5 ms·

Jesus, this is going to freak a lot of developers out.

aswanson 8y ago
Think of it as a "heads up", and prepare accordingly.
opportune 8y ago
It shouldn’t as long as you keep up with skills such that you can actually command a 20+ years of experience salary based on those skills. I see this with data teams where older developers can be less productive than people who are much younger that have a few years experience working in the Hadoop ecosystem. There is no reason to pay people 50-100% more if they aren’t nearly that much more productive
- aswanson 8y ago
  Hadoop was released in 2011. No one has more than 8 years of experience in it but the initial developers. So even if the older devs had the median level of experience with that particular tool, there's likely a much more inexperienced as good with that particular framework, hence, a rapidly devaluing skillset against the environment with respect to time. There is probably no framework or set of tools from 20 years ago in software that is as valuable to an employer as more recent technology.
  - opportune 8y ago
    Yes and there are plenty of people with 4+ years of experience with Hadoop who are working with (or worse, under) people with more total experience but no experience with Hadoop who are not as productive. That is all I’m saying. I’m having trouble parsing your second sentence
    - aswanson 8y ago
      Yeah, sorry. That was badly worded; it was meant as a retort to your initial assertion that 20 years of experience matters only with the right experience with tools. The tools have such a short half-life that none of them matter over that time frame and you are always pushing uphill every few years against newer people that can have almost as much experience with the latest tool de jure.
  - nikanj 8y ago
    Then one day your Hadoop installation starts acting up, and you thank your dear lord that you have someone on your team with experience in the arcane. Unix is well over 20 years old, so is Ethernet, TCP, GCC, and an endless plethora of technologies that stand tall behind the thin curtain of a Node.js installation. Full-stack nowadays means "I know how to write a Dockerfile and deploy it", but a senior dev might actually understand the full stack. This is of course assuming they have 20 years of experience, not one year of experience * 20.
    - mgkimsal 8y ago
      Possibly apropos of nothing, but I just got back from a tech conference, and ... talking to vendors and hiring folks was odd. Whenever asked "what do you do?", even after a few times, I still... paused. I heard plenty of folks saying "I do full stack development" and then struggle to communicate basic ideas and tech stuff (not everyone, but more than a couple times). And yeah, i get it, we all start some place, and no one is perfect, but... I don't want to be using the same words as people who demonstrably struggle with some basics. But that meant that I struggled with quick 5 second definer intro statements. More interesting, I found, was on 3 separate occasions today when speaking with some tech vendors, they all mentioned "file descriptors". "When installing, you gotta make sure you up your default file descriptors - system defaults won't work". A MySQL tuning guy said "almost no one ever has enough, and almost no one knows about these - you need 60000 minimum, but distros usually default to 1024". And I nodded, because I've hit that issue many times in the last 20+ years, and now recognize symptoms and that's now in my diagnostic bag. "Senior dev" seems to mean 3+ years of work, and "full stack" seems to mean they know "npm install" and have built create-react-app samples. (I'm tired and cynical, I know).
WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
It should. Real life takes no prisoners. You need to plan on how you'll stay employed all your life. There were companies that could keep you employed all your working career those companies are on their way to extinction. You need to plan for your next job.
- aswanson 8y ago
  Damned straight.
- eropple 8y ago
  This is true, and I wish more people spent time thinking about it. I was lucky, in that I knew what time it was young. I remember saying to a friend at my first job out of college (at one of the more well-respected Boston tech companies, with a NASDAQ symbol and a lot of lifers): "this company is just a client and I am exclusively selling to them, that won't last forever." Being always ready to jump, in many ways, sucks. But it's what we've got.
- ericd 8y ago
  You don't need to stay employed all your life. You need to not spend all the money you make. Most corporate software devs make enough that they can save a large percentage of their take-home pay if they live frugally. 20 years of saving 50%+ of your take-home, and a well diversified portfolio (read: not 100% US equities), and you most likely never need to work another day in your life if you don't want to, even if you never get a stock payday.

