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Should Younger Developers Be Paid More?
jammag writes "A project manager describes facing an upset senior developer who learned that a new hire — a fresh college grad — would be making 30 percent more than him. The reason: the new grad knew a hot emerging technology that a client wanted. Yes, the senior coder was majorly pissed off. But with the constant upheaval in new technology, this situation is almost unavoidable — or is it? And at any rate, is it fair?"
Old programming languages still work fine for new tech if they have appropriate libraries, etc
I have a perfect example on how wrong you are: Fortran.
I do a lot of engineering software and a lot of that is in Fortran. A few years ago I migrated a system with 400 thousand lines of VAX-Fortran code to Linux, using g77. Recently I had to install this system in a new computer, running Ubuntu Lucid. To my dismay, I learned that Lucid doesn't have the g77 package anymore, the gcc compiler suite has been "upgraded" to gfortran. And gfortran does not support the VAX extensions that g77 did.
Luckily there's still a way to install g77 in Lucid using the Hardy repositories, but how long will this last?
Had the old engineers said, "OK, Fortran is dead, let's just keep a legacy compiler to run old code" everything would have been fine. But no, they insist on "improving" Fortran by putting C language features, e.g. pointers, into it. Why can't they just learn to program in C and let the old compilers do what they are good for, which is running legacy code?
I once signed a petition to retire Fortran, where the best reason why experience isn't always welcome is stated: "In order to best serve future generations of scientists who rely on numerical simulation, we propose that FORTRAN be retired, allowing its successor(s) to evolve in the absence of the legacy FORTRAN juggernaut. Until FORTRAN is formally retired by the J3 Committee, institutional inertia will prevent alternatives from being adopted by science and industry"
The current Fortran standard is the worst of all possibilities: unable to run legacy code which is stable and tested, and unable to compete with modern languages in either execution speed or programming ease.
(And before anyone comes with some contrived benchmarks "proving" that Fortran code executes faster than C, let me point out that the legacy Lapack code is optimized in Atlas by compiling key functions in C+Assembly code)
All of this conversation is a lot more idealistic than what I've seen in the places I've worked -- which is that when a new position opens, the employer looks to see how much they have to offer to get qualified applicants, and does this. The existing workforce doesn't get raises, or only gets a pittance, and so the newest hires almost always make the same or more than veterans. Existing workers face the option of either finding jobs elsewhere to stay within the pay curve, or staying in a comfortable environment where they know the culture and can be productive, until they get sufficiently pissed off at being rewarded for loyalty with being paid less.
Did you even RTFA? Here is a quote: "I felt like I was letting down one of our most promising engineers. He was someone who had the most knowledge about the business we supported and was an expert in the core client-server application. " It wasn't someone sitting in a corner shooing kids off his lawn while he became an old curmudgeon, it was the team lead in the core application. I don't know about you, but I don't always have time to become an expert in every new IT technology that comes along. I have limited time and so I pick and choose. This guy had spent his time working hard and becoming their team lead, which naturally meant focusing on their core business and application. He then finds out they're hiring graduates at a 30% higher salary and expecting him to mentor them in the business requirements because he hasn't also had time to become an expert in mobile applications. Tell me you wouldn't be pissed off in such a situation? Yes, the salary for the graduates was driven by the market, and purely from a fiscal perspective the company did the best thing for it. Let's not pretend though that there aren't people involved and that they weren't screwed.