President By Day, High-Tech Headhunter By Night

theodp writes "The White House is following up on an offer made by President Barack Obama this week to help find a job for an unemployed semiconductor engineer in Texas. The offer was made during a live online town hall after the ex-TI engineer's wife questioned the government's policy concerning H-1B visa workers. Obama asked for EE Darin Wedel's resume and said he would 'forward it to some of these companies that are telling me they can't find enough engineers in this field.' While grateful, patent-holder Wedel said the president's view on the job prospects for engineers in his field 'is definitely not what's happening in the real world.' Duke adjunct professor Vivek Wadhwa offered his frank take on 40-year-old Wedel's predicament: 'The No. 1 issue in the tech world is as people get older, they generally become more expensive. So if you're an employer who can hire a worker fresh out of college who is making $60,000 versus an older worker who is making $150,000, and the younger worker has skills that are fresher, who would you hire?' Coincidentally, Texas Instruments sought President Obama's help in reducing restrictions on the hiring of younger foreign workers in 2009, the same year it laid off Wedel."

Comments

Old is gold?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you're an employer who can hire a worker fresh out of college who is making $60,000 versus an older worker who is making $150,000, and the younger worker has skills that are fresher, who would you hire

Dont the older ones come with experience?
As an example (though not valid in this case, but still shows the point), a more experienced person would know to avoid using floats to save monetary values,etc...
In the tech industry, as in management, the top spots are obviously fewer than entry level, so over time many people will stagnate when climbing the ladder

Re:Old is gold?

[SJHillman]

Yes, but is the experience worth an extra $90,000 a year? The value of experience usually hits a plateau, but workers still want wages to continue increasing.

Re:Old is gold?

[RightwingNutjob]

Depends. Is it the difference between a product up to spec as per contract and an emergency fix that costs 90k to implement or a schedule slip with a 90k lateness penalty?

Re:Old is gold?

[cosm]

willing to work 80 hours a week and call it 40

This. The 'end' of overtime is infuriating. If you're salary perhaps there are exceptions in that it's understood as such, ie the financial security of salary is repayed by the occasional 50-80 week to get the job done. But if you're hourly and being 'payed' for a full '40' pseudosalary-style (seen this many places), and being worked 60+ on a consistent basis, well, fuck that. I've known shops where everybody is getting paid an hourly wage on the checks for 40 a week, but you were an immediate outcast if you didn't come in 2 hours early and stay 2 hours late every gd day.

Re:Old is gold?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the places that hired a contractor that cost them a bit over a million and half of product recall. I was hired to test and fix that product. For 6 month worth of work, the defect went down from 15% return to 0%.

Do you think I am worth that money to the company?

Re:Old is gold?

[forkfail]

Sad thing is, the experienced guy can often get done in 20 what it takes the new guy 80 to do, but to a certain type of managers, all he sees is that the old guy goes home after 40, and the young guy is working away over the weekend....

Re:Old is gold?

[BoRegardless]

Upfront: I am over 60. Been doing product design for 45+ years. I think and have thought for decades, you get what you pay for.

An article recently in Wired or Tech. Review noted that it takes longer for engineers in complex subjects to start to make significant innovations and patents as the technology field becomes so much more complex from coatings to material alloys to sensors. Older, more experienced engineers are needed.

Experience = thousands of failures experienced on your projects and co-workers failures, some which were "fixed" and some which were terminal. Success = avoiding & overcoming failures quickly based on wide experience in your field!

Without that knowledge, you don't know how to frame a design to avoid the hidden failure modes, and you don't have the breadth of solutions to offer to get to a solution in the fastest time.

I've seen newer engineers make gross mistakes costing companies on a single product, millions of dollars a year in lost profits for a variety of reasons and also having a less than optimal product. I also know that the guy who designed it was 2 years out of college and given the design job because "it is a simple product". You can analyze this 10 ways to Sunday, but everyone knows you can produce a simple product that is a loser. It is also true that the young engineer did NOT have an experienced engineer over him to guide him in the right directions. Most likely it was an "Engineering Manager" who didn't know true product design that gave the young guy the job.

Re:Old is gold?

