4 ms·

I wonder how much the preference for youth has to do with the fact that younger workers are (1) generally cheaper and (2) more open to working longer hours sin

I wonder how much the preference for youth has to do with the fact that younger workers are (1) generally cheaper and (2) more open to working longer hours since they are less likely to have families and more likely to be looking to make an impression.

swalsh 13y ago
That's a matter of environment. A startup with equally young and inexperienced management is going to fall for the fallacy of longer hours. An environment with older more experienced management should know better. However I think its common for that experienced management to end up in corporations as opposed to start ups. So its merely a matter of perception.
adventured 13y ago
Not to mention younger workers are often more risk tolerant / seeking. If you're 43 years old, with a family to support and a mortgage, it might make perfect sense to take a safer job. If you're 20 with no family, no mortgage, etc. you sign up with Zuckerberg to 'change the world,' with little concern over whether it crashes and burns. I think that equation artificially pumps up the pop culture relation between youth and doing great things at new startups (never mind the rarely told stories of failure and misery that can go with crashing and burning). Leading to a false conclusion that youth is superior at things like programming / engineering / innovation.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > If you're 20 with no family, no mortgage, etc. you sign up with Zuckerberg to 'change the world,' with little concern over whether you crash and burn. Fixed that for you.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    I don't think that's really fair. Even if you work on a failed startup and invested all your money in it, you still have more programming experience than you started with. And programming experience is worth plenty of money in our field.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      I'm actually referring to physical and mental health.
      - jrockway 13y ago
        Young people recover quickly. Stay away from the sugary sodas, though.
- dkrich 13y ago
  What does that have to do with the quality of the coder though? I've worked alongside developers young and old (as I suspect most here have) and I see no relationship whatsoever between age and effectiveness. If anything, the older developers are probably consistently better. Here I am defining older as 35+.
  - adventured 13y ago
    It doesn't actually have anything to do with the quality of the coder, it has everything to do with the perception. The hackers that built Facebook would be perceived (by the public / media / whatever) to be better because of the halo that comes with their involvement in creating FB.
- edanm 13y ago
  I might be wrong, but you seem to think that "young software developers" equates to "people working on startups". Programmers working on startups represent a very very small fraction of working developers.
freyr 13y ago
These factors hold in any industry, though, so they're not sufficient to explain the preference for youth in the software industry.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  Similarly, in any industry, older employees are more difficult to fire (you tend to open yourself up to discrimination suits)
deleted_account 13y ago
Less experienced workers are typically cheaper because they're less productive. You may luck out hiring a super-productive, recent graduate on the cheap, but they'll quickly learn their worth. Your second point sounds purely anecdotal. My experience has shown just the opposite; older developers with families are much more committed because...well...they have families to support.
- tracker1 13y ago
  I can't speak for anyone else.. I'm an older developer, and a bit of a "rock star" so to speak. I know I'm at the pay ceiling, and peaked out into upper mgt a couple years ago, and never again. I'll accept where the pay is, and simply work where the best fit is. I've never been one to show up at a certain time every day (usually 9-ish).. but after lunch, I tend to get a lot more done than my contemporaries. I try to at least be aware of what's going on around me. It's not always easy as there's a lot of new stuff every day, and when you finally get around to it, things change. Most recently, I've been dabbling in NodeJS, as it's a good fit for one-off import scripts and backend systems. That allowed my to have a grunt script setup for the client parts of a new .Net project, where the backend is ASP.Net MVC ... I've seen the bundles out of the box in mvc, and feel that it's excessively painful. By the same note, I can usually make a good judgement call as to when to plug my nose, and just make the patch work. Experience counts for a lot. And at the higher end the pay doesn't generally match your productivity... I'm a cog, but good enough at what I do that people tend to overlook my quirks regarding daily schedules. For every prodigy I've seen (about 3 others in my career), I've seen a several dozen that were competent, not great, but get the job done, and several more dozen idiots who really should have a different career, and enough people that could be good, but can't break out of the same patterns they've used for over a decade to be more effective that I don't like thinking about it. There are plenty of stereotypes, and plenty of exceptions. It's funny that SO is mentioned as the source in the article, as most of my best answers happen to come from me revisiting and updating older answers/questions with newer material. Beyond that it's pretty narrow as a focus, just tend to gear towards my interests.

