Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

>If you have a long work history, and if you are good at something, there's a good chance soon the thing you're good at will be replaced by something you're not good at.

We know that doesn't happen for everything, but the problem is that it isn't somewhat predictable. We're pretty much in a lottery until the industry becomes insensitive to new tools which could take decades or more and we all have our own opinions on the safe bets and the risky bets. Maintaining legacy code sucks but it will at least get better because in two decades, the legacy code then will still have decent tools supporting it. I look forward to maintaining .Net 4.5 code in particular with visual studio 2013/15, despite that visual studio 2030 would be available. The IDE for my current legacy code responsibilities has a blazing white (#FFF) background with small font, non-monospaced black (#000) text. Kill me.

It's to the point now that if you gamble on investing time in new languages/tech, you have to plan to be out of a job while you retrain if something happens to your corner of the industry. Don't get me wrong though, churn like this is good because it's evolutionary. A new language isn't exciting any more because there's so many of them, but when one does make everyone excited, it's easier to see if it's worth the time. Eventually we'll get to the point where the idea of making a new programming language just isn't worth it because our normal set of tools are just so damn good.

I am an experiences software developer and I won't break my back and work nights/weekends/12 hour days for any employer. I foolishly did this enough in my youth on many occasions and it's just not worth it because you are doing all of the work, your personal life is suffering, and in the end, the investors and owners get rich while you need to find another job when it goes under or is acquired (in rare cases, do you get to keep your job because usually the company acquiring you already has their own people).

When I own > 50% of the company, it's a different story.

At one of my last jobs (> 3 years ago), the boss would call us on holidays, weekends, and whenever else things were on fire and expected us to work. One guy even had to cancel his entire vacation because of a release which had the entire team working on New year's eve into New year's day.

I just refused and wouldn't pick up my phone on the weekends or change my vacation schedule. I think the main issue with me was that the boss's poor management skills caused the delays and issues. Mainly, someone kept corrupting the git repo because they didn't know how to check-in code properly and it would re-introduce bugs we recently fixed and new bugs almost every week. It took her and the project manager 3 months to figure out who it was...and they weren't fired.

I was let go after a little over a year working there and replaced with a remote developer from Mexico. In fact, everyone on the US team was replaced with remote workers because they could work on our holidays and had no problems working every day.

The best part was that the owner gave me shares in the company, for every hour that I worked. I never actually received my share total on paper (besides a generic agreement when I was first employed) because the owner kept giving me a different excuse. About 6 weeks after I left, the owner dissolved the corporation and created a new one so he wouldn't have to pay anyone shares that were promised.

This sort of behavior is common in the valley (re-incorporating to push undesirable people out) and playing semantic and number games on paper to liquidate employees shares.

It's this sort of behavior that forces me to be unemployable as an experienced engineer.

What are you talking about? I'm 33 and I've thrown everything out and started over with new platforms, tools, libraries, and languages several times in my career so far. I haven't slowed down at all after getting married and having kids either... I've just gotten much better at recognizing dead ends early and not wasting time on stuff that doesn't matter.

This age trope seems to be from some early days when technology did move slower and people expected to spend their entire career working on the same technology. I've never had that expectation.

Anyone who thinks experience is worthless is an utter fool. My work hacking on an F# JavaScript compiler directly translated to doing massive CoW in-memory snapshots using immutable data structures in C#. My early work with SQL and transactions informed my approach to using atomic CMPEXCH to do optimistic in-memory commits, giving the entire app database-like MVCC transactional semantics.

All of that has been invaluable now that I do iOS development full time. Swift's approach to value types and mutability are natural fits to a wide range of things (like undo stacks and concurrent background processing while publishing consistent changes to the UI). Different platform, language, tools, etc but the experience was far from wasted. Hell, having done manual memory management back when iOS was an after-hours hobby project gives me the tools to find memory corruption bugs and diagnose crashes in an hour that some struggle with for days. Even within iOS there has been massive change and upheaval. There again, experience with generics in C# pays off.

Doing full stack development, writing JS libraries, wrangling with CSS... It's all been valuable experience.

Or, if you're experienced and "old", you realize that all the technologies you mention can be picked up in about a week or two (for all not per technology) and are essentially just rehashing old ideas that you already have years of experience with. You realize how with little effort you can pick up new things and recognize the stupidity of youth who write posts like this. And you write way better code than most young people because you understand what matters and it's not knowing some specific framework or tool.

Could you elaborate on the "Scrum" compliant part?

I am not super well versed in software development methodologies but the company I am interning at is using Scrum and I have come to appreciate the fact that it helps me "focus" on something and provide fast iteration for the product. Why is do you think it's bad and what are some alternatives?