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, but is the experience worth an extra $90,000 a year? The value of experience usually hits a plateau, but workers still want wages to continue increasing.

Yes, and it's worth a hell of a lot more than that in most cases.

See, what you (and many, many shortsighted corporate HR types) are overlooking is this: it's not just the individual's expertise in his particular field that should be counted. Contrary to popular belief, engineers cannot just be dropped into any situation based upon their resume, plugged in, and rationally be expected to be highly productive. There's a reason for that: an engineer's specific knowledge of his organization, its products, and its operations is often far more important than the nominal technical skills he picked up in school. Such intimate knowledge can take many, many years to acquire, and simply cannot be replaced at the drop of a hat. You also have to account for the relationships that engineers build with both suppliers and customers: that rapport is an often vital aspect of engineering and can make the difference between a profitable project or an abysmal failure. Engineering staff that customers come to trust are an important part of retaining said customers. And again, that takes time, and if you want your engineers to stick around long enough to do all that, you have to treat them with some respect as well.

Smart managers will, as their senior people begin to age and head towards retirement, bring in a younger engineer or two and have them work hand-in-hand with the older staff until they're capable of picking up the load. That takes time, it takes an investment in people, and salary/benefits are actually the least important part of the equation.

Frankly, all this focus on transient workers (which is all your average H-1B is, when you get right down to it ... most aren't here for the long haul) and salary leaves out of the discussion an engineer or technical person's actual value. That's a lot harder for your typical cost-cutting "efficiency" type to pin down, so they use simple-minded metrics such as salary. And you know what? That kind of thinking has cost American business a lot.

Re:Old is gold?

[secretsquirel]

well, not anymore..

Re:Old is gold?

[SJHillman]

But is that much experience required? What about all of the workers in the middle ground, with ten or twenty years experience opposed to thirty or forty years? There's bound to be plenty of cases where forty years beats twenty, but there's a point of diminishing returns. While you couldn't replace an experienced worker with ten fresh college grads, you might be able to replace one highly experienced worker with one moderately experienced worker plus a fresh grad and pocket ten or twenty thousand.

Re:Old is gold?

[frosty_tsm]

Depends. Is it the difference between a product up to spec as per contract and an emergency fix that costs 90k to implement or a schedule slip with a 90k lateness penalty?

Worse than that. There are a lot of 60k/year engineers that might not ever deliver, much less require 3-5 times the head count.

From what I've seen, most entry-level software engineers are paid more than they are worth to the company at time of hire. Most will grow into their role quickly and the company will get a return on investment. These usually have a few of the 150k engineers around to mentor them.

Re:Old is gold?

[YrWrstNtmr]

Upfront: I am over 60. Been doing product design for 45+ years. I think and have thought for decades, you get what you pay for.

When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Re:Old is gold?

[YrWrstNtmr]

Sad thing is, the experienced guy can often get done in 20 what it takes the new guy 80 to do, but to a certain type of managers, all he sees is that the old guy goes home after 40, and the young guy is working away over the weekend....

Bingo. The young bloods will flail away for 3 weeks to come to solution Z, after going through A, B, C, X and Y. The old guy can look at it and say "Yeah, we saw this concept 8 years ago. Solution Z is what you want. Hang on a sec, let me find my original design. Put it in a new wrapper, but no need to redesign the basic concept"
(channeling my inner Space Cowboy)

Re:Old is gold?

[tgd]

I was cocky in my 20's and 30's. I thought I owned the world and every big-name company I worked for 'stroked' me. but when I hit 40, things changed. and now that I'm 50, things VERY much changed.

And there's a lesson that every single person on /. should learn from and learn well -- put your effort into building up your investment and savings nest egg. Someone making upper-tier pay in a technical field, and putting a priority on savings, not living the baller lifestyle, can approach this juncture in a vastly different way. Decisions everyone makes when they're 25, 35, 40, etc all have direct bearing on this. The reality is, this problem happens in EVERY field to everyone as they get older. Your pay will not scale forever, and if you scale your cost of living with your pay, rather than scaling your savings, it will HURT when that trend reverses itself.

I'm not yet at 50, but I have plenty of friends and coworkers who are. Some of them, at equal pay, are looking at scaling back their work, focusing on consulting, even if their income ends up cut in half. Others are panicked at the slightest possibility of losing their job because they have a few months' expenses saved.

