The Brutal Ageism of Tech

In this case, if you want 50 well-respected professors, you have to go out of your way to identify 100, then identify potential concerns (licensing issues with existing publishers and universities) and solve that problem. Building a website for people to upload slideshows and movies is a solved problem (hundreds of times over). Building a process to extract out valuable content from people who would otherwise not create digital content, then monetize that, that is not at all a solved problem, at least in many verticals.

Yes, someday, someone's going to crack this. I really don't think it'll be "some naive kid". The way you're saying it makes it sound like it's the "naiveté" which is the magic potion in all this (gosh he just didn't know what he didn't know and just 'made it happen'). That's a nice narrative, and does happen now and then - people win the lottery now and then too. But by and large it doesn't happen that way.

Certainly this space will get solved - probably in the next few years - but it'll be a licensing deal between the larger publishers and universities and someone who builds a platform for them to generate revenue from these captive audiences.

Of course, I might be 100% wrong, but judging by the number of students I talk to with "why isn't there a ..." ideas, I don't think so. most of the time the reason there isn't a good FOO when you're in the education world (as a student or teacher) it's because there's policies and purchasing procedures which prohibit it, not because someone hasn't thought of the idea yet.

If you were using one at age 10 and are now 35 that would have been 1989/1990 or so... there were no magazines writing about it by that time. You had some old issues of the TI-99er or something?

Wrong question, I think. Talent does increase with age, at least if the developers in question actually care enough to stay current. [1] I don't think it gets better by orders of magnitude, though -- the mythical 10x-20x programmer starts out as a 5x+ programmer. I know I was already at least that much better than most of my coworkers when I got my first day job.

What does happen is that developers are less willing to work crazy amounts of overtime just to impress management, and it's overtime bias that's the real problem.

I just blew away a team of two developers (both much younger) who had been working on a project for 9+ man weeks, catching up and passing them in less than two calendar weeks of development (on an implementation of the same code on another platform). And I did it in 30-40 hours per week. At a "traditional" company that rates performance by the number of hours each developer sits at their desks, I would have been the worst performer, and it's only the fact that I was doing almost exactly the same thing as the other team that made it clear I was getting more work done in less than half the work hours.

The corollary is that, as a young programmer, I cost the same as an idiot who couldn't put two lines of code together without creating three bugs, but I was already at least 5x as productive as that idiot (well, infinitely more productive than some developers I knew back then...). But now I have a track record and I make a lot more money; if I'm as good as 3-5 typical programmers, 3-5x the average starting salary is a bargain (considering reduced overhead, management, and increased chance of project completion because of reduced complexity).

But most companies don't recognize that, so they'd rather hire and manage 3-5 young developers for "cheap" who are willing to work lots of overtime. If they get at least one who's good, they may get more than their money's worth. Otherwise they're likely to end up with a project that's late, has tons of preventable security issues, and that is harder to extend than if they'd hired the expert.

That's what's broken. As to how to fix it: Would be wonderful if there were some verifiable way to rate programming skill, but until someone comes up with a system that can't be gamed, I don't see how.

[1] I've known many developers who effectively "give up" on learning new things at some point, and from that point on their skills rot (and/or they become managers). The ones who keep learning don't seem to hit a "skill wall", at least into their 50s, where my sample size drops precipitously.