8 ms·

Once upon a time (1969-ish), my father was hired as a programmer. He was an electrical engineer by training, but had zero programming experience at the time. Gi

by jowiar 14y ago

Once upon a time (1969-ish), my father was hired as a programmer. He was an electrical engineer by training, but had zero programming experience at the time. Given a shortage of programmers, IBM placed an ad in the newspaper, hired smart people, and taught them how to program. Assembly. On mainframes. 40+ years later, companies are in a similar situation, but instead, given a shortage of engineers, they are simply whining about it. Presumably, with tools that are 40+ years better that making it "easier" to program, such a system of the past would be reasonably replicable today, no? I've seen a few things pop up here and there - hungryacademy and such, but, by and large, this is the exception far more than the rule. Once upon a time, companies would hire and develop talent, investing years to develop the talent with years of rewards on the end for both sides of the deal. Now? Companies expect hires to come fully trained, ready to deliver from day one, at their own expense (and much debt to the banks). Employees have no loyalty (and for good reason).

wfunction 14y ago
The cool thing with EE is, in a lot of cases, the older you get, the more in demand you become (or at least, not any less wanted), since experience is so crucial in EE. With CS, it seems like every company's looking for young, energetic undergrads fresh out of college who know the latest technologies, in many cases to replace the older people. It's always seemed a little too short-sighted to me... not sure how my generation of CS majors is going to do in the long term.
- Vlaix 14y ago
  They tend to recruit a lot of youngsters because coding-jobs are typically low on the CS ladder and don't forcibly attract people with more experience (that's a general statement, I perfectly know that specialized coding can get extremely lucrative).
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Don't overlook the fact that a lot of times the reason they want to hire younger folks is because they are much more likely to tolerate working insane hours and being on call 24/7. Due to their enthusiasm, lifestyle (often single with no kids), lack of experience, etc. And many companies still think that a coder who works 100 hours a week is obviously better than one who only works 40, or god forbid, 15.
  - kyllo 14y ago
    It comes back around though. Currently there is a severe shortage of COBOL developers, and they are commanding very good salaries. Many major corporations and banks still use it. Today's cutting-edge is tomorrow's underdocumented legacy codebase mess to clean up.
- hga 14y ago
  "not sure how my generation of CS majors is going to do in the long term" The way to bet is "very badly", and if you're a conventional salaried employee have your exit strategy well in place by the time you hit 35. Expect to be conventionally unemployable at 40, unless you can hide your age.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    The way to bet is "very badly", and if you're a conventional salaried employee have your exit strategy well in place by the time you hit 35. Expect to be conventionally unemployable at 40, unless you can hide your age. 29. I don't expect "conventional employment", as defined by VC-istan or the corporate megaliths, in 11 years. Those will exist, but I don't think they'll be where the exciting action is. But yes, if you're applying for subordinate positions that any idiot can fill, and you're 40+, you did something wrong. You don't need to be a manager by 40, but you need to be at a level of skill where it's obvious that you don't need traditional "here's work, go do it" management.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Part of it is the difference in programming culture. With startup culture, which has many good aspects, also came the idea that the death march should be the norm. Meaning, 20-somethings should be working 80 hour weeks on a regular basis and projects should be shipped at the soonest possible moment it's even remotely feasible to do so. This sort of working environment has no slack, no capability to operate effectively in apprenticeship mode, and little leeway to allow long ramp up times. And as a result it has become more difficult to positively advance the state of the industry or the average skill toolset of coders. It's the classic problem, when you spend all your time in emergency mode fighting fires you don't have the cycles to be able to make improvements to systems or to other coders as well.
- dexen 14y ago
  While I agree with your overall message, the > (...) death march should be the norm. Meaning, 20-somethings should be working 80 hour weeks on a regular basis and projects should be shipped at the soonest possible moment it's even remotely feasible to do so. has got me puzzled: in my (limited) experience and from what I've read, a death march is exactly the opposite of shipping early. The usual story goes: a deadline looms, or a milestone slips, a middle manager decides to whip up his team instead of reporting it. Overworked team members can't meet another deadline, the client and/or upper management is kept in the dark about the problem, no extension of deadlines for sake of good metrics, rinse and repeat. ``It is done when it is done'' and shipping early is a panacea, not a cause of the problem.
  - Retric 14y ago
