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At Google, You're Old and Gray At 40
theodp writes "Google faces an imminent California Supreme Court decision on whether an age discrimination suit against it can go forward. But that hasn't kept the company from patting itself on the back for how it supports 'Greyglers' — that's any Googler over 40. At a company of about 20,000 full-time employees, there were at last count fewer than 200 formally enrolled Greyglers working to 'make Google culture ... welcome to people of all ages.'"
I'm rapidly approaching 40, and I'm becoming more risk averse by the day.
Here's why: I know that when companies over-reach, then it'll be me who's pulling the late nights and weekends to deliver, not the guy that over-sold the product.
Younger guys either haven't learned that yet, or don't care as much, because they think that Arbeit Macht Frie. Well, I put in the Arbeit years ago, and I want my Frei now - just as today's young turks will want theirs tomorrow when they have families to take care of.
But they don't want it today, and that's why they make better employees, plain and simple.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's amazing the differences, working on a long term project. How long term? Our first released version was in the mid-nineties - and yes, we're doing more than just maintenance, even now. It's a defense project.
I'm on a team (within the larger project, which is 70-100 people) of seven people. Four are over forty, in some cases by a lot, one is about to turn forty, I'm thirty-three, and then we have our one, shiny just out of college person. We're pretty representative of the project as a whole, with the UI team trending younger than the others. The idea that older people don't know what they're doing, even on new languages, is pretty silly to me.
Some believe that the H1B flooding is actually designed to get rid of older IT workers
I think that's just to keep wages down in general. Our universities are pumping out plenty of CS and MIS grads as well as math and engineering graduates to keep up with demand. The companies that say there are shortages are just saying that to justify going overseas or to bring in H-1bs.
My father in law in quite an accomplished design engineer but as he got older, he has been gradually moved into testing positions.
It starts off with a lay-off and he gets it, finds another job that's not quite what he did before, lay-off, then another job not quite like what he did, and so on until now where he's writing Perl scripts to take data from testing equipment and putting that into Excel spreadsheets. Pretty beneath him, but he's grateful to have some sort of technical job at 70. All his contemporaries went into management (if they could) a long time ago, changed careers or they're now retired.
In my programming experience, I've known very few folks who stayed in programming after 40. One was well into his 50s but he grabbed onto a product and stuck with it for years. When I left, he was still programming C on Dos. But folks came and went because they didn't want to work on old shit and he was very lucky to have gotten a product with a very long market life - cash register software.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
There are more experienced techies who understand new technology than there are young ones who understand old technology. Or how their new technology works behind the scenes, for that matter.
And no, people aren't old at 40-50. With a normal work life lasting from 20-25 to 60-70, that's only halfway through, and is more likely to be near the peak of performance.
Clean Room Technician: You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty?
[to Aaron, who shakes his head]
Clean Room Technician: They take them out and shoot them.
I'm over 40 (almost 50) and get all new technology except for mobile phones. Maybe it's just me. I just don't have the social network I used to have in my 20s. By get, I mean motivated/interested in developing applications for. Not many new graduates seem to understand web services, SAS or SOAP.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
I'm bald. But the good news is I never get called away from work because of an emergency with the children, they left home long ago. I don't have to take time off for pre or post natal activities. Or to watch some 6 year-old in a school activity. I don't break a leg on "adventure" holidays and require all my co-workers to subsidise my recklessness. I don't get drunk every weekend and have "off" days every Monday. I don't spend half my working day trying to chat up my co-workers (for which they're very grateful) and I don't feel so insecure that I need to challenge every decision, or jostle for promotions - no matter how meaningless.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I bet most of the guys who started with Google in 1998 got rich and retired, which is why you don't see too many of them around.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I'm in senior mgt in IT at a bank. One of our departments wrote an iphone banking front end app, took a handful of people a couple of weeks. we launched it, got lots of press, tons of 20 somethings moving their bank accounts to us so they can 'bank on their iphone'. The 100 million of banking infrastructure behind the personal accounts and payments system preexisted the iphone, but several thousand dollars of development effort allowed us to open up a new channel to customers. its more of a marketing/accessibility thing, but in terms of 'real' IT most of the mobile market is a joke in relative IT terms. its the snazzy front end, its the geocities of the 1990s; fancy graphics and a twirling icon for the hipsters who think they're gods gift to technology. The real plumbing of technology is serviced by veterans with years of experience and deep technical knowledge; i'm happy google is ignore the greyframers, because frankly we need them (note: i am under 40).
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
My department wanted to hire me (46 y.o.) a younger "assistant" to help with all my duties. Mostly they're nervous that I'll leave and be hard to replace.
