7 ms·

The Plight of the Graying Tech Worker

89 points by qwerty242586 8y ago

malvosenior 8y ago
They’re not overreacting. My analysis of employee-level U.S. Census Bureau data and qualitative interviews show that U.S. tech workers over age 40 have good reasons to be concerned about how globalization affects their career longevity. In addition to competing with greater numbers of skilled foreign workers, older tech workers are now also more likely than younger workers to lose their jobs when technical work moves overseas. All that said, it would be a mistake to rein in U.S. immigration policy. Here’s why. The largest and most prominent visa category for employment-based immigration to the United States is what’s known as the H-1B visa. Some 90% of H-1B visa recipients are individuals under age 40.7 Typically, economists analyze the effects of immigration through an apples-to-apples comparison of immigrants and nonimmigrants in the same general age and education bracket who are looking for employment. However, peer displacement doesn’t appear in that data set because the salary differences between workers with H-1B visas and domestic employees of similar ages and skills are minimal (in part due to a law requiring companies to pay an H-1B worker the “prevailing wage” for the position). I don't see how it follows that adjusting the US immigration policy is a "mistake". Isn't the increased supply of workers putting downward price pressure on salaries? Even if H1B requires a prevailing wage, that wage will go down to meet the increased supply of talent that additional developers bring.
- noego 8y ago
  The rest of the article is behind a paywall. Presumably they have justified their earlier statement. Your reasoning sounds reasonable, but it falls for the lump of labor fallacy. Having more smart and talented people makes our society better off, not worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/opinion/lumps-of-labor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/opinion/lumps-of-labor.ht...
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    That might be the case but that NYT opinion article didn't cite any research to back up its assertions. It's pretty hard to imagine how more developers wouldn't lower salaries though. I say this as someone who's done a lot of hiring. It's really hard to find good people and they can command a premium (fair market wage). Being able to hire H1Bs helps hiring managers but I don't think it helps developer salaries at all.
    - noego 8y ago
      The "NYT opinion article" is written by a Nobel prize winner, and he's describing the opinion that most economists hold towards the lump of labor fallacy. If you're curious to learn more, there's plenty that come up in a simple Google search. > It's pretty hard to imagine how more developers wouldn't lower salaries though This is the textbook definition of the lump of labor fallacy.
      - krapht 8y ago
        I mean, it's also not the case that labor markets are immune to supply and demand. As always, the answer is somewhere in the middle.
        noego 8y ago
        The whole point of the "lump of labor fallacy" is that growing the workforce will increase both the supply and demand. This is why unemployment is comparable across 1900 and 2000 America, despite the population exploding. The answer isn't always somewhere in the middle. If someone tries to convince you that the Earth is flat or that climate change isn't happening, I would hope that you will lend more credence to the experts instead of believing the answer is somewhere in the middle.
        krapht 8y ago
        Utility is maximized for society as a whole when the workforce grows. However, my utility is not equal to society's. In fact, selfishly speaking, I would be better off if h1b was shut down, licensure roles introduced, etc etc.
  - amacdona 8y ago
    I'm on the SMR editorial team — we've removed the paywall on this, so you should have access to the full article now.
- throwawaystale 8y ago
  A related effect is that almost all H-1B's count as "diverse" in HR statistics. If so, then currently there would be intense pressure to hire the H-1B candidate over a citizen, even if the former required a higher salary. I have some skin in this game. I was rejected at Google for mysterious reasons after passing the all-day and hiring committee. No way to know, but I am indeed pale, male, and stale (and a citizen). If you look at Google's own diversity reports, their fraction of people like me has falling like a stone for several years now.
  - killerdhmo 8y ago
    Wow, a troubling rationale. They’ve doubled in size in the last five years, your rejection, and an increase in diversity do not equate to not hiring white people. They just didn’t hire you. I’d find it concerning to jump at anti-immigrant rhetoric so quickly.
    - throwawaystale 8y ago
      Both I and my wife are second generation immigrants. I have no issues with immigrants at all, and I've worked my entire career besides H-1Bs and other PRs. If you had asked me five years ago, I'd have expressed a (somewhat naive) wish that we just drop national borders altogether, for the purposes of immigration. (I'm a bit more sanguine these days.) I wasn't aware that Google was still growing that fast. That makes the reduction in the proportion of non-diverse employees a little more credible. On the other hand, it makes the sibling poster's thought (headcount reduction) a little less credible. Obviously, they didn't hire me, and in the end, I have no idea why. They probably barely know why themselves.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jarsin 8y ago
    No comments on your take on why they did not hire you but just curious who can override the hiring committee at google? Seems weird they go through so much trouble hiring and it still comes down to one person giving their ok?
