Here's my stance on the problem. Most people here have heard of the MacLeod hierarchy (Losers, Clueless, Sociopaths). The VC-istan cult is about Cluelessness. (The MacLeod Sociopaths are the investors and executive implants who live outside companies and, smartly, get to diversify.) The whole ecosystem is built up around extracting value from young, white men who have a high proclivity toward Cluelessness.
When you're in school, deadlines are well-tested because everyone's doing approximately the same work. Unless you have a health crisis or death in the family, you don't have an excuse for a late assignment and the typical 10%/day policy is more than generous. When you're at work, though, 90% of "deadlines" are just someone's opinion and a good 50% are impossible. VC-istan is about exploiting young kids who haven't learned that yet and who would rather stay at work till 3:45 am than miss a "deadline" set by some VP with Shit's Easy Syndrome. See: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
The older programmers are really good at what they do, and they're a lot more flexible than the stereotype gives them credit for. The problem, however, is that they're a threat to the cult. Bring someone on board who does his best work between 8 and 11 (when the kids are just starting to roll in) and goes home at 5:30, ignores the deadlines that don't actually matter (i.e. the ones set by egotistical bosses, not hard deadlines that must be met if at all possible) and suddenly there's a breakdown of the Cluelessness. Couple this also with the Dunning-Kruger effect in reverse; the Clueless young people don't see that the older guy is 4x more efficient than they are (because they're inefficient and don't know it, cf. D-K). All they see is a guy putting in significantly fewer hours. Either the young Clueless will see him as a piker for his shorter work hours, or as a badass for his high effectiveness (making him a legitimacy threat, as the younger engineers see him as the real alpha).
I would also add that there's a culture of extremely harsh age-grading. VC-istan is most concentrated in high-COL areas where you can't raise a family on a (non-financial) programmer's salary; at two you can do it, but two career jobs, plus kids, necessitates maids and daycare and that's expensive and complicated, too. Because the only way to own a house in these cities is to become an executive or financier, you have a lot of 22-year-olds who see themselves being executives-who-code in 5 (!) years-- having managerial control of the division of labor and using it to give themselves the fun stuff, but being full-time programmers-- never mind the fact that that's extremely impractical in almost every organization. Very rarely do executives spend less than 20 hours per week in meetings. A 40-year-old who's been around the block and still programs might tell them as much. That's a problem. To counteract this, the 35-year-old VCs and 30-year-old founders discredit the 40-year-old programmers as "bitter" and he reacts by leaving, just after the one-year cliff so as to take a couple lottery tickets out the door with him because, well, strange things happen.
The short way to say this is that older programmers aren't the problem. The issue is that most of these formulaic startups are founded on exploiting young talent that overestimates the career value of low-end engineering work (because these people don't have the experience to tell what quality work is) and most older people can see through the bullshit. That's dangerous, insofar as it represents the threat of the younger Clueless engineers also learning to see.
"If it's easy to imagine, then it's easy to implement."
I once worked for a CEO and 90% owner of a startup who did very well for himself ($30 million exit - which he got almost all of as he hadn't taken any external funding) even though he really believed this. As far as I could tell he wasn't pretending - he really believed that any feature (no matter how complex and we were working in a very complex area) could be implemented in a week. As I was VPEng this perplexed me greatly - particularly as there was a conspicuous track record of features not being implemented in the times before I arrived.
My only explanation was that his attention span was about a week - if he asked for something and it appeared in a week it was great. If not he forgot about it....
[NB This CEO was a very bright guy - and I had a lot of respect for him].
A certain one week feature I planned has taken 3,5 years and still is ongoing. Despite I believe no feature should be planned that takes more than one week. Agile development I think this is called.
All of this... so true. Spot on. I'm seeing the same thing now. I'm in my early 30's and the younger developers we're hiring are doing all the shit work, and they are freaking out about following the rules and doing everything on deadlines. I've had the exact same realization about the deadlines being arbitrary, and ever since I realized the engineering talent gets to set the deadlines, I ignore most of what's dictated to me and I set them back. The management at my company can't do much about it because regardless of how long it takes, the work I do is the important technology work in the company and none of the other developers could do it (not now at least, maybe in a few years).