So, kids, learn a lesson here. When you're comfortable living on $60k a year, and find yourself making $150k a year, you can buy a $70k car and a $500k house, or you can keep right on living comfortably, and putting $50k a year away in investments. 20 years later you'll be facing this decision in a vastly different way.

Re:Old is gold?

[geekoid]

I ended up getting a bovernment job. The pay is less..40% less, but the benes are good and I work hours that allow me to have time for a life.

Plus I can talk about issues and solutiuon without worrying about insulting some management type.

The only other option is starting my own business; which I would do if I coulf afford health care.

And that's the issue. I bet that's the issue for many people are age. I know many start ups that can't hire people with families because they all want insurance.

Why companies aren't backing A government insurance program is beyond me. There Health insurance would drop, and it wouldn't be in issue for who you need to hire.
Older people cause the companies overall insurance to go up. So even though at the moment of hiring it's the same, then next year it increase as your workforce ages.

One of many problems that go away with a government healthcare insurance program.

Re:Old is gold?

[ghostdoc]

"the key is to not adjust your lifestyle above where it needs to be and"

yes, we should, all live in mud huts, eat beetles and walk to work in dirty rags, because that's allow really need, right?

So spend more than you earn so you don't have to life in a mud hut, is that it? Max out the credit cards, take another mortgage to afford the holiday you deserve, after all you work hard, you're earning a decent wage, you should be able to afford a new car every few years, right?

And when you get old and sick, start whining at the government that it wasn't your fault, you *deserved* to spend all that money, now you *deserve* a pension and medical care over and above what you can afford, because you paid all those taxes right?

Yeah. So. Fuck You. If you can't live within your means then you're the fucking problem.

We're about to hit the baby boomers doing exactly this (well, technically it started two years ago when the people born in 1945 hit 65, but that's only the leading edge of the bell curve). A huge bulge of population has completely failed to save enough money to pay for their retirement, and are going to ask you to pay more taxes to keep them afloat in their old age. And possibly alive in their old age, as there are a lot of very expensive treatments for age-related illnesses that are available now.
They feel entitled because they worked hard their whole lives, and paid taxes their whole lives, and they've never been refused anything they want because they're such a big block of voters. This is going to be a brutal shock to either them, or the rest of us, because there isn't enough money to keep everyone happy here.
Crunch time will be when your Mum asks you to pay for the surgery she needs to keep walking, and you realise that you'll have to sell your house to cover it. Not a pleasant choice, or a pleasant conversation to have with her.

Fresher skills?

[DoninIN]

How often in the real world do you find yourself thinking. "Gee he's never really done this before in an applied, practical setting. That makes his skills fresher!" In my case that would be a big never.

Leading question.

[forkfail]

So if you're an employer who can hire a worker fresh out of college who is making $60,000 versus an older worker who is making $150,000, and the younger worker has skills that are fresher, who would you hire?

Fresher? Skills aren't vegetables. The older guy is also the wiser and more experienced. He knows the meta behind the skills, and what will work, and what won't. And if he's worth his titles, he has been constantly learning throughout his career. He knows how to be part of a team (even if he never grew into liking to "work with others"), and how to get things done.

The young guy is going to make a lot of mistakes. What he has is energy and drive, and fresh ideas. But too often, he'll work for 20 hours when an hour of thought would have led to a four hour solution that works better - a solution that would have occurred instantly to the old guy. He'll get the job done, but it won't have the eloquence that the older guy would have brought to the table. Many of his ideas will be naive, but through sheer force of will and energy, he'll make them work. But it'll be ten years before he has the experience to even come close to the depth and perception of the older engineer.

(Obviously, written by someone who's paid their dues for a couple of decades, and is still doing so.)

Re:Leading question.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

You know this. I know this. Most people on /. know this. Most people who actually do any meaningful work know this.

But the MBA class, the new nobility, who have thoroughly established their control over the corporate world and are doing their level best to take over other environments as well (the military, medicine, and academia are the places where I've seen it happening; I'm sure there are plenty of others) don't know this, or if they do, they don't care. To them, we're all peasants, and peasants don't have "skills." We're more or less interchangeable, and the only real distinction between us is that younger peasants will work for a smaller portion of scraps and take longer to drop dead in the fields.

