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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

#71

Post by cageface »

tptacek wrote: post #70
cageface wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of them can. I've worked with several myself. As you might expect, they don't need jobs. I worked with a 20-something at my previous job that was as productive on his own as some entire teams.

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.

I know several 20-somethings making well over 100k/year coding and managing teams of much older engineers. For the most part they got the domain expertise that implies doing real research in top undergraduate CS departments, but they do exist.

Of course, the smartest thing you can do as a senior programmer is build domain expertise and get out of the more commodified areas, like web app dev. If that's what you & Patrick are suggesting I agree, but you underestimate your juniors at your peril.

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

#72

Post by nostrademons »

cageface wrote: post #17
patio11 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

So that's when you do things ridiculously different than other people. If you fail, you've still got this baseline of skills to fall back on, and you're indistinguishable from everyone else. If you succeed, you're very much distinguishable from everyone else, and that's worth a lot of money.

The same explosion of knowledge that open-source and github has spawned has created a wealth of new niches that are quite promising but generally underexploited. Everybody's piling into Ruby on Rails, Django, JavaScript, iPhone, and Android development. How many people are piling into things like computer vision, large-scale data mining, wearable computing, or robotics?

Search was not sexy in 1998. E-commerce was sexy. Everybody piled into E-commerce, which left the field wide open for Google to come in and clean up while Pets.com withered away and died.

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

#74

Post by nostrademons »

didip wrote: post #16
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…

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.

I'm pretty sure that at least some companies compensate for negotiation skill at annual raise time. Google, for example, tries to normalize salaries by performance & job function when they grant raises. So if you're a really good negotiator and managed to get a salary much higher than your equally-performant peers, your annual raise & bonus will be less than if you're a really good programmer but suck at negotiation.

My guess is that all other things being equal, a bad negotiator won't actually catch up to a good negotiator. If things are not equal though, and the good negotiator sucks at his job while the bad negotiator is absolutely rocking it, I think that the strong technical person could easily make up the difference through promotions and bonuses.

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

#75

Post by nostrademons »

HilbertSpace wrote: post #32
sanj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go find a better company to work for. All of those issues are company-specific. Sadly, most companies have at least some of the problems. And I find your McDonald's story insulting: talk to me after you run one a single McD's by yourself and then you'll be able to convince me that a programmer should get paid more. Dealing with people is hard. Dealing with short term employees is harder. Dealing with people who don't…

When I was an MBA prof, one of my students was running a Wendy's, in Columbus! He explained some of the opportunity: Watch staffing CAREFULLY. To do this, more than once a day, watch the weather, various public events, say, a high school football game, or anything and everything else that can affect traffic, Then staff accordingly. If are one person short on a shift, then lose revenue. One person long, then waste mon…

That's an information problem, though, right? A McD's manager uses information and domain knowledge they have to lever up efficiencies in the business. They're every bit as much of a knowledge worker as a software engineer.

Now imagine that you partner one of those with someone who has technical skills in data mining, expert systems, and real-time data feeds. They build a system that watches local events, checks the weather feed, looks at traffic, etc, and predicts likely sales and staffing needs. Heck, it could even call the employees in to work while the manager sits on his yacht.

This lets several marginally profitable McDonalds owners suddenly start living the high life on $1M/year. The software might cost say $100K, quite a reasonable price if it saves at least that much on employee costs. There are 12,000 McDonalds in the U.S. The software engineer and his McD's partner are now head of a company doing roughly $1.2B/year in revenue, and there are maybe 10,000 newly-minted millionaires out there.

Any experienced McDonald's managers looking for a technical cofounder?

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

#76

Post by bokonist »

lzw wrote: post #39

Zuckerberg advocated age discrimination outright from the stage of startup camp 2007. Of course at his age, he doesn't know any better. Here's a big secret, it isn't a struggle for older people to keep up with younger people. It is actually easier for me to pick new technology, or languages now than when I was a 20 year old programmer.... And I'm able to take responsibility for projects and order of magnitude more co…

Almost never have I been on an interviewed where they actually checked to see if I was qualified competently. And universally the ones who did, didn't ask me to write code for them.

