11 ms·

MIT alumni in their 50s

199 points by zootar 11y ago

option_greek 11y ago
Wow. Just shows why cogs and wheels are referred to so often in software profession.
gcb0 11y ago
or: the successful programmers do not bother to show up to pan handling events and/or: even the failures still make lots of money until 50, while the failures on other fields aren't even invited. or: I'm just in denial :-(
pixelscript 11y ago
This post reeks of confirmation bias or at least the sample size is too low to draw any conclusions. What if that software engineer didn't want to progress his career and was happy at the level he was? What about those engineers that did go into management? I could be wrong but if you choose to stay in a roll a 30yo can fill why would it be strange that you would be expected to compete with those younger to get a job?
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Why wouldn't that also apply to doctors? Maybe a surgeon enjoys the surgery, doesn't want to manage a surgery department of a hospital. I think the relative comparison is still relevant.
  - jmorrison 11y ago
    Because in both the doctor and professor cases, the knowledge base is curated, history and experience (at least - I was tempted to add "and judgement learned therefrom") count for something. Alan Kay is right when he says software is "pop culture," and its "disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field."
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Most doctors build/join a practice, take on partners and hire PAs and Nurse Practitioners. They build a book of business and referral network and when it's time to retire have a bag of money and business equity. That's changing now, and my guess would be that twenty years from now, we'll hear the laments of employee doctors in a similar situation.
- calinet6 11y ago
  I made the mistake of continuing to read other posts down the page. The author appears to have many biases, and a myopically logical view of people. I am unconcerned.
  - danielweber 11y ago
    He has his own particular style. If you can get past it [1], there are interesting things. [1] I used to be able to, but as I got older I said "fuck it, it isn't worth my time for him to purposefully misunderstand me."
deleted 11y ago
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wimagguc 11y ago
The other conclusion is, always be hireable. I guess it’s hard to be 50 and pride yourself to work for senior-senior level salary when a 30 year old can easily do your job. Hierarchies worked very well in the uni prof’s favour, but engineering companies tend to apply flatter structures. If there’s nothing that keeps the young folks competing, they will. So for us, engineers it may be a good idea to move to supervisory roles, a field with harder-to-aquire skills, or start teaching later on. (+1 for small sample size and confirmation bias though. /re: @pixelscript)
- dba7dba 11y ago
  Agree. Being always be hireable is one's own responsibility. Not anyone else's.
  - calinet6 11y ago
    It's still interesting to consider systemic effects, however.
- happywolf 11y ago
  Unfortunately being hireable and getting hired are two separate things. Yes, we can do things better and more thorough, however the sad thing is, most employers (at least in Singapore where I am) don't care. They care about salary and ability to work extra hours. Things could vary in the states though
  - danielweber 11y ago
    Regardless of your age, fuck employers who want you to work long hours. (Unless you have a big piece of equity. .1% is not big.)
- gcb0 11y ago
  good programmers can always consult. old managers can't do nothing unless he is hired at a big company, which is exactly what won't happen according to this
kristopolous 11y ago
Do people here anticipate programming being their lifelong career, or do they in good faith, think there will be a switch later? Personally, I've done this for 15 years and I keep doing contracting to pay the bills but really I'm pretty done with it. What about you?
- reidrac 11y ago
  I've been doing this for ~15 years too, but things have changed enough over the time (and I've changed too!) so it still feels fresh. I guess the way technology changes can be a two edge sword, as in you're always catching up, but so far I can't say I'm bored or thinking on doing anything else to pay my bills.
- wobbleblob 11y ago
  Yeah, that was my thought. If you're still a programmer at age 50, either something has gone very wrong in your career development, or you're such a legend in the field that it would be a loss to the world if you had moved on.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    Or you enjoy what you're doing. I've had "director" or "head of" or similar in my titles for the majority of the last 20 years, but I keep finding excuses to code because it's what I enjoy doing the most. Whenever my job responsibilities doesn't let me code, I spend more time coding at home. I'm 40 now, and I can't see that changing. I first started programming when I was 5 years old, and it's an integral, important part of my life.
    - wobbleblob 11y ago
      Of course you still program, but your job title on that MIT gathering wouldn't have been 'programmer'.
      - gohrt 11y ago
        ahem https://www.google.com/search?#q=%22I+am+a+programmer.+On+my+1040+form%22 https://www.google.com/search?#q=%22I+am+a+programmer.+On+my...
thewarrior 11y ago
This post really scares me and part of me wants to quit this industry even though I enjoy coding. Ageism is a brutal reality.
- plg 11y ago
  In my experience if an older engineer/programmer is more expensive than a younger one --- but the older one is better --- the older one will be hired. You get what you pay for. As long as your skill set isn't basically a "commodity" (generic web design for example) you will be ok. Put another way---if your decades of experience _don't_ give you some appreciable advantage over a 20-something new guy, then yes maybe you are in the wrong business.
  - danielweber 11y ago
    Go read 'patio11 or 'tptacek posts on avoiding competing on price. You want to compete on quality. You don't even have to buy all in. I bought in just enough to get my head out of my ass, and have improved my financial situation considerably.
  - mcguire 11y ago
    One of the most entertaining conferences I ever attended was Usenix, several years ago. The paper sessions typically went like this: a grad student would stand up and present his and his advisor's research. In the sbsequent question-and-answer period, one of a small number of grey-beards (you'd recognize their names, but I can't remember who exactly it was; I'm old, too) would come to the mic and ask some variant of, "when we tried that back in the '80s, it didn't work because of.... How are you dealing with the problems?" There was never any real answer. (To be truthful, there were also a number of responses along the lines of "Why didn't you cite our earlier work?" which were more annoying since the typical true answer would have been "Because you only published it in a single post in rec.arts.no-one-reads-this." Bah.) Since then, I've learned one thing: experience in this field doesn't give you any advantage. Or, more precisely, Cassandra, it doesn't give you any advantage that anyone will pay attention to. I've had many similar conversations since that conference, usually along the lines of: Them: "We should do X." We: "That didn't work the last time; A, B, and C happen and only super-genius levels of D will get you out of the mess, which we don't have." Them: "But X is the hot newness and everything's different this time, anyway." Or sometimes: We: "We're doing Y." Them: "That's stupid, everyone is doing Z now." (Them almost never has more than 2-3 years of experience, by the way.) We: "No one we've hired in the last ten years knows how to do Z, Z offers no actual advantage over Y, and I'd personally prefer not to have to deal with 27 different ways of doing the same thing." Them: "I'm doing Z." We: "Great. You'll be solely responsible for that project until you quit, then we'll throw it away and rewrite it. Just like last time." Sure, you can keep up with the technology fashion; that's fairly easy. But it's a bit dispiriting to see the same problems in the new tech from the last time the dharma wheel rolled around. And to be unable to convince the new kids not to try to cross the railroad bridge because the 12:15 really does have a good on-time record. The entertainment value of watching projects hit the same shoals eventually loses its charm.
dba7dba 11y ago
