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> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0).

> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career. I’ve never quite understood the dynamics of this. Do people mostly self select? Is there organizational pressure to do this? Is the constant rate of change in terms of technology too exhausting for people to keep up (More senior engineers are def capable!)? In my experience I’ve seen a it of all of these, but honestly not enough examples to see clear patterns (...precisely because I’ve only worked with people in their 20s and 30s).

toohotatopic 7y ago
People stop learning when they grow older. Think of advertising target groups - old people don't matter because they don't change anymore. But I don't agree with the conclusion. The fact is that there is no relation anymore. That just means that more knowledge is not more useful. It doesn't mean that people have to 'retire, switch or change careers'.
foota 7y ago
That first statement "For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income" doesn't imply the second? Certainly there are possibly different dynamics at play wrt age, but regarding just experience as mentioned couldn't it just be that after 15 years you've gotten as good as you will get? Edit: I read through the article, I believe these statement are not implying causation, just an AND. That said, I don't think the editorial "tech is for the young" is really justified by the following statements, as neither is necessarily a bad thing.
axaxs 7y ago
Mostly self selection. This data is -extremely- off. Who is most likely worried about their salary, or most likely to search about it and compare? If I had to guess, the median salary for a software engineer in the USA is about 100k. For 15 years experience, probably about 150k. Yes, you might make 200k in the valley sharing an apartment, but for every one of those are three in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, etc who are content with much less. Most software engineers in the US don't take this survey. The ones who do have something to prove.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  > The ones who do have something to prove. Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers.
  - axaxs 7y ago
    Sorry, I agree with you. I absolutely think that salaries should be open, and shared. That said, what I meant was who is most likely to be talking about their salary. A guy in SLC making 100k at a no name company, happy with his situation. Or a guy making 200k in the valley, unable to afford his own house? There's two issues at play that make the second person more likely. One is competition, as he can find a new job at any time. The other is inadequacy I guess you call it, because he feels he's not making enough.
  - rexpop 7y ago
    > Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers. Sounds like the definition of "something to prove."
    - Pfhreak 7y ago
      That's a pretty cynical take. Sometimes people do what they think is right independent of whether they think they'll ever get credit for it.
      - rexpop 7y ago
        Maybe I am confused about the idiom "something to prove." Does it necessarily mean "something to prove [about their own name]?" I thought it might also mean "something to prove about [a group]."
  - DarthGhandi 7y ago
    Quite sure in Nordic countries everyone's salary is public data you can search.
ummonk 7y ago
Wouldn’t the best paid engineers be able to retire earlier? Also, do people really expect there to be significant improvements in IC labor productivity after 15 years of experience?
- eldavido 7y ago
  Two thoughts. First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics. Second, our industry is really young. Average years of experience is what, like, 6? It's because the industry has grown so rapidly over the past decade. We have the demographics of a country like India. Compare this to an older field like architecture, law, or medicine--they've had a lot more time to work out the industry-wide division of labor between entry-level, mid, and very senior. The commercial software industry is maybe 40 years old, we're just starting to figure this out now. I think overall the industry just doesn't know how to use very senior people. It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). We're a very youthful, faddish bunch and I think it's to everyone's detriment. (Background: 10+ year experience, 35-year old software dev here, who's married to an architect that builds buildings, and works with a lot of people over 50)
  - ummonk 7y ago
    >First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics. True. An engineer can create much more value at a company with a thriving feature-driven business than at a stodgy low profit company. >It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, A lot of that changes fast though - and the highest paying subfields of software seem to be new and/or fast-changing, e.g. web dev and ML, as opposed to say kernel programming). I don't think a person with 25 years of experience is like to have an advantage in things like domain expertise over someone with 15 years of experience in these sorts of fields, or what will be hard or easy in modern projects. The experience you gained 20 years ago is not going to be as valuable as the recent experience you gained in the past several years. >how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). Right, but this is getting into skills that are valuable in the management ladder, not the IC ladder. I doubt you'll see the same leveling off in pay at 15 years of experience when you look at engineers & engineering managers as a group.
NalNezumi 7y ago
