8 ms·

>>75% - one year's experience 30 times, not 30 years experience. You don't want these people. You are basically saying 75% of the developers after certain age

>>75% - one year's experience 30 times, not 30 years experience. You don't want these people. You are basically saying 75% of the developers after certain age are useless. I don't agree or disagree with your statement . Just startled. What does it say about software development as a career ? Would you say the same thing for lawyers or doctors with 30 years experience? This is depressing.

sixQuarks 12y ago
why are you startled? Have you never heard of the 20/80 rule? It appears in almost every dataset. The top 20% of any set do 80% of the work. Example: The top 20% of a population owns 80% of the wealth. And yes, this applies to other occupations as well.
- chillingeffect 12y ago
  Yes and even among the 80% who are useless, they are useful 20% of the time. I work with a few people like that... They either need a challenge, an end date or other creative ways of being motivated.
- Beltiras 12y ago
  It's called the Pareto Principle(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle) and it does not need to be a symmetric 80/20 split. 1% of the people own 50% of the wealth is one other application of the same math.
  - Emphaticdotco 12y ago
    Wikipedia doesn't do narrative justice to the interesting history behind Pareto. We tried to correct that in this blog post (http://www.emphatic.co/blog/know-stuff-think-shouldnt/ http://www.emphatic.co/blog/know-stuff-think-shouldnt/).
hcho 12y ago
Lawyers and doctors are not too different.The premise is true for most of white collar jobs, if not all.
- MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
  Yep. Most of the folks who are only doing it for the money fall into that 75% group. If you don't have passion for something you'll never be truly good at it.
  - teh_klev 12y ago
    That's a somewhat naive assumption and sentiment. I've known plenty of devs around my age (40-50 yrs) who are really very bloody good at what they do and yes...shock horror...they do it for the money. Otherwise what or who will finish the paying the mortgage, help with paying for your children's further education, top up your pension, etc, etc. Sure they may not have the "passion" but it also doesn't mean they're grinding away through their days. As I said in another comment, your priorities change and your perception/measure of job satisfaction changes as you get older. Mine certainly has despite being a techy and developer to my core.
evilduck 12y ago
Not after a certain age. They're equally useless young too. These are the people who fail at FizzBuzz.
- khyryk 12y ago
  I think this failing at FizzBuzz thing is becoming a meme.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    Unfortunately, it is real. I've interviewed "senior software engineers" with "12 years of C++ experience" who could not tell me the difference between an int and a char*.
matwood 12y ago
Not useless, but perhaps useless outside of their small niche. The problem is in technology small niches can disappear in an instant.
dagw 12y ago
I think that after 30 years you're left with only the very best and the very worst still programming. Everybody in between have probably drifted of towards other responsibilities. You also could uncharitably argue that 75% of developers of any age are useless. Furthermore programming has a much lower barrier to entry than being a doctor or lawyer and it's much easier for a terrible programmer to hide their terribleness for 30 years than it is for a doctor or lawyer.
mkohlmyr 12y ago
actually he's saying they are equally as useful as they were 29 years ago.
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
> Would you say the same thing for lawyers or doctors with 30 years experience? I don't have a reference for this, but I remember reading that other than surgeons, doctors' skills decline the further out they get from medical school... of course that's doesn't take into account a lot of the other important parts of being a doctor like how you interact with patients, etc.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Doctors and nurses are required to take continuing education to stay licensed.
teh_klev 12y ago
I'm 47* and I've been around a bit (dotcom era startups to banking and telecoms) and I'm familiar with the 75% mentioned. There is a type of programmer that works away in blue chips turning up to work on time, doing what's asked of them and then knocking off at half five. Sure they maybe repeat the same one year's experience year after year perhaps with some technology transitioning years from COBOL to VB to VB.NET or C# or maybe Java, that kinda thing. They'll know Oracle or MS SQL or DB2 well enough to make stuff work, or maybe they call into a message switch (with a pre-wrapped library for their language/framework) to read/write their LOB data. They work there for years and years collecting their salary and annual (if there are any) bonuses and many will be the last lucky few to hang on to a decent occupational pension, in return to knocking out code to meet business requirements. But they do it well, they know their line of business apps for their organisation's market sector and "how things are done". These are conservative people working in conservative business environments. The thing is who cares? Many of these folks have interesting lives outside their corporate bunkers which involve travelling the world, renovating houses, flying small aircraft, model trains and enjoying friends and family...and much, much more. It's just a job and I'm sure these folks will have their own measure of job satisfaction which will be different from ours. It might not be as exciting as the seat