There was a bullshit fake article written by someone at facebook this week, some tongue in cheek thing about how awesome it is to work at facebook as a developer. Reading it made me sick, and right here you have articulated exactly why.
The problem with families is a real one. If you choose to have a family, well, you are going to have a lot less time and energy to put into your career. It's as bad as a MMPOG addiction; worse, probably, most people don't have the guts to ask for time off for a raid.
But, I don't think that has a lot to do with what we see as age discrimination; It does give the young kids a boost, but most people start families in their mid to late '20s, and even in the computer industry, that's young. By the time you are hitting 50 and seeing real age discrimination? your kids are almost taking care of themselves. (or, at least, they are leeching money, not time.)
meh, the previous generation is /dramatically/ better set for retirement than this generation seems to be. Defined benefit pensions are a real thing for them, as is healthcare for life as a retirement benefit. Often these things start in the '50s.
a lot of this is that risk-free investments had a positive expected return when they were working. Imagine that; T-bills that pay out more than inflation! I mean, it's a total thing of the past now, of course.
In VC-istan and on Wall Street, you see age discrimination sooner. Then again, that may have to do with extreme costs of living and mediocre quality of life pushing a lot of people out as they get into their family-building years. But my observation has been that age discrimination starts in the late 20s, although it doesn't become a show-stopper (only an annoyance) till much later.
It's not about absolute age. It's about harsh age grading. If you're 37 and VP/Eng, you're fine. If you haven't held a management position by that age, it starts to raise questions (even if you have no desire to manage). Hell, even at 26 you're out of the running for analyst-level positions in banking; you better have something that shows you're associate-level (a graduate degree or strong technical accomplishments).
I'm 29 and already experiencing age discrimination. I'm losing callbacks because I have "too many jobs" (which is basically a legal, back-door age discrimination although it's about the cynicism and "disruptive" expertise that come with "job hopping", not chronological years). Now, any place that has that attitude is a shitty place to work, but sometimes shitty jobs are useful and it's a loss (not a major one, but it affects leverage and financial planning) not to have them as options.
I just don't see it. I'm much older than you and have had no problems.
You mention too many jobs. What is your duration at such? If your history shows a consistent pattern of moving on every 18mo or so, it will raise flags about your commitment level. It has nothing to do with age at that point for many people I know when they look at resumes. Of course, the other end of that is many years at the same org can raise questions if it shows a lack if advancement.
>I'm 29 and already experiencing age discrimination. I'm losing callbacks because I have "too many jobs" (which is basically a legal, back-door age discrimination although it's about the cynicism and "disruptive" expertise that come with "job hopping", not chronological years)
well, to the best of my knowledge, at twenty nine, you are not in a protected class. the age protected class is 45 and up, I believe.
I'm skeptical of this idea that you face age discrimination before 30. It doesn't line up with any of the statistical data, and it certainly doesn't line up with any of my anecdotal data. (I'm older than you are, but not by a whole lot.) I mean, I could be wrong, of course, but that's below the median age, most places I've worked. (I mean, if you are talking specifically about web-startups that are still in the startup phase, then that's old. but that's a pretty small percentage of the job market. It takes a whole lot of web startups to make one yahoo in terms of number of engineering jobs. And generally speaking, the startups pay shit, so they get young workers trying to get their foot in the door, young workers who move up and out to the larger companies that pay more.)
Maybe you just have higher standards than I do? I mean, I thought getting paid six figures as a unix janitor in an area where that salary means I live in a condo (or buy during the downturns; the median santa clara county single family home last year was two hundred thousand dollars cheaper than the median single family home this year. Last year, median was a reasonable half-million.) means I'm doing pretty good. I mean, yeah, if you want to make millions of dollars a year, you are going to be on something of an accelerated schedule.
On the other hand, I haven't seriously tried to get a full-time job working for someone else for several years now, so maybe I'm just not seeing it.