I can't imagine a programmer making enough $$ to be able to show up at an event where the main goal is donation. Granted some did show up. Let's list the careers that were still considered safe age 50. Doctor. Lawyer. Professor. All important, no doubt. But which one of those truly helped advance our society or nation? As in improving GDP or trade balance? Most likely not. But the other engineers (some with uncertain future) are the ones who designed/built/produced something for the society.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  > Doctor. Lawyer. Professor. All important, no doubt. But which one of those truly helped advance our society or nation? As in improving GDP or trade balance? Ehh... all three? Try running a country without them and see where your GDP ends up. As for 'truly helped advance' and linking that to just GDP is incredibly myopic. I have all the respect in the world for engineers but let's not fetishise over them.
  - dba7dba 11y ago
    Eh, maybe I was a bit harsh. But still, consider this. Doctor: Was the doctor in research? Lawyer: No comment. Professor: How good was his research? Or was he one of those the taught from same note year after year and just took credit for work done by grad students? And my mistake in linking it just to GDP. How about advancing the society by building better tools, transportation, medicine, improve efficiency in this/that?
    - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
      Sure I'll consider it First of all, what's with that standard? 'if you didn't invent something new, e.g. through research, it doesn't count.' Or, if you kept things together without making progress, it doesn't count? So a police officer or a fireman or a nurse, who cares about that, they're not advancing society because they didn't happen to build a better tool or a new medicine. I mean what are you even arguing here? And second, alright so let's apply your standard to engineers who spend their entire lives applying laws of physics they didn't invent or models that existed for decades, sometimes even before they were born. e.g. designing the 10000th sewage system in just another city according to existing principles, would you call that 'taking credit for work done by grad students / previous engineers' and dismiss it as unimportant, when it's a truly significant part of society? And how do you rate a software engineer building the millionth crud app for some use case? Say like Hacker News? Unimportant? Of course not. I mean the heuristic here to help think about value is to remove from society/laborforce for a moment anyone who ever does something that's already done before. And then keep anyone who's building something new. And then compare it with the opposite. The former will result in chaos, the latter will result in a more or less stable society with a lack of progress. Now obviously you need both. If we didn't have the guys doing new stuff, we'd still be living like we did 50k years ago. But we need both, and the implication that it's somehow only engineers who do the new stuff just isn't true. I mean hell just consider how far engineers get without the professor teaching them all those lame things other people already figured out like laws of physics. Anyway I get the feeling I'm misconstruing your points but you kept offering questions as things to consider so I just try to interpret what you're implying as best I can. Feel free to just concretely make your point instead.
whiteheat752 11y ago
As an MIT student... should I not become a programmer? I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability, and now would be the time to switch to a field with more "lock-in". What would that field be? Medicine? Mechanical engineering? Consultancy?
- brlewis 11y ago
  As an MIT alumnus at age 47, here's my advice: If you love programming, keep programming. If you don't love it, do something else.
  - reuven 11y ago
    This 44-year-old alumnus concurs. At the same time, I've been doing more and more training, and less and less day-to-day development, over the last few years. Not only do I enjoy it, but I find that my long-term perspective and experience helps me to explain things to the younger and less experienced developers. That said, it's pretty amazing to see what today's kids have done before they've even finished their first college degree. It's a bit intimidating... until I demonstrate that I can still debug things faster than they can. :-)
    - danielweber 11y ago
      I'll pile on, too. Professor Robert Rose had some great advice for me as a freshman: as an MIT student, you can probably succeed at whatever you want, enough to enjoy life. So pick a field that gives you personal satisfaction. Money is valuable and ego-boosting, but when you hit your 30s you will realize that enjoying your workday is much more important than maximizing your paycheck. (But there are also easy ways to increase your paycheck. If you can become better than a potted plant[1] at negotiating, you can boost your salary.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289750
      - hga 11y ago
        All tenured MIT professors must be taken with a grain of salt on career advice. They got tenure by being #1 or #2 in their sub-field, as well as a number of other things like being adequate teachers, so the selection bias is extremely strong. In general Professor Rose is generally right, but there are a lot of exceptions, and he's also much older than us, his experiences might not hold for the America/world of today and the future.
druml 11y ago
The link of the OP points to the blog. The link to the post is http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-their-50s/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-...
danielrhodes 11y ago
None of this should be particularly surprising: if you choose to be complacent in your career you can't expect stability or increased prosperity over the long term. The path from a junior engineer to a lead engineer is quite short relative to a your typical career length. If you don't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except laterally. After a certain point the impact of a person's improved programming skills does not get significantly better over time, at least for what most companies need. Therefore a company becomes incentivized to hire younger engineers who cost less as they still get similar or even better output.
- vanderZwan 11y ago
  > If you don't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except laterally. I find it almost insulting how you imply that "not desiring to be a manager" is the same as "being complacent in your career" Were the doctor, the professor and the attorney forced to move onto management?
  - dagw 11y ago
    Were the doctor, the professor and the attorney forced to move onto management? I can't speak about doctors or attorneys, but how to keep getting promotions without taking on management responsibility (and thus having less time for research and teaching) is constant topic of discussions among my friends with academic careers. In fact it is on of the reasons my wife is seriously considering getting out of academia.
    - zootar 11y ago
      Is your wife a tenured professor? What is she thinking of doing instead?
  - arethuza 11y ago
    When I worked in a UK university for a Professor (a title which only the most senior academics have) his role was arguably almost entirely "management" - he was a very bright guy and did get involved in the research his team did (about 15 of us) but it was obvious that 98% of his time was effectively "management" responsibilities. Similarly for medics and lawyers - certainly for lawyers (in the UK anyway) getting past a particular level is more about business development and managerial skills than anything else.
zaroth 11y ago
Just keep reading the rest of the posts on that page. Wow, some true entertainment there...
- calinet6 11y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I have known people who looked at the world in similar ways, and to put it lightly, it was frustrating to speak with them.
justonepost 11y ago
Ugh. Confirmation bias and sample size aside, these are MIT alumni. Aren't they already supposed to be above average? That being said, he didn't exactly say what sort of engineers these folks were. Electrical? Software? Big difference.. Also, one thing that didn't jive, if they are in financially uncomfortable retirement, why exactly are they showing up at a donors gathering?
- neolefty 11y ago
  > "why exactly are they showing up at a donors gathering?" Yes, this probably means the problem is even bigger than the sample demonstrates. Most of the people in uncomfortable retirement are not going to show up at all.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    I wouldn't be that inclined to make assumptions about what sort of selection bias there was. I could also argue that people who show up at such gatherings are more likely to be people with time on their hands or who are making a concerted effort to network, while those who are working full-time are busier.
- calinet6 11y ago