swalsh 13y ago

That's a matter of environment. A startup with equally young and inexperienced management is going to fall for the fallacy of longer hours. An environment with older more experienced management should know better. However I think its common for that experienced management to end up in corporations as opposed to start ups. So its merely a matter of perception.

adventured 13y ago

Not to mention younger workers are often more risk tolerant / seeking. If you're 43 years old, with a family to support and a mortgage, it might make perfect sense to take a safer job. If you're 20 with no family, no mortgage, etc. you sign up with Zuckerberg to 'change the world,' with little concern over whether it crashes and burns. I think that equation artificially pumps up the pop culture relation between youth and doing great things at new startups (never mind the rarely told stories of failure and misery that can go with crashing and burning). Leading to a false conclusion that youth is superior at things like programming / engineering / innovation.

saraid216 13y ago
> If you're 20 with no family, no mortgage, etc. you sign up with Zuckerberg to 'change the world,' with little concern over whether you crash and burn. Fixed that for you.
- jrockway 13y ago
  I don't think that's really fair. Even if you work on a failed startup and invested all your money in it, you still have more programming experience than you started with. And programming experience is worth plenty of money in our field.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    I'm actually referring to physical and mental health.
    - jrockway 13y ago
      Young people recover quickly. Stay away from the sugary sodas, though.
dkrich 13y ago
What does that have to do with the quality of the coder though? I've worked alongside developers young and old (as I suspect most here have) and I see no relationship whatsoever between age and effectiveness. If anything, the older developers are probably consistently better. Here I am defining older as 35+.
- adventured 13y ago
  It doesn't actually have anything to do with the quality of the coder, it has everything to do with the perception. The hackers that built Facebook would be perceived (by the public / media / whatever) to be better because of the halo that comes with their involvement in creating FB.
edanm 13y ago
I might be wrong, but you seem to think that "young software developers" equates to "people working on startups". Programmers working on startups represent a very very small fraction of working developers.

freyr 13y ago

These factors hold in any industry, though, so they're not sufficient to explain the preference for youth in the software industry.

hkmurakami 13y ago
Similarly, in any industry, older employees are more difficult to fire (you tend to open yourself up to discrimination suits)

deleted_account 13y ago

Less experienced workers are typically cheaper because they're less productive. You may luck out hiring a super-productive, recent graduate on the cheap, but they'll quickly learn their worth. Your second point sounds purely anecdotal. My experience has shown just the opposite; older developers with families are much more committed because...well...they have families to support.

tracker1 13y ago
I can't speak for anyone else.. I'm an older developer, and a bit of a "rock star" so to speak. I know I'm at the pay ceiling, and peaked out into upper mgt a couple years ago, and never again. I'll accept where the pay is, and simply work where the best fit is. I've never been one to show up at a certain time every day (usually 9-ish).. but after lunch, I tend to get a lot more done than my contemporaries. I try to at least be aware of what's going on around me. It's not always easy as there's a lot of new stuff every day, and when you finally get around to it, things change. Most recently, I've been dabbling in NodeJS, as it's a good fit for one-off import scripts and backend systems. That allowed my to have a grunt script setup for the client parts of a new .Net project, where the backend is ASP.Net MVC ... I've seen the bundles out of the box in mvc, and feel that it's excessively painful. By the same note, I can usually make a good judgement call as to when to plug my nose, and just make the patch work. Experience counts for a lot. And at the higher end the pay doesn't generally match your productivity... I'm a cog, but good enough at what I do that people tend to overlook my quirks regarding daily schedules. For every prodigy I've seen (about 3 others in my career), I've seen a several dozen that were competent, not great, but get the job done, and several more dozen idiots who really should have a different career, and enough people that could be good, but can't break out of the same patterns they've used for over a decade to be more effective that I don't like thinking about it. There are plenty of stereotypes, and plenty of exceptions. It's funny that SO is mentioned as the source in the article, as most of my best answers happen to come from me revisiting and updating older answers/questions with newer material. Beyond that it's pretty narrow as a focus, just tend to gear towards my interests.