Slashdot Mirror
It's Hard For Techies Over 40 To Stay Relevant, Says SAP Lab Director
New submitter NewYork writes with this chestnut from an article about the role of age in the high-tech workplace: 'The shelf life of a software engineer today is no more than that of a cricketer — about 15 years,' says V R Ferose, MD of German software major SAP's India R&D Labs that has over 4,500 employees . 'The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do.'" The article features similar sentiments from Mukund Mohan, CEO of Microsoft's India-based startup initiative.
He will be forty one day too...
I do IT for a cricket league. My shelf life is only 15 minutes!
bacause they aren't hype/trends followers. They will not tell you to rewrite your whole system in Ruby
The 20 year olds "provide more value" to a company that expects them to live, breathe, and die for the company, because by the time they're 35 the people have realized that the promised rewards for working themselves to death for the company are lies. So the 35 year olds start screwing the company back.
Oh well, can't expect any CEO to say any different than what they're saying. That's why the only good CEO is a dead CEO.
Is the task really about quality, or quantity?
Most places I've worked, it has been about quantity. Number of reported bugs fixed. Number of lines of code.
These are metrics which can be shown to other people. That's how your manager gets promoted. How the shareholders are convinced that the product is doing well.
The people who are still around after 20 years of coding are binary: they're either wizards or burnouts.
On the other hand, the younger workers are inexperienced, which means you can keep fooling them with the same gigs. Make them work for 24 hours straight, keep them in the office for 12-hour days with $5 of free soft drinks a week, promise them a great career someday. They're guileless and easy to manipulate, which is great if you want your metrics to look good but don't care about the quality of the final product.
Personally, I'd prefer to hire wizards and to shift the burnouts into doing something they might enjoy more, because older workers bring a lot of experience and realism to the game.
But that won't impress my bosses or the shareholders.
Futurist Traditionalism
'The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do.'"
Value=lower salary & willing to give up having a life outside of work.
I'm 43 and still very relevant. I offer experience as well as raw skill. I know what works, and what doesn't. I know the best practices and I know the pitfalls, and I know them well. I can troubleshoot a problem much faster than any of the kids, as well as learn new languages and new technologies very quickly, since after the first dozen or so, they're all pretty much the same. I can be a sysadmin, and a DBA, as well as a developer because I've seen it all, and over the years done it all.
The comments are from India, where the software field has not been around as long as it has been in the U.S. Attitudes on age are just now (barely) starting to come around in the U.S., and I predict they will in India as well in a few years.
Bob Mansfield, Apple's Indispensable Man, Gets New Responsibilities
...these companies should stick with tried and true products and environments, and expand upon them. That's why Linux is still relevant today and is taking over damned near everything that isn't a desktop, IMHO.
...Steve
So, this guy says that the entire career of a Software Engineer will be 15 years.
And the politicians and business leaders are saying we have and extreme need for more people in science and technology fields. .....Ummmm.
Why the FUCK should students going to college today sign up to go into a career where they know they'll be out of work in 15 years?
Outside of that, this guy is spouting total bullshit. I understand that there are some great young innovators out there. But that's not all we need out there. We need people with experience building large complex IT systems. People who've done it before and know what might happen. People who know where the gotcha's will be. Not everyone is just going to be writing iPhone apps.
At my first job, when I was young and I guess still valuable, the company I worked for was staffed completely by young people. It was staggering the bad shit and unforeseen consequences we ran into. Having just one staff member with some experience and proven capability in the field would have been invaluable.
There are plenty of us "techies" out here who are not software engineers, and are more valuable than the twentysomethings precisely *because* we've got 20+ years of experience.
once people hit 40 they actually expect to have decent pay and some time to spend with their family...
Writing as someone coding professionally since the early 80s, in project teams sizes from 3 to 10k, and at the highest primarily engineering position I can achieve without becoming a non-coding manager (Systems Architect)...
As engineers age, they may gain experience, but productivity does often drop. We also have those pesky families and/or work-life balance goals. And an unfortunately repeating pattern for engineers is reaching a point where they now think they know everything they need to, and learning grinds down, sometimes to nothing. If they only work on legacy code that might be OK if no innovation is required. Domain knowledge is difficult to quantify the value of, and varies greatly by organization and project, and I would argue that all seniors should work hard at making sure this is clearly documented AND passed down.
Most companies are happy to keep a few older experienced engineers around to try and direct teams of young high productivity programmers (no family / life, willing to work 60-100 hour weeks) and attempt to mentor them to make less mistakes. Increasingly these teams are in low cost regions, most commonly India.
I would begrudgingly agree that in most cases, in terms of a cost / benefit analysis of 'value to the organization / stockholder', which is what really matters, this is true a statistically significant percentage of the time.
Of course, most of the time comments like this are merely the result of a HR directive to cull expensive engineers to reduce payroll and make room for more low cost region 'resources', driven by a suit that doesn't understand the full value of their older engineers. Unfortunately we live in a world where most important decisions are made by MBAs without a clue. Older engineers must learn to make sure the layers above them understand their real value to the organization.
