Over the Hill at 35

http://takimag.com/article/over_the_hill_at_35/print#axzz1lSv1c7C0

by billswift • 14 years ago

42 60 14 years ago

orangecat• 14 years ago

So what advantage does a 60-year-old .NET programmer have over a 27-year-old .NET programmer when they both have, at most, 5 years of experience doing .NET programming? Absolutely none.

Regardless of your age, you do not want to work for companies that believe this.

Turing_Machine• 14 years ago

Definitely. Companies that think that the ".NET" part is more important than the "programming" part are going to be clueless about other things as well.

ramblerman• 14 years ago

What's your age out of curiosity ?

cunac• 14 years ago

whole lifetime of programming (assuming you start late in your early 20s) that gives you 35+ years of programming things that 5 year experience can't even scratch. Most of programming is not about programming language that easy part. My explanation to non techies is we all can read and write but how many of us are writers ?

pgroves2• 14 years ago

I have 10 yrs experience with Java, Ocaml and Ruby. This Jan 1 I started work on a contract with a company that uses Python. Having to learn Python as I went kinda slowed me down that first week.

beachgeek5• 14 years ago

> the USSR was tottering, India and China were struggling out from under the rotting hulks of, respectively, state socialism and Maoist lunacy, Major Medical was the merest notch on one’s paycheck, and young female office workers were wearing sneakers for their commute.

Cool. But this article was in no way racist or sexist, right?

:-)

beachgeek5• 14 years ago

Neggers can neg me if you want. But the truth is the world is getting browner, yellower and more female.

If you can't deal with this because you're a grumpy old white man, I suggest that instead of writing little passive-aggressive blog articles, you should really go fsck yourself.

w33ttoast• 14 years ago

Well, it's getting statistically less female in the places that are brown and yellow, at least in South & East Asia.

Also, grumpy old white men are staggeringly over-represented in terms of responsibility for the technology "beachgeek" is most likely using. If he can't deal, I'd suggest he write something for Takimag that would explain...unless of course, "fsck yourself" is the best he can do...

rbanffy• 14 years ago

I didn't read it that way. It's just stating a couple facts. In 1985, the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. I don't know about India or healthcare costs (I was 17), but China was recovering from Maoism (and it's fair to call it lunacy) and women who are expected to dress more formally for work still wear sneakers for commutes. Men would too if we had to use high heels. At least I would.

The racism may come from the concept citizens should have privileges and companies should not be able to hire the most effective workers available. I have mixed feelings about that because it can lead to unsustainable situations in either extreme. You have to issue immigrant work visas with care.

bsg75• 14 years ago

> So what advantage does a 60-year-old .NET programmer have over a 27-year-old .NET programmer

The advantage that more time on this Earth brings in terms of communication and understanding. "People skills, dammit."

dguaraglia• 14 years ago

Not only that. I've met 'old' (as in, 50+) programmers that were incredibly good.

These guys were programming assembly at the same age we started programming in BASIC (or Python/Ruby or whatever kids start programming in nowadays). I've never heard one of them complaining about how confusing pointers are, or wondering why is it that, although their structure is clearly X bytes big, allocating Y consumes more than X*Y memory.

Age in engineering is a completely irrelevant topic. Sure, old timers are more unlikely to adopt Node.js as their framework, but in general they don't because of the right reasons, not just because they are being backwards.

kstenerud• 14 years ago

tl;dr: "They're all using H1-B visas to take jobs away from citizens! Well, except for me, that is. My case was special. But the rest of them are all job thieves!"

Selvik2• 14 years ago

He's british though, movement of college educated professionals from london to new york creates very little (if any) downward pressure on wages, working conditions etc. Movement from Bangalore to New york, on the other hand, might.

georgieporgie2• 14 years ago

He stated that he was conflicted on the subject. He also explained that he came during an enormous boom period (1980s Wall Street), and definitely did not take a job away from an American.

raldi2• 14 years ago

How can he say he didn't displace an American who would otherwise have gotten the job? Or that he didn't help his company outcompete another one, causing them to lay off Americans?

bpm1402• 14 years ago

I’d make the case that it’s better to hire the 27-year-old because he is still at the stage of his career where he enjoys the stuff and is therefore more motivated to learn and work harder, while the 60-year-old is surely bitter about the fact that he’s getting paid less than the younger programmers.

