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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

#41

Post by stellar678 »

hga wrote: post #33
yungchin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The variation in productivity between programmers is somewhere from 1 to 10 to 1 to 100 (although I like to point that for a certain level of problem difficulty there's a cutoff below which productivity is 0 (ADDED:) ... and then there are those who's contribution to the organization is negative, but that's a different problem...). If it were the case that "salaries reflect the value you provide to your employe" we'd…

The question I have about these 100x (or 10x) productive programmers is why they wouldn't jump ship on employment and sell their 100x productivity on a project basis? Presumably they would make multiples of their salary if they are really multiply productive.

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

#42

Post by hga »

HilbertSpace wrote: post #29

Also over the past 10 years, venture capital in Silicon Valley lost money. Generally the venture partners do not know how to build significant businesses. Look at their backgrounds and see why. Compare with people doing significant work in technology for, say, the US DoD.

While I don't agree with your general point those are things with have always been true. For the last 10 year period I can't exactly blame the venture partners for SarBox ending the IPO exit (as another article has noted, in the last ten years there have been fewer > $100 million exits than there are VC firms). Add in the dot.com crash which started a bit before SarBox and the Great Recession and it's no surprise the industry has lost money. Or that we have every expectation it will continue to as it radically shrinks. The great 1958-2002 VC experiment is over.

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

#43

Post by mattmanser »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #19

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 Russi…

Experience.

That experience means you don't have to pay for your worker to be spending half the day trawling google or api documentation to learn how to do x when they could be writing code.

You also pay for the code to be maintainable, well written, flexible, robust. An inexperienced programmer will write shitty code, no matter how good they think they are, regardless of the number of books they've read.

Finally you pay for experience within the same domain as your company's problems. I don't care if a guy's been programming since 12, there's a 99% chance they've never touched business software. They will not know the right questions to ask.

As for the 60% discount, if that's what gets you gigs, fair play.

But to offer it on principle? That's just bad business.

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

#44

Post by hga »

ratsbane wrote: post #7

It's really more about how long it's been since you learned new stuff. Lots of programmers in their 40s learned most of their skills writing Windows apps and, at least the ones I know, are very resistant to change. If you just looked at older programmers who are open-minded and still learning then the numbers might be different.

Maybe it's that subset. Windows 3.0 was released in the middle of 1990 and it took a while for it to get red hot. Lots of programmers "in their 40s" should have "learned most of their skills" on earlier technology, e.g. UNIX and MS-DOS. Or mainframes.

I'm something of an extreme in that I was forced by finances to quit college after my freshman year and am about to turn 50, so it was a dozen years into my career before I started programming Windows (Charles Petzold C SDK level ... which I suspect is also not the sort of Windows programming you're talking about).

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

#45

Post by pointillistic »

This article fails to mention the most important factor, even more important than the money. Often people who advance to the management rank have the political skill or fund raising skill superior to their technical expertise. They simply don't what experienced engineers around who can see right through their bluff.

For the same reason the executives advocate immigration, they want ever greater supply of slaves to be discarded just when they start to understand the real game.

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

#46

Post by sabat »

hga wrote: post #37
sabat wrote: post #6

I suppose programming as a particular profession may have this dark secret; I'm not a straight-up developer (meaning I'm an IT generalist who does develop but usually has some sort of hybrid job including mgmt). However: I know lots of 50-something developers who have no problem maintaining employment and contracts. They are top-notch; their skills are current and their proven track record and accomplishments are wha…

How many of them are normal, full time permanent employees vs. contractors? The major issue I perceive here is that things are ugly for people wanting the former and many aren't cut out for doing the latter.

They're mainly contractors, by choice it seems. But as far as I'm able to tell, things are ugly for anyone who wants to be a perm employee these days.

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

#47

Post by Silhouette »

cageface wrote: post #25
Silhouette wrote: post #18

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 singl…

I think a lot of this makes sense when you realize that the typical tech company isn't really trying to do something that's very difficult. The average internet company is chasing some gimmicky take on social marketing or a trivial mobile fad etc and your ability to succeed in that kind of environment is going to depend more on your ability to work corporate politics than your technical skills, unless you're absolute…

I agree with much of what you're saying, but I don't think the "typical" tech company is anything close to the HN stereotype web start-up. Most tech companies -- and almost all successful tech companies -- are not just implementing some obvious, trivial web/social/mobile service and hoping to luck out on a quick acquisition.

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

#49

Post by cageface »

Silhouette wrote: post #47
cageface wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of this makes sense when you realize that the typical tech company isn't really trying to do something that's very difficult. The average internet company is chasing some gimmicky take on social marketing or a trivial mobile fad etc and your ability to succeed in that kind of environment is going to depend more on your ability to work corporate politics than your technical skills, unless you're absolute…

I agree with much of what you're saying, but I don't think the "typical" tech company is anything close to the HN stereotype web start-up. Most tech companies -- and almost all successful tech companies -- are not just implementing some obvious, trivial web/social/mobile service and hoping to luck out on a quick acquisition.

That's probably true. I think what I'm saying holds to a large degree within companies too. For instance, you're probably going to have fewer opportunities to distinguish yourself by ability if you're administering mail servers at Intel than you are if you're doing chip design.

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

#50

Post by hga »

stellar678 wrote: post #41
hga wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The variation in productivity between programmers is somewhere from 1 to 10 to 1 to 100 (although I like to point that for a certain level of problem difficulty there's a cutoff below which productivity is 0 (ADDED:) ... and then there are those who's contribution to the organization is negative, but that's a different problem...). If it were the case that "salaries reflect the value you provide to your employe" we'd…

The question I have about these 100x (or 10x) productive programmers is why they wouldn't jump ship on employment and sell their 100x productivity on a project basis? Presumably they would make multiples of their salary if they are really multiply productive.

A lot of us including myself just don't have what it takes to work on a multi-client consulting basis. Plus at least back before the net became really big Gerald Wienberg said that the correct hourly basis to set is 5-6 times what you want to earn because of all the overhead and downtime that comes with this business model. That's still a factor if you're charging on a project basis, which is extraordinarily dangerous in our field due to the inability of our customers and ourselves to correctly scope a project before it starts.
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