The most important thing in coding was making it work.(Getting out fast was second.) As a 40 something year old coder I know the most important thing is making your god damn code readable since you will come back to it, you ALWAYS come back to it. (Amazing how many other coders don't get this even after years of experience.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I'll be sure to tell Rob Pike and Vint Cerf. You know, the next time I have lunch with him at Google with the Greyglers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9M0RPNr9qg and be sure to remind Sergey Brin and Larry Page that they have one year until they're over the hill like Steve Jobs was and Steve Wozniak is currently. Oh, and like Elon Musk is over the hill by a year.
Alternately, I'm going to just dismiss the author of the article as an idiot who has a terrible idea of what constitutes "relevance" based on a particular development model which I don't have a hell of a lot of faith in being able to actually deliver working product.
The 20 year old guy can program but the 35 year old can make requirements.
Never cut corners, nothing good comes out of cutting corners.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
They referenced Q on Skyfall as an example. Idiot hooked up Silva's laptop to the MI6 network and then powered it up. An experienced IT person would know that would be a very stupid thing to do.
If you work in IT, learning new technology is part of your career, it never stops, you're doing it all the time.We know the old tech and the new tech. Anyone who states otherwise has no idea what they are talking about.
...companies that bought "awesome" Indian dev companies filled with hundreds of 20 year olds.
They were totally useless (not because of the kids, but the fact that effective software engineering LEADERSHIP doesn't seem to exist in the majority of Indian software companies.)
Now, that's often the case elsewhere, but it seems to be particularly endemic to the Indian way of doing things. It's too bad as well, because some of the best software engineers I've worked worth are ex-pat Indians. Plenty of talent over there, total lack of leadership.
43 here, and more relevant than ever before.
First of all, the question is, if you even need to keep up. Some software engineering jobs don't need much keeping up at all. The core knowledge is the same since the 60s. And languages are just tools. Sometimes they fit the job better, sometimes they are interchangeable.
Then the question is, if you can keep up. I see no reason why there wouldn't be enough jobs that a 40-year-old can keep up with. I mean you're not suddenly retarded at 40. You're not much different at all. Unless you ate nothing but saturated fats, sugar, heated dairy proteins and salt. (In that case, you're fucked. ;)
When I hire people, and I discriminate against a group solely because of stupid prejudice, I just harm myself. And since I'm not stupid...
I am sure he is right, when I need low level manual labor coding done, something that needs no creative thought, a 20 year old drone is more productive. That being said, give me my smart 35+ year old engineers all day long.
...depending how LONG that person has been a techie though.
Most over 40's techies have an experience that the younger techies doesn't even have (and would LOVE to have), is the hands-on experience how the insides of a computer REALLY work. Sure, any young technician can learn to program, anyone of them can complete any engineering course and school, with brilliant results, but that's just it - results aren't what they used to be. We have a LOT of theory today, they rarely get to try everything out in real life.
Sitting and working in front of a computer, with simulated circuits simply won't provide the total knowledge, and even though they can come up with amazing new innovations, show fantastic skills etc. many of them come short if they fail to see why their design doesn't work as well in real life as in the simulated environment.
This is where us old techies simply excel over the youngsters. I've had numerous dazed looks on the various younger techs faces when I within few seconds to minutes, points out the flaw in their design, when they eagerly show me formulas and huge math equations + simulations to show me how "flawless" their design SHOULD be, and desperately want me to agree with their designs. Then I show them HOW it COULD be done, and many of them say - what you just did doesn't make sense - but it work - it shouldn't work - but it works.
To us old techies, the inner workings of everything, from scratch, from transistors to assembly code etc. are second nature, because we grew up with everything from scratch. We weren't served a huge bunch of books, a ready to use computer with a gazillion libraries, we often had to construct everything from scratch, including designing the logic, often on a breadboard - programming the OS ourselves etc.
So techies over 40 with experience from the start of it all - can't even be replaced.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Q. Why is employing graduate like having sex with a virgin?
A. Because neither one knows how badly you are screwing them.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I am sorry but someone who is 35 should have moved on to a bigger role then just being a software engineer or a developer. By 35 you should be an Architect.
This has got to be a garbage study. All it takes for a techie to remain viable is for him or her to commit to lifelong learning, reading, and experimenting with new technologies. I guess it must be true because a wealthy executive said it so we should all immediately believe him and say, "Oh whoa is me. When I turn 40 I'll irrelevant." Bollocks!
It's Hard For Techies Over 40 To Stay Relevant
True. As a 42 year old hacker (in the empirical tinkerer sense, not the security circumvention sense), I have to spend as much time learning my craft, every day, as I did when I was 12. It was hard to stay relevant then, and when I was 22, and 32, and now. Fortunately, I love doing so now as much as I did then.
'The shelf life of a software engineer today is no more than that of a cricketer -- about 15 years,'
Depends on what you are using them for. If they are expected to mindlessly bash out the filling of methods prescribed by a spec, that may be so. If, however, they are expected to understand the context -- both business and logical -- of the component, and to make decisions accordingly, experience and its attendant judgment can be far more valuable than stamina.
SAP's India R&D Labs ... Microsoft's India-based
I have done a lot of work on the database side of enterprise software. Given Oracle's educational initiatives in India in the 90's, that means I have worked with a lot of Indian database professionals. Many of them are incredibly skilled and it has been an enriching experience to work with and learn from them.
