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MIT alumni in their 50s

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Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#111

Post by mcguire »

plg wrote: post #50
thewarrior wrote: post #9

This post really scares me and part of me wants to quit this industry even though I enjoy coding. Ageism is a brutal reality.

In my experience if an older engineer/programmer is more expensive than a younger one --- but the older one is better --- the older one will be hired. You get what you pay for. As long as your skill set isn't basically a "commodity" (generic web design for example) you will be ok. Put another way---if your decades of experience _don't_ give you some appreciable advantage over a 20-something new guy, then yes maybe yo…

One of the most entertaining conferences I ever attended was Usenix, several years ago. The paper sessions typically went like this: a grad student would stand up and present his and his advisor's research. In the sbsequent question-and-answer period, one of a small number of grey-beards (you'd recognize their names, but I can't remember who exactly it was; I'm old, too) would come to the mic and ask some variant of, "when we tried that back in the '80s, it didn't work because of.... How are you dealing with the problems?" There was never any real answer. (To be truthful, there were also a number of responses along the lines of "Why didn't you cite our earlier work?" which were more annoying since the typical true answer would have been "Because you only published it in a single post in rec.arts.no-one-reads-this." Bah.)

Since then, I've learned one thing: experience in this field doesn't give you any advantage. Or, more precisely, Cassandra, it doesn't give you any advantage that anyone will pay attention to.

I've had many similar conversations since that conference, usually along the lines of:

Them: "We should do X."

We: "That didn't work the last time; A, B, and C happen and only super-genius levels of D will get you out of the mess, which we don't have."

Them: "But X is the hot newness and everything's different this time, anyway."

Or sometimes:

We: "We're doing Y."

Them: "That's stupid, everyone is doing Z now." (Them almost never has more than 2-3 years of experience, by the way.)

We: "No one we've hired in the last ten years knows how to do Z, Z offers no actual advantage over Y, and I'd personally prefer not to have to deal with 27 different ways of doing the same thing."

Them: "I'm doing Z."

We: "Great. You'll be solely responsible for that project until you quit, then we'll throw it away and rewrite it. Just like last time."

Sure, you can keep up with the technology fashion; that's fairly easy. But it's a bit dispiriting to see the same problems in the new tech from the last time the dharma wheel rolled around. And to be unable to convince the new kids not to try to cross the railroad bridge because the 12:15 really does have a good on-time record. The entertainment value of watching projects hit the same shoals eventually loses its charm.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#113

Post by grmarcil »

sokoloff wrote: post #40
whiteheat752 wrote: post #12

As an MIT student... should I not become a programmer? I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability, and now would be the time to switch to a field with more "lock-in". What would that field be? Medicine? Mechanical engineering? Consultancy?

If you love programming and are good at it, it is the best field there is, bar none. You'd be a fool to turn away from it for a lifetime grind with epsilon better prospects. I'd do my job for half what I get paid; I just don't have to. As for nearing the peak of your ability (assuming typical undergraduate age and experience): BWAHAHAHA! You'll be even better than you are now in 5 years, and again 5 years after that.…

Wanted to put in a word of support for this point about looking back in 5 years. I nearing my fifth year out of college and the difference between now and then is huge.

It doesn't always feel that way because we often are comparing ourselves to last week or the guy at the next desk, but just in terms of expanded toolkit and knowing how to work within a big project and a big team, the difference is enormous. Lots of skills, both technical and "soft", that you don't even realize you don't have yet.

I think also, in college, you tend to think of your abilities in terms of A) how clever you are and B) how fast you can learn something new. Once you're working, your abilities are really judged more like A) how effective you are and B) how much you already know. Learning quickly is great, but having already accumulated knowledge and digested it for several years is even better. I could see myself feeling like I'm near the asymptote in 5 more years, but I could also see this going on for another 10 or 15 years. There is a lot to learn.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#114

Post by danielweber »

vanderZwan wrote: post #18
danielrhodes wrote: post #15

None of this should be particularly surprising: if you choose to be complacent in your career you can't expect stability or increased prosperity over the long term. The path from a junior engineer to a lead engineer is quite short relative to a your typical career length. If you don't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except laterally. After a certain point the impact…

> If you don't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except laterally. I find it almost insulting how you imply that "not desiring to be a manager" is the same as "being complacent in your career" Were the doctor, the professor and the attorney forced to move onto management?

