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Re: guess young people are more eager to change/try new things whereas older people are more reluctant to change... As I mentioned elsewhere, as I got older I

by tabtab 8y ago

Re: guess young people are more eager to change/try new things whereas older people are more reluctant to change... As I mentioned elsewhere, as I got older I am more skeptical/cynical of many fads/trends, and this "attitude" is often not valued by management. The thing is, I'm right more often than wrong and would bet my own money on such if I could. The fear of keeping up with the e-joneses has made our industry stupid. Fads/trends are poorly vetted for fit. Warren Buffett has made similar observations about faddism in the financial industry, and he has the fat bucks to prove he's right.

ljm 8y ago
I find this to be true even just entering my 30s. I've made a few slips here and there, but it appears that there's a shift from mastering a skill to having decent domain knowledge for a specific tech. So, you're not hired on how to solve a problem now, you're hired on how much you know their desired solution. This isn't engineering, you're not helping desig action, you're implementing it. One of the huge failures in this sense is that tech has assumed priority over user value. Like your users give a shit about microservices, React, Vue, etc. etc. when you're using more of your runway on the infrastructure and not on the solution they want. Most of this stuff has little value to most businesses. So if you push back you don't get hired; you have to find the places mature enough to understand why you would push back at all.
- tabtab 8y ago
  I wish domain knowledge was valued more in tech staff, but I've just found that's often not the case. I'm not entirely sure why, and my theories (okay, guesses) would take a while to explain. Further, if people don't see the "latest" UI on their screen, they become afraid that the underlying technology is "behind" even if it technically satisfies a business goal. Books are judged by covers.
- mason55 8y ago
  There are a bunch of different things wrapped up in your post and I won’t address them all. One thing though is that we don’t separate a technician vs an engineering in computing. Think about a plumber vs a water systems engineer. Both are valuable and paid well but they have very different roles. Lots of people can be trained to be implementers and do valuable work. But we also don’t have stable best practices so that makes it harder. The line between engineer and implementer is blurred because an implementer constantly has to evaluate which new things should really be best practices.
umvi 8y ago
My point is that with a white person vs. a black person, you can assume that they are in all ways equal and interchangeable. A white person with 5 years of Java experience == a black person with 5 years of Java experience. Young vs. old is different. A young person with 5 years of Java << an old person with 5 years of Java. Hence you must pay the old person 3x more because of all of their non-Java experience.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Re: Hence you must pay the old person 3x more because of all of their non-Java experience. Not necessarily. I suspect what happened is IBM used to pay that way, but the industry practice has changed (for good or bad), but they fired based on current industry practice instead of their original practice, making it come out lopsided by age.

by tabtab 8y ago

ljm 8y ago

I find this to be true even just entering my 30s. I've made a few slips here and there, but it appears that there's a shift from mastering a skill to having decent domain knowledge for a specific tech. So, you're not hired on how to solve a problem now, you're hired on how much you know their desired solution. This isn't engineering, you're not helping desig action, you're implementing it. One of the huge failures in this sense is that tech has assumed priority over user value. Like your users give a shit about microservices, React, Vue, etc. etc. when you're using more of your runway on the infrastructure and not on the solution they want. Most of this stuff has little value to most businesses. So if you push back you don't get hired; you have to find the places mature enough to understand why you would push back at all.

tabtab 8y ago
I wish domain knowledge was valued more in tech staff, but I've just found that's often not the case. I'm not entirely sure why, and my theories (okay, guesses) would take a while to explain. Further, if people don't see the "latest" UI on their screen, they become afraid that the underlying technology is "behind" even if it technically satisfies a business goal. Books are judged by covers.
mason55 8y ago
There are a bunch of different things wrapped up in your post and I won’t address them all. One thing though is that we don’t separate a technician vs an engineering in computing. Think about a plumber vs a water systems engineer. Both are valuable and paid well but they have very different roles. Lots of people can be trained to be implementers and do valuable work. But we also don’t have stable best practices so that makes it harder. The line between engineer and implementer is blurred because an implementer constantly has to evaluate which new things should really be best practices.

umvi 8y ago

My point is that with a white person vs. a black person, you can assume that they are in all ways equal and interchangeable. A white person with 5 years of Java experience == a black person with 5 years of Java experience. Young vs. old is different. A young person with 5 years of Java << an old person with 5 years of Java. Hence you must pay the old person 3x more because of all of their non-Java experience.

tabtab 8y ago
Re: Hence you must pay the old person 3x more because of all of their non-Java experience. Not necessarily. I suspect what happened is IBM used to pay that way, but the industry practice has changed (for good or bad), but they fired based on current industry practice instead of their original practice, making it come out lopsided by age.