talking now would be different things.
  • sidlls 10y ago
    This is my view as well. But I'll go further: I believe there is an almost​ active hostility toward engineering, as if it's viewed simply as something anyone can pick up, like the much derided "liberal arts."
• peterwwillis 10y ago
  We don't really have a great required body of knowledge or mandatory licensing for people to work in the field. The whole industry is still in the Middle Ages in terms of how we choose people to build things.
  • nradov 10y ago
    We're actually still in a pre-Middle Ages state! In the Middle Ages craft guilds generally did have required bodies of knowledge which apprentices were expected to master.
• pnathan 10y ago
  A solid solution is to have a professional union/association with a meaningful exam for entrance, meaningful certifications for specialties, and the mandate to avoid committing professional malpractice (strike/walkout enforced). The ACM could do that, but has chosen not to: the IEEE's attempt is sort of a joke. Having spent the last 3 months totally involved in the US medical field regarding a family member's life-critical condition, I can say with confidence: the professional credential/certification process works really well when built well, and software engineers with an interest in seeing our field should strongly consider the medical community as a working example - remember - "rough consensus and running code".
  • jacquesm 10y ago
    And aviation. Not pretty but it definitely works.
    • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      I definitely agree that good professional organizations and well-functioning unions and good worker protection laws gives a good total system. However, one thing that must be kept in mind when comparing to e.g. healthcare or aviation is that progress in those fields happens at a pace that's positively glacial as compared to software development. The development time for new airplane tech or healthcare tech can easily be a decade or more. At that pace, employers don't perceive "you're old and don't understand the new stuff anymore" to nearly the same degree. Some of the stuff that happens regularly here in software land is like if suddenly accupuncture became the best cure for most diseases, or if pilots were given new planes with flight controls manipulated by moving your eyelids in a special way.
      • pnathan 10y ago
        Can you cite specific improvements in the past 5 years that aren't more reinventions of previous wheels?
        • chadcmulligan 10y ago
• gumby 10y ago
  (side point: in my new company we did a SWOT analysis and one strength was "old farts" -- we've already made tons of mistakes and have learned a lot.) I didn't see the original slashdot discussion so didn't have context, but IMHO the phenomenon described is more that programming in the USA and Europe has become a blue collar job, as it has been in Japan for decades. I think this is great -- the tools have become strong enough that someone with limited (but nonzero) training can produce solid apprentice and journeyman work. (masters, well, I know I will never be even close to some of the master machinists I've been lucky to work with; they can't craft code like I do). The fact is you don't need a programmer to throw together a viable web site. Isn't that great!? Innovation is still coming out of computer science and trickling down into the real world. And highly experienced programmers are also contributing cool stuff. But as programming has opened up as a discipline to a significantly larger pool of people, is it any wonder the density of new ideas per capita would go down? (oh, and CS has always scorned reading the literature, to its detriment).
  • dcw303 10y ago
    > more that programming in the USA and Europe has become a blue collar job, as it has been in Japan for decades I wouldn't use Japan as your data point to champion programming as accessible to the common man. One only needs to suffer through a few domestic websites to know that talent is sorely missing. Pay peanuts, get monkeys, etc.
    • mikekchar 10y ago
      I live in Japan and have friends and family members who work in large companies as programmers. None of them started out to be programmers. None of them particularly wanted to be programmers. One of them was the secretary. One day her boss dropped a whole bunch of books on her desk, "You're the new programmer". Rationale? She could type. Which is not to say that there aren't great programmers here. There are. But the average view of a programmer at large companies (not high tech), is that it is a pretty junior position.
• afpx 10y ago
  I certainly can relate to everything that the author expresses. However, I'm also quite certain that this is not exclusive to the software engineering disciplines. Somewhere around 2004 or so, I began seeing many US companies (including many large ones) abandoning analysis and planning and lots of other proven PMBOK type activities in favor of more reactionary methods. When I talk to many people under 35, across fields, they often complain about workplace disorder, mismanagement, and lack of planning. They also complain of an overload of work and of working too many hours. I don't think this is a coincidence.
  • kogepathic 10y ago
    > Somewhere around 2004 or so, I began seeing many US companies (including many large ones) abandoning analysis and planning and lots of other proven PMBOK type activities in favor of more reactionary methods. This was corporates adopting their own version of the agile development methodology. Unfortunately I can tell you large corporations with a lot of inertia and managerial politics don't mesh well with agile, so you end up with poor planning, pants on fire fixing, overworked employees* * anecdotal evidence
• austinz 10y ago
  For someone who laments the failure of modern programmers to learn from the work of the past, the author seems to completely ignore the contributions of ML, ML-style type systems, and related languages to the profession of software engineering. Perhaps this explains the snide (and, frankly, uninformed) dismissal of Swift as a hype-ridden "subset of Lisp". Aside from that, I agree with the author's points.