Think of it as a "heads up", and prepare accordingly.

It shouldn’t as long as you keep up with skills such that you can actually command a 20+ years of experience salary based on those skills. I see this with data teams where older developers can be less productive than people who are much younger that have a few years experience working in the Hadoop ecosystem. There is no reason to pay people 50-100% more if they aren’t nearly that much more productive

aswanson 8y ago
Hadoop was released in 2011. No one has more than 8 years of experience in it but the initial developers. So even if the older devs had the median level of experience with that particular tool, there's likely a much more inexperienced as good with that particular framework, hence, a rapidly devaluing skillset against the environment with respect to time. There is probably no framework or set of tools from 20 years ago in software that is as valuable to an employer as more recent technology.
- opportune 8y ago
  Yes and there are plenty of people with 4+ years of experience with Hadoop who are working with (or worse, under) people with more total experience but no experience with Hadoop who are not as productive. That is all I’m saying. I’m having trouble parsing your second sentence
  - aswanson 8y ago
    Yeah, sorry. That was badly worded; it was meant as a retort to your initial assertion that 20 years of experience matters only with the right experience with tools. The tools have such a short half-life that none of them matter over that time frame and you are always pushing uphill every few years against newer people that can have almost as much experience with the latest tool de jure.
- nikanj 8y ago
  Then one day your Hadoop installation starts acting up, and you thank your dear lord that you have someone on your team with experience in the arcane. Unix is well over 20 years old, so is Ethernet, TCP, GCC, and an endless plethora of technologies that stand tall behind the thin curtain of a Node.js installation. Full-stack nowadays means "I know how to write a Dockerfile and deploy it", but a senior dev might actually understand the full stack. This is of course assuming they have 20 years of experience, not one year of experience * 20.
  - mgkimsal 8y ago
    Possibly apropos of nothing, but I just got back from a tech conference, and ... talking to vendors and hiring folks was odd. Whenever asked "what do you do?", even after a few times, I still... paused. I heard plenty of folks saying "I do full stack development" and then struggle to communicate basic ideas and tech stuff (not everyone, but more than a couple times). And yeah, i get it, we all start some place, and no one is perfect, but... I don't want to be using the same words as people who demonstrably struggle with some basics. But that meant that I struggled with quick 5 second definer intro statements. More interesting, I found, was on 3 separate occasions today when speaking with some tech vendors, they all mentioned "file descriptors". "When installing, you gotta make sure you up your default file descriptors - system defaults won't work". A MySQL tuning guy said "almost no one ever has enough, and almost no one knows about these - you need 60000 minimum, but distros usually default to 1024". And I nodded, because I've hit that issue many times in the last 20+ years, and now recognize symptoms and that's now in my diagnostic bag. "Senior dev" seems to mean 3+ years of work, and "full stack" seems to mean they know "npm install" and have built create-react-app samples. (I'm tired and cynical, I know).

WheelsAtLarge 8y ago

It should. Real life takes no prisoners. You need to plan on how you'll stay employed all your life. There were companies that could keep you employed all your working career those companies are on their way to extinction. You need to plan for your next job.

aswanson 8y ago
Damned straight.
eropple 8y ago
This is true, and I wish more people spent time thinking about it. I was lucky, in that I knew what time it was young. I remember saying to a friend at my first job out of college (at one of the more well-respected Boston tech companies, with a NASDAQ symbol and a lot of lifers): "this company is just a client and I am exclusively selling to them, that won't last forever." Being always ready to jump, in many ways, sucks. But it's what we've got.
ericd 8y ago
You don't need to stay employed all your life. You need to not spend all the money you make. Most corporate software devs make enough that they can save a large percentage of their take-home pay if they live frugally. 20 years of saving 50%+ of your take-home, and a well diversified portfolio (read: not 100% US equities), and you most likely never need to work another day in your life if you don't want to, even if you never get a stock payday.