    All it takes is unrealistic deadlines and you end up with a death march. Unfortunately, some people game the system and assume burning people out is worth it.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Death march is often the norm, and when more effort is needed the only option is a super death march or just giving up. And yes, it's not a good way to work. Nor is it even a fast way to work. It's a an equilibrium point that is reached when certain initial conditions in regard to the value that is placed on the appearance of work and dedication are higher than craftsmanship et al is valued. For people who are immersed in that world view it seems perfectly logical that adding more hours worked will make everything better. But the paradox is that it doesn't, it often makes things worse, for a whole laundry list of reasons. People become physically and emotionally exhausted by the pace, there's no room for higher level improvements which are often the only way to achieve orders of magnitude gains in efficiency, productivity, and quality. There are a handful of companies that do things right and at those companies employees tend to stick around for not just a few years but decades and the products they make tend to have an outsized impact on the industry (valve, blizzard, 37signals, pixar, etc.) But it's still so hard to fight against the conventional wisdom.
blaabjerg 14y ago
I'm not sure this is exclusive to the software/engineering industries. My impression in general is that people "back in the day" were much more content to stay with a single employer for their whole life–or at least long periods of time–than they are today. If that's the case, training new employees from the ground up made much more sense a few decades ago from an ROI standpoint. I haven't got any statistics to back it up, though, it's just a general impression.
- sgift 14y ago
  My impression is that this is a problem of the companies own doing: In many cases they are unwilling to hold employees (because young employees are "better", so just fire them when they get "too old") and unwilling to give employees their fair share of the profits i.e. pay raises are almost always lower if you stay at a company than if you change. This two parts lead to people changing companies far more often than "back in the day" and now companies say "We cannot train people! Then our competition will just take them when they are trained!" - Yeah, because companies don't value their employees enough. And now we've come full circle.
- russell 14y ago
  I was there "back in the day". There were lots of people who stayed with a company for decades as well as lots who jumped ship after a couple of years when their employers couldnt keep up with the salary escalation. One or the big differences was that there were many more layers of management. Engineers were reasonably well paid, but the salary range was fairly compressed. In general the highest paid engineer could not make more than his manager. When a man got a family and needed more money, he was promoted to a manager. There was the HP Way where nobody was fired and engineers were taken care of. While there were startups, there was not the froth of new ventures that there is today. Finding a job was very much word of mouth, newspaper classifieds, and head hunters, not the easy searching of Craigslist of today.
flyinRyan 14y ago
>but instead, given a shortage of engineers, they are simply whining about it. I don't like this phrase "shortage of engineers". What there is a shortage of is engineers who will work for the shit salaries these companies want to pay. Labor is a market like anything else. If there is more demand than supply....
geebee 14y ago
I agree that companies need spend more time developing talent than chasing a dwindling pool of people who already have it. My mom had a similar career path to your father - she was hired out of college in the late 60s with zero programming experience by one of the railways to work on scheduling systems. There is one difference, though - the opportunity to learn programming (actually, to learn most things) has exploded in the past few decades. In 1969, I think you needed access to expensive technology (like a mainframe) to have the opportunity to learn. Now, a few hundred bucks and a web connection gets you started. So if someone wants to be hired into a programming position with no experience in 2013, that does say something about the candidate that it didn't say in 1969.
AUmrysh 14y ago
They can also just hire H1B workers who have the exact skills they're looking for while paying them level one wages. Obviously this only applies to America considering H1B, but other countries have similar programs. I don't blame the foreign workers, I blame the employers who undermine the value of our engineers to benefit their own bottom line.
hp50g 14y ago
Spot on. In the UK this business mentality is rife. You're always seeing it plastered all over the news. "Students unsuitably trained" "No skilled workforce" It's all down to greed and margins which are the two main problems with the "business leaders" as the news describes them as...
pjungwir 14y ago
From what I've read, IBM was hiring crossword players, chess players, anything that seemed to indicate intelligence. I agree it's better to hire for talent (or aptitude or intelligence) over experience, but sadly in the United States these days that is pretty much illegal. So how much of "hiring for experience" is HR departments not knowing any better, and how much is it their better knowledge of employment law and not wanting to be sued?

