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Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

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Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#11

Post by yungchin »

cageface wrote: post #4

If you're young and sharp, programming looks like paradise. It's more or less a meritocracy, there's a ton of personal freedom, and you get to spend your days doing creative, challenging work and getting paid fairly well. You may not have even had to slog through 4-5 years of college. You'll start to see the downsides as you approach 40 though. Many programmers can't play the social games that management requires, th…

> ompeting neck & neck with people twenty years younger willing to work 60+ hours a week for half your salary

My probably naive question is, how come you earn twice as much in the first place? Shouldn't salaries reflect the value you provide to your employer, so that either 1) you don't earn as much because you're actually worth less than the 60+ hours working kid, or 2) you earn twice as much because the hours you do put in are worth more than the kid's hours?

I would hate to be out of a job at fifty because by some arbitrary convention I'm supposed to either earn twice what the kid earns, or alternatively be jobless. If I can't provide more value than the kid, then pay me as much as you'd pay him.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#12

Post by hbt »

cageface wrote: post #4

If you're young and sharp, programming looks like paradise. It's more or less a meritocracy, there's a ton of personal freedom, and you get to spend your days doing creative, challenging work and getting paid fairly well. You may not have even had to slog through 4-5 years of college. You'll start to see the downsides as you approach 40 though. Many programmers can't play the social games that management requires, th…

That's assuming you're doing the same thing you used to do 20 years ago.

I mean even with new technologies, if you end up building sophisticated CRUD interfaces with language FooBar 20 years from now, you can't really complain about it.

People who managed to differentiate themselves in CS over the years moved to stuff like computer vision, natural language processing, designing programming languages, optimizing virtual machines, designing protocols or mixing their knowledge of CS with another field.

Very advanced stuff which takes years (if not decades) to master and to write/build properly.

So, I would only worry if 20 years from now, you're still solving the same problems but with a cuter UI and a faster machine.

PS: Should have used "one" instead of "you". I don't mean "you" ;-)

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#13

Post by robryan »

This vastly undervalues knowledge and experience. Maybe a graduate can compete in the day to day work of programming but over the long term of projects that extra knowledge and experience is going to help, assuming the senior programmer is constantly learning. It would be true to say programming in general isn't one of those professions where you can learn your craft and then spend a career applying it.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#14

Post by elai »

neodude wrote: post #3

Counter-anecdote: I just got rejected from a startup because I was too inexperienced, despite having 4+ years of professional experience under my belt. They said there's no reason why I wouldn't be awesome, but I've just done too little for them to know for sure.

Your not the mid-30s programmer, your the mid-20s programmer. The drop off happen after your mid-40s.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#15

Post by tristan_juricek »

So, we should be taking care of our own career growth? Shocker.

Yes, there will be a point where your salary will not grow. But that salary is usually higher than most other skilled professions. (Note: this is an assumption; if I'm wrong, that would be interesting.)

My experience has seen very little "mastery" in programming; after about 5 years, most engineers hit about the same level of ability. (Note, I'm not saying you can't hit mastery of a particular thing, but that most don't do it.) Thus, there are only two kinds of programmers, skilled, and learning. If you don't gain differentiating skills after those extra years, why should you be paid for it?

Maybe this is the real "dark secret": most programmers don't know how to gain mastery of something useful to a business. Maybe this is what "we" should be worrying about, rather than hiring practices?

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#16

Post by didip »

yungchin wrote: post #11
cageface wrote: post #4

If you're young and sharp, programming looks like paradise. It's more or less a meritocracy, there's a ton of personal freedom, and you get to spend your days doing creative, challenging work and getting paid fairly well. You may not have even had to slog through 4-5 years of college. You'll start to see the downsides as you approach 40 though. Many programmers can't play the social games that management requires, th…

> ompeting neck & neck with people twenty years younger willing to work 60+ hours a week for half your salary My probably naive question is, how come you earn twice as much in the first place? Shouldn't salaries reflect the value you provide to your employer, so that either 1) you don't earn as much because you're actually worth less than the 60+ hours working kid, or 2) you earn twice as much because the hours you d…

Ideally, things should work that way.

But in reality, salary worth is determine by your negotiation skill within that limited time window before you accept the new job. And that's another industry's dirty little secret.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#17

Post by cageface »

patio11 wrote: post #10
cageface wrote: post #4

If you're young and sharp, programming looks like paradise. It's more or less a meritocracy, there's a ton of personal freedom, and you get to spend your days doing creative, challenging work and getting paid fairly well. You may not have even had to slog through 4-5 years of college. You'll start to see the downsides as you approach 40 though. Many programmers can't play the social games that management requires, th…

We all compete with people who will work 60 hours a week for half our salary. Words cannot express how much I disagree that "knuckling down and doing your best" is a sustainable competitive position. Do it better than they do. Do it measurably better than they do. Do it ridiculously better than they do. Widen the scope of "it" to include a skill not on the menu at RentAResource.com, then do it. Market your doing of i…

Do it ridiculously better than they do.