  Alternatively, these are MIT people, so perhaps the problem is that their education and career are both overly specialized. Breadth would certainly be an asset to deal with change over a longer term. It's another great argument for a broad liberal arts education.
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    I honestly don't think there are many jobs an experienced MIT engineer couldn't do that a liberal arts graduate could. I think the matter here is most old folks with an MIT degree with a comfortable financial position would rather be unemployed just managing investments and other activities than work a low paying job.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
shams93 11y ago
Me I had no choice, now I essentially have no career at all because you reach the end game where the industry stops talking to you despite all the money you made people. Pivoting to education would be a logical choice in a civilized society but this is no such place so instead of buying me off the market some poor business is going to wind up losing all their customers because I have no choice but to become a sole founder and learn business kung fu lol, its either do that or wait for unemployment to run out and then die from starvation and exposure basically unless I want to drive uber to pay them essentially 9 cents per mile because 49 cents per mile is 9 cents less than the cost of running the car in california lol.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  The marginal cost of running the car is much lower than $0.58/mile. If you already have a car and want to drive Uber with it, you'll (likely) be financially better off through the "job". Of course buying a car solely to drive Uber is a bad business plan.
jimmcslim 11y ago
I wonder how much of this 'programming is a dead-end' angst that seems to cycle through HN fairly frequently these days is US-centric? I say that as an almost-40 Australian software developer...
- dyno12345 11y ago
  Perhaps it's less likely in jurisdictions where unpaid overtime is actually illegal.
peter303 11y ago
"Lifetime jobs" changed in 1990s with corporate restructuring fad. Younger employees should be adapted to present, fluid situation.
peter303 11y ago
Note Phil hasn't been in the corporate world himself. He struck it rich with a dot.com in the 1990s boom and worked on several interesting projects since. Among them was photo website, a Thiel-like coders academy, and flying. He has had one of the first and longest running blogs of my fellow MIT students about tech, business, travel, flying and politics.
- papercruncher 11y ago
  I took Phil's class (6.171 - Web Development Lab) in college. It was a ridiculous experience, regularly had to put 40hrs/week just on this class and I'm not exaggerating. Story time: As part of the class we were working with real clients to develop a web project for them. One day during class, he talked to us about the "technical sidekick", typically a friend of the client's that is somewhat technical and is behind-the-scenes advising the client and typically contradicting all your architectular choices as a developer. Well, to noone's surprise, a few weeks later, our client rolled into a meeting all of a sudden knowledgable as to why .NET was inferior, SQL Server bad, etc. We later found out that he took the time outside class, to take the client out for dinner and act like an adversarial technical sidekick just to teach us that lesson. I was pissed off at the time but now deeply appreciate that lesson
  - quickpost 11y ago
    Could you share any lessons he taught you about how to properly deal with the "technical sidekick"? I often encounter them in web consulting and I'm curious to see what Phil's advice on the topic was.
    - calinet6 11y ago
      Ask to meet them, and befriend them. Do it genuinely.
  - davewiner 11y ago
    Haha that sounds just like Philip, and it is an important lesson, because it happens so often.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
That dude's got a lot of weird bleep-blorp does not compute opinions about human nature.
- gohrt 11y ago
  He is one of the founding generation of technolibertarians.
  - mcguire 11y ago
    What's with his weird divorce thing? Did I miss some drama?
Zigurd 11y ago
I can provide a data point that might be less biased toward the successful. At a recent informal reunion of my dorm, I saw much the same thing as Phil saw (in fact he was there). If you're not running a business, or in a professional role where age discrimination can't touch you, you better be exceptionally well-known in your field. If you are doing the kind of technical work, like coding, design, etc. you did most of your career, the only way to be compensated in line with your experience level is to be in a senior technical management position (VP Eng., or CTO) or consulting. Based on what I saw then, I think Phil's observations are accurate. On the other hand, consulting isn't so bad. There is such a lot of bad engineering out there, there is an infinite market for old guys (and the few women of our cohort) to fix things that are fucked up.
cyphunk 11y ago
Missing an alternative option: migrate to, perhaps even become citizen in, a country with a half decent social welfare system. > Lesson: Unless you are confident that your skills are very far above average, don’t take a career path that subjects you to the employment market once you’re over 50 (and/or make sure that by age 50 you’ve saved enough for a retirement that begins at age 50 or 55
michaelochurch 11y ago
Ageism exists in the professions but it's legible and practically published. If you start law school at 30, you probably won't get Biglaw unless you clerk for a Supreme Court justice. You can get into a PhD program at any age, but you're not going to get a tenure-track position if you're after 40. Midlife career switchers generally don't get in. The difference is that, in the professions, you have to get in early but it's the norm to move up fast enough that ageism isn't a problem because, even if you make a couple of mistakes, you'll be at an age-appropriate level. You may not be a biglaw partner or chief surgeon earning 7 figures, but you'll be substantial enough that you're still taken seriously. In software engineering, there isn't a well-defined sense of what "up" is or what's "age appropriate". There isn't a published career track and a legible ageism. It's there, but it's hard to tell exactly when it's there. Is being a programmer at 55 age-appropriate? If you're an AI researcher at Google X, then yes, absolutely. If you're checking your Jira every morning to figure out which user stories you're going to be working on, then no one's going to believe that you chose to be a programmer instead of a manager. (Hell, I wouldn't believe you. I might still hire you, because I'm mature enough to separate low social status in one theater apart from low ability. If you're 55 and still have to deal with user stories, it means that you managed your social status poorly; but you might still be a rock-solid engineer whom I'd hire in a heartbeat.) If you look at the Valley's emerging professional model, it's not a kind one and it's not one that ages well. You choose between (a) a "main sequence" where each jump is a dramatically different job, from engineer to manager to founder to investor, and where there are structural reasons why most people will never make it; or (b) fighting for the small percentage of jobs that are genuinely interesting and age-appropriate at any age. I think it's much easier to deal with age if you're a consultant, because it leaves you out of the political structure of a firm. It makes people uncomfortable to have a 35-year-old "Software Manager II" overseeing a 55-year-old badass. With age, you just don't fit into the corporate hierarchy unless you've climbed it. If you're a consultant and live outside of the hierarchy, then age doesn't really matter.
stillsut 11y ago
Beyond the the ~7year business cycle, career stability in Medicine vs. Engineering is subject to long-term trends. For the current 50 year old cohort, the end of the cold war has to be the most relevant factor in the opportunities available to them. There's nothing like a bunch of missile projects to get MIT-er's some work. The spending rate on US healthcare is probably not sustainable over the next thirty years, and many physicians could see Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements plummet. In short this observation of career disparity could be reversed after several decades of unforeseeable future occurring.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Perhaps the insight here is that neither law nor medicine is advancing fast enough?
mcguire 11y ago
"There was a slight selection bias in that all those present were people whom an on-campus group was hoping to get donations from." Slight?
mcguire 11y ago
Dave Winer's response: http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHiredDougBut.html http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHire...