by jowiar 14y ago

wfunction 14y ago

The cool thing with EE is, in a lot of cases, the older you get, the more in demand you become (or at least, not any less wanted), since experience is so crucial in EE. With CS, it seems like every company's looking for young, energetic undergrads fresh out of college who know the latest technologies, in many cases to replace the older people. It's always seemed a little too short-sighted to me... not sure how my generation of CS majors is going to do in the long term.

Vlaix 14y ago
They tend to recruit a lot of youngsters because coding-jobs are typically low on the CS ladder and don't forcibly attract people with more experience (that's a general statement, I perfectly know that specialized coding can get extremely lucrative).
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Don't overlook the fact that a lot of times the reason they want to hire younger folks is because they are much more likely to tolerate working insane hours and being on call 24/7. Due to their enthusiasm, lifestyle (often single with no kids), lack of experience, etc. And many companies still think that a coder who works 100 hours a week is obviously better than one who only works 40, or god forbid, 15.
- kyllo 14y ago
  It comes back around though. Currently there is a severe shortage of COBOL developers, and they are commanding very good salaries. Many major corporations and banks still use it. Today's cutting-edge is tomorrow's underdocumented legacy codebase mess to clean up.
hga 14y ago
"not sure how my generation of CS majors is going to do in the long term" The way to bet is "very badly", and if you're a conventional salaried employee have your exit strategy well in place by the time you hit 35. Expect to be conventionally unemployable at 40, unless you can hide your age.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  The way to bet is "very badly", and if you're a conventional salaried employee have your exit strategy well in place by the time you hit 35. Expect to be conventionally unemployable at 40, unless you can hide your age. 29. I don't expect "conventional employment", as defined by VC-istan or the corporate megaliths, in 11 years. Those will exist, but I don't think they'll be where the exciting action is. But yes, if you're applying for subordinate positions that any idiot can fill, and you're 40+, you did something wrong. You don't need to be a manager by 40, but you need to be at a level of skill where it's obvious that you don't need traditional "here's work, go do it" management.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Part of it is the difference in programming culture. With startup culture, which has many good aspects, also came the idea that the death march should be the norm. Meaning, 20-somethings should be working 80 hour weeks on a regular basis and projects should be shipped at the soonest possible moment it's even remotely feasible to do so. This sort of working environment has no slack, no capability to operate effectively in apprenticeship mode, and little leeway to allow long ramp up times. And as a result it has become more difficult to positively advance the state of the industry or the average skill toolset of coders. It's the classic problem, when you spend all your time in emergency mode fighting fires you don't have the cycles to be able to make improvements to systems or to other coders as well.

dexen 14y ago
While I agree with your overall message, the > (...) death march should be the norm. Meaning, 20-somethings should be working 80 hour weeks on a regular basis and projects should be shipped at the soonest possible moment it's even remotely feasible to do so. has got me puzzled: in my (limited) experience and from what I've read, a death march is exactly the opposite of shipping early. The usual story goes: a deadline looms, or a milestone slips, a middle manager decides to whip up his team instead of reporting it. Overworked team members can't meet another deadline, the client and/or upper management is kept in the dark about the problem, no extension of deadlines for sake of good metrics, rinse and repeat. ``It is done when it is done'' and shipping early is a panacea, not a cause of the problem.
- Retric 14y ago
  All it takes is unrealistic deadlines and you end up with a death march. Unfortunately, some people game the system and assume burning people out is worth it.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Death march is often the norm, and when more effort is needed the only option is a super death march or just giving up. And yes, it's not a good way to work. Nor is it even a fast way to work. It's a an equilibrium point that is reached when certain initial conditions in regard to the value that is placed on the appearance of work and dedication are higher than craftsmanship et al is valued. For people who are immersed in that world view it seems perfectly logical that adding more hours worked will make everything better. But the paradox is that it doesn't, it often makes things worse, for a whole laundry list of reasons. People become physically and emotionally exhausted by the pace, there's no room for higher level improvements which are often the only way to achieve orders of magnitude gains in efficiency, productivity, and quality. There are a handful of companies that do things right and at those companies employees tend to stick around for not just a few years but decades and the products they make tend to have an outsized impact on the industry (valve, blizzard, 37signals, pixar, etc.) But it's still so hard to fight against the conventional wisdom.