• vacri 10y ago
  > The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for “intelligence”) worship at the altar of youth Popular music, athletics, professional team sports, combat sports, hospitality, beauticians, the military (a big one, that one), until recently airline hostesses... there's tons of them.
• ot 10y ago
  In case anyone else is wondering, this is the original Slashdot discussion: https://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10352645&cid=54022425 https://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10352645&cid=540224... I don't think it was linked in the post.
• pleasecalllater 10y ago
  The funny problem is that when I was 32 I heard from one recruiter "Oh, so you are still a programmer? I'm sorry, we cannot offer you sending your cv to our client. You see, we have hundreds of cvs from people of your age, and all are managers, so if you are not, then there is something wrong with you". Yea, 32 years old programmer is just too old, 32 years old surgeon is usually too young to work alone. I keep on learning, I have accumulated lots of knowledge working in different areas of programming like system administration, database administration, programming etc. I have been payed to program using over a dozen of programming languages... At interviews I still hear "oh, you know, I'd love to have experience like yours"... And I still hear "you are too old". What's more funny - people are not embarrassed saying that. Even though that's illegal where I live. Writing "we want to hire a woman/man only" is also illegal, but people still write that, and no one reacts. I'm afraid I will be totally unemployable in a couple of years, just after my 40, which will come too soon. And I don't want to get into management only position (which is also hard, as I cannot get a management job "because you haven't worked on such a position, and you are too old to start that". That's hilarious, but on the other hand that explains a couple of things like a-brand-new-hyped-technology, which is just a rewrite of what we had 20 years ago.
  • lobotryas 10y ago
    Get into a big and mature company (think: 10k+ employees) instead of a startup or an smb. When I visit my friend at his company's San Francisco r&d building I see just as many old people as young or middle aged. Many of the older folks are very well respected due to their experience. Downside is that you'll probably be using some OOP language to make incremental changes to some ancient api call.
    • pleasecalllater 10y ago
      I heard that mainly from recruiters working for huge companies, so huge, that I couldn't apply directly, as they had outsourced all the recruitment so some external companies. On the other hand I'm not from the USA, and what's worse - currently I need to have only remote job - which makes searching for a job even more hilarious.
• bluejekyll 10y ago
  "... back then we saw support staff (such as QA and QAE and tech writers) who worked alongside software developers;" I've personally been working in the industry for 20 years, full time for 17. I Can't believe I just read someone asking for QA/QAE/QE. Modern dev shops should be relying on automation for test coverage, and the developers of the code should be the ones writing the tests for their code. There is a place for QE, those are Software Engineers focused on tooling around the automation for tests and such. Relying on QE is an antiquated relic of the bad, very bad, Waterfall days. In those days release cycles were long because shipping software meant that there were releases timed to marketing and cyclical sales. Now software is shipped online. the role of QE has changed to not take crappy code a Dev wrote and validate it, but to be the one responsible for making sure Dev's are actually testing their code and that the code is being measured for quality. The easiest way to make this obvious, go write some code, say a few files worth, and then try to add tests to it later. You need to go back and refactor, in some cases significantly, to make the code testable. Code needs to be written from the beginning as testable. I always felt bad for QA/QE folk, because they would just get handed crap and be expected to do something with it. This is no longer cool. (btw Documentation is also a requirement for all code and should be done earlier, not later. Use your own software and try and figure out how others will use it, and document that. Tech Writers should be dealing with well understood systems...)
  • lobotryas 10y ago
    Problem is that many devs don't take the time to develop a testing mindset (or think it's not their job). QA is a lot more than writing automation or validating code correctness. QA are the first people to lobby on behalf of a customer when it comes to actually using the feature (ideally this is a PM's job, but I've seen few good PMs in the Bay so far). QA also has to think holistically about security, performance, UX, on-screen text like error messages and so on. Hopefully the team has free access to other teams who specialize in this kind of work, but more often than not such resources do not exist or are unavailable. Thus it falls onto QA to fill all these small (or big) gaps.
