WTF: "an Old" Is that supposed to be "millennial" lingo?
It's not supposed to be; it is.
Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
41–50 of 158 posts
Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
#42The 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,…
promoting people out of engineering and into management is among the worst things that an organization can do
Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
#43Earlier 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.
Twitter is arguably successful so why would you consider their decision to be folly? It worked for them.
Startups have limited resources. If you devote them to solving tomorrow's problems then you'll be beaten by someone who devotes their resources to solving today's problems.
Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
#44It'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…
> Why does an older person cost more?
Let's take an example case where two engineers are working in a second tier city earning $85,000 per year in salary. One is 25 years old, one is 53 years old. The company covers the entire cost of the employee health insurance. The health insurance for the 53 year old will cost a minimum of 2x what it does for the 25 year old. The cost of health insurance begins to aggressively increase after roughly 38-40. By the time the 53 year old employee reaches 60-63 years old, the insurance cost is now 3x that of the 25 year old.
The 53 year old will solidly cost an extra $6,000 to $10,000 in health insurance on top of that $85,000 salary, versus the 25 year old. The 60 year old might cost $12,000 to $18,000 more in health insurance.
All of these figures are minimums, the numbers get much worse if you have a nice health plan.
If you're in a second tier city paying your engineers $85k, $15,000 per year in extra cost buys a ridiculous amount of training to improve the 20 something engineers.
If you have 20 engineers, over ten years the cost of employing all 55-63 year olds, versus all 20-30 year olds, could easily be a minimum extra of $3 million in just health insurance costs (with a total salary over ten years of $17 million). The more likely cost is far higher.
Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
#45> Team social events shouldn’t require physical prowess or alcoholic excess—so forget paintball and bar crawls. As a 57 year-old backend engineer I would like to keep the bar crawls, thanks.
If anything, I have 24 years of experience to pass on to the younger generation.
Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
#46Good article. It’s kind of scary to me that “old” in tech means 40.
Only because as people get experience they end up in the “Engineering Manager” role & such. Plus there’s a GLUT of fresh grads joining each year.
Yeah, I think part of the issue is the horribly broken career progression model that most companies seem to use.
Graduate -> Software Engineer -> Senior Software Engineer -> Team Lead -> Non-Technical Manager (???)
Then again, unless a company is scaling at the same speed as your career, you're eventually (probably before 40) going to hit a wall where there's no higher level for a tech person to go, because there are no bigger problems to solve. If you want to earn more money or get more recognition, you're going to need to move to another company which can offer harder challenges.
Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
#47Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
#48"young people are just smarter" Mark Zuckerberg
More like, young people have a good smart to self worth ratio, making them easier to exploit.
Not necessarily self-worth - when you're just starting out and you have no track record, no matter how good you know you are, the rest of the world won't believe you until you've proved yourself. So you start wherever you can.
Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
#49I think my advantage is that I've seen more engineering cycles. New problems can sometimes be solved quicker by the hard fought for knowledge gained solving older ones. Mark Zuckerberg famously said young people were just smarter. In my generation it was Abbie Hoffman who said not to trust anyone over thirty. They were both wrong.
What might be "right"?
Re: Surviving as an ‘Old’ in the Tech World
#50[deleted]