I'd like to think it is due bad HR practice, based on complaints about companies I've heard from recruiters. The industry is still relatively young and the difference from one senior to another senior engineer is simply too wide to assess their competence with bad HR practices. A senior engineer co-worker I had at previous big tech company had only experience working in big companies, and refused to learn new-tech. He stuck around his own module written in his own way, and rarely tried new platform/languages the department now used. Most HR people are told to avoid hiring a person like this, and with bad practices they just filter with age. That is at least the situation in Scandinavia. This, while the industry cries for "tech talent shortages" and simultaneously refuse to hire entry-level engineers. The crazy thing is "old" in this context applies from 40+, according to a study conducted in my home country.
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post_below 7y ago
When you think about how long the modern commercial internet has been around (which is of course the source of the biggest part of software jobs), after 18 years of experience you're talking about people who have been coding since the internet was mostly just HTML. Even since before relevant degrees were worth anything in the internet world. It's a small demographic, much of which is reaching retirement age. A lot of the rest dropped out of the corporate employment world along the way to found their own companies. I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers change as time passes and there are more available people with that much experience.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  There's a fairly large "bubble" of coders aged 45-55, who grew up with home computers (Amiga, BBC micro in the UK, Commodore 64, etc) before the internet, and went into development after that. I'm one of them. Spent my 20's and 30's building desktop apps, and only moved into web development in the late 00's. My CV looks like a complete mess from an HR perspective. It's not the clean, clear, story of school -> CS degree -> internet company -> promotion ladder. I can understand how it's hard for a large company to grok my experience and where I'd fit in with a modern web dev team. I'm usually older and more experienced than the development manager in modern web dev teams, and that doesn't sit well with some managers (especially as I have an MBA, so I'm usually also more qualified to be a manager than they are). Also, I can't stand (and I'm no good at) big-company politics. So I almost never apply for these kinds of positions, and stick to smaller companies and startups where my breadth of experience counts for more and I have more control over the tech environment. But smaller companies don't pay as much. I'm clearly not represented in this survey, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an under-representation of my cohort in this survey. I meet a fair few people like me at tech meetups, we're definitely a cohort. But then , I also don't live in California or Washington, where this survey focuses. We may not be a sizable minority in those places.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Personal experience about ten years in: Churning out code gets a bit sameish. I mean sure I've got a new job now with more responsibilities and a different domain, but in the end it's still forms, validations, API calls and database storage. The technology has changed but it's basically the same thing I learned in school.
draw_down 7y ago
I’m past 15 years. I don’t want to do management and other careers don’t pay nearly as well. I am working on retirement though, because working in corporate America sucks. I don’t think getting a different, much less well remunerated office job will help that. And spending my days fretting over the very fine details of web pages has really lost its interest, if it ever had any. It doesn’t matter if the web page helps earthquake victims or plays a video or shows a stock portfolio. It is all boring and tedious.
pc86 7y ago
Look at the salary change between Principal and Distinguished Engineer, it's virtually non-existent. Most projects, even at the FANG level, do not require 30 years of incredibly specific technical experience. There just isn't an incentive to pay these folks a lot more, and this has a secondary effect of pushing them into things that can (management), or retiring. Realistically, if you've made $500k+ total comp for the better part of a decade, you can retire. I used to work for a healthcare company and we often, if not routinely, had radiologists (avg. comp $600-700k plus bonuses, starting after residency so around age 30 or so) retire between 40-45. Our manager jokes that they worked 8 years to pay off med school and 8 years to fund their retirement, then they were done.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Is radiology still so profitable now that it is so easy to outsource?
  - pc86 7y ago
    Well I didn't discuss profitability at all, only how much the average individual radiologist makes in salary (at the one company I worked at). What do you mean by outsource? If you mean to other people/companies, yes. Hospitals are much more inclined to outsource to private radiology practices precisely because they're so expensive ($500k cash comp plus bonus seems the average for a couple years post-residency). Smaller and even mid-size hospitals can't keep a radiologist busy all the time, especially off-peak hours, so even with a retail markup it ends up being cheaper to outsource. If you mean to AI/ML, those applications are incredibly specific, usually hit-or-miss depending on the model, and I'm not aware of any that are actually approved for clinical applications prior to a physician reading the study anyway (they may exist I'm just not aware of them).