deleted 11y ago
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rayiner 11y ago
> The medical doctor was at the peak of his career and in no danger of being fired. The university professor had the security of tenure and was looking forward to a defined benefit pension starting six years from now. The corporate attorney was finishing up a prosperous career. I do think tech undervalues experience and overvalues familiarity with technological fads. That said, there are two sides to the coin. Those other fields the author mentions all aggressively put people into "tracks" early in their careers. Take the corporate lawyer, for example. His job is secure because most of the competition for his job from his cohort was tracked-out in earlier filtering stages. If tech was like law, you'd have job ads for people with 10+ years' experience saying "top undergraduate school (MIT/CMU/Stanford/Caltech or the equivalent) and top company (Apple/Google/Facebook or the equivalent) required." That would certainly create a lot of insulation for people who went to MIT, interned at Google, then put in 3-5 years after graduation to earn a credential they could bank on the rest of their careers. I'm not sure we'd all prefer that to be the case.
- kvcc01 11y ago
  If you get some ghastly disease and need a surgeon, you may not necessarily prefer a fresh graduate operating on you. I may personally filter for an experienced physician, in their 50s, 60s all fine, who has done thousands of the same procedure with good track record. Similarly, if I were a defendant on jury trial, I wouldn’t prefer a new law grad to represent me. I’d filter for an older, experienced attorney, with good track record in the courtroom. I think the above is common sense. But somehow most people get it completely backwards in our field of software. Why is it that people’s mental image of a competent developer biases towards 20-something whiz-kids as opposed to older devs? Doctors and lawyers have verifiable track records; is it because that most developers, especially in big corporations, don’t build such auditable track records that attest to their competency? I’m very curious about this. A 60-yo surgeon who continues to operate every day, is revered, has job security, doesn’t worry about ageism, outsourcing, obsolescence, etc. A 60-yo dev who hasn’t moved onto management bears stigma of failure. (Not my thinking, just the common attitude I see in society.) Something is broken somewhere.
  - hga 11y ago
sixtypoundhound 11y ago
If we reverse the clock back to their 30's, the underlying math of these career choices isn't so kind... - The academic is completing their PHD program, with it's associated vow of poverty and about to start a multi-year tenure cagefight, in low-wage contract instructor roles. Only a small fraction will make it to full tenure; the rest will drop out to pursue industry jobs, 10+ years behind the engineers who went directly into industry. - The young doctor FINALLY completed their training, with a truckload of debt. In the horizon, they see many sources of downward pressure on medical pay (rising power of insurance companies, malpractice liability, lower reimbursement rates due to Medicare and Obamacare, etc.). In 20 years, will Medicine be a $300K/year job or a $125K/year job? Oh...and a bunch of their peers already dropped out, loaded with debt. - Meanwhile, the 30 year old MIT engineer has good odds of making six figures as a senior tech or technical lead. They are young enough to start a business and bounce back when things don't work out. Young enough to start a big family. If their spouse is also a middle class professional, they have a decent chance of saving $1MM by age 45 for a solid start on retirement. Making enough to pay down their debt early. Yeah...the back end of the engineering career has a shelf life; you get your money up front. Using it wisely is up to you.
- imjk 11y ago
  Agreed. Also, I think the article is more a reflection of the engineering landscape 30 years ago than a comparison of career choices that the author seems to be implying. I think it'd be foolish to make career choices based on the 30 year outcome of people in the previous generation.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    My understanding that law in particular has gone from being a pretty solid career path, especially for liberal arts majors who want some structure to get started in the workplace, to one that's relatively bleak for many who don't go to a Tier 1 school (or excel at a Tier 2), land a job of a big city firm, and either make partner or land a good corporate law job.
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  > Meanwhile, the 30 year old MIT engineer has good odds of making six figures as a senior tech or technical lead. Only in the major urban areas of the left and right coasts. Other places you have to fight to make above 75K.
deleted 11y ago
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- hga 11y ago
  "IT" is particularly bad here because our ruling class has a national consensus that we need to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers each year to satisfy the demand (for talent on the cheap). E.g. in an area I'm watching, the the serious Republican 2016 contenders are entirely bad, with the most "restrictive" of them, Ted Cruz, wanting to up the H-1B cap to 300K per year. Yeah, most of these people are slated for "drone" level jobs, but plenty of the very best also get in and do good work. Your ideology might thing this is great, but that doesn't pay your living expenses, especially if you want a family, or a retirement of any quality.
adebtlawyer 11y ago
The calculation of total lifetime earnings / career track is tough to make in advance. It's important to remember that the licensed professions (doctor, lawyer) have significant costs to enter. The advantages are that the fields change more slowly, cannot be done remotely, and are licensed. This allows you to more easily accumulate knowledge and experience over time, and prevents competition to some degree. Theoretically, that should lead to a stabler career, but a higher earning one is harder to be sure about. I have a CS degree and used to be a decent programmer, but became a lawyer. To maximize my lifetime earnings, should I have simply moved to California and gone into tech eight years ago? Right now, things are doing well now in tech, and there are too many lawyers, but would that have meant I'd be completely out of a job at age 50 due to ageism/competition? That was my fear, and not an entirely irrational one, since these discussions keep coming up.
JoblessWonder 11y ago
I'm curious to see if this is as big of an issue 20-30 years in the future as it is now. 30 year olds in America were raised with computers in the schools (if not the classroom and home.) 20 year olds were raised with computers in the home and in their pockets. [1] Will we continue to see people over 50 (or even 40) as unable to grasp new technology if they were raised in a society that placed such a high value on technology being an integral part of life from a young age? Part of me says no, part of me says yes. [1] I'm not saying it won't be an issue. Just as sexism and racism are still around in the workplace, ageism will continue to be an issue. I'm just wondering if it won't be seen as the norm.
mathattack 11y ago
One point he admits in the beginning... There was a slight selection bias in that all those present were people whom an on-campus group was hoping to get donations from. This doesn't include doctors who quit medical school, academics who got pushed out of the funnel, and lawyers who couldn't get good law jobs. The engineers also may have already been victims of age discrimination by the first dot com bubble.
diminoten 11y ago
I've always thought that the age discrimination problem in the software engineering world will self-solve when the first generation of programmers age into the discriminatory age brackets. Besides, some of the best programmers I know are 50+.
sixtypoundhound 11y ago
Regarding the lawyer, there's a more complex bait and switch going on here... As you progress in the practice of law, you spend less time working on document review and trial / transaction prep. Due to the nature of law firms, senior lawyers tend to either be focused on client development (sales!) or various forms of cat herding (project / business management!)... Wait... tell me again about the career prospects of engineers in their 50's who (successfully) switched into sales and management? [um yeah, nothing to see here....]
pasbesoin 11y ago
For reference, this is the URL of the actual post (as opposed to the current URL to the year/month entries): http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-their-50s/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-...