blaabjerg 14y ago

I'm not sure this is exclusive to the software/engineering industries. My impression in general is that people "back in the day" were much more content to stay with a single employer for their whole life–or at least long periods of time–than they are today. If that's the case, training new employees from the ground up made much more sense a few decades ago from an ROI standpoint. I haven't got any statistics to back it up, though, it's just a general impression.

sgift 14y ago
My impression is that this is a problem of the companies own doing: In many cases they are unwilling to hold employees (because young employees are "better", so just fire them when they get "too old") and unwilling to give employees their fair share of the profits i.e. pay raises are almost always lower if you stay at a company than if you change. This two parts lead to people changing companies far more often than "back in the day" and now companies say "We cannot train people! Then our competition will just take them when they are trained!" - Yeah, because companies don't value their employees enough. And now we've come full circle.
russell 14y ago
I was there "back in the day". There were lots of people who stayed with a company for decades as well as lots who jumped ship after a couple of years when their employers couldnt keep up with the salary escalation. One or the big differences was that there were many more layers of management. Engineers were reasonably well paid, but the salary range was fairly compressed. In general the highest paid engineer could not make more than his manager. When a man got a family and needed more money, he was promoted to a manager. There was the HP Way where nobody was fired and engineers were taken care of. While there were startups, there was not the froth of new ventures that there is today. Finding a job was very much word of mouth, newspaper classifieds, and head hunters, not the easy searching of Craigslist of today.

flyinRyan 14y ago

>but instead, given a shortage of engineers, they are simply whining about it. I don't like this phrase "shortage of engineers". What there is a shortage of is engineers who will work for the shit salaries these companies want to pay. Labor is a market like anything else. If there is more demand than supply....

geebee 14y ago

I agree that companies need spend more time developing talent than chasing a dwindling pool of people who already have it. My mom had a similar career path to your father - she was hired out of college in the late 60s with zero programming experience by one of the railways to work on scheduling systems. There is one difference, though - the opportunity to learn programming (actually, to learn most things) has exploded in the past few decades. In 1969, I think you needed access to expensive technology (like a mainframe) to have the opportunity to learn. Now, a few hundred bucks and a web connection gets you started. So if someone wants to be hired into a programming position with no experience in 2013, that does say something about the candidate that it didn't say in 1969.

AUmrysh 14y ago

They can also just hire H1B workers who have the exact skills they're looking for while paying them level one wages. Obviously this only applies to America considering H1B, but other countries have similar programs. I don't blame the foreign workers, I blame the employers who undermine the value of our engineers to benefit their own bottom line.

hp50g 14y ago

Spot on. In the UK this business mentality is rife. You're always seeing it plastered all over the news. "Students unsuitably trained" "No skilled workforce" It's all down to greed and margins which are the two main problems with the "business leaders" as the news describes them as...

pjungwir 14y ago

From what I've read, IBM was hiring crossword players, chess players, anything that seemed to indicate intelligence. I agree it's better to hire for talent (or aptitude or intelligence) over experience, but sadly in the United States these days that is pretty much illegal. So how much of "hiring for experience" is HR departments not knowing any better, and how much is it their better knowledge of employment law and not wanting to be sued?