ForHackernews 8y ago
I don't mean this to sound as glib as it probably will, but I can't help noticing that HN appears to be _very_ concerned about age discrimination in contrast to the amount of concern here for gender or racial discrimination.
- posix_compliant 8y ago
  Age affects everyone, so there's a larger pool of people to make posts and fewer people who would disagree with the negative effects of aging.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  There are many, many programs, scholarships, mentorship opportunities, recruitment drives, meetups, support groups, hr policies... that are designed to help women and non-white people. Can you think of a single program or system designed to help older workers? I can't.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - stirfrykitty 8y ago
    There are none. That's because no one cares. It's about youth, beauty, fresh talent, and using/abusing younger workers because they have no families/children. They won't balk at working 60-80HR work weeks, while older people simply cannot do this. I won't do it. I DESERVE a life/work balance, and I also demand to be an hourly employee to prevent just such an occurrence. Most employers will pay you hourly if you ask nicely. What they don't want to do is pay you overtime. Texas is a RTW state, so employee rights here are already thin and vague. If I work, you are paying me for my exact time. I do not work for free. I want money and other tangible benefits for my time and talent. I have children at home still. I cannot hit the rewind button to spend time with them. My family is far more important to me than helping someone up in the C-Suite get another useless BMW and cruise.
- krapht 8y ago
  Is this supposed to be some sort of "aha-gotcha" insightful remark? News at 11, people are concerned with issues that affect them over ones that don't.
stirfrykitty 8y ago
I'm apologetically opposed to foreign workers. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. Years ago, I worked for a rather well known security/dev company in Northern Virginia. We had two arms to the company: the gov contractor side, which required security clearances and the dev side. The dev side hired a few H-1B visas and within a year, the boss, a former H-1B visa holder himself, now a citizen, slowly, but surely purged the Americans from the dev team in favor of people from his country. We all complained, but to no avail. Six months later, the place had two Americans: the good looking admin assistants. That was it. This happens all the time. I have friends in Northern Virginia that I still keep in touch with and they say nothing has changed. The IT payscale has been run down because of this. Same thing is happening with a certain large HW vendor here in Houston. Filled to the brim with H-1B visa holders while native sons and daughters are given the brush off.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- chasingthewind 8y ago
  This really doesn't match my experience. As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level. I changed jobs a year ago and got lots of interest from a wide variety of employers from a big enterprisey place to a small local startup, two smallish local fintech firms, and a SV software company's regional dev center where I landed. I'm in my mid forties. I can't really explain the difference in your experience vs mine other that perhaps the location.
  - jacobyoder 8y ago
    > As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level Amen. I've been in a few US markets (non CA/NY) over the past 20+ years. Finding a decent number of available/skilled software engineers is always a challenge. If they're skilled (beyond competent), they're employed or doing their own thing. I've recently taken a 6 month contract, and have been amazed at the quality of the team, but... they're really having trouble finding people - people that wouldn't be a net negative on the team (there's both cultural fit as well as skill fit). And yes, they're hiring junior folks from area bootcamps and training them up. Doing real training - reviews, handholding, explaining, testing - is a real investment, and takes a lot of time. This has been one of the few teams I've worked in where I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of quality of everyone in the company (10 in the group I'm in, around 65 in the company altogether I think). I'm watching how they interview/hire/expand, and... it's tough. They could easily bring on more people quickly who would be a net negative, and cause more problems (I've seen that many times - I was the net negative problem at least once!)
pmichelman 8y ago
It's important to read this article w/out a political agenda as I don't the researchers have one. Aging in a young industry is a topic worthy of even more coverage.
- hinkley 8y ago
  Most of these old workers were young when they called it a 'Young industry' and I expect all the old workers around in the 90's just shook their heads about this being a young industry. Most of the really big discoveries were done, documented and in some cases patented in the mid 1970's. That's 45 years ago. We are not so young, and I think a lot of the ills in our industry can be attributed to characterizing us as young. It isn't that young. We know better about any number of things, and we excuse it as youthful indiscretion. Most of the software activities we do today were laid out in the late 90's and those involved stealing a bunch of ideas from older discoveries or other industries's discoveries in the 70's and 80's. It's all old. We've just been refining execution and improving tools (painfully slowly for my tastes) for the last 20 years but it's really the same stuff.
  - Dumblydorr 8y ago