However, it is just statistically / economically true that most people over 35 in India were not spending hours writing code on their own computers when they were 18. It is unfortunate that most of them did not have that opportunity, but a person who has not been cutting code for 15 years will not have the experience that is the strength of veteran programmers. A manager of an Indian software lab has an inherently distorted view of reality because of the small number of people in India who have been programming for 15 years. In that context the natural, flawed, conclusion is that age is inversely related to software productivity. It is as rational and objective as the conclusion that swashbuckling buccaneer quantity is inversely proportional to the rate of global warming.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
poor metrics lead to gameing the system all the way to makeing things very bad for quality.
Do want things fixed right or bandage fixes?
Do want easy stuff banked up and not fixed right away to fill gaps from harder stuff that count the same?? keep in mind easy stuff can be a password reset.
Do want to be guy working the big ticket that covers a say a system that is down and 100's of users need but only counts as 1 ticket and will take most of the day to fix or just do tickets covering the other general 100's of users that say only take 30-60 min each?
"Shailesh Thakurdesai, business development manager at Texas Instruments India , says college hiring is a priority for the company because "freshers learn fast and do things differently, without the baggage of past experience..."
Wow, really? So experience is baggage? I know this analogy has been used millions of times in the past, but if I was having open heart surgery, I'd certainly want a surgeon with "baggage" versus a fast-learning "fresher."
What a tool. Is this guy for real?
...above a certain age they just start telling me to fuckoff, to my face rather than behind my back.
Or maybe this is a quote from his resignation letter, explaining why he feels he must resign. Jolly good of him to do so! Especially since it would be so wrong of him to continue to slow down all of those high-output 20-something-or-others. Bravo!
Sent from my ENIAC
Notice that people always complain about my generation's lack of experience but no one wants to pick up the tab to train us.
older people know about legacy code / systems and there is so much of things like that in a office it's can hit you in a bad way if no one knows about it.
I have head of the old door key system that was left over from the last office tenants that after some time that no one in the new offices IT had any idea about up it failed or some found a old system and ether pulled it or tried to change the os. Also have seen other old hacks / quick fixes that where put into place due lack of funds that stay in place for some time and then after the people who set it up are gone fail and then the newer IT staff have to deal with it.
The article is all about India. How many over-35 techies do they really have? I think what they are reporting is an experience biased by the way the tech economy development has played out in their country -- recent rapid expansion. In countries that have had a high tech industry longer, there's a bigger population of people over 35 who have been working in the tech industry since they were 20.
The things that I hear American companies seeing as problems with development in India are the same as you would expect from giving major projects over to a bunch of inexperienced programmers: sloppy, bug-ridden code, poor understanding of customer expectations and a need for real experts to go back in and untangle the mess. Young programmers need more experienced oversight to learn how to work on big, complex projects, create code that can be maintained and stay focused on goals that match customer expectations.
I expect that over the next decade, Indian development organizations will begin to recognize that the elder programmers are more effective and put the younger ones under the supervision of the older ones so they can learn to do things the right way.
There's also a lot of focus on junkware development in the article. (iOS and Android apps, for instance). When you're developing a free or cheap app for a mobile platform, you don't care about quality. It's all about who is first to the market with the flashy-looking app -- a market where poor software practices are rewarded and focus on quality and maintainability will only hold you back.
In my experience, for many Indian engineers, there seems to be more of a management rot culture, where after 30 there is a strong desire to delegate to others, and do less. Of course there are many exceptions. India is not alone. In Korea, the culture seems to expect engineers to retire by 40. People of course are strongly influenced by cultural pressures.
We are affected by cultural pressures and expectations, but it is up to each of us (even managers!) to decide to keep learning. If always learning, there is no age limit.
Im 71 - still doing good work - no one told me to stop when I was 40.
Horses for courses
"The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do."
Well, considering Ferose is the manager of an overseas R&D lab, the company probably expects him to deliver a tireless, low-cost workforce. That's why it was opened, and this determines what he values. With that in mind, he's right, a workforce that is as young as possible delivers even more of this kind of value, on top of the overseas move.
This, however, is horse shit:
"freshers learn fast and do things differently, without the baggage of past experience"
Shailesh Thakurdesai, "business development manager" - I expect this person manages things he does not understand, which is why he's confused experience with baggage. He has none himself.
That SAP produces software with such a horrible reputation--idiots running the show!
I'm in my 40s and I'm working on innovative stuff every day. At my company the younger guys all look to me for help and mentoring. The company looks to me for technical leadership. I agree that there are a lot of really talented young technologists out there, but very few of them can do what I do or bring the type of value I bring to the organization. Give them 20 years experience and maybe they will do the job better than I can, but for now I think my "relevance" is very safe and secure.
