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

Is anyone willing to think about the opposite hypothesis? Maybe programming really is a young person's game.

You don't see a lot of startups full of old programmers dominating their fields. You don't see a lot of old programmers creating awesome open source projects. Not even from those who retired and have plenty of time on their hands. Many of the programmers who created great things 30 years ago are in positions to name their projects now, but what they've achieved since is less than when they were young and limited. Math and physics (the fields generally most like cs) show the same pattern: throughout history, most great work done by people under 40. None of this can be attributed to discrimination.

Certainly old coders feel as sharp as ever, with knowledge and experience tacked on. But how one feels is a poor measure of anything. Measuring overall talent is hard, and controlling for everything else so as to measure talent by age is harder. I haven't heard of anyone seriously trying.

It's a scary thought. Can anyone disprove it?

> Shouldn't salaries reflect the value you provide to your employer

Maybe they do.

An hour of one person is not always worth the same money as the hour of another.

Experience is a differentiating factor, and older people tend to have more of it.

That doesn't mean that every older person is worth more than every younger person or that every older person is more experienced than every younger person.

But if I can decide between hiring two guys, one that is experienced and gets the job done by working 40 hours and has a life and the other that works 60 hours and has no life I'd go for the one that works 40, whatever the age.

So if you're afraid to be out of a job at 50 because you're going to be 'expensive' work smarter, not harder. Provide the same value without having to put in the same number of hours.

That's the best way to guard against obsolescence.

Some of us did. As a contractor, you certainly can earn a significant multiple of the hourly rate you would make as an employee in most companies. If you set up your own business and build your own stuff, then you have almost astronomical potential: the software development business has low barriers to entry, and the right idea can scale from a small team to serving thousands or millions of customers.

However, it's not as simple as that: you absolutely must have a broader set of skills to work effectively in these ways. There are many management and communication skills that you wouldn't need much working in a technical role as an employee that are quite simply essential to working independently, and more still if it's not just your own work to be organised but a whole team/company. Also, you are operating without the safety net that being an employee provides: you typically bear all of the risk if you're on a high-margin fixed-price contract that overruns by a year, or if you put your own money into starting a company and your idea just doesn't work out.

> 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.

Firmly agree and I'll go a step further. I think the traditional org structure and traditional titles aren't well suited for emerging technologies.

Fact is, whoever is held responsible for succeeding/failing is going to get paid more. Being held responsible sucks and is hard.

I think a reasonable alternative would be smaller, largely decentralized teams that don't have traditional management, instead having two people they interface with who take over the traditional management roles - a logistics/supplies guy who checks what each team needs and makes sure they're equipped, and a planning/coordinating guy that makes sure the technical team has something sort of resembling a plan that fits in with the organization's grand strategy.

Team size would be 3 to 10 people or so, with one logistics/supplies guy and one planner/coordinating guy checking in with 5-10 teams at regular times and being on call during certain times if needed.

Something like that. As long as you've got a manager and he's held accountable for results, he'll have higher social status, be more neurotic, and expect to be paid more. I think moving to a supplies/logistics guy (similar to a servant manager type) and a planning/coordinating guy (strategist/diplomat/mediator) you could build an organization where engineers had more respect and authority and seniority, but things would be kept in check. There'd still be some friction between your planning/coordinate guy and technical people, which is natural, but ideally less so and there'd be more of a push for good engineers to lead a new team working on a new project than to become middle managers/planning guys. Largely different skillsets, engineering and planning/coordinating. Google Wave is a pretty good example of why you need a planning/coordinating guy and not just a pure engineering project, but engineers should have the most authority, social status, and prestige in a technology organization.

If they are making 60k a year, you can make several thousand dollars right now by getting them a rather large pay raise. Otherwise, re-re-read Patrick.

I seem to have been bitten by the radioactive spider that allows me to reliably post the highest-ranking "who's hiring" comment here, and your perspective on the availability of domain expert programmers doesn't square with my reality.