199 points by zootar 11y ago

Wow. Just shows why cogs and wheels are referred to so often in software profession.

gcb0 11y ago

or: the successful programmers do not bother to show up to pan handling events and/or: even the failures still make lots of money until 50, while the failures on other fields aren't even invited. or: I'm just in denial :-(

pixelscript 11y ago

This post reeks of confirmation bias or at least the sample size is too low to draw any conclusions. What if that software engineer didn't want to progress his career and was happy at the level he was? What about those engineers that did go into management? I could be wrong but if you choose to stay in a roll a 30yo can fill why would it be strange that you would be expected to compete with those younger to get a job?

moron4hire 11y ago
Why wouldn't that also apply to doctors? Maybe a surgeon enjoys the surgery, doesn't want to manage a surgery department of a hospital. I think the relative comparison is still relevant.
- jmorrison 11y ago
  Because in both the doctor and professor cases, the knowledge base is curated, history and experience (at least - I was tempted to add "and judgement learned therefrom") count for something. Alan Kay is right when he says software is "pop culture," and its "disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field."
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Most doctors build/join a practice, take on partners and hire PAs and Nurse Practitioners. They build a book of business and referral network and when it's time to retire have a bag of money and business equity. That's changing now, and my guess would be that twenty years from now, we'll hear the laments of employee doctors in a similar situation.
calinet6 11y ago
I made the mistake of continuing to read other posts down the page. The author appears to have many biases, and a myopically logical view of people. I am unconcerned.
- danielweber 11y ago
  He has his own particular style. If you can get past it [1], there are interesting things. [1] I used to be able to, but as I got older I said "fuck it, it isn't worth my time for him to purposefully misunderstand me."

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

wimagguc 11y ago

The other conclusion is, always be hireable. I guess it’s hard to be 50 and pride yourself to work for senior-senior level salary when a 30 year old can easily do your job. Hierarchies worked very well in the uni prof’s favour, but engineering companies tend to apply flatter structures. If there’s nothing that keeps the young folks competing, they will. So for us, engineers it may be a good idea to move to supervisory roles, a field with harder-to-aquire skills, or start teaching later on. (+1 for small sample size and confirmation bias though. /re: @pixelscript)

dba7dba 11y ago
Agree. Being always be hireable is one's own responsibility. Not anyone else's.
- calinet6 11y ago
  It's still interesting to consider systemic effects, however.
happywolf 11y ago
Unfortunately being hireable and getting hired are two separate things. Yes, we can do things better and more thorough, however the sad thing is, most employers (at least in Singapore where I am) don't care. They care about salary and ability to work extra hours. Things could vary in the states though
- danielweber 11y ago
  Regardless of your age, fuck employers who want you to work long hours. (Unless you have a big piece of equity. .1% is not big.)
gcb0 11y ago
good programmers can always consult. old managers can't do nothing unless he is hired at a big company, which is exactly what won't happen according to this

kristopolous 11y ago

Do people here anticipate programming being their lifelong career, or do they in good faith, think there will be a switch later? Personally, I've done this for 15 years and I keep doing contracting to pay the bills but really I'm pretty done with it. What about you?

reidrac 11y ago
I've been doing this for ~15 years too, but things have changed enough over the time (and I've changed too!) so it still feels fresh. I guess the way technology changes can be a two edge sword, as in you're always catching up, but so far I can't say I'm bored or thinking on doing anything else to pay my bills.
wobbleblob 11y ago
Yeah, that was my thought. If you're still a programmer at age 50, either something has gone very wrong in your career development, or you're such a legend in the field that it would be a loss to the world if you had moved on.
- vidarh 11y ago
  Or you enjoy what you're doing. I've had "director" or "head of" or similar in my titles for the majority of the last 20 years, but I keep finding excuses to code because it's what I enjoy doing the most. Whenever my job responsibilities doesn't let me code, I spend more time coding at home. I'm 40 now, and I can't see that changing. I first started programming when I was 5 years old, and it's an integral, important part of my life.
  - wobbleblob 11y ago
    Of course you still program, but your job title on that MIT gathering wouldn't have been 'programmer'.
    - gohrt 11y ago
      ahem https://www.google.com/search?#q=%22I+am+a+programmer.+On+my+1040+form%22 https://www.google.com/search?#q=%22I+am+a+programmer.+On+my...

thewarrior 11y ago

This post really scares me and part of me wants to quit this industry even though I enjoy coding. Ageism is a brutal reality.

plg 11y ago
In my experience if an older engineer/programmer is more expensive than a younger one --- but the older one is better --- the older one will be hired. You get what you pay for. As long as your skill set isn't basically a "commodity" (generic web design for example) you will be ok. Put another way---if your decades of experience _don't_ give you some appreciable advantage over a 20-something new guy, then yes maybe you are in the wrong business.
- danielweber 11y ago
  Go read 'patio11 or 'tptacek posts on avoiding competing on price. You want to compete on quality. You don't even have to buy all in. I bought in just enough to get my head out of my ass, and have improved my financial situation considerably.
- mcguire 11y ago
  One of the most entertaining conferences I ever attended was Usenix, several years ago. The paper sessions typically went like this: a grad student would stand up and present his and his advisor's research. In the sbsequent question-and-answer period, one of a small number of grey-beards (you'd recognize their names, but I can't remember who exactly it was; I'm old, too) would come to the mic and ask some variant of, "when we tried that back in the '80s, it didn't work because of.... How are you dealing with the problems?" There was never any real answer. (To be truthful, there were also a number of responses along the lines of "Why didn't you cite our earlier work?" which were more annoying since the typical true answer would have been "Because you only published it in a single post in rec.arts.no-one-reads-this." Bah.) Since then, I've learned one thing: experience in this field doesn't give you any advantage. Or, more precisely, Cassandra, it doesn't give you any advantage that anyone will pay attention to. I've had many similar conversations since that conference, usually along the lines of: Them: "We should do X." We: "That didn't work the last time; A, B, and C happen and only super-genius levels of D will get you out of the mess, which we don't have." Them: "But X is the hot newness and everything's different this time, anyway." Or sometimes: We: "We're doing Y." Them: "That's stupid, everyone is doing Z now." (Them almost never has more than 2-3 years of experience, by the way.) We: "No one we've hired in the last ten years knows how to do Z, Z offers no actual advantage over Y, and I'd personally prefer not to have to deal with 27 different ways of doing the same thing." Them: "I'm doing Z." We: "Great. You'll be solely responsible for that project until you quit, then we'll throw it away and rewrite it. Just like last time." Sure, you can keep up with the technology fashion; that's fairly easy. But it's a bit dispiriting to see the same problems in the new tech from the last time the dharma wheel rolled around. And to be unable to convince the new kids not to try to cross the railroad bridge because the 12:15 really does have a good on-time record. The entertainment value of watching projects hit the same shoals eventually loses its charm.