of your pants local startup but it pays the mortgage and provides reasonable financial security. Sure there are no absolute guarantees about job security, but I live in the UK and we're at a lot less risk of being fired for no reason other than "at will". It takes quite a bit of legal effort and cost to make employees redundant, especially in finance where you're fairly likely to be a member of a union (mass redundancies have to be negotiated and consulted on and redundancy payments agreed etc). It's not depressing, it's just that these folks have different priorities in life. Scott Hanselman described some of these folks as "Dark Matter Developers"[0]. [0]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9... * To address the Ayende's question, being 47 I'm probably an "older dev" I've worked for the same company since 2003 (ISP/Web Hoster), I like the work, I'm happy there, they treat me well, I work from home, it's (fingers crossed) reasonably secure. It'd take a really seriously good offer to make me change employers. This is not to say that I don't keep abreast of the latest tech and frameworks, the fact that I follow HN should make that abundantly clear; for example we're looking at how we could monetize Docker for our clients - first heard about here.
shams93 12y ago
Down here in Los Angeles the talent pool is very shallow, now we are starting to see the first companies offering equity down here that is meaningful since 1998, seriously. If I hadn't had to go the last 14 years without equity I wouldn't still be coding pushing 43, I'd be an angel investor, basically making a living helping to fund companies. With no equity life is a kind of living hell, no ability to have the normal human experiences of say starting a family, instead its a twilight world of paycheck haircuts and forced unpaid overtime, that leaves you feeling permanently like a zombie as everywhere you turn, its the same demand, everyone here wants 100-140 hours a week, offers you 40 hours pay then tries to haircut you back to 20 hours pay, management through extortion is common down here, either work 100 hours for free or you don't see your next check.
- DennisP 12y ago
  Sounds like LA is a pretty crappy market for employees. Move someplace with a reasonable cost of living and some big corporations, stick with corporate-friendly technologies, and it's not too hard to pull a six-figure salary in an easy 40 hrs/wk.
- mark-r 12y ago
  Don't overplay the importance of equity. It's like a lottery ticket - you can't win if you don't have it, but the chances of winning big are still remote.
ska 12y ago
I've seen this stated this as another occurrence of the 80/20 rule, which close enough to 75/25. It doesn't really have anything to do with after a certain age, either. Some percentage %x of your 5 year experience programmers haven't really moved much past their first year at all. To be fair, I think of it really as a series of plateaus, not a hard and fast rule. People get stuck at a level of professional development for all sorts of reasons, internal and external. The thing is, it gets more noticeable the longer time period you are talking about. Comparing two people with 3 years experience where one of them hasn't really progressed past the first year or so, and the other has 3 solid years is a lot different than comparing two people with 30 years experience where one of them hasn't really passed the 10 year mark of development and the other has a solid 30. And "useless" is the wrong way of looking at it. There is a lot of use for a developer with 5-10 years of experience, so long as you don't expect them to perform like a developer with 20-30 years experience. This is true even if they have 30 years on paper, which can be a bit of sticky point w.r.t compensation, but that's a different issue. This absolutely happens with lawyers and doctors, by the way. A real difference is that a doctor has been forced into a good 10 years of professional development before they take the training wheels off, so the base level of competence is much higher. Some of them don't progress significantly beyond that for the rest of their careers, but that doesn't mean they aren't productive for that whole time. As an industry, I do believe that software development is pretty weak on developing talent internally, particularly beyond the entry level.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Lots of employers want to pigeonhole you in the "same year of experience, 30 times" group. You can sometimes tell this during the interview; one warning sign is that they want someone with their exact technology stack experience they are using right now. But I've always thought a team of generalists beats a team of specialists, which is swimming against the current tide.
  - ska 12y ago
    I don't think this is as simple as specialization vs. generalization. Considering nearly any situation your team encounters, junior people, experienced people, and very senior people are likely to take different lessons for it, because they have different perspectives on what happened and what could have/should have happened. To me, a "same year of experience, 30 times" person is someone who runs into similar situations over and over, but fails to grow in how they understand and react to them. This is true of architectural issues, interpersonal issues, schedule management issues, ... everything really. Technology stack isn't so important here. If anything I expect the experienced people to pick up a new stack faster, if they've done this before, all else being equal. I'd expect insight and ideas from a 20+ year developer I'd never dream of asking a junior (< 5 years), and if you don't get them - you're probably looking at someone who has repeated many of those 20 years.