    • ubersoldat2k7 10y ago
• danso 10y ago
  Programming, and computer science, is inherently about information. And because information as it relates to the young is so valuable (think about how TV shows value the 18 to 35 demographic is), it's not surprising that leaders in the work of programming can skew young. The example of Facebook immediately comes to mind. I'm sure everyone has read articles about "TheFacebook" on the Harvard Crimson's website for a good chuckle. But reading those 2004 articles give insight to how Mark Zuckerberg succeeded despite not being a better programmer or computer science thinker than others (including faculty) at Harvard. He was not only competing with an already dominant MySpace, but Harvard computing services: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register-for-new-facebook-website/?page=single http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register... > “I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,” [Zuckerberg] said. “The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.” > But Director of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98 said that the creation of a Harvard facebook was not as far off as Zuckerberg predicted. > “There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College. We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.” Doesn't seem like that Harvard-built-and-funded Facebook got very far. I'm also struck by how mundane the work of Facebook sounded (including the low salary), as described in this old article, when you compare it to, say, Clinkle: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/3/1/facebook-expands-beyond-harvard-harvard-students/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/3/1/facebook-expands-... > In order to expand, Moskovitz and Zuckerberg had to write computer programs that would “parse the course catalogs and student newspapers” of the additional schools. Following Columbia, Stanford and Yale, which Zuckerberg said took about three hours each to set up, he hopes to open the site up to Boston-area schools like Boston University and MIT. As I get older, yes, I start to appreciate the foundational concepts as the OP does. But I think that programming's seemingly youth-centered churn of knowledge is not unrelated to how personal and malleable -- i.e. how varied the goal of programming is, because of how programming is so directly related to the work of how humans consume and disseminate knowledge.
  • josephagoss 10y ago
    > Programming, and computer science, is inherently about information. And because information as it relates to the young is so valuable (think about how TV shows value the 18 to 35 demographic is), it's not surprising that leaders in the work of programming can skew young. Is it possible this is more apparent because the industry is so young compared to the other professions? Historically most programmers have gone into other industries or management, however with more programmers today in their 30's than ever before isn't it possible that the average age of our profession increases? Perhaps it's just because I know lots of entrepreneurs that are much older, in their 40's - 60's that consume massive amounts of new information and enjoy doing so that I don't fully agree with your statement. And about Facebook, I am sure there were lots of other social networks being formed around the world by young people that feel over too. I am not sure that is such a old vs new thing.
• ternaryoperator 10y ago
  One of his points is key and seemingly goes unmentioned in these comments. The total disregard for software engineering (the field of study, that is) by developers. Even the very basics of software engineering are unknown, and if mentioned, frequently discarded if they don't fit with the zeigeist.
• josephagoss 10y ago
  Also remember that of all of the professional industries, ours is young and still maturing. I believe that being an old programmer will become accepted in time. I believe that posts like these help to bring this issue to the forefront and it's good that it's being discussed.
• arca_vorago 10y ago
  Honestly I think its just economic decisions by short sighted management disguised to others as a social issue. Not to discredit the real ageism that exists, but far more often I think its the fact that older, saltier people are going to demand a higher wage, more work life balance, and see through bullshit easier. All of those things are negatives for a middle manager trying to fill a role. That's right, they become more focused on the task of filling a role than about solving the companies issues. I'd wager that if you got old farts to agree to the same bullshit terms pushed on younger people because they missed Legal Contracts 101, the gap would shrink. What's funny to me is that a contractor I was the dude picking up the pieces after the technical debt inevitably bit them in the ass, so in the long run companies that make decisions like that end up paying more for them. I actually gave up my share of my first startup because it was built on exploiting this fact, and I felt a proper counciling of the customer would include something along the lines of "we are more expensive than a full time person, but do less than a tenth of the work of one since we split our time between many clients, therefore we should be a temporary stopgap and a continuing advisory position", which obviously didn't go well for an msp style it support company. I'm increasingly convinced the business world is full of short sighted incompetence.
  • josephagoss 10y ago
    > and see through bullshit easier. This one resonates with me quite a bit. It is much easier to take advantage of young inexperienced people.
  • vidarh 10y ago
    > I actually gave up my share of my first startup because it was built on exploiting this fact, and I felt a proper counciling of the customer would include something along the lines of "we are more expensive than a full time person, but do less than a tenth of the work of one since we split our time between many clients, therefore we should be a temporary stopgap and a continuing advisory position", which obviously didn't go well for an msp style it support company. My selling point as a consultant is "I am more expensive and should be a stopgap and ongoing advisory position". I can push my rate up more by basically marketing myself as an expert / luxury / problem solver. It means I get rejected more, but it's worth it over time, because I know when people call me later, it's because they have problem where they won't quibble over my day rates, because they're calling me about things they know their regular staff can't handle and that it'd be very expensive to hire to solve. It also avoids the issue of having to justify my price with bullshit and arguing over timesheets. But I can certainly see someone trying to scale up a business around it finding it easier to try to pretend they're a good way of replacing hiring.