They probably did move into a mentoring role, where swaps out "how many patients/cases you can handle is limited by your physical body" with "how many patients/cases you can handle is limited by how well you can keep your team going."

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#115

Post by madcaptenor »

mcguire wrote: post #94
madcaptenor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feynman writes about having to satisfy a liberal arts requirement in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman , so the requirement goes back at least to the late thirties.

It's been a while since I read it, but I seem to recall his approach to it was what I assume to be the normal MIT student's: take the minimum he could get away with and complain about how useless it was. I could be misremembering, though, and that was written much later in his life.

You're pretty much right, according to:

- this oral history: http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_2.html (search for "astronomy", which apparently was considered a humanities course!)

- this transcription of the relevant section of Surely You're Joking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Paranoid/Feynman

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#116

Post by sanoli »

gohrt wrote: post #78
Chinjut wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Hacker News is full of silly "programming exceptionalism", but programming is not all that fundamentally different from any other vocation. Go to a site for, say, doctors, and find people singing many of the same paeans to medicine that are here presented as specific to software engineering. People in many lines of work think that their field is the one thing truly worth doing.

I love baseball and I'm good at it, but it will never pay my bills. I am on a minor league team and I program to pay the bills.

Sports is different, in that the number of positions available that are good enough financially are very, very few. So for sports, you're just not good enough. As an analogy, if you were a doctor in a smaller town, in a tiny hospital, and you loved it and were good, you'd be fine.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#117

Post by mcguire »

hikz wrote: post #91
whiteheat752 wrote: post #12

As an MIT student... should I not become a programmer? I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability, and now would be the time to switch to a field with more "lock-in". What would that field be? Medicine? Mechanical engineering? Consultancy?

I do feel like I'm nearing the peak of my programming ability I'm very interested in what kind of projects you have done that made you feel like that. Sounds very interesting.

hikz, please stop dripping sarcasm on my desk. It's going to make my popcorn soggy.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#118

Post by adebtlawyer »

The calculation of total lifetime earnings / career track is tough to make in advance. It's important to remember that the licensed professions (doctor, lawyer) have significant costs to enter. The advantages are that the fields change more slowly, cannot be done remotely, and are licensed. This allows you to more easily accumulate knowledge and experience over time, and prevents competition to some degree. Theoretically, that should lead to a stabler career, but a higher earning one is harder to be sure about.

I have a CS degree and used to be a decent programmer, but became a lawyer. To maximize my lifetime earnings, should I have simply moved to California and gone into tech eight years ago? Right now, things are doing well now in tech, and there are too many lawyers, but would that have meant I'd be completely out of a job at age 50 due to ageism/competition? That was my fear, and not an entirely irrational one, since these discussions keep coming up.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#119

Post by imjk »

sixtypoundhound wrote: post #98

If we reverse the clock back to their 30's, the underlying math of these career choices isn't so kind... - The academic is completing their PHD program, with it's associated vow of poverty and about to start a multi-year tenure cagefight, in low-wage contract instructor roles. Only a small fraction will make it to full tenure; the rest will drop out to pursue industry jobs, 10+ years behind the engineers who went dir…

Agreed. Also, I think the article is more a reflection of the engineering landscape 30 years ago than a comparison of career choices that the author seems to be implying. I think it'd be foolish to make career choices based on the 30 year outcome of people in the previous generation.

Re: MIT alumni in their 50s

#120

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

sixtypoundhound wrote: post #98

If we reverse the clock back to their 30's, the underlying math of these career choices isn't so kind... - The academic is completing their PHD program, with it's associated vow of poverty and about to start a multi-year tenure cagefight, in low-wage contract instructor roles. Only a small fraction will make it to full tenure; the rest will drop out to pursue industry jobs, 10+ years behind the engineers who went dir…

> Meanwhile, the 30 year old MIT engineer has good odds of making six figures as a senior tech or technical lead.

Only in the major urban areas of the left and right coasts. Other places you have to fight to make above 75K.

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