toohotatopic 7y ago

People stop learning when they grow older. Think of advertising target groups - old people don't matter because they don't change anymore. But I don't agree with the conclusion. The fact is that there is no relation anymore. That just means that more knowledge is not more useful. It doesn't mean that people have to 'retire, switch or change careers'.

foota 7y ago

That first statement "For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income" doesn't imply the second? Certainly there are possibly different dynamics at play wrt age, but regarding just experience as mentioned couldn't it just be that after 15 years you've gotten as good as you will get? Edit: I read through the article, I believe these statement are not implying causation, just an AND. That said, I don't think the editorial "tech is for the young" is really justified by the following statements, as neither is necessarily a bad thing.

axaxs 7y ago

Mostly self selection. This data is -extremely- off. Who is most likely worried about their salary, or most likely to search about it and compare? If I had to guess, the median salary for a software engineer in the USA is about 100k. For 15 years experience, probably about 150k. Yes, you might make 200k in the valley sharing an apartment, but for every one of those are three in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, etc who are content with much less. Most software engineers in the US don't take this survey. The ones who do have something to prove.

Pfhreak 7y ago
> The ones who do have something to prove. Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers.
- axaxs 7y ago
  Sorry, I agree with you. I absolutely think that salaries should be open, and shared. That said, what I meant was who is most likely to be talking about their salary. A guy in SLC making 100k at a no name company, happy with his situation. Or a guy making 200k in the valley, unable to afford his own house? There's two issues at play that make the second person more likely. One is competition, as he can find a new job at any time. The other is inadequacy I guess you call it, because he feels he's not making enough.
- rexpop 7y ago
  > Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers. Sounds like the definition of "something to prove."
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    That's a pretty cynical take. Sometimes people do what they think is right independent of whether they think they'll ever get credit for it.
    - rexpop 7y ago
      Maybe I am confused about the idiom "something to prove." Does it necessarily mean "something to prove [about their own name]?" I thought it might also mean "something to prove about [a group]."
- DarthGhandi 7y ago
  Quite sure in Nordic countries everyone's salary is public data you can search.

ummonk 7y ago

Wouldn’t the best paid engineers be able to retire earlier? Also, do people really expect there to be significant improvements in IC labor productivity after 15 years of experience?

eldavido 7y ago
Two thoughts. First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics. Second, our industry is really young. Average years of experience is what, like, 6? It's because the industry has grown so rapidly over the past decade. We have the demographics of a country like India. Compare this to an older field like architecture, law, or medicine--they've had a lot more time to work out the industry-wide division of labor between entry-level, mid, and very senior. The commercial software industry is maybe 40 years old, we're just starting to figure this out now. I think overall the industry just doesn't know how to use very senior people. It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). We're a very youthful, faddish bunch and I think it's to everyone's detriment. (Background: 10+ year experience, 35-year old software dev here, who's married to an architect that builds buildings, and works with a lot of people over 50)
- ummonk 7y ago
  >First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics. True. An engineer can create much more value at a company with a thriving feature-driven business than at a stodgy low profit company. >It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, A lot of that changes fast though - and the highest paying subfields of software seem to be new and/or fast-changing, e.g. web dev and ML, as opposed to say kernel programming). I don't think a person with 25 years of experience is like to have an advantage in things like domain expertise over someone with 15 years of experience in these sorts of fields, or what will be hard or easy in modern projects. The experience you gained 20 years ago is not going to be as valuable as the recent experience you gained in the past several years. >how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). Right, but this is getting into skills that are valuable in the management ladder, not the IC ladder. I doubt you'll see the same leveling off in pay at 15 years of experience when you look at engineers & engineering managers as a group.