sixQuarks 12y ago

why are you startled? Have you never heard of the 20/80 rule? It appears in almost every dataset. The top 20% of any set do 80% of the work. Example: The top 20% of a population owns 80% of the wealth. And yes, this applies to other occupations as well.

chillingeffect 12y ago
Yes and even among the 80% who are useless, they are useful 20% of the time. I work with a few people like that... They either need a challenge, an end date or other creative ways of being motivated.
Beltiras 12y ago
It's called the Pareto Principle(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle) and it does not need to be a symmetric 80/20 split. 1% of the people own 50% of the wealth is one other application of the same math.
- Emphaticdotco 12y ago
  Wikipedia doesn't do narrative justice to the interesting history behind Pareto. We tried to correct that in this blog post (http://www.emphatic.co/blog/know-stuff-think-shouldnt/ http://www.emphatic.co/blog/know-stuff-think-shouldnt/).

hcho 12y ago

Lawyers and doctors are not too different.The premise is true for most of white collar jobs, if not all.

MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
Yep. Most of the folks who are only doing it for the money fall into that 75% group. If you don't have passion for something you'll never be truly good at it.
- teh_klev 12y ago
  That's a somewhat naive assumption and sentiment. I've known plenty of devs around my age (40-50 yrs) who are really very bloody good at what they do and yes...shock horror...they do it for the money. Otherwise what or who will finish the paying the mortgage, help with paying for your children's further education, top up your pension, etc, etc. Sure they may not have the "passion" but it also doesn't mean they're grinding away through their days. As I said in another comment, your priorities change and your perception/measure of job satisfaction changes as you get older. Mine certainly has despite being a techy and developer to my core.

evilduck 12y ago

Not after a certain age. They're equally useless young too. These are the people who fail at FizzBuzz.

khyryk 12y ago
I think this failing at FizzBuzz thing is becoming a meme.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Unfortunately, it is real. I've interviewed "senior software engineers" with "12 years of C++ experience" who could not tell me the difference between an int and a char*.

matwood 12y ago

Not useless, but perhaps useless outside of their small niche. The problem is in technology small niches can disappear in an instant.

dagw 12y ago

I think that after 30 years you're left with only the very best and the very worst still programming. Everybody in between have probably drifted of towards other responsibilities. You also could uncharitably argue that 75% of developers of any age are useless. Furthermore programming has a much lower barrier to entry than being a doctor or lawyer and it's much easier for a terrible programmer to hide their terribleness for 30 years than it is for a doctor or lawyer.

mkohlmyr 12y ago

actually he's saying they are equally as useful as they were 29 years ago.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago

> Would you say the same thing for lawyers or doctors with 30 years experience? I don't have a reference for this, but I remember reading that other than surgeons, doctors' skills decline the further out they get from medical school... of course that's doesn't take into account a lot of the other important parts of being a doctor like how you interact with patients, etc.

cpeterso 12y ago
Doctors and nurses are required to take continuing education to stay licensed.

teh_klev 12y ago

I'm 47* and I've been around a bit (dotcom era startups to banking and telecoms) and I'm familiar with the 75% mentioned. There is a type of programmer that works away in blue chips turning up to work on time, doing what's asked of them and then knocking off at half five. Sure they maybe repeat the same one year's experience year after year perhaps with some technology transitioning years from COBOL to VB to VB.NET or C# or maybe Java, that kinda thing. They'll know Oracle or MS SQL or DB2 well enough to make stuff work, or maybe they call into a message switch (with a pre-wrapped library for their language/framework) to read/write their LOB data. They work there for years and years collecting their salary and annual (if there are any) bonuses and many will be the last lucky few to hang on to a decent occupational pension, in return to knocking out code to meet business requirements. But they do it well, they know their line of business apps for their organisation's market sector and "how things are done". These are conservative people working in conservative business environments. The thing is who cares? Many of these folks have interesting lives outside their corporate bunkers which involve travelling the world, renovating houses, flying small aircraft, model trains and enjoying friends and family...and much, much more. It's just a job and I'm sure these folks will have their own measure of job satisfaction which will be different from ours. It might not be as exciting as the seat of your pants local startup but it pays the mortgage and provides reasonable financial security. Sure there are no absolute guarantees about job security, but I live in the UK and we're at a lot less risk of being fired for no reason other than "at will". It takes quite a bit of legal effort and cost to make employees redundant, especially in finance where you're fairly likely to be a member of a union (mass redundancies have to be negotiated and consulted on and redundancy payments agreed etc). It's not depressing, it's just that these folks have different priorities in life. Scott Hanselman described some of these folks as "Dark Matter Developers"[0]. [0]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9... * To address the Ayende's question, being 47 I'm probably an "older dev" I've worked for the same company since 2003 (ISP/Web Hoster), I like the work, I'm happy there, they treat me well, I work from home, it's (fingers crossed) reasonably secure. It'd take a really seriously good offer to make me change employers. This is not to say that I don't keep abreast of the latest tech and frameworks, the fact that I follow HN should make that abundantly clear; for example we're looking at how we could monetize Docker for our clients - first heard about here.

