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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.'"
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.
Is it possible that this statistic is just due to the fact that Google is a young company? My hypothesis here is that they've just done the most hiring where there are the most candidates, straight out of school. I don't know whether this is sufficient to explain the numbers, but it's not like they can focus on retaining employees that have been with the company for twenty years. Anyone old at Google was hired old.
There is always the talk of how older people don't get new technology, but i think this only described the people who grew up without IT and were confronted with it at a late age for the first time.
This might be naive, but i think now is the time where people grew up in this high tech scenario and for the first time actually grew old with it, too. Society needs to understand that the "new old guys" are just as proficient in adapting new technology as the young ones because adapting is what they did their whole life.
I applied to Origin Systems in the late 80's after I got my CS Degree, I was 28. Had a phone interview, at one point the guy (kid?) interviewing me told said "You're kind of old, we don't think you could handle the pressure." Seriously..28...kind of "old"? Lulz.
yeah they LOOKED 40. Probably late 20ies on near-burnout.
Is it? Or do the old-timers just not get new technology?
The kids think some rehashed ancient concept from the 70s or 80s with a new marketing campaign, or same old stuff tweaked by the engineers now with improved specs, is "new technology".
I know about IBM VM OS from the 80s, so I know everything about Xen/KVM/etc except the new marketing spin and the command line syntax.
I know pascal p-code virtual machine system from the 70s, so I know everything about the java virtual machine concept except the new marketing spin and the command line syntax.
The kids are trying to wrap their heads around the very concept of virtual machines, or the very concept of clustering, or the very basic concept of parallelization/threading. I did that back in the 80s, its old technology to me, not new.
Same &#!^ different day with "high level language of the week (tm)", client-server processing, middleware, packetized data networks, etc.
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?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Most people over 40 realize that in the end it's just a job. Families are important and when you reach a certain age you start to understand what's important in life. Most corporations will drop you short of fully vetted and with not so much as a "thank you very much" to save the money.
20 somethings are great because they'll work long hours and think nothing of it. The problem is quantity does not equate to quality. Google might not be in so many new court cases if they had a little wisdom present when some 20 something said "Hey, lets put WiFi sniffers on our camera cars!".
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
Or do the old-timers just not get new technology?
Funny, my young friends come to me for help with their tech. Maybe I'm not your normal geezer, but most other nerd geezers aren't so normal either.
Besides, most people over 40 don't want to spend 60hours+/week at work.
Damned right, suckers. With a few years (hopefully) one gains a bit of wisdom. I don't live to work, I work to live, and sixty hours a week doesn't leave much time for living.
I think it's a damned shame that you young people are willfully giving up what my and previous generations have fought and striven for.
Again -- SUCKERS!
Now GOML.
Free Martian Whores!
Holy crap, are you serious? First of, who really wants to work a 60 hr week? For that matter why forty or even a flippin' 8 hr day. programming is not assembly work, it is craftsman work, more art then anything else. Since I started in this industry over 29 years ago I found that the idea of turning on creativity at 9 and turning it off at 5 was laughable. For accounting purposes I appreciate the need for some set time frame of measurement for payment of services, but if it takes you 60 hours to accomplish tasks in a week then either you cannot do your job well, you are way over worked thus abused in your job, or a workaholic that cannot comment on how normal people approach their job. I do not want to spend 60+ hours a week working because at 49, I have a life.
As to understanding new technology? How frickin' pretentious can you get? Define "new" technology? Show me a language that is radically different from most other languages that only "young" technicians understand. Are machines that more sophisticated today then five, ten, fifteen years ago or have they just improved in speed, storage space, and simplicity. I don't use an Iphone so am I just an old geezer or a person who does not want to toss his well earned salary on Apple/AT&T for a bunch of toy apps. Ipad, slates, notebooks, these are not "new" technology, just repackaged current technology. New would be along the lines of neural links, bio-integrated technology that free me completely from carrying around some plastic, silicon and wire.
Grow up, think for a moment. One day you will be me, a 49 year old, active, knowledgeable IT professional with the potential to work, add value to a company while enjoying a life. Step away from the narcissistic attitude and consider your future when you say things like "do the old-timers" and then don't say it unless your purpose is to sound stupid in public.