Re:Leading question.

[usuallylost]

All to often management is willing to accept the mistakes new people are going to make simply because it helps the bottom line short term. You layoff an experienced engineer making $150,000 and replace him with a fresh out of college guy making $60,000. In the short term the manager cuts the cost of his division and looks more profitable. If they have costs later on because of some problem that the more experienced guy would have simply avoided so what. By the time that happens the manager who made the decision will have usually pocketed his bonuses and moved on. So it is the next guy who is suddenly stuck fixing whatever went wrong. From my point of view this is just more of the same MBA mentality that is one of the factors wrecking American business.

Re:Leading question.

[amiga3D]

Sadly you've been moderated funny. I have no mod points but your comment is dead on insightful. This is exactly what is happening in the US. I remember when Made in the US meant so much, now it's no different from Made in China because the desire is to make money not products. The idea is to turn out cheap shitty products at a profit and sell extended warranties that cost more than the products themselves cost to produce. The days of a 15 year old washing machine are gone.

Re:Leading question.

[DerekLyons]

Fresher? Skills aren't vegetables. The older guy is also the wiser and more experienced. He knows the meta behind the skills, and what will work, and what won't.

He also has a chance of having acquired bad habits and/or prejudices that are going to be harder to train out.
 

And if he's worth his titles, he has been constantly learning throughout his career. He knows how to be part of a team (even if he never grew into liking to "work with others"), and how to get things done.

Between the two quotes above and most of the unquoted remainder - it seems you really need to read about the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

Re:On the campaign trail

[foniksonik]

That is what Obama asked for in his State of the Union. He can't do it on his own though, Congress must send him a new tax act to sign.

I dont get this.

[unity100]

i dont get why you people complain about this, after subjecting yourself to, supporting, praising and furthering the capitalist system you have been living in through all these decades.

capitalist system seeks to maximize profits of the stakeholders. anyone who is not holding a stake, is expendable as long as s/he is replaceable.

huge short term gains at the cost of anything, enabled through 'deregulation' for the sake of free market is the epitome of this. if you just sit and evaluate this equation, you will find that anything is justifiable as long as it flies - from destruction of oceans to near-slavery. and the wealth amassed furthers the power of the wealth owner to turn everything from public (non)opinion to justice/law in their favor. its circular.

what did you expect in such an environment ? goodwill ? social responsibility ? decency ?

or, did you think that being a better, more experienced engineer (through age or other means) would increase your value ?

well, they just made society get used to accepting subpar products/services in everything, then they replaced you with those who would do shabbier jobs for cheaper......

in a dog eat dog society, you cant expect decency.

the ultimate end of this is, practical aristocracy/monarchy/empire with a seemingly 'democratic' storefront (late roman empire) and after the point society gets used to it, outright aristocracy/monarchy/empire (roman empire after octavianus).

Old IS gold

[fyngyrz]

Speaking as a guy who just retired from running a tech company, yes, it is. In the EE realm, with which I am most familiar, the experienced guy has been through the FCC testing rigamarole and can just be sent off to do it without supervision -- and he'll come back with a product that passed, because he knew what the requirements were when he designed it.

The experienced guy knows all the suppliers; knows where to call for what components; knows to check for multiple sources and to avoid single source vulnerabilities if at all possible; has written in programming languages A..M and when presented with N, can learn it in very little time, whereas New EE Guy knows languages L,M and N and is absolutely clueless when it comes to maintaining product X's assembly code written in F, nor has he the depth needed to pick it up, and the product design with all its little foibles, that the experienced guy has.

The experienced guy has tons of product experience and puts that to work for you every time a new design is required. New EE guy will probably get caught asking your techs questions instead of educating them. The experienced guy knows that the GPL is a box of landmines, and that it must be avoided at all costs; New EE Guy is likely to walk around for quite some time proclaiming open source is great before he actually understands that the company needs to make money and needs to retain the technology to do so exclusively for as long as possible in order to to pay him.