So HR asked for the skills and qualifications I have that are needed for the jobs and projects that I do.
After getting the list and doing some research, HR told them they would need to hire 3 or 4 younger people to meet those qualifications, at a cost of at least 2 to 3 times my salary.
So yeah, experience beats youthful enthusiasm every damn day. Get yourself some experience, kids.
Oh, I got a raise out of the deal.
I like how this comment ignores the generational gap between digital natives and digital immigrants.
Note
but perhaps they're not relevant to your lifestyle
Communication without disturbing anyone nearby (on public transport, during lessons at school, in the office)
There exists a mental technique called 'patience'. The huge downside to instant communication, and instant gratification from it, is that we fail to realize that half of our thoughts aren't important enough to actually send. If/when you have to wait 20-30 minutes to communicate it, you tend to condense things down. Your brain chews on them a while. Try it. Even with the digital tech, you may find the practice to be enlightening. This is what people used to do before cell phones, because, believe it or not those situations did pop up within their lifestyles.
Communications when the recipient is busy, or might be busy, but can respond later
See the above. And as you said, email might be better, and would likely be less intrusive. Texts tend to be small and very, very frequent. Again I assert that a great many of them are 'junk' that are only sent because they can be, rather than because they actually benefit either the sending or receiving party.
A note that doesn't need a reply when the sender doesn't want to be drawn into a conversation (e.g. text parent/partner to say you'll be late)
This is actually a decent example, but you may be surprised to note that before everyone had a phone in their pocket, people used to just try and not be late. They'd let others know to expect them well prior to the event, rather than twenty minutes beforehand. And on the flip side, we'd typically just stop inviting people who weren't dependable in this way. Life would happen, as it does today, and the party who arrived late would typically have a story to tell, which often garnered some sympathy, etc. Today it is "I got a text from Jim, he'll be late," and it has become just a bit too mundane.
The point being, people haven't changed much. The technology exists to prop up a certain level of impulsiveness that is the trademark of youth, but even the youths of yesteryear got by without such things. I think, too, that there are benefits of both points of view. And I think many of the older generation can see the benefits of the newer tech. On the other hand, none of the youngsters seem to get it, and I worry that society is feeding their sense of self-importance just a bit too quickly for our collective good.
Right on the money. That was my experience. I'm 49 and I was invited to an interview with Google (Approached). This was
initially flattering. However, when I got there the only person I saw all day that seemed anywhere near my age was the security guard at the front. not that this bothered me at all. During the interview they asked me to write a binary search algorithm on the whiteboard in whatever language I liked. Now all this some it was feeling somewhat insulted as these things are elementary, I also felt awkward doing such on a whiteboard, I spend almost 24/7 behind a computer and type faster than most folks I know. In addition, I spend 7 years working on hardcore search engine design and wrote a system that could fully index a 10GB corpus of text and html in a single pass (TREC test data) in 45 minutes on a circa 2002 PC (I know there was some systems that were faster, I could do it better now as well), and to be asked to write a binary search algorithm was not so inspiring, particularly when I asked if they wanted to see anything about the search engine I was working on they declined, stating that it would taint they interview procedure which was based on some standard tests. So what it comes down to is that it appeared that they did not take any past experience into account apparently (A procedure that maybe is just as well when hiring new graduates). Bizarrely enough, they didn't hire me for a sysadmin job, claiming I was weak in coding!! Some friends of mine reported that they knew some very smart people that reported the same experience, which helped my ego somewhat I'm glad.
I was better off that they declined anyway, I'm earning much more now than I could ever have earned there and have a couple of new promising businesses well on the way in addition to my day job (Business involving lots of coding, BTW).
You can work 40 hours and retire well.
All you have to do is spend less than you make consistently.
I make about 60k after all taxes are taken out. I spend about $36k a year. This includes a couple decent $1k vacations. Every year I basically build up a half year's retirement even without any return on the investment. Besides that, my car and house will be paid for in about 4 years and then my spending drops to $24k a year.
I drive a new car, with a warranty plan (so no unexpected bills for 7 years) and I have a warranty repair plan on my house (so no unexpected bills period). I dress well. I eat well (if I ate out less I could spend $30k now- I probably blow $500 a month on food).
I have one pet. When it dies, this will save me another $1k a year, until I replace it when I retire.
I suppose I could be blowing that $14k. I lived that life for about 6 years. It was fun-- but after a hiccup in the job market, I opened my eyes and said, "this is stupid".
I'm on track to be able to retire in about 8 years. Basically I have 4 years living expenses now- every year that grows by another 9 months worth (and if it starts growing from investments again like it did from 2000-2003, I could see 2 year increases each year).