When I was in my 20's, I was in a group of developers who were also all in our 20's. There were only a few guys who were in their 40's and 50's and they were kinda slow. I thought the same thing too at the time. Now that I'm 53 and making 10x more as a consultant than I did back then, I can see reasons why my skewed adhoc-survey gave those results. I think the biggest factor is that the go-getters can get-up-and-leave when they get 15 years of experience (I left after 13 years) and make way more money either designing their own products or starting their own companies, like me. This is software, it's easy to create your own and start your own company from your living room, so why stay? So that leaves the lesser-motivated, lesser-driven "software engineers" (yeah, it's a euphemism anyway) in the same cubicles as the n00bs. At that point, I can see why it looks like the 20's outperform the oldies. So, what's left is the lesser-performers. I think Mr. VR would be smarter to focus on employee retention, but hey, what do I know? I'm just a 53-yo consultant who has enough money that doesn't need to go to work anymore, so for SURE I'm not generating the same volume of code or intrinsic value as those n00b. Uh-huh.
Sent from my ENIAC
More value in low pay. Less value in mistakes + inability to solve problems (especially when googling fails them) since they lack experience.
"time and effort into new learning and also to unlearn old ones."
"freshers learn fast and do things differently, without the baggage of past experience"
Unlearning and never-having-learned are virtues now? If the business development manager goes from having no "baggage" to "not knowing shit at all" will he be running the company? (Seemingly yes, so at least there's some consistency to it.)
right
do you want this website hacked
then post another retarded article like this and ill show you what 42 means
just happens to be my age too
I would expect this kind of statement from the kinds of morons that run SAP and Mickeysoft. The kiddies they are talking about have no discipline, have probably not been exposed to standards based development and aren't worth half a person with 15+ years of experience. I would never hire a kiddie except as an intern or entry level developer.
Only if the 35-year old is asking for more significantly more compensation than the 20-year old, right? There must be some level of compensation that's "higher than what the 20-year old asks" that still presents a good value proposition to an employer, considering the 35-year old has the benefit of 15 years work experience (and "general maturity").
This is the kind of ageist comment meant to justify firing older workers and hiring green thumbs.
It's the same thing in public schools; veteran teachers are the most valuable, but the most costly, so school administrators save money by forcing veterans to quit (e.g. deliberately giving them an overcrowded classroom with the bulk of kids that have discipline issues) and then hiring some new, well-meaning but basically ineffective teachers who just got out of college.
So to make money, they shortchange the education of children. It's the same thing here, they want to hire some new programmers who will work crazy hours until they burn out, because it's less expensive than retaining one veteran who will do quality work.
Though SAP is German, and this brilliant fellow is based in India, they should be careful. These kinds of statements suggest a more widespread policy of overt age discrimination at SAP, which is illegal in the US, among other countries. SAP should release a statement disowning this rant. Imagine: 'My experience is that race X is generally not as productive as race Y, so I prefer not to hire anyone of race X'. Also, gender F tends to go on maternity leave and not come back, so I prefer to hire gender M. Unacceptable.
I am an Indian. And he is correct for the wrong reasons. Western countries should actually do something about this, kind of like how they (at the very least) frown upon sweat shops of china.
Guys like him exploit young IT workers as they are starting their career trying to prove something. This results in 12+ hour working days and often weekends too. If AT&T pays some company in India to do some software, they need it done. the company in India treats these folks like work horses and 11:00AM to 11:00PM, 7 day a routine is quite common. Hence a 40 year with family with a PM around his age will say screw you and go to his kids. It has nothing much to do with tehcnologically relevant or not, so the 20 year slave labour does provide him more value. Not only does he work hours on end, he asks lesser money. A shit peace of software with a pretty interface is delivered to the client, non-techie iPhone generation business people see this bit, say, ooh look slide to unlock, this must be good, lets cut the check. Off to another client.
Anyhow, I am 37 and learned to say no to pushy managers long back, clearly I don't provide the value I did 10 years ago when 11-11 was the norm.
the people who are 40+ now, sure they probably suck each others dry, dusty balls. but when *i'm* 40 i'll be all kinds of awesome.
-Lod
I make my living writing software. I work for a highly successful software company, which for some reason uses SAP software for things like handling expenses. Among my colleagues the majority believe that the company uses SAP intentionally because it is so horrible to use that you'd rather not do your expense claims than suffering through the use of the SAP software.
I'll just say that if I worked for SAP, which I don't, and was developing software for them, I would be _ashamed_ to admit to it. That's how bad it is.
In India you are expected to live to the ripe old age of 47 and the die in a pyre along that stankie river Indus !!
the fact that a 40 year old working in the field as long as the 20 year old has been alive would obviously demand a higher salary, right??????
I'm still in my 30's, but I'm old enough to remember that they had to farm a lot of Y2K work out to retired guys in nursing homes because they were the best ones to figure out all the COBOL that had to be updated. Ignore the value of experience at your peril.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
The field of technology is just about a half century old and it's patterns in everything are revolutionary. From Moores law to the run of IPO's in the 90 and 2000's. From the passion of garage built computers to the sharp blow to the head of outsourcing. I've been it for 20 years and know one thing. If you work really hard you can excel at your job - 20 or 50.
Now one comment I get is the divide between program paradigms. Anyone over the age of 50 learned assembler, 40 - c, 30 - Java & finally 20 - .net / c#, etc. .net & not had to get my hands dirty with assembler, pointers, etc. Everything is an .api. While not bad, older programmers consider me a lightweight because I don't understand void* void* .... Nonetheless, in .net I could build a better application in a quarter the time.