• deleted 10y ago
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• blauditore 10y ago
  I keep on reading about ageism in this industry, but haven't observed it myself. Yes, devs are over-proportionally young in the companies I've seen, but from my (limited) insight into recruiting, this roughly reflects applications. Also, it's not that most of the devs in the companies I've been are just fresh out of university; about half of them are 30+ years old. My impression has always been that this just reflects the growth of the industry and related increase in graduates. Quite possibly, this "young, dynamic, better" culture is more prevalent in startup-heavy areas like the US or eastern Europe, as opposed to western Europe where I live.
• rustynails 10y ago
  I'm an old guy. I've been coding for about 40 years. I'd like to share my experiences and thoughts on your post. In short, your references are questionable (which undermines your credibility) and you draw very broad brushstrokes which oversimplify things. My first thought was that for your age, your thought processes ring alarm bells for me. Let me give you some examples. When I have hired, I screen based on experience and Hire on cultural suitability (eg. For a maintenance project, I want stayers not high flyers). Some people may see cultural compatibility as ageism/sexism/racism, but for me, it comes down to the attitude and personality conveyed by the candidate. If you put down younger people the way you do, you will put plenty of team members offside. Culturally destructive people can easily be spotted by probing with a few questions. Without interviewing you, I can't say for sure how you would come across under normal circumstances. Secondly, your references indicate of a lack of research. I'll give you a few examples. Your link on sexism says the following, "Women make up only about 30 percent of the technology workforce, according to LinkedIn. And they only hold about 15 percent of software engineering jobs." Then the article makes all sorts of flimsy excuses. Let's do some fact checking. How many women go into IT vs how many women go into medicine? The figures are equivalent opposites of each other. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/gender-breakdown-by-subject-area/2009177.article#survey-answer https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/gender-breakdown-b... You will find a similar breakdown in other countries (eg. Australia). If it involves people and animals, it's more popular with females based on the data. So, if the figures are low in a discipline, wouldn't you expect the number of graduates and employees to be similarly low? (FYI, my wife has been an engineer for decades. She has never had an issue with sexism. It doesn't mean sexism doesn't happen, it just means it's not universal. I personally don't care about people's gender or age or race unless it's mandatory, eg. ITAR). You also have anecdotes about tech writers not being embedded in teams and QA numbers dropping. My wife and I both agree that this hasn't changed in either of our industries for decades. Look, I understand prejudice occurs. I criticised Ars Technica recently for its extremely imbalanced reporting about Ellen Pao vs sacking of most of the senior male staff at Yahoo (as one of many examples that prejudice does exist). However, as an old guy (who still sometimes does tech roles and management roles), I have rarely encountered things as extreme as you report. Based on what you've said, I'd probably not hire you if I interviewed you. I've overlooked great people before because of their attitude. Your references and fact checking is also not what I would expect, which would cast doubt in my mind. I do wish you luck and hope you find an employer you are compatible with.
• deleted 10y ago
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• js8 10y ago
  If you enjoyed the OP, especially the comments about how unscientific SWE is, I think you will enjoy anything from Greg Wilson, such as: https://vimeo.com/9270320 https://vimeo.com/9270320 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtKO619O5g0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtKO619O5g0
  • wallacoloo 10y ago
    > especially the comments about how unscientific SWE is After trying for months to get into a CSE course at my university (they had a disagreeable policy wherein CSE courses were almost entirely open only to CSE majors), I was surprised by this aspect. We were taught methods for proving correctness for recursion-based code, re-expressing recursion as iteration, and things like loop invariants - the latter in particular presented a more methodical way to approach programming than I had seen before. But the general reaction was almost uniformly "yeah, sure, like I'm ever going to use this". And sure, I don't think about loop invariants when I write most loops. And KISS tends to make most of my loops pretty trivial to understand. But for more algorithm-intensive work, the ideas behind these approaches have proven to be really useful tools! It's disappointing for me to see scientific approaches to SWE so quickly shrugged off. I seem to see the "cobble something together, and then patch it until nobody complains about bugs" approach to coding more often than "assemble this code in a way where it's demonstrably correct and easy to comprehend", and I'm often in the minority by strongly preferring the latter.
    • logicchains 10y ago
      That sounds more like computer science than software engineering. At my university, they were different majors, with the focus of the latter being UML and building large inheritance hierarchies, so I imagine SWE means different things to different people.