dba7dba 11y ago

I can't imagine a programmer making enough $$ to be able to show up at an event where the main goal is donation. Granted some did show up. Let's list the careers that were still considered safe age 50. Doctor. Lawyer. Professor. All important, no doubt. But which one of those truly helped advance our society or nation? As in improving GDP or trade balance? Most likely not. But the other engineers (some with uncertain future) are the ones who designed/built/produced something for the society.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
> Doctor. Lawyer. Professor. All important, no doubt. But which one of those truly helped advance our society or nation? As in improving GDP or trade balance? Ehh... all three? Try running a country without them and see where your GDP ends up. As for 'truly helped advance' and linking that to just GDP is incredibly myopic. I have all the respect in the world for engineers but let's not fetishise over them.
- dba7dba 11y ago
  Eh, maybe I was a bit harsh. But still, consider this. Doctor: Was the doctor in research? Lawyer: No comment. Professor: How good was his research? Or was he one of those the taught from same note year after year and just took credit for work done by grad students? And my mistake in linking it just to GDP. How about advancing the society by building better tools, transportation, medicine, improve efficiency in this/that?
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    Sure I'll consider it First of all, what's with that standard? 'if you didn't invent something new, e.g. through research, it doesn't count.' Or, if you kept things together without making progress, it doesn't count? So a police officer or a fireman or a nurse, who cares about that, they're not advancing society because they didn't happen to build a better tool or a new medicine. I mean what are you even arguing here? And second, alright so let's apply your standard to engineers who spend their entire lives applying laws of physics they didn't invent or models that existed for decades, sometimes even before they were born. e.g. designing the 10000th sewage system in just another city according to existing principles, would you call that 'taking credit for work done by grad students / previous engineers' and dismiss it as unimportant, when it's a truly significant part of society? And how do you rate a software engineer building the millionth crud app for some use case? Say like Hacker News? Unimportant? Of course not. I mean the heuristic here to help think about value is to remove from society/laborforce for a moment anyone who ever does something that's already done before. And then keep anyone who's building something new. And then compare it with the opposite. The former will result in chaos, the latter will result in a more or less stable society with a lack of progress. Now obviously you need both. If we didn't have the guys doing new stuff, we'd still be living like we did 50k years ago. But we need both, and the implication that it's somehow only engineers who do the new stuff just isn't true. I mean hell just consider how far engineers get without the professor teaching them all those lame things other people already figured out like laws of physics. Anyway I get the feeling I'm misconstruing your points but you kept offering questions as things to consider so I just try to interpret what you're implying as best I can. Feel free to just concretely make your point instead.

whiteheat752 11y ago

As an MIT student... should I not become a programmer? I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability, and now would be the time to switch to a field with more "lock-in". What would that field be? Medicine? Mechanical engineering? Consultancy?

brlewis 11y ago
As an MIT alumnus at age 47, here's my advice: If you love programming, keep programming. If you don't love it, do something else.
- reuven 11y ago
  This 44-year-old alumnus concurs. At the same time, I've been doing more and more training, and less and less day-to-day development, over the last few years. Not only do I enjoy it, but I find that my long-term perspective and experience helps me to explain things to the younger and less experienced developers. That said, it's pretty amazing to see what today's kids have done before they've even finished their first college degree. It's a bit intimidating... until I demonstrate that I can still debug things faster than they can. :-)
  - danielweber 11y ago
    I'll pile on, too. Professor Robert Rose had some great advice for me as a freshman: as an MIT student, you can probably succeed at whatever you want, enough to enjoy life. So pick a field that gives you personal satisfaction. Money is valuable and ego-boosting, but when you hit your 30s you will realize that enjoying your workday is much more important than maximizing your paycheck. (But there are also easy ways to increase your paycheck. If you can become better than a potted plant[1] at negotiating, you can boost your salary.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289750
    - hga 11y ago
      All tenured MIT professors must be taken with a grain of salt on career advice. They got tenure by being #1 or #2 in their sub-field, as well as a number of other things like being adequate teachers, so the selection bias is extremely strong. In general Professor Rose is generally right, but there are a lot of exceptions, and he's also much older than us, his experiences might not hold for the America/world of today and the future.

druml 11y ago

The link of the OP points to the blog. The link to the post is http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-their-50s/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-...

danielrhodes 11y ago

None of this should be particularly surprising: if you choose to be complacent in your career you can't expect stability or increased prosperity over the long term. The path from a junior engineer to a lead engineer is quite short relative to a your typical career length. If you don't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except laterally. After a certain point the impact of a person's improved programming skills does not get significantly better over time, at least for what most companies need. Therefore a company becomes incentivized to hire younger engineers who cost less as they still get similar or even better output.

vanderZwan 11y ago
> If you don't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except laterally. I find it almost insulting how you imply that "not desiring to be a manager" is the same as "being complacent in your career" Were the doctor, the professor and the attorney forced to move onto management?
- dagw 11y ago
  Were the doctor, the professor and the attorney forced to move onto management? I can't speak about doctors or attorneys, but how to keep getting promotions without taking on management responsibility (and thus having less time for research and teaching) is constant topic of discussions among my friends with academic careers. In fact it is on of the reasons my wife is seriously considering getting out of academia.
  - zootar 11y ago
    Is your wife a tenured professor? What is she thinking of doing instead?
- arethuza 11y ago
  When I worked in a UK university for a Professor (a title which only the most senior academics have) his role was arguably almost entirely "management" - he was a very bright guy and did get involved in the research his team did (about 15 of us) but it was obvious that 98% of his time was effectively "management" responsibilities. Similarly for medics and lawyers - certainly for lawyers (in the UK anyway) getting past a particular level is more about business development and managerial skills than anything else.

zaroth 11y ago

Just keep reading the rest of the posts on that page. Wow, some true entertainment there...

calinet6 11y ago
My thoughts exactly. I have known people who looked at the world in similar ways, and to put it lightly, it was frustrating to speak with them.

justonepost 11y ago

Ugh. Confirmation bias and sample size aside, these are MIT alumni. Aren't they already supposed to be above average? That being said, he didn't exactly say what sort of engineers these folks were. Electrical? Software? Big difference.. Also, one thing that didn't jive, if they are in financially uncomfortable retirement, why exactly are they showing up at a donors gathering?