Notice the decline in 'system programming'. I've coded
Such is the march of technology. The next generation is supposed to be better than the last. The next generation is supposed to take the hard work of the previous & build off of it.
I'm really hoping that schools are starting to teach more relevant tech, these days. One of the reasons that I never went back to school, was I had zero interest in spending thousands of dollars, countless hours, and losing sleep, in order to learn technology that was already 5 years out of date (stone age, in tech years), and qualify for a job making half what I already made, and a lot less enjoyable, to boot.
What it really is all about, is classic ageism. Young folks:
Ah, well. Not that big a deal. I just find the dishonesty in this argument rather depressing. I guess "Honesty" is also one of those "Quaint and Irrelevant" attributes of old folks.
As a tech manager that employs some real, real sharp folks; some young, some older than I, I can say that silly, blanket statements like this are not much more than click-magnets.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
#1 - Walled gardens from iOS to WinRT have expensive barriers to entry, so only us old timers who have been employed for a while can pay to play. Who is going to learn how to program these days for devices like Surface, and the iOS ecosystem which requires Mac + developer fee + device? Frankly, these companies are going to destroy themselves by putting us old folks out to pasture, and creating barriers to entry for the next generation. Only Android is something a college student could start tinkering with easily. (Must be nice to be able to forget about the economic crisis and student debt. And you can do wakka do.)
#2 - Who will maintain the old stuff? Someone forgot all that Visual Basic, COBOL, Java, and so on has to keep running. I saw a live 2012 web site written in Cold Fusion last week. I guarantee you that anyone who needs work on that site will look for an old timer like me. Because I'm one of the few people left who remembers Cold Fusion!
#3 - The irony of SAP, the ultimate can't get a job without experience and can't get experience without a job platform that has been perennially in need of developers since I started hearing about them in the early 90s, making these comments is too rich for me. No one of any age can get experience with SAP's enterprise software, because you have to have a job working with it to have access to it. No one can get any experience with SAP, so who cares how old they are?
These people need to be whacked up side the head with a clue stick.
I worked in SAP Labs India till 2 years ago, and I was there during Feroze's first two years as its MD. That place has a culture of mediocre coding standards and general lack of any programming methodology. This person has thrived on that culture, and moved up the ranks very fast and hasn't spent more than 5 years as a programmer himself. This is primarily why he has made this comment because he has no understanding or perspective on the importance of programming experience and why that or why it matters.
That confirms what my many years of IT experience has taught me. i.e. : The major problem in IT is the wrong people heading IT departments. Too many"Directors", "CTOs" and "CEOs" have no fringing idea of what they're doing or saying.
Those would fall under the "unskilled and unaware of it" label:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect:
I've seen lots of "young dynamic" (sigh) companies hit the bottom because there were no experienced engineer to stir all the young, inexperienced ones in the good direction. Of course those fresh graduates had "more value" to upper management. since they were cheaper and not experienced enough to question their often unrealistic expectations. The best performing companies I've seen had a mixture of old & young engineers.
I've worked with two people from the bottom 10%, and had to clean up after one other one. All three of those had managed to find techie work for years despite being blindingly incompetent from a technical perspective. If you're one of those people, as you age more and more people will notice that you can't answer the most basic questions about anything you put on your resume, despite having years of experience in the field. Once you cross the line where everyone notices that, that's it. Boom. You're done.
At the same time, that dinosaur who's been coding since the 70's and actually knows his stuff, he doesn't particularly need to go anywhere. As long as he enjoys his work, his job is secure. He can work there until retirement. Some young upstart like SAP will never even see his resume, because he's happy where he is.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Obviously, 4,500 battery of hens would look nicer 'deployed' in the excel/powerpoints world of an "MD".
Just to expand on this on top of everything else if you write messy code even if you don't work on it directly expect to spend extra time when the guy who does needs to talk to you about your virtual chicken scratches.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
SAP blows. Their software sucks and makes life hell for those in the trenches who have to use it for time tracking. It's like mainframe software badly tacked into a web UI.
SAP also gave HP a bad case of Apotheker.
Based on my personal experience, many CS grads have never touched on compiler design or coded in C. They've spent most of their academic studies steeped in Java or worse, Javascript. This is fine for mobile development or designing web page UIs, but it's very poor for good software design.
It's sad that the most promising software engineers I see coming out of college today come from other engineering disciplines, like MEs, EEs, or PEs, self-taught in low level languages and actually capable of turning out quality, testable code that others can maintain.
The key word is relevant. I agree with him...the golden demographic is the 18-35 year old consumers in this world. I am 42 and I have zero interst in what an average 18 year old finds fascinating. I guess I am not relevant.
He is probably confusing lines of code with value.
I'm 46, run my own company, and still do the lion's share of development on our products. My experience with hiring programmers is that most people under about 30 are more work to train than their older peers. They haven't had the work experience to develop into disciplined and experienced programmers.
Still, it's good to know that geezers like Linus Torvalds are two years past their prime and poor old Alan Cox is four years into his decline.
I keep a link in my favs for moments like this: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-sell-a-con/
Can be applied to many statements alike the originating one.