• yAnonymous 10y ago
  The author is quite arrogant himself. What's wrong with looking up solutions for complex problems on StackOverflow? It saves a lot of time and in most cases will end up better than what you come up with on your own, because it has been tested and improved by hundreds of users. And if you manage to find an improvement, share it to make the code better. Reinventing the wheel every time is stupid and it really seems more like he's the one not able to adapt. When I can do the same things faster and better than you, because I make use of available resources, then I'll be the better choice for most employers, regardless of the age. Experience is good, but constantly learning and adapting is even more important in this industry and he seems to think he doesn't need to do that.
  • shiro 10y ago
    I took that the author didn't assume that experience (which seemed to be assumed in the article to be positively correlated to the length of career) was the only factor---lack of proper training, including knowing "classics", was also the issue. I tend to agree the latter premise, although I'm not sure the situation is as bad as the author describes. (The author says "I can’t think of a single developer I’ve met professionally who belong to the ACM or to IEEE". Is that really the case?) IMHO, it's ok to lift answers from SO as long as 1) you know it's a shortcut and 2) when necessary you can trace back the history to the origin so that you can know the original frame the technique was invented and how it was modified along the line. A good solution in a certain context might not be optimal for your context, even though it has been improved by many. The second point requires a certain level of skill---able to search and read CS papers and implement by yourself or incorporate the ideas into your domain. Without having proper training, it's difficult to acquire that kind of skill solely from skimming SO and alike. But I'd like to assume that graduate-level CS course do give such skill, and by experience you can hone it. I do note that some answers in SO are pretty decent, with references to the original papers. When I answer online questions I try to do the same as much as possible within my ability and knowledge.
• HNLogInShit 10y ago
  I had to stop reading this because of nonsense like "backronym" and statements that don't even make grammatical sense: "Ours is also one of the fewest industries based on scientific research which blatantly ignores the research"
• partycoder 10y ago
  Until the early 90s you couldn't push updates for released software as easily as today, so software had to be launched with a high standard of quality. Then, after the Internet became more ubiquitous the industry started pushing towards "minimum viable products" that get fixed over time, but can still make revenue. Usually keeping the product low profile with low to no marketing. But after a couple of years, the agile enthusiasts took over and decided that everything should add "customer value", and everything else should be neglected. The Scrum proponents were also very inclusive, inviting non-technical people to become certified... and that's when things went south and the beginning of the low quality doctrine started. As digital distribution starts becoming more popular, business people no longer wanted to keep a low profile launching a minimum viable product. Now they want to launch their prototype with full marketing and user acquisition. Post-launch, software gets bloated with additional features nobody requires, rather than finally fixing long-standing bugs. In addition, developers get the blame for defects and if they want a solution they have to fix them on their own time. Any non-engineer can become certified in Scrum, and that has had an impact in the way Scrum has been implemented. Suddenly, a certification involving 16 hours of training to pass a 35 question exam with 68% passing score is more important than an engineering degree. Then, the vast majority of people who criticize non-Scrum methodologies has not actually been curious enough to try them and form their own opinion. It is the herbalife of software. A Scrum certification without a software engineering degree should not lead to a managerial position in software. You can hire the best engineers, but with mediocre leadership results will be mediocre. It is time to acknowledge Scrum has been hijacked by greed and has produced a huge software quality crisis.
  • nradov 10y ago
    Scrum isn't the problem, there's no causative relationship. And I don't remember that older software being any higher quality than what we have today on a defects per function point basis.
    • partycoder 10y ago
      What are the requirements for becoming a Certified Scrum Master? Do you think someone can professionally employ Scrum without having a background in software engineering without contributing to the problems I mentioned before? If Scrum isn't the problem, it's clearly not the solution either.
• mathattack 10y ago
  For better or worse I only had a couple years to be a heads down programmer. After management hit, programming became more of a hobby. Some of the gray beards really just repeat 1 year of experience over and over, but many are worth their weight in gold.
• notacoward 10y ago
  Point 1: I see a lot of highly-upvoted comments blaming management for why engineers are messed up. Hardly surprising for such a venue, I guess. If we're going to blame management, though, perhaps we should look at why the managers themselves are messed up. Personally I think it might have something to do with the conceit that management is the uber-skill, so important in itself that a couple of years (at most) of generic training in management qualifies a person to manage any activity effectively even without a shred of domain knowledge. Pfeh. Point 2: maybe not all of the blame lies with management, and the most important exercise for a crowd of technical people involves introspection instead of blaming others. We get enough of that in politics; we don't need a bunch of little techie-Trumps playing the same tune. Some of the blame belongs with the engineers themselves, who hoodwink naive managers or exert peer pressure to create a culture of deliberate ignorance. When "disruption" is one of the most popular words within an industry, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that even one's thoroughly disrupted predecessors knew a thing or two worth learning. Good software engineering is a lot like recycling - instead of incinerating all "legacy" code just because it's legacy, find the parts (ideas) that can be used as part of something new. New solutions to old problems can be found without having to reintroduce the old problems in new code.