shams93 12y ago

Down here in Los Angeles the talent pool is very shallow, now we are starting to see the first companies offering equity down here that is meaningful since 1998, seriously. If I hadn't had to go the last 14 years without equity I wouldn't still be coding pushing 43, I'd be an angel investor, basically making a living helping to fund companies. With no equity life is a kind of living hell, no ability to have the normal human experiences of say starting a family, instead its a twilight world of paycheck haircuts and forced unpaid overtime, that leaves you feeling permanently like a zombie as everywhere you turn, its the same demand, everyone here wants 100-140 hours a week, offers you 40 hours pay then tries to haircut you back to 20 hours pay, management through extortion is common down here, either work 100 hours for free or you don't see your next check.

DennisP 12y ago
Sounds like LA is a pretty crappy market for employees. Move someplace with a reasonable cost of living and some big corporations, stick with corporate-friendly technologies, and it's not too hard to pull a six-figure salary in an easy 40 hrs/wk.
mark-r 12y ago
Don't overplay the importance of equity. It's like a lottery ticket - you can't win if you don't have it, but the chances of winning big are still remote.

ska 12y ago

I've seen this stated this as another occurrence of the 80/20 rule, which close enough to 75/25. It doesn't really have anything to do with after a certain age, either. Some percentage %x of your 5 year experience programmers haven't really moved much past their first year at all. To be fair, I think of it really as a series of plateaus, not a hard and fast rule. People get stuck at a level of professional development for all sorts of reasons, internal and external. The thing is, it gets more noticeable the longer time period you are talking about. Comparing two people with 3 years experience where one of them hasn't really progressed past the first year or so, and the other has 3 solid years is a lot different than comparing two people with 30 years experience where one of them hasn't really passed the 10 year mark of development and the other has a solid 30. And "useless" is the wrong way of looking at it. There is a lot of use for a developer with 5-10 years of experience, so long as you don't expect them to perform like a developer with 20-30 years experience. This is true even if they have 30 years on paper, which can be a bit of sticky point w.r.t compensation, but that's a different issue. This absolutely happens with lawyers and doctors, by the way. A real difference is that a doctor has been forced into a good 10 years of professional development before they take the training wheels off, so the base level of competence is much higher. Some of them don't progress significantly beyond that for the rest of their careers, but that doesn't mean they aren't productive for that whole time. As an industry, I do believe that software development is pretty weak on developing talent internally, particularly beyond the entry level.

danielweber 12y ago
Lots of employers want to pigeonhole you in the "same year of experience, 30 times" group. You can sometimes tell this during the interview; one warning sign is that they want someone with their exact technology stack experience they are using right now. But I've always thought a team of generalists beats a team of specialists, which is swimming against the current tide.
- ska 12y ago
  I don't think this is as simple as specialization vs. generalization. Considering nearly any situation your team encounters, junior people, experienced people, and very senior people are likely to take different lessons for it, because they have different perspectives on what happened and what could have/should have happened. To me, a "same year of experience, 30 times" person is someone who runs into similar situations over and over, but fails to grow in how they understand and react to them. This is true of architectural issues, interpersonal issues, schedule management issues, ... everything really. Technology stack isn't so important here. If anything I expect the experienced people to pick up a new stack faster, if they've done this before, all else being equal. I'd expect insight and ideas from a 20+ year developer I'd never dream of asking a junior (< 5 years), and if you don't get them - you're probably looking at someone who has repeated many of those 20 years.