What they did the companies who actually checked your competence ask you?

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

#77

Post by cageface »

nostrademons wrote: post #72
cageface wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

So that's when you do things ridiculously different than other people. If you fail, you've still got this baseline of skills to fall back on, and you're indistinguishable from everyone else. If you succeed, you're very much distinguishable from everyone else, and that's worth a lot of money. The same explosion of knowledge that open-source and github has spawned has created a wealth of new niches that are quite promi…

Agreed. That is my current plan exactly. I'm heading off for 3-6 months in SE Asia to spend travelling, living cheaply and studying math & machine learning with the goal of coming back to the States later to either pursue a graduate degree or a gig doing ML/analysis.

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

#78

Post by d4nt »

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…

> "Move up the ladder into management, architecture, or design"

The ability to convert detailed specs into code is a fungible commodity. Management, architecture and design, on the other hand, are areas of software development where you need multiple complementary skills; technical ability, good communication, understanding of your customers and industry area, an ability to influence others, etc. People like that cannot easily be replaced, hence the higher price. In some cases technical guys appear to need those things too, but that's just because they're unofficially doing the job of an architect, manager or designer.

> 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.

Define wise. That sounds a lot like "capable of being an architect/manager/designer". If you're capable but resisting the promotion then I'm suspicious of your claim to deserve more money.

I agree with you that an experienced coder will be more productive than a less experienced one. But I would also say that 20 years experience will never make up for a lack of natural ability. I've interviewed programmers with decades of experience who failed the most basic of our technical tests (think FizzBuzz). I'll bet for every old timer who's excellent and just wants to stay a coder, there are 5 who are just below average and have never been offered a promotion.

I see the issue more as a failure by the good experienced coders to differentiate themselves in the marketplace than a conspiracy against old people. If you've been doing something for 30 years but all you're selling is "5 years python experience" just like everyone else then why should I pay you more? Tell me why you're worth more. Convince me you're lack of promotion comes from a passion for your craft and not just down to a lack of ambition or ability.

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

#79

Post by tptacek »

cageface wrote: post #71
tptacek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know several 20-somethings making well over 100k/year coding and managing teams of much older engineers. For the most part they got the domain expertise that implies doing real research in top undergraduate CS departments, but they do exist. Of course, the smartest thing you can do as a senior programmer is build domain expertise and get out of the more commodified areas, like web app dev. If that's what you & Patr…

You're doing a really good job of evading the point here.

If your friends are making $100k/yr, they are squarely in the same hiring demo that 40 year old senior devs are.

The whole thesis behind the article you are commenting on is that companies are hiring young because young devs are cheap. You made a comment to the effect of, "watch out, young cheap people can be domain experts too". I think you're mostly wrong, but I'd love it if you were right, and I'm very much putting my money where my mouth is.

I know that there are anomalously capable 25 year olds out there. I'd love to talk to them, too. But the idea that all of Silicon Valley is built around those people rings false. It may very well be built around 25 year olds, but not the weird ones that run High Frequency Trading Engine teams.

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

#80

Post by Silhouette »

lionhearted wrote: post #68
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'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 pai…

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

Indeed, but let me ask you this: what real responsibility do all those layers of middle management in a typical big software company actually have?

Detailed planning of individual features is junior management stuff. The only estimates that are really worth a damn come from the junior managers, based on the technical data provided by their teams.

Strategic product and project management -- what products and major functionality are going to be built and when they will ship -- is senior management stuff. The technical decisions that really matter are taken by senior managers or executives. Are we going to drop major projects W and X but include Y and Z, given that this means we can ship a new version of this product in Q3? Shall we authorise a 20% increase in payroll budget for this product's team, given that this would allow us to include project Y by that deadline as well?

Obviously in a large organisation with many products, each of which is itself large, there is scope for having layers of management in between so everyone is working on a sensible scale. But you can scale out a pretty long way with just a single layer containing just a few extra managers, and I'm pretty sure that the 2/3/4/5/6 layers you often find in a lot of big software companies are mostly dead weight.

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