Another option is to massage your resume so it reflects what the company is going to want to see. Project only the image you need to to get the job. Strip everything out but the five or so best-looking jobs, add a year or two on to the hire dates if you feel the need. Let them ask you what you did between jobs. ("Consulting. Not terribly interesting.") I don't think any hiring manager or recruiter wants to wade through a sea of text, anyway.
>Strip everything out but the five or so best-looking jobs, add a year or two on to the hire dates if you feel the need.
That's lying. It's REALLY STUPID lying at that. Your employment duration is one of the things companies are unequivocally allowed to say, and often do.
You can get around that by having your buddy pose as the hiring manager. Wish I had the stones to actually pull something like that. Go total Sociopath and see how far I can take it.
What I'm curious to understand is, are you at a competitive disadvantage if you don't follow this strategy? Or is it the case that a company structured around sane hours employing older, more experienced workers will be more effective, all else being equal?
In other words, is this pattern followed because it works, or is it just a cultural artifact that these companies would do best to abandon (but maybe can't for whatever reason)?
It depends on what kind of company you're trying to build. If you have short-attention-span investors who want to see shiny shit every 2 weeks, and you're trying to force yourself into a B2C red ocean, then you may want the 90-hour-per-week plug-em-burn-em-dump-em Clueless young programmers. Remember that most of VC-istan right now is social media, and most of that is marketing experimentation that happens to use technology, but not technology itself.
If you're trying to build Real Technology and you don't have a few 10+ year programmers, you're probably fucked. Different game altogether. Unfortunately, it's hard to get money for Real Technology because the payoff happens in the longer term. Most Real Technology companies make most of their money by consulting.
When you're in school, deadlines are well-tested because everyone's doing approximately the same work. Unless you have a health crisis or death in the family, you don't have an excuse for a late assignment and the typical 10%/day policy is more than generous. When you're at work, though, 90% of "deadlines" are just someone's opinion and a good 50% are impossible. VC-istan is about exploiting young kids who haven't learned that yet and who would rather stay at work till 3:45 am than miss a "deadline" set by some VP with Shit's Easy Syndrome. See: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
The older programmers are really good at what they do, and they're a lot more flexible than the stereotype gives them credit for. The problem, however, is that they're a threat to the cult. Bring someone on board who does his best work between 8 and 11 (when the kids are just starting to roll in) and goes home at 5:30, ignores the deadlines that don't actually matter (i.e. the ones set by egotistical bosses, not hard deadlines that must be met if at all possible) and suddenly there's a breakdown of the Cluelessness. Couple this also with the Dunning-Kruger effect in reverse; the Clueless young people don't see that the older guy is 4x more efficient than they are (because they're inefficient and don't know it, cf. D-K). All they see is a guy putting in significantly fewer hours. Either the young Clueless will see him as a piker for his shorter work hours, or as a badass for his high effectiveness (making him a legitimacy threat, as the younger engineers see him as the real alpha).
I would also add that there's a culture of extremely harsh age-grading. VC-istan is most concentrated in high-COL areas where you can't raise a family on a (non-financial) programmer's salary; at two you can do it, but two career jobs, plus kids, necessitates maids and daycare and that's expensive and complicated, too. Because the only way to own a house in these cities is to become an executive or financier, you have a lot of 22-year-olds who see themselves being executives-who-code in 5 (!) years-- having managerial control of the division of labor and using it to give themselves the fun stuff, but being full-time programmers-- never mind the fact that that's extremely impractical in almost every organization. Very rarely do executives spend less than 20 hours per week in meetings. A 40-year-old who's been around the block and still programs might tell them as much. That's a problem. To counteract this, the 35-year-old VCs and 30-year-old founders discredit the 40-year-old programmers as "bitter" and he reacts by leaving, just after the one-year cliff so as to take a couple lottery tickets out the door with him because, well, strange things happen.
The short way to say this is that older programmers aren't the problem. The issue is that most of these formulaic startups are founded on exploiting young talent that overestimates the career value of low-end engineering work (because these people don't have the experience to tell what quality work is) and most older people can see through the bullshit. That's dangerous, insofar as it represents the threat of the younger Clueless engineers also learning to see.