When do you think was the last time the author actually spoke to a 60-year-old?

zavulon• 14 years ago

Did you read the whole article? The author himself is around 60

bpm1402• 14 years ago

The quote was from the Half Sigma article. I didn't get the idea that he was very old.

nirvana2• 14 years ago

I don't understand where the assumption that the 60 year old is getting paid less than the 27 year old comes from. Maybe this was written by a 27 year old?

The reason to hire younger people is that they're theoretically cheaper if you assume their output is the same as a more experienced person.

kruhft• 14 years ago

I'm 36 and after a hiatus and restart (of about 2 1/2 years) I'm just about to really get started again with my programming career. I'm tired of these stories.

nantes• 14 years ago

I'm 37 and enjoying the best year of any of my careers. I work with incredibly bright people, get paid pretty well in an inexpensive city, and get to do fun (mostly) fun work all day long.

Welcome back.

nirvana2• 14 years ago

The thing about age is, when you're 25 and you look at 35 and 45 year olds, you're amazed at how much they don't know. But when you're 45, and you look back on when you were 35, or 25, you're amazed at how much you didn't know.

The software profession is plagued by HR practices formulated by people who have zero understanding of software production. They think hiring 25 year olds is cheaper than hiring 45 year olds because they assume the output is the same while the cost is less.

Reality is a lot more complicated by that, and in terms of factors that determine the return for a given dollar in salary, age is is a complete wash. I don't think you can generalize on age at all.

As for H1B visas, we should get rid of the quotas. I've worked with 20-something Indian programmers. All have been good people. If they beat me out for a job, then so be it. I think companies that don't recognize the value of older engineers are shooting themselves in the foot, but that's their right to do so.

cageface• 14 years ago

I'll make you a deal: we get rid of the H1B visa quotas as long as we start rigorously enforcing laws against collusion among the big companies to keep salaries down.

cletus• 14 years ago

This is basically nonsense.

I'm over 35. I work at Google. I got my job when I was over 35. I've interviewed people over 35. Very few of the applicants I've met and/or interviewed have been extended an offer. None of it has anything to do with age. It all comes down to one thing:

There are a shocking number of people who work as programmers who cannot actually program.

The industry as a whole is crying out for people who can get shit done. If you can do that age is no barrier. Ageism, at least as far as programmers go, seems to be used as an excuse by those unable or unwilling to get a job as to why they can't get a job.

EDIT: the fact that this is Google I think makes my point rather than detracts from it. If at 35 with no particularly amazing background I can get hired at a top-tier employer, why not any employer?

You can argue that lower-tier employers are more biased but in my experience they're also less selective (or at least they select for different traits).

luser0013• 14 years ago

I think you're being too quick to dismiss the article because of your Google experience. Google may be one of the few enlightened companies which doesn't think this way.

Life being risky if you're over 35 is a regular topic of conversation in my circles. Vivek Wadhwa (IIRC) even had data showing that salary plateaus and then drops after 40.

beachgeek5• 14 years ago

Bull shit. Cletus is absolutely right. I'm a grumpy old Indian bastard in my mid-40s and I can find a job without breaking a sweat.

I'm sick and tired of these thinly-veiled-fascist stories that lay blame on Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Mexicans, Muslims, women, young people, martians etc, just because the dude that wrote the story is a big fat loser.

Learn new skills, keep networking, get with the program, learn to compete or deal with it. I'm no genius but my salary did not plateau at age 40.

neilk• 14 years ago

It depends what you mean by getting shit done though. The thing about 40-year-olds is that they want fair compensation, have informed opinions, and some of them even have lives. Meanwhile, our industry works by raining money down on the glib or foolishly optimistic, who see engineers as mere implementors. So many managers prefer a compliant 20-year-old who will sacrifice sleep and life to execute on the latest "pivot".

My manager at Google was exactly like this, by the way. Once, after a few drinks at a party, he mused on how he would achieve greatness, striding over the bodies of burnt-out twentysomethings.

(Before you raise an obvious objection: yes, the code was in a shambles, before it even launched. But code quality has rarely been a crucial factor in career success in the Valley, as far as I can tell.)

ilaksh• 14 years ago

I think it must also have something to do with H1-B workers _and_ young workers being cheaper.

jphackworth• 14 years ago

The lady’s husband, a semiconductor engineer, has been unemployed for three years, yet people in his field are being brought in on H-1Bs. She doesn’t think this makes any sense.