Sit on my lawn all you want because (1) I bought it with my salary (2) I can enjoy it because I work to enjoy it and (3) because it seems you need a place to remind you that life is more then work.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
You're not getting it. Pretty much everything 'new' in IT is just the old stuff renamed/repackaged. The point the OP was making is that once you grok the concepts, learning the latest syntax is trivial. I found Java pretty easy to pick up because it had so much of previous languages in it. I already knew how much of the underlying technology worked so all I had to do was work out what J2EE and other terms were all about. A day with Google, a half decent book or two on Java and 2 weeks later I was running circles around the hot new Java 'Guru' grads at work. The only difference was that I went home at 5:30 and they stayed somewhat later working on something that would have taken anyone with experience ten minutes to solve.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
has a built in karma
if you are white, you'll never be black. if you're a man, you'll never be a woman
but if you are 20, some day you WILL be 50. therefore, all of the hatred you dish out will be visited back on you... by your own self. karma still applies to sexism and racism, but it comes back in the form of other people's views of you. not the special hell of a self-created low self-opinion
if you are 20, and have a bad attitude towards the aged, someday, you will have a bad attitude towards yourself. self-hatred is something all of us carry around to some extent, but to have self-hatred gradually grow as you get older must be a terrible weight to bear, and it keeps growing
you can see it on the street: the guys with the ridiculous fake hair and the women with the ridiculous facial plastic surgery: this is self-hatred. who wants to walk around broadcasting their lack of confidence and stinking of desperation, to telegraph that you want to be something you can never be again? to worship youth, but then turn into someone old, must be a terrible experience to go through. to simply look at yourself in the mirror and be filled with anguish: built in karma for being an ageist. this also might explain some suicides by people in their 40s and 50s
meanwhile, if you always treated the elderly fairly and gracefully, then when you yourself are older you will still be confident, and still like yourself, because you will treat your older self the way you treat older others today. built in karma still applies, but in the positive: you age gracefully, and have a full happy life
so the cost of being an ageist is to have an unhappy older life
don't be an ageist. look at the elderly and see yourself as you will be someday, and smile, for the sake of your own future happiness. you want to age gracefully, you really do. so prepare yourself psychologically now for aging gracefully, by treating the aged you encounter today with the same grace you want to treat yourself with later
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Funny thing about that. We are doing an SAP conversion and one of the principles on the project is in his 60's and outworking the consultants who are working obscene hours because they are paid hourly. Many of the other developers in their 50's are putting in 60+ hour weeks (and have been for several months).
But generally, it's not a question of "too tired" as much as "too smart".
Pay me hourly and I'll work the hours you want.
Why should I work 60+ hours a week for a 10% bonus?
Why is your emergency an emergency? Sure an emergency can go on for a few weeks but if you are talking 18 months-- you are understaffed. It's not an emergency. You are using me as a slave and a battery to toss away when I get to be "old" at 40.
Especially when I know the managers are going to be getting 33% bonuses if the project goes in?
Also, the younger people get 30 years of career payoff for (in some cases literally) killing themselves. On our last big push 10 years ago we had a fairly young developer die when an other wise mild virus wasn't taken as sick time and he worked and worked and finally it crossed the blood brain barrier. The doctors apparently said he was so worn down he couldn't fight the illness.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I blame it on the current talent pool in the midwest. Most of the people we bring in now all have this "video game" degree from the nearby university. Not one of them understands the concept of designing practical solutions. They also do not understand testing. They seem to fall into the duct tape programmer category. Simple obvious decisions about user interface, input formatting, smart security decisions, anticipating user mistakes, these things just dont come with that degree they arrive with. The seasoned programmers here watch the same stupid mistakes getting made over and over again. On the one hand, we desperately need the help, there is so much work to get done and tons of money to be made, on the other hand, these kids that come in just make more work for us in the long run as we keep recoding and recoding the stupid shit that they do. In a few instances, these kids get a degree and find out its not really what they wanted to do with their life. They just got the degree because they liked playing with their wii and their parents were excited to have something their kids would actually pay attention through in school.
I would much rather bring in the mature, more experienced programmer that has been through it all and builds in ways that eliminates all the obvious problems, so we can stay focused on the bigger issues of a project.