NalNezumi 7y ago

I'd like to think it is due bad HR practice, based on complaints about companies I've heard from recruiters. The industry is still relatively young and the difference from one senior to another senior engineer is simply too wide to assess their competence with bad HR practices. A senior engineer co-worker I had at previous big tech company had only experience working in big companies, and refused to learn new-tech. He stuck around his own module written in his own way, and rarely tried new platform/languages the department now used. Most HR people are told to avoid hiring a person like this, and with bad practices they just filter with age. That is at least the situation in Scandinavia. This, while the industry cries for "tech talent shortages" and simultaneously refuse to hire entry-level engineers. The crazy thing is "old" in this context applies from 40+, according to a study conducted in my home country.

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post_below 7y ago

When you think about how long the modern commercial internet has been around (which is of course the source of the biggest part of software jobs), after 18 years of experience you're talking about people who have been coding since the internet was mostly just HTML. Even since before relevant degrees were worth anything in the internet world. It's a small demographic, much of which is reaching retirement age. A lot of the rest dropped out of the corporate employment world along the way to found their own companies. I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers change as time passes and there are more available people with that much experience.

marcus_holmes 7y ago
There's a fairly large "bubble" of coders aged 45-55, who grew up with home computers (Amiga, BBC micro in the UK, Commodore 64, etc) before the internet, and went into development after that. I'm one of them. Spent my 20's and 30's building desktop apps, and only moved into web development in the late 00's. My CV looks like a complete mess from an HR perspective. It's not the clean, clear, story of school -> CS degree -> internet company -> promotion ladder. I can understand how it's hard for a large company to grok my experience and where I'd fit in with a modern web dev team. I'm usually older and more experienced than the development manager in modern web dev teams, and that doesn't sit well with some managers (especially as I have an MBA, so I'm usually also more qualified to be a manager than they are). Also, I can't stand (and I'm no good at) big-company politics. So I almost never apply for these kinds of positions, and stick to smaller companies and startups where my breadth of experience counts for more and I have more control over the tech environment. But smaller companies don't pay as much. I'm clearly not represented in this survey, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an under-representation of my cohort in this survey. I meet a fair few people like me at tech meetups, we're definitely a cohort. But then , I also don't live in California or Washington, where this survey focuses. We may not be a sizable minority in those places.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

Personal experience about ten years in: Churning out code gets a bit sameish. I mean sure I've got a new job now with more responsibilities and a different domain, but in the end it's still forms, validations, API calls and database storage. The technology has changed but it's basically the same thing I learned in school.

draw_down 7y ago

I’m past 15 years. I don’t want to do management and other careers don’t pay nearly as well. I am working on retirement though, because working in corporate America sucks. I don’t think getting a different, much less well remunerated office job will help that. And spending my days fretting over the very fine details of web pages has really lost its interest, if it ever had any. It doesn’t matter if the web page helps earthquake victims or plays a video or shows a stock portfolio. It is all boring and tedious.

pc86 7y ago

Look at the salary change between Principal and Distinguished Engineer, it's virtually non-existent. Most projects, even at the FANG level, do not require 30 years of incredibly specific technical experience. There just isn't an incentive to pay these folks a lot more, and this has a secondary effect of pushing them into things that can (management), or retiring. Realistically, if you've made $500k+ total comp for the better part of a decade, you can retire. I used to work for a healthcare company and we often, if not routinely, had radiologists (avg. comp $600-700k plus bonuses, starting after residency so around age 30 or so) retire between 40-45. Our manager jokes that they worked 8 years to pay off med school and 8 years to fund their retirement, then they were done.

lonelappde 7y ago
Is radiology still so profitable now that it is so easy to outsource?
- pc86 7y ago
  Well I didn't discuss profitability at all, only how much the average individual radiologist makes in salary (at the one company I worked at). What do you mean by outsource? If you mean to other people/companies, yes. Hospitals are much more inclined to outsource to private radiology practices precisely because they're so expensive ($500k cash comp plus bonus seems the average for a couple years post-residency). Smaller and even mid-size hospitals can't keep a radiologist busy all the time, especially off-peak hours, so even with a retail markup it ends up being cheaper to outsource. If you mean to AI/ML, those applications are incredibly specific, usually hit-or-miss depending on the model, and I'm not aware of any that are actually approved for clinical applications prior to a physician reading the study anyway (they may exist I'm just not aware of them).