My nephew, an avid basketball player, has been unemployed for three years, yet the NBA is bringing in basketball players from other countries!

This article makes the incorrect assumption that if two people have the same job title, they must have the same skills. I was initially surprised that a "leading authority on H-1B visas" would make this mistake, but it turns out he is a professor rather than someone with any experience in the software industry, which explains why his arguments are driven by statistics without any understanding of how the industry works.

ryanwaggoner• 14 years ago

But whatever future lies beyond the next election cycle is of zero interest to any important person in any of the federal government’s three branches, so the band plays on.

Fortunately, not true for the judicial branch.

philwelch7• 14 years ago

To judge from blogs and comment threads, it makes perfect sense to that mighty legion of persons who believe that the nation’s laws should strive to ensure that citizens enjoy no advantage whatsoever over non-citizens; or, to put it another way, that the nation’s citizenship should be worthless and the nation itself a fiction.

Software firms are trading in their 35-year-olds for 25-year-olds as if they were aging matinée idols.” Countering them were a few retrograde souls who had been laboring under the juvenile illusion that US citizens’ interests should enjoy primacy in the calculations of US policy-makers.

It's hard to exactly gauge my moral response to this argument, but if you replaced "US citizen" with "white person" throughout that passage of text, you would come close. It's fundamentally evil to discriminate against people based solely upon the circumstances of their birth. This kind of protectionist jingoism isn't even in the best interests of actual US citizens.

hackinthebochs9• 14 years ago

Meh, your analogy doesn't hold up at all. A nation is by definition a collective of people. The collective of people should operate with the best interests of the people it represents in mind. The analogy with white just isn't valid.

I do think a nation should attempt to limit immigration when there are people in the country who can do the job (full disclosure: I'm American). If their skills are rusty, then train them. It's simply good social policy. The benefits of the nation (strong economy) should go to the citizens of that nation first.

philwelch7• 14 years ago

If you take this nonsense seriously, you conclude that massacring your neighbors and using their territory for "living space" is good policy. That's the actual outcome of nationalism. And for most of this "nation"'s history, the white racial identity of the "nation" was a controlling factor, using the exact same reasoning you are here.

Suffice it to say, I don't trust bureaucrats in DC to judge who can or can't do a given job over the judgment of actual employers whose bread and butter depends on it. And if you enable bureaucrats to keep people out of the country who can produce wealth, then the "benefits of the nation" will wither away. As a worker, let me worry about my own competence and ability to compete; as a consumer and as someone who needs the rest of the ecosystem for my job to exist in the first place, I want the best fucking semiconductor engineers in the world doing the work, not just some "rusty" guy deemed "good enough" to keep out a more qualified candidate by some uninvested bureaucrat, simply by the virtue that the better engineer happens to have been born in India.

7952• 14 years ago

Why is restricting free trade of talent in the best interest of the people?

raldi2• 14 years ago

I think a rock band is a better analogy. If your guitarist isn't showing up to practice and just doesn't keep up with the rest of the group anymore, you can replace him with a new guitarist. That doesn't make membership in the band worthless, or the band itself a fiction.

known• 14 years ago

Depends. Software consulting companies prefer < 35 and product development companies are open to senior programmers.

frasertimo• 14 years ago

Well I'll admit I don't have the experience in this area as that of Prof. Norm Matloff, but I've heard this story many times before, and it usually turns out to be the same; if you're complaining about foreigners taking your jobs, it's almost certainly because they do them better than you.

nasmorn• 14 years ago

What is a race-realist?

Selvik2• 14 years ago

I think he means to say he's one of the people who believe differences in measured iq scores between ethnic groups reflect underlying genetic potential for intelligence.

Some different perspectives on the issue:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/11/the-study-of...

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2011/11/29/th...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/29/1040695/-Andrew-Sul...

pgroves2• 14 years ago

I've had interesting conversations with recruiters where they make the point that people who write code are always in demand but demand for engineering management can come and go. I remember one distinctly saying that people my age (early 30's) who moved up to project managers were screwing themselves. This was in 2007 when the economy was in shambles.

I've always wondered how big an effect this has on these stories about old engineers finding it hard to find work. The older you are, the more likely your last position had a significant project management component that makes you sound like a PHB.

Over the Hill at 35

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