neolefty 11y ago
> "why exactly are they showing up at a donors gathering?" Yes, this probably means the problem is even bigger than the sample demonstrates. Most of the people in uncomfortable retirement are not going to show up at all.
- ghaff 11y ago
  I wouldn't be that inclined to make assumptions about what sort of selection bias there was. I could also argue that people who show up at such gatherings are more likely to be people with time on their hands or who are making a concerted effort to network, while those who are working full-time are busier.
calinet6 11y ago
Alternatively, these are MIT people, so perhaps the problem is that their education and career are both overly specialized. Breadth would certainly be an asset to deal with change over a longer term. It's another great argument for a broad liberal arts education.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  I honestly don't think there are many jobs an experienced MIT engineer couldn't do that a liberal arts graduate could. I think the matter here is most old folks with an MIT degree with a comfortable financial position would rather be unemployed just managing investments and other activities than work a low paying job.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

shams93 11y ago

Me I had no choice, now I essentially have no career at all because you reach the end game where the industry stops talking to you despite all the money you made people. Pivoting to education would be a logical choice in a civilized society but this is no such place so instead of buying me off the market some poor business is going to wind up losing all their customers because I have no choice but to become a sole founder and learn business kung fu lol, its either do that or wait for unemployment to run out and then die from starvation and exposure basically unless I want to drive uber to pay them essentially 9 cents per mile because 49 cents per mile is 9 cents less than the cost of running the car in california lol.

sokoloff 11y ago
The marginal cost of running the car is much lower than $0.58/mile. If you already have a car and want to drive Uber with it, you'll (likely) be financially better off through the "job". Of course buying a car solely to drive Uber is a bad business plan.

jimmcslim 11y ago

I wonder how much of this 'programming is a dead-end' angst that seems to cycle through HN fairly frequently these days is US-centric? I say that as an almost-40 Australian software developer...

dyno12345 11y ago
Perhaps it's less likely in jurisdictions where unpaid overtime is actually illegal.

peter303 11y ago

"Lifetime jobs" changed in 1990s with corporate restructuring fad. Younger employees should be adapted to present, fluid situation.

peter303 11y ago

Note Phil hasn't been in the corporate world himself. He struck it rich with a dot.com in the 1990s boom and worked on several interesting projects since. Among them was photo website, a Thiel-like coders academy, and flying. He has had one of the first and longest running blogs of my fellow MIT students about tech, business, travel, flying and politics.

papercruncher 11y ago
I took Phil's class (6.171 - Web Development Lab) in college. It was a ridiculous experience, regularly had to put 40hrs/week just on this class and I'm not exaggerating. Story time: As part of the class we were working with real clients to develop a web project for them. One day during class, he talked to us about the "technical sidekick", typically a friend of the client's that is somewhat technical and is behind-the-scenes advising the client and typically contradicting all your architectular choices as a developer. Well, to noone's surprise, a few weeks later, our client rolled into a meeting all of a sudden knowledgable as to why .NET was inferior, SQL Server bad, etc. We later found out that he took the time outside class, to take the client out for dinner and act like an adversarial technical sidekick just to teach us that lesson. I was pissed off at the time but now deeply appreciate that lesson
- quickpost 11y ago
  Could you share any lessons he taught you about how to properly deal with the "technical sidekick"? I often encounter them in web consulting and I'm curious to see what Phil's advice on the topic was.
  - calinet6 11y ago
    Ask to meet them, and befriend them. Do it genuinely.
- davewiner 11y ago
  Haha that sounds just like Philip, and it is an important lesson, because it happens so often.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

That dude's got a lot of weird bleep-blorp does not compute opinions about human nature.

gohrt 11y ago
He is one of the founding generation of technolibertarians.
- mcguire 11y ago
  What's with his weird divorce thing? Did I miss some drama?

Zigurd 11y ago

I can provide a data point that might be less biased toward the successful. At a recent informal reunion of my dorm, I saw much the same thing as Phil saw (in fact he was there). If you're not running a business, or in a professional role where age discrimination can't touch you, you better be exceptionally well-known in your field. If you are doing the kind of technical work, like coding, design, etc. you did most of your career, the only way to be compensated in line with your experience level is to be in a senior technical management position (VP Eng., or CTO) or consulting. Based on what I saw then, I think Phil's observations are accurate. On the other hand, consulting isn't so bad. There is such a lot of bad engineering out there, there is an infinite market for old guys (and the few women of our cohort) to fix things that are fucked up.

cyphunk 11y ago

Missing an alternative option: migrate to, perhaps even become citizen in, a country with a half decent social welfare system. > Lesson: Unless you are confident that your skills are very far above average, don’t take a career path that subjects you to the employment market once you’re over 50 (and/or make sure that by age 50 you’ve saved enough for a retirement that begins at age 50 or 55

michaelochurch 11y ago

Ageism exists in the professions but it's legible and practically published. If you start law school at 30, you probably won't get Biglaw unless you clerk for a Supreme Court justice. You can get into a PhD program at any age, but you're not going to get a tenure-track position if you're after 40. Midlife career switchers generally don't get in. The difference is that, in the professions, you have to get in early but it's the norm to move up fast enough that ageism isn't a problem because, even if you make a couple of mistakes, you'll be at an age-appropriate level. You may not be a biglaw partner or chief surgeon earning 7 figures, but you'll be substantial enough that you're still taken seriously. In software engineering, there isn't a well-defined sense of what "up" is or what's "age appropriate". There isn't a published career track and a legible ageism. It's there, but it's hard to tell exactly when it's there. Is being a programmer at 55 age-appropriate? If you're an AI researcher at Google X, then yes, absolutely. If you're checking your Jira every morning to figure out which user stories you're going to be working on, then no one's going to believe that you chose to be a programmer instead of a manager. (Hell, I wouldn't believe you. I might still hire you, because I'm mature enough to separate low social status in one theater apart from low ability. If you're 55 and still have to deal with user stories, it means that you managed your social status poorly; but you might still be a rock-solid engineer whom I'd hire in a heartbeat.) If you look at the Valley's emerging professional model, it's not a kind one and it's not one that ages well. You choose between (a) a "main sequence" where each jump is a dramatically different job, from engineer to manager to founder to investor, and where there are structural reasons why most people will never make it; or (b) fighting for the small percentage of jobs that are genuinely interesting and age-appropriate at any age. I think it's much easier to deal with age if you're a consultant, because it leaves you out of the political structure of a firm. It makes people uncomfortable to have a 35-year-old "Software Manager II" overseeing a 55-year-old badass. With age, you just don't fit into the corporate hierarchy unless you've climbed it. If you're a consultant and live outside of the hierarchy, then age doesn't really matter.

stillsut 11y ago

Beyond the the ~7year business cycle, career stability in Medicine vs. Engineering is subject to long-term trends. For the current 50 year old cohort, the end of the cold war has to be the most relevant factor in the opportunities available to them. There's nothing like a bunch of missile projects to get MIT-er's some work. The spending rate on US healthcare is probably not sustainable over the next thirty years, and many physicians could see Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements plummet. In short this observation of career disparity could be reversed after several decades of unforeseeable future occurring.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Perhaps the insight here is that neither law nor medicine is advancing fast enough?

mcguire 11y ago

"There was a slight selection bias in that all those present were people whom an on-campus group was hoping to get donations from." Slight?

