ccleve...
I am now 71 years of age. I retired in 2014 after 42+ years in corporate development. I have developed 3 commercial products in my career and am Still doing development.
I have worked through three major eras of computer technologies from mainframes, to LANs, to the Internet. I am also a published technical writer in Europe.
Can I get hired today? Not a chance. I took an interview out of curiosity several years ago just to see what was going on in the industry. Even though I answered all the questions successfully, the attitudes of the interviewers were questioning why I was even there since I was in my late 60s at the time.
I have written on several ocassions that the entire field went to crap in 2010 when Microsoft changed from ASP.NET WebForms to the ASP.NET MVC paradigm, without continuing to refine the WebForms internals as they had been doing. From what I could see, this move was done to accommodate the new mobile technologies but other than that, the Microsoft Community had completely ignored this new development paradigm as its mirror image was always available from the then known Castle Project. But few showed any interest in this offering. Why would they when WebForms could do everything actually required with a lower learning curve, and substantially less complexity.
I worked on one of the largest MVC projects at the time in the United States. I worked with 2 other highly qualified software engineers and quickly saw the attraction of the MVC paradigm. It allowed anyone to break as many rules of project development as they liked, while creating as much complexity as one could want. The project completely collapsed after 3 months (my initial contracted time) for 2 very specific reasons (though we made each of the expected phase deadlines); one, the management had no idea how to handle such a project and as a result, increasingly got into viscous fights with the client the application was being developed for. And two, the MVC paradigm, though providing all the flexibility required, could not provide superior project time lines as a result of its inherent complexity. The WebForms environment and tools would have done the same exact things with much faster turn-around times. However, my 2 colleagues could simply not get their heads out of the sand long enough to see the mistake they had made by adopting such a development paradigm.
And to this day, I always wonder why anyone would take up a development technology that added a tremendous learning curve, far more complexity than WebForms ever had, resulting in far more vulnerabilities to attack as a result.
I can't blame everything on the younger generations of developers but they were certainly a driving force behind this adoption. Everyone was going to develop the next mobile killer-app.
The odd thing is that Microsoft had on one of its web pages that discussed the use of MVC whereby it stated that it should only be used for content and not such things as database intensive applications. Well as MVC continued to get traction, that statement was eventually removed, though the paradigm did not get any less complex.
Since the early 2000s, Internet development especially, has been driven by fads emanating from the younger generations of technologists. Some of this is warranted as the industry needs younger people to try out the newer technologies that come along.
However, the loss of the senior personnel driven out by younger arrogance combined with corporate greed that exploits such people has had devastating effects on a profession that saw its vital functions and working hierarchies destroyed for the sake of both these factors.
No senior engineer worth their salt would have allowed such developments in their organizations seeing them as primarily driving up costs, development timelines, and severely lowering the integrity of the organization's systems.
Today, everything is now under attack from the criminal element on the wires, with Cloud operations being the juiciest targets for such attacks. Web sites are poorly designed and long proven implementation architectures have been thrown out the window to accommodate cost reductions and just plain laziness. But everyone just keeps promoting this path. Mostly because our younger counterparts don't know any other way of doing development.
Without the guiding influence of experienced, senior professionals, the entire IT industry has been lost to a fantasy emanating out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere with corporate buy-in because it sounds "cool" and it promises to reduce costs in an area that simply tends to be costly when done correctly, though there are ways to reduce these costs scientifically.
Young people in our profession are the life blood for taking on the challenges of new tools and software. But they do not have the experience to know what works or doesn't. They do not understand that in general, everything will do the same things that have always been done in our profession and the slight increases in application performance they get from their efforts does not mean that such new techniques are justified in terms of general implementations. But now there is no one to demonstrate this to them. You can see this trend in the differences that the spat between SpaceX (Musk) and Blue origin (Bezos) are bringing out.
Despite Elon Musk's idiosyncracies, he has created new industries generating huge profits and his SpaceX company has hired and worked with some very talented engineers. Musk is a highly intelligent man with a double degree in both economics and physics. What is Bezos? As Economics Professor, Richard Wolff stated recently, Bezos is nothing more than a glorified delivery man making an obscene amount of money for coming up with nothing really original.
His Blue Origin company appears to be run the same way as his Amazon warehouses, where everything is on deadline, everything is corralled into budgets, and safety is an afterthought. No wonder his top engineers are beginning to leave the company, with some going to SpaceX.
Blue Origin has never produced anything to the level's of SpaceX but Bezos insists that he has a right to the NASA contracts for the Lunar modules being developed.
The two companies, on the face of it, are like night and day.
Our profession is just as much a science as it is an art. But without the science (Blue Origin does not have), you cannot get to the art (SpaceX).
This disastrous loss, is just not the fault of the inexperienced younger technicians but instead must also be placed at the doorsteps of our large corporations that threw out our American citizens of all ages to outsource one of our most valuable industrial capabilities, that of software engineering, mesmerized by the ability to cut costs (and corners) at all levels of our profession. And many foreign managers were brought in to do just that making things even worse.
GE, the most innovative company in the world in its heyday, was destroyed by Jack Welch as he turned it into a financial operation. Now GE is merely a shell of itself. It no longer innovates because it no longer produces anything.
Sears Corporation is another example of American management stupidity. Twenty years ago the board hired a real estate mogul whose intent was to make money by selling off the vast land holdings the company owned, thereby destroying one of the most successful retail outlets in the nation and ruining thousands of lives economically along the way.
To understand the need for the experience levels of older technologists, we have to turn to a real life example in our profession. A few years ago a highly competent senior technical analyst at 55 years of age decided she wanted to get experience in the new wave of technologies with the younger and newer technical startups. She resigned from her company where she could have stayed until her retirement and joined a startup. The younger technicians were anxious to tap into her experience levels for development projects until she began to warn them that their approaches would not work. Increasingly, this women was soon pushed aside as she watched one project after the other go down in flames as she had warned these younger professionals that they would. After around a year she left the company and formed her own, now successful business.
Unfortunately, the die has been cast and there is little that can be done within established companies. But young people can start anew with worker-cooperatives where there is an emphasis on a 50-50 split in a company's employment practices. Half the company made up of senior personnel and the other half the young tigers. The older people to temper the whims of the young, and the younger people to bring fire into their endeavors.
Finally, there is but one bible of software development to be followed, despite the many other publications on the subject; the 1996 edition of "Rapid Development" by Stephen McConnell, which is still in its first edition printing.
Every young professional should get a copy of this venerable book that is based upon 35 years of project analysis and research as it will clearly demonstrate that unless one is working in scientific or engineering development endeavors, general development will NEVER change. It can't simply because the axioms to it are like the laws of physics. Not every tool has a a place, software design patterns are solutions looking for problems, and every single development endeavor has an optimal number of people that can be assigned to work on it within an optimal time frame to complete the effort.
This is what has been lost to us as professionals and we need our younger counterparts to begin thinking in terms of discipline, structure, and paradigms that have been proven to work by software engineers over so many years...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer