Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 158 posts

Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

#11

Post by abritinthebay »

Cacti wrote: post #9

It's not complicated: the costs of software development are almost entirely in labor. As long as that remains true, older people will be at a severe disadvantage simply because they cost 2-5 times as much as a new hire. Once Moore's Law slows down (or whatever we want to call the current golden age we're seemingly still in), this will change, but until then you're just fighting against exponential growth.

If you don’t factor quality of code/architecture in there, then yes.

But that would be folly long term.

Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

#12

Post by ggg9990 »

Cacti wrote: post #9

It's not complicated: the costs of software development are almost entirely in labor. As long as that remains true, older people will be at a severe disadvantage simply because they cost 2-5 times as much as a new hire. Once Moore's Law slows down (or whatever we want to call the current golden age we're seemingly still in), this will change, but until then you're just fighting against exponential growth.

Why does an older person cost more? Either they produce more, or they’re overpaid. The first type is definitely worth finding and paying... I’ve seen companies built solely by 22-year old script kiddies and usually the stack can’t scale. At that point, you’re in a trickier spot because a 40-year-old who can inject some good sense at the beginning of a project is a lot more abundant than a 40-year-old who can lead a turnaround effort on a fucked up stack while keeping the company and stack operational for existing customers.

Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

#14

Post by anoncoward111 »

As a salesman who is constantly told he is "too young" and is habitually underpaid/fired, I can tell you that age discrimination is both real and highly arbitrary.

If anybody out there can see the value in having an enthusiastic customer advocate, rather than just another sales guy, please do reply :)

Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

#15

Post by virmundi »

abritinthebay wrote: post #11
Cacti wrote: post #9

It's not complicated: the costs of software development are almost entirely in labor. As long as that remains true, older people will be at a severe disadvantage simply because they cost 2-5 times as much as a new hire. Once Moore's Law slows down (or whatever we want to call the current golden age we're seemingly still in), this will change, but until then you're just fighting against exponential growth.

If you don’t factor quality of code/architecture in there, then yes. But that would be folly long term.

From being on HN for years, folly is ok for a lot of VC backed startups. "We know Ruby! Let's do everything in that!", said the team at Twitter. Then performance took a nose dive since the language was known at the time to not scale. Now it's Java or Scala.

Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

#16

Post by nbm »

Cacti wrote: post #9

It's not complicated: the costs of software development are almost entirely in labor. As long as that remains true, older people will be at a severe disadvantage simply because they cost 2-5 times as much as a new hire. Once Moore's Law slows down (or whatever we want to call the current golden age we're seemingly still in), this will change, but until then you're just fighting against exponential growth.

When people talk about agism and finding it hard to find a job as an older person, they're generally comparing against someone with the same capabilities and salary expectation going for the same job. (Edit:) And they're not complaining about companies not matching their salary, they're complaining about not getting an offer at all.

It isn't in comparison with the job available to new grads.

(Of course, there's the question of whether a senior industry hire is actually only worth some factor of a new grad hire.)

Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

#17

Post by qubax »

butterfi wrote: post #3

wow, I'm not sure how good the article is, but my browser threw a hairball trying to load that page. Rarely do I see a page fail as hard as this one did. Has Wired just collapsed under the weight of ad trafic nonsense?

Not just wired. Almost every news site. Ad block, update your host file, etc. Ever since forbes had viruses/malware for ads a few years ago, I don't visit a news site without protection.

Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

#18

Post by pm90 »

ggg9990 wrote: post #12
Cacti wrote: post #9

It's not complicated: the costs of software development are almost entirely in labor. As long as that remains true, older people will be at a severe disadvantage simply because they cost 2-5 times as much as a new hire. Once Moore's Law slows down (or whatever we want to call the current golden age we're seemingly still in), this will change, but until then you're just fighting against exponential growth.

Why does an older person cost more? Either they produce more, or they’re overpaid. The first type is definitely worth finding and paying... I’ve seen companies built solely by 22-year old script kiddies and usually the stack can’t scale. At that point, you’re in a trickier spot because a 40-year-old who can inject some good sense at the beginning of a project is a lot more abundant than a 40-year-old who can lead a t…

So this is a nuanced question and requires a detailed response. But the gist is that older folks don't necessarily cost more. I've seen many older folks continue to work as developers for most of their lives (albeit this is outside Silicon Valley). But for many older developers who continue on the technical track, they have accumulated a lot of experience building software and they do bring a lot to the table, in terms of design, or prescient thinking, or knowing the internals of certain stacks very very well. That kind of knowledge is certainly useful for firms that operate on scale, have systems that cannot tolerate downtime, and so on.

In other words, it depends on the individual.

Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

#19

Post by abritinthebay »

virmundi wrote: post #15
abritinthebay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t factor quality of code/architecture in there, then yes. But that would be folly long term.

From being on HN for years, folly is ok for a lot of VC backed startups. "We know Ruby! Let's do everything in that!", said the team at Twitter. Then performance took a nose dive since the language was known at the time to not scale. Now it's Java or Scala.

Absolutely! Short term a startup will make a lot of fuckups - that’s a good thing, it’s learning!

But once the product is set having sane architecture and good code quality often become a deciding factor in being successful - because they allow you to iterate faster & outmaneuver your competition.

Sometimes you can get away with it for longer, but eventually you’ll grind to a place where you need to fix these things and it’s easier to do earlier.

Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World

#20

Post by ThJ »

The tendency to promote people out of engineering and into management is probably down to the bottom line. At some point, an engineer's economic worth plateaus, and the only way to justify a bigger paycheck is to have him offload the upper management. Managing people is extremely time consuming. Time spent on managing people is time not spent on closing deals, maintaining business relationships, securing investments, etc, so it becomes extremely important to delegate.
Post reply on HN