  • titzer 10y ago
    > a couple of years (at most) of generic training in management qualifies a person to manage any activity effectively even without a shred of domain knowledge. Pfeh. +1 to that. However, it cuts both ways. Being an engineer with a recently bolted-on manager responsibility, I am struck by the many ways that nothing in Engineering or Science prepared me for dealing with the people side of management.
    • Bartweiss 10y ago
      This double-bind seems like one of the deepest problems in software management. At high levels and large companies, managers are often trained in 'management', without any of the domain knowledge needed to understand their choices. But throughout all levels of the industry, the alternative is raising engineers to management with only a seminar (or nothing at all!) for training. It seems fairly obvious that effective technical management involves two different skills. But I virtually never see people react to that knowledge and seek (or train) expertise in both domains. As a result, the best management seems to be from engineers who are naturally adept at management, or eager to learn on their own. Project management is already its own skillset. Do you think people in your position would benefit from some short-and-intensive course in "software team management"?
• falsedan 10y ago
  > when they run into an interesting problem tend to search Github or Stack Overflow, even when it is a basic algorithm problem (I’ve met programmers with years of experience who couldn’t write code to maintain a linked list) This comment feels incongruous with the rest of the article: why wouldn't I refer to a standard implementation rather than trying to solve it on my own? Isn't that a commendable case of not ignoring the 'old junk'?
• Shivetya 10y ago
  Well there are many programming opportunities out there for people of all age. You just need to broaden your horizons if not your choices of languages, tools, and even platforms. at fifty plus the only thing I note with difficulty in moving to a new job is that it is harder to change. learning something new, language, etc, isn't that difficult but I do have to fit in. It is the idea of changing environments that I do not care for. Many people I know in the placement of developers look not only as skills but how long you have been where you are, because apparently I am not alone in being reluctant to leave even if I say I am willing
• kemiller2002 10y ago
  I'm almost 40, and I don't let articles like this scare me. Everyone has this fear they are going to be rejected for some reason or another. It's just another idea that you can obsess over at night wondering if you are going to be able to continue living the life you want. Is this article true? Yes, partially. There will be companies and people out there who won't hire older programmers, and this is true for almost every other profession as well. 15 years ago there was the scare about offshoring all our jobs too. We were constantly told that the people in India were smarter, worked harder, and had cheaper salaries. They said we were lucky to keep our jobs. Is this true, yeah partially, but anyone who as any good found another job at a better company. Are the people in India hard workers and smart? Yeah there are a lot of them that are. I've worked with a lot of people from India, and many of them are great people. They are smart, passionate about what they do, and nice. Heck there is a woman from India sitting 10 feet from me who is brilliant, and a hard worker. Am I afraid of this? No. Sure there are companies that will pick her over me strictly because she is younger, but I don't want to work there anyway. A lot of times companies making decisions like that are the ones that are in real trouble and do it, because they know that older and more experience people won't stay long. You can keep those companies. I've already lived through that. Getting rejected by a company doesn't bother me, especially for a silly reason like that. I'll see where they are in a year, and I'll most likely get the last laugh.
  • marktangotango 10y ago
    > because they know that older and more experience people won't stay long. You can keep those companies. I've already lived through that. Getting rejected by a company doesn't bother me, especially for a silly reason like that. I'll see where they are in a year, and I'll most likely get the last laugh. Indeed. You see things over the course of 5, 10, and 15 years. You start to see the same patterns over and over. Oh that high flying company with the big merger? Turned out they attempted a system integration, offshored most of it, laid off senior talent 10 years ago. Then 5 years ago started hiring like crazy. Turned out the integration was a disaster, all the organziation knowledge left. The only people who stayed were the 'don't move my cheese' types who didn't have any other options. Now, they're still hiring, and if they can't get their apps off of IE6 (or IE11 in IE7 compat mode) they're screwed. That's when they start paying through the nose for senior on shore talent.
• cjCamel 10y ago
  I've always wondered whether the descriptor young startup /young company etc. in a job post is put in to warn off older (>30) people from applying. Which can be depressing when you search http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/ http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/ for the word "young". Interestingly, companies don't tend to describe themselves as "male startup", or "white startup"... tl;dr Language matters.