    You're saying nothing is new under the sun. Okay sure, but there are measurable demographic and numerical changes in the technology workforce and certainly growing up with technology had led countless currently young tech workers to where they are. That's not to say tech never existed or there were never young hotshot. Millenials, like boomers, are a large workforce and its possible we are describing a bimodal distribution. There may be plenty of older workers but IMO, the sheer quantity of younger folks, who are told truthfully that tech is a great wage in a bad wage economy, those billion younger people globally and the youth of many successful founders and high performers, those are the main contributors to our perception as young.
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
      FWIW it goes boomers, generation X, Millenials (with a capital M). The names except for Millenial (which is pejorating) aren't that good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation
paulm1 8y ago
This excerpt says a lot: "Employers should be more cautious about pursuing strategies that discount the contributions of older workers. In recent years, some companies realized too late — after older employees had departed — that longtime employees possessed critical knowledge and experience. Moreover, whatever cost reductions companies achieve can be ephemeral if young hires move on to other opportunities."
- mylons 8y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28UEoLXVFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28UEoLXVFQ
- gcb0 8y ago
  problem with the industry is short term vision. today even the CEO will make lots of money if they drag the company in the mud for short term perceived profit (doesn't even have to be actual profit). splitting cost centers and being the manager of the one that gets more income than outcome associated in some spreadsheet makes zero more money but pays lots of bonus and promotions. same for launching tons of features aligned with some strategic goal, even if it completely destroy obvieties like market reputation (eg YouTube kids) or is ridden with bugs that you discounted as "will implement on phase 2. because agile" (don't even get me started on documentation and maintenance runbooks, your waterfall dinosaur!) now get off my lawn!
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    Isn't that what publicly traded industry is supposed to do? Maximize the returns for the shareholder each quarter?
    - cat199 8y ago
      industry perhaps (though this is debatable); industry is not society however. confusing the two can be problematic.
    - dwaltrip 8y ago
      A company is supposed to maximize returns over its lifespan, while also upholding an ethical standard and a set of values.
JCDenton2052 8y ago
Ah... the old debate about onshore vs offshore. I tend to work for technology companies these days and give the ones with offshore dev teams a wide berth. If your product is a technological product and you skimp on labour needed to produce it, sorry, you are doing it wrong.
tgsnyder 8y ago
Great article!
dmckinney242 8y ago
Great read!
pteredactyl 8y ago
To add, in regard to H1B, In some instances it's a national security issue. You have highly paid foreigners who can't quit (unless they want to go home), working on sensitive, sometimes morally questionable projects.
raincom 8y ago
Ask any Graying Tech Worker, whether (s)he wants to recommend the same career path to his/her kids. Ask why they don't recommend the path. Basically, the Industry has made it hard for Americans to seek tech a career path--for the following reasons. (a) get rid of older workers (b) offshoring (c) use H1-B to suppress wages, even though Google/Facebook will pay $200K to junior developers. The industry is not just Google/Facebook When it comes to India, where offshore companies operate, you see the same: (a) get rid of expensive workers, as delivery managers to show profit by hiring cheaper warm bodies (b) Tech Industry, just like any other industry, has lots of 'bullshit' jobs. Instead of getting rid of bs jobs, replace them with cheaper warm bodies, and capture the profit. (c) For average Indians, unlike Average American Kids, there are no better alternatives to seeking a job in tech sector. So, there is more competition for 'billable hour' jobs at offshoring companies.
- xref 8y ago
  >Ask any Graying Tech Worker, whether (s)he wants to recommend the same career path to his/her kids. Ask why they don't recommend the path. I’ve heard people say this for many, many professions, not just tech. Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, politicians, architects, bankers, etc. maybe once someone spends a career inside an industry it has just lost all the glamor and they only see it as mundane work.
  - raincom 8y ago
    That's true. But I have seen many STEM students flocking to consulting, investment banking, law, MD, etc.
sharadov 8y ago
Ageism is very much an issue in Silicon Valley ( they want young workers with not a lot of responsibility, make the office look like Disneyland, ply them with free food and then work them to death). I work for an AI company in Boston and we have engineers all over the spectrum - from 20s to the 60s. We work hard, but we also have a work-life balance.
casper345 8y ago
This has already perplexed me on this shift - on discrimination on older tech workers and woman in tech compared to now- because 40 years ago THEY were the predominant tech force. The idea of the young white-asian male being dominant in this work force is relatively new, correct? What shift happened?
- Izkata 8y ago
  Looking at degrees in the US, IIRC, the shift did happen in the mid/late 80s. I have no idea what might have caused it, but basically the male/female ratio was pretty consistent until then, when male degrees suddenly skyrocketed while female rose slowly, at a pace very closely in line with the previous pattern.