mcguire 11y ago

Dave Winer's response: http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHiredDougBut.html http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHire...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 11y ago

> The medical doctor was at the peak of his career and in no danger of being fired. The university professor had the security of tenure and was looking forward to a defined benefit pension starting six years from now. The corporate attorney was finishing up a prosperous career. I do think tech undervalues experience and overvalues familiarity with technological fads. That said, there are two sides to the coin. Those other fields the author mentions all aggressively put people into "tracks" early in their careers. Take the corporate lawyer, for example. His job is secure because most of the competition for his job from his cohort was tracked-out in earlier filtering stages. If tech was like law, you'd have job ads for people with 10+ years' experience saying "top undergraduate school (MIT/CMU/Stanford/Caltech or the equivalent) and top company (Apple/Google/Facebook or the equivalent) required." That would certainly create a lot of insulation for people who went to MIT, interned at Google, then put in 3-5 years after graduation to earn a credential they could bank on the rest of their careers. I'm not sure we'd all prefer that to be the case.

kvcc01 11y ago
If you get some ghastly disease and need a surgeon, you may not necessarily prefer a fresh graduate operating on you. I may personally filter for an experienced physician, in their 50s, 60s all fine, who has done thousands of the same procedure with good track record. Similarly, if I were a defendant on jury trial, I wouldn’t prefer a new law grad to represent me. I’d filter for an older, experienced attorney, with good track record in the courtroom. I think the above is common sense. But somehow most people get it completely backwards in our field of software. Why is it that people’s mental image of a competent developer biases towards 20-something whiz-kids as opposed to older devs? Doctors and lawyers have verifiable track records; is it because that most developers, especially in big corporations, don’t build such auditable track records that attest to their competency? I’m very curious about this. A 60-yo surgeon who continues to operate every day, is revered, has job security, doesn’t worry about ageism, outsourcing, obsolescence, etc. A 60-yo dev who hasn’t moved onto management bears stigma of failure. (Not my thinking, just the common attitude I see in society.) Something is broken somewhere.
- hga 11y ago

sixtypoundhound 11y ago

If we reverse the clock back to their 30's, the underlying math of these career choices isn't so kind... - The academic is completing their PHD program, with it's associated vow of poverty and about to start a multi-year tenure cagefight, in low-wage contract instructor roles. Only a small fraction will make it to full tenure; the rest will drop out to pursue industry jobs, 10+ years behind the engineers who went directly into industry. - The young doctor FINALLY completed their training, with a truckload of debt. In the horizon, they see many sources of downward pressure on medical pay (rising power of insurance companies, malpractice liability, lower reimbursement rates due to Medicare and Obamacare, etc.). In 20 years, will Medicine be a $300K/year job or a $125K/year job? Oh...and a bunch of their peers already dropped out, loaded with debt. - Meanwhile, the 30 year old MIT engineer has good odds of making six figures as a senior tech or technical lead. They are young enough to start a business and bounce back when things don't work out. Young enough to start a big family. If their spouse is also a middle class professional, they have a decent chance of saving $1MM by age 45 for a solid start on retirement. Making enough to pay down their debt early. Yeah...the back end of the engineering career has a shelf life; you get your money up front. Using it wisely is up to you.

imjk 11y ago
Agreed. Also, I think the article is more a reflection of the engineering landscape 30 years ago than a comparison of career choices that the author seems to be implying. I think it'd be foolish to make career choices based on the 30 year outcome of people in the previous generation.
- ghaff 11y ago
  My understanding that law in particular has gone from being a pretty solid career path, especially for liberal arts majors who want some structure to get started in the workplace, to one that's relatively bleak for many who don't go to a Tier 1 school (or excel at a Tier 2), land a job of a big city firm, and either make partner or land a good corporate law job.
kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
> Meanwhile, the 30 year old MIT engineer has good odds of making six figures as a senior tech or technical lead. Only in the major urban areas of the left and right coasts. Other places you have to fight to make above 75K.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

hga 11y ago
"IT" is particularly bad here because our ruling class has a national consensus that we need to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers each year to satisfy the demand (for talent on the cheap). E.g. in an area I'm watching, the the serious Republican 2016 contenders are entirely bad, with the most "restrictive" of them, Ted Cruz, wanting to up the H-1B cap to 300K per year. Yeah, most of these people are slated for "drone" level jobs, but plenty of the very best also get in and do good work. Your ideology might thing this is great, but that doesn't pay your living expenses, especially if you want a family, or a retirement of any quality.

adebtlawyer 11y ago

The calculation of total lifetime earnings / career track is tough to make in advance. It's important to remember that the licensed professions (doctor, lawyer) have significant costs to enter. The advantages are that the fields change more slowly, cannot be done remotely, and are licensed. This allows you to more easily accumulate knowledge and experience over time, and prevents competition to some degree. Theoretically, that should lead to a stabler career, but a higher earning one is harder to be sure about. I have a CS degree and used to be a decent programmer, but became a lawyer. To maximize my lifetime earnings, should I have simply moved to California and gone into tech eight years ago? Right now, things are doing well now in tech, and there are too many lawyers, but would that have meant I'd be completely out of a job at age 50 due to ageism/competition? That was my fear, and not an entirely irrational one, since these discussions keep coming up.

JoblessWonder 11y ago

I'm curious to see if this is as big of an issue 20-30 years in the future as it is now. 30 year olds in America were raised with computers in the schools (if not the classroom and home.) 20 year olds were raised with computers in the home and in their pockets. [1] Will we continue to see people over 50 (or even 40) as unable to grasp new technology if they were raised in a society that placed such a high value on technology being an integral part of life from a young age? Part of me says no, part of me says yes. [1] I'm not saying it won't be an issue. Just as sexism and racism are still around in the workplace, ageism will continue to be an issue. I'm just wondering if it won't be seen as the norm.

mathattack 11y ago

One point he admits in the beginning... There was a slight selection bias in that all those present were people whom an on-campus group was hoping to get donations from. This doesn't include doctors who quit medical school, academics who got pushed out of the funnel, and lawyers who couldn't get good law jobs. The engineers also may have already been victims of age discrimination by the first dot com bubble.

diminoten 11y ago

I've always thought that the age discrimination problem in the software engineering world will self-solve when the first generation of programmers age into the discriminatory age brackets. Besides, some of the best programmers I know are 50+.

sixtypoundhound 11y ago

Regarding the lawyer, there's a more complex bait and switch going on here... As you progress in the practice of law, you spend less time working on document review and trial / transaction prep. Due to the nature of law firms, senior lawyers tend to either be focused on client development (sales!) or various forms of cat herding (project / business management!)... Wait... tell me again about the career prospects of engineers in their 50's who (successfully) switched into sales and management? [um yeah, nothing to see here....]

pasbesoin 11y ago

For reference, this is the URL of the actual post (as opposed to the current URL to the year/month entries): http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-their-50s/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-...