• mr_overalls 10y ago
  Are sysadmins, network/data engineers, or other back-end techs subject to the same age discrimination as programmers? As an aging jack-of-all-trades, I've been wondering if I should refocus more on back-end skills (and skills lower down the software stack) and start transitioning away from app development - especially web development. I'm also wondering if Woody's observations of ageism mostly apply to 1) Silicon valley, 2) startup companies, and 3) web development.
• pweissbrod 10y ago
  So the author left a comment on slashdot and received an ignorant knee-jerk response from someone with an inflated sense of superiority. That's not reflective of the industry! Thats the slashdot community and you should expect such treatment. There are several sites like this and unless you have a pension for online flame wars its pretty much a waste of time to read :(
• wsy 10y ago
  Anybody who read "Disrupted" by Dan Lyons knows that not only software engineers suffer from this ignorance. It is amazing that nowadays startup companies can become successful even if the ignorance level of their employees is quite high.
• ahallock 10y ago
  > (I’ve met programmers with years of experience who couldn’t write code to maintain a linked list. FFS, our industry is huge and there are many problem domains and many specialized areas of expertise, most of which don't require you to write linked lists. It's like expecting someone who's building windshield wipers for a car to also know how build an alternator (this analogy may not be great, but you get the idea). I'm sure if someone spent half an hour brushing up on linked lists, they could easily create one. If you don't do something a lot, you forget. You get rusty. Why is this so hard to understand? This is true in any discipline.
  • hughw 10y ago
    C'mon man. A linked list. edit: To use one, you need a mental model of how they work, so you should be able to write one. Not a great one... just one that works.
    • Sharlin 10y ago
      A linked list is one of those things everybody thinks is trivial to write until they actually try to write one that supports all the normal operations and actually works in all corner cases.
      • robotresearcher 10y ago
        Which is one of the reasons why we give it has homework in college. Not because you're going to do it in the workplace, but because (a) you see how the implementation entails the big-O behaviour you learned about, and (b) it's simple but tricky, thus training you to consider every aspect carefully. Aspect (b) is why people ask about it in interview questions. You are not expected to remember the details, you are expected to think about them as you go.
      • NotSammyHagar 10y ago
        What are all those corner cases and hard problems? I routinely ask interview subjects to write code to manage a linked list (it was a small part of a problem in a previous job), and I've been asked to write a ll class. Writing a linked list is like hiring someone to be a professional driver, and you want to make sure they know that you can change tires, and that one should adjust mirrors to be able to see behind the car.
• ViViDboarder 10y ago
  I'm sure there's some kind of problem here... But from a person trying to hire a more experienced engineer, I can tell you getting someone in the door is hard. I've had an open spot for someone with 5+ years of experience for nearly 6 months. I've done maybe a dozen interviews and made two offers. Still unfilled. At this point I really need more people and may have to start looking for new grads instead. I don't doubt that there are experienced engineers unable to find jobs, but I wonder if there are other regional factors at play. I'm in San Francisco, so it's possible (probable even) that more established companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, etc. are recruiting for the same people.
  • lj3 10y ago
    > so it's possible (probable even) that more established companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, etc. are recruiting for the same people. You're hiring for the same skills as the big companies are in the same field in the same geographical region. I bet you're even using a similar interview process. I also bet you don't pay as much as they do. You either need to pay more or play programmer moneyball[0]. [0]: https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/
  • DrScump 10y ago
    What skills were you looking for aside from 5+ years of experience (say, with skillsets not directly related to the needs stated in your job ad) ?
• smsm42 10y ago
  Is it really true anymore that '30 is considered “old”'? I've worked with many people that are 30+ in the industry, and working with many right now, and I don't see any tendency to regard them as "old". Maybe it's my own bubble or more localized phenomenon, but I don't think it's true anymore.
  • foo101 10y ago
    It looks like I am one of the few like you who think it is not true that '30 is considered "old"'. All my life, I have worked with experienced developers (called principal engineers, consultant engineers, distinguished engineers, etc.) who were between 28 years and 55 years old. Not even once they were regarded as "old". On the other hand, the more experienced the developer was, the more valued he or she was because of a strong correlation of higher productivity and wisdom. Can somene name companies where 30 or older is considered old?
  • mmmpop 10y ago
    Old is merely perception and a convenient way to sum up the "bias" that is actually just a vague "culture fit". Face it, dev culture is a bit geeky and perhaps off-putting to some, but likely more tolerable from a younger person fresh out of college. It gets less cute the older one gets so if one has not made an effort to keep their appearance and social skills up, they'll likely lose out to a younger, fresher-faced person with an objectively lower skill set since we're so fortunate to be able to "brute force" your average business problems with less skill.