Isn't he just pushing his company's agenda of trying to get a million youngsters to graduate every year?
If skills are quickly out of date, and skilled workers are hard to find and there is a perennial shortage, my advice is for the industry as a whole to put its money where its mouth is and go back to standards. Even a decade ago, programmers could learn standard languages and be productive in different environments. Since then, software development has become Balkanized into walled gardens where the wheel is reinvented over and over. Each company has an MVC paradigm to learn. Each company uses a different language for its walled garden. Each company has its own ORM framework. All this duplication is insane and means programmers have 10x to learn. Let's standardize on SQL again, which worked fine until recently when overengineered ORM frameworks started appearing. Let's throw out all walled garden languages like C#, Objective-C, Go, Java, ABAP, etc and use standard C++ with no proprietary extensions. Dump proprietary runtimes like the JVM, .NET, and SAP.
An industry where both Core Data and Android's database access frameworks - two of the most Byzantine and insanely overengineered frameworks I've ever seen - are used to talk to SQLITE, THE SIMPLEST DATABASE EVER CREATED means something has gone wrong.
Okay, I'm waiting. Do it, Microsoft, Google, Apple, SAP - who will be the leader?
"He is probably confusing lines of code with value."
+1
I'm 47, and still code for a living. If you've got a few 20 year olds who want to cut some heads, bring 'em and line 'em up - I'm ready, and I bet I'm not the only one on here.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What'd you expect? Him to not want cheap labor for better bonuses for himself? No need to bring in racism or nationality here. It is all about the money, don't kid yourself, and nothing else. Always is.
Would you sleep better if its development and monitoring is in the hands of a a. 20 year old or b. a 45 year old? Not every job is in an offshore "doesn't have to work today" R&D center.
An employee shelf life in a company is about five years, after that they grow comfortable and tend to work the politics of the place. Anything they don't want to do, they can figure out a way to avoid doing it, usually because a "more important project" now requires their attention. They are resistant to change. Managers, in particular, become wedded to spreadsheets and processes and learn to promise as little as possible for the next product release, while listing every little thing done (such as upgrading versions of the compiler) as project achievements.
Sounds like this guy just gave everyone that works for him that's over 40 and didn't get a raise last year a pretty good excuse for a lawsuit. Serves him right, fucking bastard.
Well is it not obvious?
It's India, enough said.
For some reason nobody in India wants to be a programmer for a long time, it is all in advancing up the ladder. If you fail that you're a failure. You must become a project manager (PM) or else. There are none passionate about programming who'd love to do it all their life in India. That's it and that explains the entire story.
Me though, I'll be programming when I'm 70+ if I'm still alive. I've done PM and also being the BOSS running my own show in a mid sized company, until I sold it. Why, because I don't enjoy either PM or being a business guy, I just want to code and that's that.
Well, he works for SAP, he needs large numbers of low-skill laborers for the kind of software they produce. I tend to think that's not the future of the software industry.
From my perspective, if you're doing nothing but code jockeying at 40, you aren't bringing enough value. I'm a developer, but that's not all I do -- I fly to other continents to meet with customer representatives and user groups. I play a big role in the technical conversations my company has with other companies. I can write documentation like nobody, understand all the business aspects. On top of that, I design the architecture of new products. This is not just a "dev" job and I wouldn't expect to be able to keep a "dev" job through my 40's -- hell, I feel threatened now and I'm only 32.
This is now the second inane piece of trollbait I have seen on the frontpage of /. in the last 2 days. I know pleanty of twentysomething developers who are awful and plenty of 40+ devs who can do in a day what it takes junior developers weeks to accomplish. And vice versa.
I think the OP says more about competent developers over 40 who want to work for such an idiot rather than saying a lot about talented youths who are willing to tolerate such crap!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
A couple examples from India, and every 35+ programmer on the planet is doomed?
We don't need to throw out developers with age and experience, we need to throw out clueless journalists.
------
There are two kinds of innovation. One blazes the trail. The other paves the road.
The 35 year old can make requirements. The 45 year old can see how to break down the business requirements into work flow that makes sense. The 45 year old can look at requirements and immediately point out exactly what won't work and why.
Yeah, using %x is a sneaky way to chop 18 years off your age, and if you get caught you can say it was a coding error.
That might have the HR folks nodding approvingly until they get to the "right good code" part.
It looks like slashdot is also going the trash way. seriously, you believe a quote about programmer productivity from someone in SAP labs india? I think even guys in Bangalore do not think of "SAP Labs india" as a programmer's place. And the other guy is a Facebook/Twitter/All Media Troll who likes to toot his own horn. I would urge the slashdot editors to be a little more prudent in future. is this a paid article btw?
A short story about an engineer.
He worked for a large company helping to develop a complex matrix of computers. In our troubled times he was forced to take an early retirement and let the company under less than agreeable circumstances. Financially he was solid and looked forward to spending his time working on things that interested him.
Six months later the company called. The matrix of computer wasn’t working right and they had millions of dollars of equipment idling while others tried to troubleshoot the problem. Would he come in and help? The engineer agreed. He showed up and spent half a day looking and peering and testing. Finally he took a piece of chalk and marked an X on a board and said replace this.