89 points by qwerty242586 8y ago

They’re not overreacting. My analysis of employee-level U.S. Census Bureau data and qualitative interviews show that U.S. tech workers over age 40 have good reasons to be concerned about how globalization affects their career longevity. In addition to competing with greater numbers of skilled foreign workers, older tech workers are now also more likely than younger workers to lose their jobs when technical work moves overseas. All that said, it would be a mistake to rein in U.S. immigration policy. Here’s why. The largest and most prominent visa category for employment-based immigration to the United States is what’s known as the H-1B visa. Some 90% of H-1B visa recipients are individuals under age 40.7 Typically, economists analyze the effects of immigration through an apples-to-apples comparison of immigrants and nonimmigrants in the same general age and education bracket who are looking for employment. However, peer displacement doesn’t appear in that data set because the salary differences between workers with H-1B visas and domestic employees of similar ages and skills are minimal (in part due to a law requiring companies to pay an H-1B worker the “prevailing wage” for the position). I don't see how it follows that adjusting the US immigration policy is a "mistake". Isn't the increased supply of workers putting downward price pressure on salaries? Even if H1B requires a prevailing wage, that wage will go down to meet the increased supply of talent that additional developers bring.

noego 8y ago
The rest of the article is behind a paywall. Presumably they have justified their earlier statement. Your reasoning sounds reasonable, but it falls for the lump of labor fallacy. Having more smart and talented people makes our society better off, not worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/opinion/lumps-of-labor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/opinion/lumps-of-labor.ht...
- malvosenior 8y ago
  That might be the case but that NYT opinion article didn't cite any research to back up its assertions. It's pretty hard to imagine how more developers wouldn't lower salaries though. I say this as someone who's done a lot of hiring. It's really hard to find good people and they can command a premium (fair market wage). Being able to hire H1Bs helps hiring managers but I don't think it helps developer salaries at all.
  - noego 8y ago
    The "NYT opinion article" is written by a Nobel prize winner, and he's describing the opinion that most economists hold towards the lump of labor fallacy. If you're curious to learn more, there's plenty that come up in a simple Google search. > It's pretty hard to imagine how more developers wouldn't lower salaries though This is the textbook definition of the lump of labor fallacy.
    - krapht 8y ago
      I mean, it's also not the case that labor markets are immune to supply and demand. As always, the answer is somewhere in the middle.
      - noego 8y ago
        The whole point of the "lump of labor fallacy" is that growing the workforce will increase both the supply and demand. This is why unemployment is comparable across 1900 and 2000 America, despite the population exploding. The answer isn't always somewhere in the middle. If someone tries to convince you that the Earth is flat or that climate change isn't happening, I would hope that you will lend more credence to the experts instead of believing the answer is somewhere in the middle.
        krapht 8y ago
        Utility is maximized for society as a whole when the workforce grows. However, my utility is not equal to society's. In fact, selfishly speaking, I would be better off if h1b was shut down, licensure roles introduced, etc etc.
- amacdona 8y ago