• gwbas1c 10y ago
  Our industry needs to require certification. Doctors have to go through a pretty rigorous certification process that is independent from medical school and career work. We need a similar certification process that requires that we know a lot of the things we need to know; and breaks the misconception that the industry is always changing.
• mgrennan 10y ago
  How we got here: Tech bobble gold rush, big tech (google/s) takes best talent, investors only want good enough (build to a price), young bro-grammers fill need, flood of millennials (like the Chinese army) take over IT. Now we are moving as fast as we can, in the cheapest vehicle we can build, caring other people's property. Some of this is good. (SpaceX?) Some is pandering gossip (Facebook?) Some are rubber dog turds. (Ha.. sh-- sells) The pendulum swings: Mainframes connected to dumb terminals sending CICS to real time computing (PCs) to AWS connect to browsers sending HTML/CSS. So the bro-grammers think they are inventing something new. Wisdom is learning from other's mistakes. Developers today think of anything older then 5 years as obsolete. They are excited by what they think is NEW but really they are just naive. Time is the flame in which or lives burn. If only more would take a moment and seek wisdom their products and lives would be enriched. I've been IT for 40+ years. Still working. Still seeing the same mistakes made over and over again. I have a few young people I mentor and I've seen them move way above their co-workers. So here is some words of wisdom if your new in IT. Find a co-worker over 50 and ask for advise.
• mgrennan 10y ago
  How we got here: Tech bobble gold rush, big tech (google/s) takes best talent, investors only want good enough (build to a price), young bro-grammers fill need, flood of millennials (like the Chinese army) take over IT. Now we are moving as fast as we can, in the cheapest vehicle we can build, caring other people's property. Some of this is good. (SpaceX?) Some is pandering gossip (Facebook?) Some are rubber dog turds. (Ha.. sh-- sells) The pendulum swings: Mainframes connected to dumb terminals sending CICS to real time computing (PCs) to AWS connect to browsers sending HTML/CSS. So the bro-grammers think they are inventing something new. Wisdom is learning from other's mistakes. Developers today think of anything older then 5 years as obsolete. They are excited by what they think is NEW but really they are just naive. Time is the flame in which or lives burn. If only more would take a moment and seek wisdom their products and lives would be enriched. I've been IT for 40+ years. Still working. Still seeing the same mistakes made over and over again. I have a few young people I mentor and I've seen them move way above their co-workers. So here is some words of wisdom if your new in IT. Find a co-worker over 50 and ask for advise.
• deleted 10y ago
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• OliverJones 10y ago
  Some say this youth-culture obsession is a US workplace problem. That may be true. To my way of thinking it's a Sili Valley workplace culture problem. Sili Valley is a high-rent district, and doesn't favor people who need more than minimal housing, unless they've already made it big. Also, Sili Valley is all about the new new things. It will be interesting to see what happens to the present crop of Sili Valley giants in 20 years. What happens when Page, Brin, and Zuckerberg turn 55? What happens when the rapid growth of their companies slows? Maybe they retire and start concerning themselves with scenic easements and other perqs of the hyper-rich. Or maybe they try to keep reinventing themselves and the companies. They may make the same mistake Digital Equipment made: responding to a slowdown with a hiring freeze. Once a hiring freeze is imposed, a company loses access to new people and the ideas they bring. The median age increases by one year for every calendar year that goes by. There's nothing wrong with older folks, but not all of us can be managers. They may make the mistake MSFT made in the first few post-Gates years, and that AAPL is in danger of making now: laurel-resting and inward-turning. One of the problems of measuring age distribution is this: Averages don't mean anything. Many effective orgs have lots and lots of fresh young faces and a dramatically tapering age pyramid. Military services are a case in point: Sure, the median age is 22. That's because they have vast numbers of 19 year olds. But they also have lots of 30 year old captains, 35 year old majors, and even older colonels and generals. I'm a developer who started on Hollerith 80-column punch cards. I'm still doing good work. Others can too. But not in Sili Valley: we have too much sense to jump on the latest js framework.
• woodandsteel 10y ago
  Seems to me the solution for this is for the older-than-young programmers to get together and start companies that produce better software.
• squozzer 10y ago
  Not to pick on the author too hard, as I like the cut of his giblets, but his hair seems awfully brown for a 50-something. My temples and beard are quite gray / grey.
• theworldrocks2 10y ago
  I’m a Certified Ethical Hacker(CEH), that is something to write home about. You can contact me for anything that has to do with hacking and I’ll send you an invoice within 12 hours including info on modus operandi(mode of operation). I also help people who have been scammed in anyway to recover their stolen money. Just don’t feel reluctant to contact me via mail: steelbreaker /at/ techie d0t c00m