That sounds nice on paper, but there are a lot of extremely talented and productive young programmers on the market now. The kind of education you can provide yourself if you really dive into the open-source world and things like github simply wasn't available even ten years ago. So yeah, do your best, in the old fashioned sense of the word before people became so enchanted with non-sequiturs like 110% performance.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#18

Post by Silhouette »

Management error #1: "Move up the ladder into management, architecture, or design"

As long as management insist on perceiving themselves as superior to other people, and assuming that technical competence somehow implies management competence, there will always be a drain on the good technical guys. The reward and recognition structure strongly encourages them to change discipline. However, can anyone cite me a single source that justifies this position? I'm not sure that any company I've worked for, of any size, really got more value from its middle managers than from the senior technical people it keeps trying to turn into middle managers.

The assumption that architecture/design is more important than front-line coding is also dubious. A good architect/designer is worth their weight in gold on a large project (just like a good manager), and to be sure you probably need a fair bit of experience to be any good at all in that sort of role. But that just means the low end of the scale for that role is higher, it doesn't mean the high end of the scale for front-line coding jobs has to be lower. All the evidence I've ever seen still says an expensive, high-end front-line coder is disproportionately productive compared to a cheap, lower-end worker. You can have the best project management and the best design in the world, but if all the guys implementing it are chumps, your project is still going to suck.

Management error #2: "Even though you may be highly experienced and wise, employers aren’t willing or able to pay an experienced worker twice or thrice what an entry-level worker earns."

That's because they're dumb... Maybe because they got too many technical people to do their management instead of people who are actually knowledgeable about and good at management? Project costs scale disproportionately with team size/structure. Developer productivity scales disproportionately with experience. How is it that so many companies can't do the basic arithemtic required to see the implications?

Management error #3: "This means keeping up-to-date with the latest trends in computing, programming techniques, and languages, and adapting to change."

This is not an error in itself. On the contrary, IME most older developers who are genuinely interested in their field do keep up (and find it far easier to do so than their younger and less experienced colleagues, since the tech industry doesn't innovate nearly as fast as the PR guys would like to pretend: older guys have seen a lot of it before, and can quickly identify genuinely new things worthy of further exploration and put them in context).

However, the error is in drawing this sort of conclusion based on the statement above: "To be writing code for a living when you’re 50, you will need to be a rock-star developer and be able to out-code the new kids on the block."

Almost everyone who is keen enough to still be coding by that age will out-code the new kid with his trendy tools and methodologies in his sleep.

BTW, I'm not an "old guy" in programming terms, and there's no bitterness here. I'm just a guy who watches this sort of debate from the sidelines, wondering how so many supposedly smart management people can be so utterly, obviously, incredibily dumb for so long, and still not get it in 2010.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#19

Post by mark_l_watson »

I don't get why someone who is older should get/expect a higher salary, all things considered. To me, it seems like this should be a free market thing. And by free market I mean on a global basis. On the other hand, I am in my late 50s, and I don't think that I have ever suffered from age discrimination (but who knows).

Experience over the last 14 years as a consultant, working with a few very skilled people in Russia, Brazil, India, Vietnam, etc. has convinced me that salary or consulting fees should be based on value provided, not location, age, etc. I offer a 60% discount when I work remotely because frankly remote workers are not as effective as having everyone in one location and I see little difference between myself telecommuting in the USA or someone equally talented half way around the world, assuming that people are willing to time shift their work schedule as needed. Age does not have too much to do with it either, except that I find myself unwilling to work long-term more than a certain number of hours per week - and this is probably common with older workers.

Re: Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

#20

Post by cageface »

yungchin wrote: post #11
cageface wrote: post #4

If you're young and sharp, programming looks like paradise. It's more or less a meritocracy, there's a ton of personal freedom, and you get to spend your days doing creative, challenging work and getting paid fairly well. You may not have even had to slog through 4-5 years of college. You'll start to see the downsides as you approach 40 though. Many programmers can't play the social games that management requires, th…

> ompeting neck & neck with people twenty years younger willing to work 60+ hours a week for half your salary My probably naive question is, how come you earn twice as much in the first place? Shouldn't salaries reflect the value you provide to your employer, so that either 1) you don't earn as much because you're actually worth less than the 60+ hours working kid, or 2) you earn twice as much because the hours you d…

I agree. Salaries should correlate more directly with performance but in a lot of companies you steadily collect your yearly raises and after a while they add up. This can be very dangerous for people in tech though. In fact I just left a job after ten years of steady raises because I felt I was stagnating. I'll probably take a considerable pay cut in my next job but I think staying put would have been a lot riskier in the long run.

At least I'm not chained to an S.F. mortgage that means I can't live on < $90k/year.

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