The experienced EE can do a myriad of things; interview new hires (if you let HR do this, you're already half way to screwed, frankly) he can answer questions at any level from customer to any tier of technical support, he can actually *resolve* problems and in minutes because he's familiar with your products (if you kept him on... if he's experienced but a new hire to you, his benefit is he will learn them a lot faster.) The experienced guy probably even knows a lot about things he wasn't directly involved with, by a sort of office osmosis... people talk about the biz, especially if they're well compensated and treated well, and a synergy arises that New EE Guy simply can't roll into blind.

New EE guy has a limited number of tools in his "toolbox" and very little, if any, experience employing them. The experienced guy has enormous depth and is likely to solve any given problem faster, better, and more to the company's long term benefit than the New EE guy can.

Yes, the experienced EE costs more for insurance, deserves (doesn't always get) higher compensation, should have accrued more vacation time, probably has kids... he or she costs more, all right, but you get so much more it's an obvious decision if the goal is for the company to do well in the long run.

If, however, the goal is to appease myopic beancounters about the upcoming quarter... yeah, that experienced guy is getting replaced by New EE Guy, the bottom line looks better for a few months, and future products will have to look after themselves. And looking at the state of today's US tech companies, with the notable exception of Apple... I can't say I'm surprised at all. By and large, they are reaping what they have sown.

Having said all that, companies still need New EE Guy. but not as a means to kick out some experienced fellow; you want the new guy hired ten years or more before the experienced guy is going to retire so he can learn FROM the experienced guy, and then, when Really Experienced Guy retires, New EE Guy isn't New EE Guy any more, he is Experienced Guy.

If you don't invest in the future, you won't fucking have a future. Company executives should inscribe that on a bat and beat the damned beancounters over the head with it on a regular basis. Figuratively speaking.

Re:Old IS gold

[ScrewMaster]

Figuratively speaking.

I'm not to0 sure about that: I think it might take a few literal attempts to get the point across.

Re:Old IS gold

[MooseTick]

All that sounds good if the older employee has actually been working and continued learning for 20-30 years. I've worked with those guys. I've also worked with a lot of 50-60 year olds who are lazy, graduated college in the 60/70s, haven't bother learning anything new in 20 years, and are coasting for the next 10 years to retirement. They feel like their time in entitles them to big bucks while they are not even as productive as a 20 something. I've worked with more of the latter than the earlier.

Re:misunderstanding of TFA

[M. Baranczak]

what was actually much more stunning to my mind was the fact that it appears that the U.S. has a President who is willing to say "I Don't Know The Answer Right Now".

I don't think that's what's happening. Obama's a lawyer. One of the first things they teach lawyers is: when examining a witness in court, don't ask a question unless you already know the answer. And in this case, the answer is pretty obvious: when those companies say that they can't find workers, what they really mean is that they can't find schmucks who'll work 60 hours a week for third-world wages. Obama just wants them to admit it publicly.

Either that, or he had to say something to get rid of the guy, and threw out some "we'll look into it" bullshit.

^^^this^^^

[fyngyrz]

Yes, exactly, precisely, perfectly on-target.

Beancounters see salary and associated costs, and nothing else. And that view rewards them next quarter after a replacement with many dollars. Later in the year, when the second hire has to be made, the beancounter's sole reaction will be to make sure it's the cheapest person they can find -- and there is no realization that the entire cost came from the beancounter's error in the first place.

Re:Experience trumps

[ScrewMaster]

And maybe the more experienced people indeed do have to consider lowering their sights.

Or maybe (just maybe) employers and government officials should stop stabbing them in the back ... because that is precisely what they've been doing. And as America's decline from the pre-eminent industrial power to another third-world outfit looking for a handout continues, you'll eventually begin to understand what I mean. Sometimes you do have to take care of your own.

Re:On the campaign trail

[countertrolling]

I don't think it's Japan and China as much as Apple and Caterpillar and Walmart etc. that ended the tarrifs. The predators are domestic, right here in our own house.

Re:On the campaign trail

[Uberbah]

Because shipping, cheap 3rd world labor and international communications didn't exist in the 50's? What kept corporations from leaving the U.S. in droves then, along with the rich when levied with a 91% marginal tax rate?