On top of that I have social security- which currently would provide all my living expenses but which I may never see.
On top of that I have a pension which will be about the same as social security.
In some ways, once I finally start saving and retire- my spendable income will go up.
Unfortunately, I may have to work longer than I want due to medical issues but only about 15% of the population has to deal with that.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I can totally relate to this. I had an internship last year (as a Junior in college) where I was told I would have to work 30 hrs/week at least. This is already a lot for a part time job, but I was going to get $400 a week. Of course this sounded enticing. Well this was November and shit ended up getting hardcore. I dropped out in the beginning of April; by that point I was making $600 a week (this was all flat rate, not hourly), but I was working up to 70 hour weeks (this was BEFORE school factored in, classes and homework). I spent pretty much my entire winter break working, weekends and all, along with spring break (I worked weekends consistently through January and February until I finally spoke up). My transportation wasn't paid for and when you have 10-14 hour days and work across town, you end up taking expensive cab rides so my salary already lost $25 a day, for the most part. I wasted away and my girlfriend was depressed, I couldn't hang out with my friends and I couldn't lift at the gym and lost a lot of the muscle I had put on. I finally had to quit because finals were coming up and I couldn't handle it. Now, over the summer, I have to work on a paper that I didn't do well on but had a nice enough professor that she gave me an incomplete so that I could work on the paper after the term and get at best, a C in the class. My other classes I didn't do all that much better in, but luckily I get credit for all of them (even the major classes) so it's not the end of the world. However the stress literally made me waste away and push away people around me. My parents just assumed I hated them because I stopped going home as often.
My girlfriend constantly told me I was getting used, and I blew her off refusing to believe her and would get angry thinking she just didn't want me to succeed.
Finally, I saw the light and realized I didn't like where I was in life. The hardest part was breaking away from the "cool company" ideal every young developer dreams of in high school and realizing how full of shit it generally is when a business tries to appeal to your fun side and act relatable. It's worse than a high school assembly where some 20 year olds try and come in and act relatable so they can warn you about the evils of sex and drugs. If I'm in a work environment, then it should be relaxed but it shouldn't constantly pretend it understands where I'm coming from while feeding me bullshit.
I had to eventually "buy out of" the whole idea that the work I was doing was important; that our small dev shop was better than everyone else's small dev shop and all the other internal propaganda that gets circulated around. This is the hardest to do because the reason you work so many hours is because you are tricked into thinking that by doing so you are going to become the next 20 something year old billionaire if just put enough hours in and that everything your company thinks of is gold. In the end, just like every other small dev shop, it's people scrambling around in the twilight of the social networking boom trying to latch on to the one or two social networks that will remain relevant even after the bubble bursts (think the Amazons and Ebays of Web 2.0 compared to whatever the hell websites thought they had a future back in 1998 that no one remembers or cares about).
The good thing to come out of all of this is that I learned my lesson and got some experience. I want to make it, but I'm not going to listen to any management bullshit that I need to work mandatory unpaid overtime to get there. No one "makes it" putting their life into someone else's company. The only time working a job significantly more than M-F, 9-5 is if it is your company or partly your company. If you have an idea or you and a friend have an idea, then you put your life into it. If someone has an idea, don't let them hire you to put your life into it. There is no reason to ever do this much work for someone else because you will never reap the benefits. I was strung along with guarantees of a couple thousand here, a couple thous
Many of the other developers in their 50's are putting in 60+ hour weeks (and have been for several months).
Here's a graph you might find interesting: Productivity, 40 hours versus 60 over eight weeks.
From the same presentation:
Working more than 40 hours per week leads to decreased productivity
- Less than 40 hours and people weren't working enough.
- Greater than 40 hour work week gives a small productivity boost.
- The boost lasts three to four weeks and then turns negative.
Ford chewed on this problem for 12 years and ran dozens of experiments. As a result of Ford's experiments, he and his fellow industrialists lobbied Congress to pass 40 hour a week labor laws. Not because he was nice. Because he wanted to make the most money possible. We like to think of a 40 hour work week as a 'liberal policy' when in fact it was hard headed capitalism at its finest.
I'm only 33, have already transitioned out of IT for a living, and have a LOT of respect for the older generations, especially the mainframe engineers and the people who created the BBS scene. I agree with most of your post.
Is there any "new technology" out there to get, that I didn't get decades ago with a different marketing campaign and different command line syntax?
MediaWiki (Wikipedia) was really new. We had had user-generated content before (e.g. BBSes) but wikitext, history, discussion pages, integration with email, and concurrent revisions IMHO made a really new animal.
But beyond that, I'm kind of drawing up a blank too.