The following day the company got a bill for $50,000 from the engineer. Accounting was aghast and asked for an itemized bill. The engineer sent this back: $1.00 for marking the X; $49,999 for knowing where to put it.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I look at those words and read "our training and employee development is so bad, after fifteen years employees have regressed! HELP!"
For the most part I agree with you! What really confuses me is that the 25 year old programmer, generally can't define a working requirement set to save their life. School spends so much time teaching about coding style, coding patterns, stats, calc and etc... etc... etc... but never teaches how to draw a requirement list that works. The only way you can learn that is to be given a project where you make your own requirements and see how bad you fail at it 3 months down the road 1/4 of the way into the project.
Oh yeah? Try getting someone under forty to learn COBOL. They wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Old technologies and programming languages rarely disappear entirely.
In sweatshops, especially those that bill by the hour, they need coding whores not artists. So I suspect this guy pays sweatshop wages resulting in dumb 20 year olds being fooled into working hard. In places like that anyone who is approaching 40 and still there is a fool; probably a resentful fool.
Often I see these places that are horrifically managed where they have "heroic" work hours easily punching through 60 a week. They then put out buggy products and often these places end up going down in flames after a few years of pretty stunning success. Think Zinga.
Often the problem with 40+ year old workers is that if they were good then after 20 years they have a crazy skill set resulting in just stupid productivity. But this productivity is often not of the code code code sort. It can be more of the "I've seen a library in Python that can save us 10 weeks of programming." which they then deploy in 15 minutes. So some MBA manager type gets angry that the guy who regularly saves the company millions of dollars is demanding a pretty big salary. The crappy MBA then argues that he could get 3-8 fresh CS grads for the same salary.
But on the otherhand I have seen many 50+ one trick pony programmers. They know powerbuilder or Adabas like a god and make excellent arguments against replacing the IBM big iron machine with a linux box.
If profit comes from the company, the health of the company needs to come before profit.
Futurist Traditionalism
I've dealt with some of what's coming out of India. I hate to say it, but while individually their developers are sharp as tacks, collectively they lack a) experience and b) initiative. Given a clear set of instructions they can churn out the code, but it's often unpolished and missing those small critical bits that an experienced dev has learned you omit at your peril. Correct calls to base-class constructors for instance, and factoring of common bits of logic out into base-class methods that can be used without duplicating the code. 2 bits of logic will often be left intertwined, with no effort made at separating them if the original instructions didn't say to write them separately. That turns into a maintenance nightmare further down the road when we need to use just one part of the logic and we can't because it's tied up with another unrelated part that we don't want. And if you hand them a normal set of requirements where you haven't already done the analysis and design work, figured out how the code needs to be written and reduced it to a set of clear instructions for a coder? They'll still treat it as if you'd done all that and write exactly what you asked for, incomplete and ambiguous bits and all. This... does not add value at all. It adds profit margin for the shop in India doing the work, but it ends up costing more in the long run when maintenance involves re-writing the modules from scratch to make any significant changes.
The annoying thing is I know the individual developers on the India side are better than that. When I sit down and start talking with them, it's obvious they understand what I'm talking about. I can hear them recognize exactly what I'm talking about, and their immediate response starts right down the path to what I'd've done about the problems. But none of them have done long-term maintenance on software before. They haven't had to take the same code and do bugfixes and updates and enhancements on it for 5 years running. They're making the same mistakes I was making my first few major projects.
Come to think of it, those are the same mistakes I see contractors making a lot of the time. Which'd make sense, contractors follow the same pattern of coming in, doing specific bits of work and leaving, not having to stay with the same codebase over the long term. They never have to live with the consequences of the code they're writing or the work they're doing. And all too often, what's optimal in the short term is highly non-optimal over the long term. It reminds me somewhat of what my brother deals with at a gold mine. They've got some operators who run the mills with everything right at 100% capacity. That makes their single-shift production numbers look great, but there's no margin for error. Anything goes wrong anywhere in the system and everything overflows, and you end up with the mill floor 4' deep in mud and the whole mill shut down while it's cleaned up. And if the next shift after them slows things down to create some breathing space, that cuts their production down because they've got to run at 50% capacity for most of the shift. So while those operators might say they're doing good, just look at their production numbers, the mill superintendent's not impressed that total mill production goes up significantly when these guys go on vacation.
SAP lab director has head up ass.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
From reading the article (yes, I did read it), it sounds like self justification for not treating their staff fairly.
I'm still a software developer at heart, though I don't get to code nearly as much as I want to. The problem that I see with too many (certainly not all) people is that they "retire on the job." They don't bother learning new things or new ways of thinking about problems.
We were given the green light to do a mass conversion of the existing code base. The customer even agree that we could move it off of FORTRAN and into C++ (told you I was old). One of the old timers fought me tooth-and-nail the entire way, refusing to give up FORTRAN or the FORTRAN mindset.
Another time I was brought in to convert the legacy dumb-terminal database application to a web-based application. We eventually had to force several of the developers out of the way because they refused to give up the 1980s dumb-terminal environment that they were comfortable in.