  I'm on the SMR editorial team — we've removed the paywall on this, so you should have access to the full article now.
throwawaystale 8y ago
A related effect is that almost all H-1B's count as "diverse" in HR statistics. If so, then currently there would be intense pressure to hire the H-1B candidate over a citizen, even if the former required a higher salary. I have some skin in this game. I was rejected at Google for mysterious reasons after passing the all-day and hiring committee. No way to know, but I am indeed pale, male, and stale (and a citizen). If you look at Google's own diversity reports, their fraction of people like me has falling like a stone for several years now.
- killerdhmo 8y ago
  Wow, a troubling rationale. They’ve doubled in size in the last five years, your rejection, and an increase in diversity do not equate to not hiring white people. They just didn’t hire you. I’d find it concerning to jump at anti-immigrant rhetoric so quickly.
  - throwawaystale 8y ago
    Both I and my wife are second generation immigrants. I have no issues with immigrants at all, and I've worked my entire career besides H-1Bs and other PRs. If you had asked me five years ago, I'd have expressed a (somewhat naive) wish that we just drop national borders altogether, for the purposes of immigration. (I'm a bit more sanguine these days.) I wasn't aware that Google was still growing that fast. That makes the reduction in the proportion of non-diverse employees a little more credible. On the other hand, it makes the sibling poster's thought (headcount reduction) a little less credible. Obviously, they didn't hire me, and in the end, I have no idea why. They probably barely know why themselves.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jarsin 8y ago
  No comments on your take on why they did not hire you but just curious who can override the hiring committee at google? Seems weird they go through so much trouble hiring and it still comes down to one person giving their ok?

ForHackernews 8y ago

I don't mean this to sound as glib as it probably will, but I can't help noticing that HN appears to be _very_ concerned about age discrimination in contrast to the amount of concern here for gender or racial discrimination.

posix_compliant 8y ago
Age affects everyone, so there's a larger pool of people to make posts and fewer people who would disagree with the negative effects of aging.
malvosenior 8y ago
There are many, many programs, scholarships, mentorship opportunities, recruitment drives, meetups, support groups, hr policies... that are designed to help women and non-white people. Can you think of a single program or system designed to help older workers? I can't.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- stirfrykitty 8y ago
  There are none. That's because no one cares. It's about youth, beauty, fresh talent, and using/abusing younger workers because they have no families/children. They won't balk at working 60-80HR work weeks, while older people simply cannot do this. I won't do it. I DESERVE a life/work balance, and I also demand to be an hourly employee to prevent just such an occurrence. Most employers will pay you hourly if you ask nicely. What they don't want to do is pay you overtime. Texas is a RTW state, so employee rights here are already thin and vague. If I work, you are paying me for my exact time. I do not work for free. I want money and other tangible benefits for my time and talent. I have children at home still. I cannot hit the rewind button to spend time with them. My family is far more important to me than helping someone up in the C-Suite get another useless BMW and cruise.
krapht 8y ago
Is this supposed to be some sort of "aha-gotcha" insightful remark? News at 11, people are concerned with issues that affect them over ones that don't.

stirfrykitty 8y ago

I'm apologetically opposed to foreign workers. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. Years ago, I worked for a rather well known security/dev company in Northern Virginia. We had two arms to the company: the gov contractor side, which required security clearances and the dev side. The dev side hired a few H-1B visas and within a year, the boss, a former H-1B visa holder himself, now a citizen, slowly, but surely purged the Americans from the dev team in favor of people from his country. We all complained, but to no avail. Six months later, the place had two Americans: the good looking admin assistants. That was it. This happens all the time. I have friends in Northern Virginia that I still keep in touch with and they say nothing has changed. The IT payscale has been run down because of this. Same thing is happening with a certain large HW vendor here in Houston. Filled to the brim with H-1B visa holders while native sons and daughters are given the brush off.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
chasingthewind 8y ago
This really doesn't match my experience. As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level. I changed jobs a year ago and got lots of interest from a wide variety of employers from a big enterprisey place to a small local startup, two smallish local fintech firms, and a SV software company's regional dev center where I landed. I'm in my mid forties. I can't really explain the difference in your experience vs mine other that perhaps the location.
- jacobyoder 8y ago
  > As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level Amen. I've been in a few US markets (non CA/NY) over the past 20+ years. Finding a decent number of available/skilled software engineers is always a challenge. If they're skilled (beyond competent), they're employed or doing their own thing. I've recently taken a 6 month contract, and have been amazed at the quality of the team, but... they're really having trouble finding people - people that wouldn't be a net negative on the team (there's both cultural fit as well as skill fit). And yes, they're hiring junior folks from area bootcamps and training them up. Doing real training - reviews, handholding, explaining, testing - is a real investment, and takes a lot of time. This has been one of the few teams I've worked in where I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of quality of everyone in the company (10 in the group I'm in, around 65 in the company altogether I think). I'm watching how they interview/hire/expand, and... it's tough. They could easily bring on more people quickly who would be a net negative, and cause more problems (I've seen that many times - I was the net negative problem at least once!)

pmichelman 8y ago

It's important to read this article w/out a political agenda as I don't the researchers have one. Aging in a young industry is a topic worthy of even more coverage.

hinkley 8y ago
Most of these old workers were young when they called it a 'Young industry' and I expect all the old workers around in the 90's just shook their heads about this being a young industry. Most of the really big discoveries were done, documented and in some cases patented in the mid 1970's. That's 45 years ago. We are not so young, and I think a lot of the ills in our industry can be attributed to characterizing us as young. It isn't that young. We know better about any number of things, and we excuse it as youthful indiscretion. Most of the software activities we do today were laid out in the late 90's and those involved stealing a bunch of ideas from older discoveries or other industries's discoveries in the 70's and 80's. It's all old. We've just been refining execution and improving tools (painfully slowly for my tastes) for the last 20 years but it's really the same stuff.
- Dumblydorr 8y ago
  You're saying nothing is new under the sun. Okay sure, but there are measurable demographic and numerical changes in the technology workforce and certainly growing up with technology had led countless currently young tech workers to where they are. That's not to say tech never existed or there were never young hotshot. Millenials, like boomers, are a large workforce and its possible we are describing a bimodal distribution. There may be plenty of older workers but IMO, the sheer quantity of younger folks, who are told truthfully that tech is a great wage in a bad wage economy, those billion younger people globally and the youth of many successful founders and high performers, those are the main contributors to our perception as young.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
    FWIW it goes boomers, generation X, Millenials (with a capital M). The names except for Millenial (which is pejorating) aren't that good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation

paulm1 8y ago

This excerpt says a lot: "Employers should be more cautious about pursuing strategies that discount the contributions of older workers. In recent years, some companies realized too late — after older employees had departed — that longtime employees possessed critical knowledge and experience. Moreover, whatever cost reductions companies achieve can be ephemeral if young hires move on to other opportunities."

mylons 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28UEoLXVFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28UEoLXVFQ
gcb0 8y ago
problem with the industry is short term vision. today even the CEO will make lots of money if they drag the company in the mud for short term perceived profit (doesn't even have to be actual profit). splitting cost centers and being the manager of the one that gets more income than outcome associated in some spreadsheet makes zero more money but pays lots of bonus and promotions. same for launching tons of features aligned with some strategic goal, even if it completely destroy obvieties like market reputation (eg YouTube kids) or is ridden with bugs that you discounted as "will implement on phase 2. because agile" (don't even get me started on documentation and maintenance runbooks, your waterfall dinosaur!) now get off my lawn!
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  Isn't that what publicly traded industry is supposed to do? Maximize the returns for the shareholder each quarter?
  - cat199 8y ago
    industry perhaps (though this is debatable); industry is not society however. confusing the two can be problematic.
  - dwaltrip 8y ago
    A company is supposed to maximize returns over its lifespan, while also upholding an ethical standard and a set of values.

JCDenton2052 8y ago

Ah... the old debate about onshore vs offshore. I tend to work for technology companies these days and give the ones with offshore dev teams a wide berth. If your product is a technological product and you skimp on labour needed to produce it, sorry, you are doing it wrong.

tgsnyder 8y ago

Great article!

dmckinney242 8y ago

Great read!

pteredactyl 8y ago

To add, in regard to H1B, In some instances it's a national security issue. You have highly paid foreigners who can't quit (unless they want to go home), working on sensitive, sometimes morally questionable projects.

raincom 8y ago

Ask any Graying Tech Worker, whether (s)he wants to recommend the same career path to his/her kids. Ask why they don't recommend the path. Basically, the Industry has made it hard for Americans to seek tech a career path--for the following reasons. (a) get rid of older workers (b) offshoring (c) use H1-B to suppress wages, even though Google/Facebook will pay $200K to junior developers. The industry is not just Google/Facebook When it comes to India, where offshore companies operate, you see the same: (a) get rid of expensive workers, as delivery managers to show profit by hiring cheaper warm bodies (b) Tech Industry, just like any other industry, has lots of 'bullshit' jobs. Instead of getting rid of bs jobs, replace them with cheaper warm bodies, and capture the profit. (c) For average Indians, unlike Average American Kids, there are no better alternatives to seeking a job in tech sector. So, there is more competition for 'billable hour' jobs at offshoring companies.

xref 8y ago
>Ask any Graying Tech Worker, whether (s)he wants to recommend the same career path to his/her kids. Ask why they don't recommend the path. I’ve heard people say this for many, many professions, not just tech. Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, politicians, architects, bankers, etc. maybe once someone spends a career inside an industry it has just lost all the glamor and they only see it as mundane work.
- raincom 8y ago
  That's true. But I have seen many STEM students flocking to consulting, investment banking, law, MD, etc.

sharadov 8y ago

Ageism is very much an issue in Silicon Valley ( they want young workers with not a lot of responsibility, make the office look like Disneyland, ply them with free food and then work them to death). I work for an AI company in Boston and we have engineers all over the spectrum - from 20s to the 60s. We work hard, but we also have a work-life balance.

casper345 8y ago

This has already perplexed me on this shift - on discrimination on older tech workers and woman in tech compared to now- because 40 years ago THEY were the predominant tech force. The idea of the young white-asian male being dominant in this work force is relatively new, correct? What shift happened?

Izkata 8y ago
Looking at degrees in the US, IIRC, the shift did happen in the mid/late 80s. I have no idea what might have caused it, but basically the male/female ratio was pretty consistent until then, when male degrees suddenly skyrocketed while female rose slowly, at a pace very closely in line with the previous pattern.