Regardless of your age, if you aren't actively learning new environments, new ways of thinking about the problem, you will be obsolete in 10 years. You can probably hang on for 15 years without learning something new, but you will always be second fiddle.
In the mean time I have seen what young coder can do (know the latest fad/language but very poor in experience and paid very very cheap) versus older coder (in average much more experienced, and likely their experience make them easy to bring to a new language ---- if they are willing but they are expansive). What that CEO in essence is saying "I don't care about experience I want young cheap inexperienced people because I can get more for the price of one older experienced person". And he is right. But by now if I have to hire, I would rather hire more experienced than 2 youngling.
'The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do.'"
--- that would all depend on what you value. If you value youth because it's trendy and cheap and easy to control, then those are things you value above experience, insight, and perspective. Fortunately for me, I'm now with an employer that values the fact that I've seen the mistakes made in the corporate realm, made a fair few of them myself, and learned in the process. So I can teach the younger ones around me, while they in turn help me stay current, aware of what's going on and coming out now. This is a phenomenon that is increasingly being denied or rejected by our culture: it is known as mentorship, a relationship among equals in which learning happens as it was originally intended to -- a 360 arc of progress among co-equals rather than a down-moving flow of control along the corporate food chain. As I have had to remind people a few times in our internal IT meetings: the only shit that "flow" -- downhill or otherwise -- is diarrhea.
the rate of change in technology. There is a different rate for different types of software. But...it does look, like things are changing at a faster rate (than they used too) across the board. There is a degree of stress produced by this rate. So very different scenarios play out depending on what this rate is assumed to be. It's very similar to nature. Survival of the fittest, not the strongest or the smartest but the fittest. i.e. those that can adapt quickly. One thing we do know about nature is 98% of the documented species have gone extinct. Long term stress followed by short term shocks can cause mass extinction events. The tech sector is a very exciting but dangerous place imho :)
Here, developers start to produce proper quality in design, architecture and code at age 35. They have an excellent education under their belt and at age 35 they tend to understand some stuff they learned at age 22, due to hard-won experience.
Google has essentially hired all the "old, famous farts" of software engineering, because they are keen on acquiring their expertise.
So, this is all bonkers.
This explains why SAP is such a horrendous piece of crap. And if you are gonna say that I'm trolling, please first go and use it yourself.
My request to this asshole: please get someone *above* 40, someone with more than 20 years of experience behind his back in GUI design and software ergonomics and code optimization, so that he can fix what your cheap workforce has pulled out of its butt.
The reason you get more out of the 20 year-olds on your team is that no 35 year-old would work for you unless he was a loser. Enclosed please find one clue bat.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yup, been going on for some time. Probably 40 years!
The University of Toronto used to use Kraft, p., Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States (Heidelberg Science Library, 1984) as a textbook in their programming and software engineering curricula.
I still recommend it, as managers still try to get rid of the good people, hire cheap ones, and then promote from within.It's a dumb move, but common.
One of my customers noticed that dumbness, and has been preferentially hiring the semi-retired.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
You can get more value out of a younger person why???
a. the enthusiasm to excel and succeed at almost any cost to solidify his future and to help pay down the balance of their college loans?
b. the exciting opportunity to take advantage of a lesser mature individual when it comes to roles and responsibility. Eg: Having a Help desk Intern doing major projects at a higher risk factor while paying lower wages due to lack of experience? Also allowing the individual the opportunity to pay down the educational
I think this type of article is outrageous, inflammatory and potentially insensitive to some.
I also think most if not all of the subject material is somewhat subjective, leading to the old adage "you get what you pay for, Value priced work for Value quality work"
From a contingent perspective it makes sense, but to scale that may the challenge. Its not necessarily whats will work now, but lets look to what will work for generations to come..
me.
Yeah, tell me about it. Retire last December, now 65 yrs old, and ran into a lotta stuff that makes older people have a tougher time in SW development.
Best guys in our section were actually going thru the man files and reading everything about every little nuance of the new compiler. I didn't have time to do that... the guy found an error I'd been trying to fix for 3 weeks (woulda asked him sooner, but he was on vacation) in about 2 hours. They change the compiler so that the arguments of a standard utility the software had been using for a long time could no longer be allowed to point to the same piece of memory for the argument. Of course, this one did, and the error message was a total mystery. 3 weeks. Dang...
I always had something to do, reading man pages was not one of them.
Then there's the enthusiasm gap. When you're new at it, you go home and program for fun. That wore off a long time ago for me. And, in fact, there was no longer time to do it, as I had a continuous battle almost every night with... my weight. I had to hit the gym hard, or weigh 300 lbs. I was spending up to 3 1/2 hours, 4 nights a week. Yeah, I got down to some decent weight - had an interviewer for a job tell me he kept up with everything by programming in the evening for fun - and he _did_ appear to be just about 300 lbs.
And at a certain point, there's an energy level thing to battle. Got where the pressure of the job made sleeping very difficult, psoriasis ran rampant, etc. and couldn't even get into the gym. Drive 20 miles to the gym (out in the middle of nowhere, but closer to the workspace) and then just too fatigued to get out of the car, go in, and start.
Yeah, this would ALL be WAY easier if I was 25. Young guys do, I think, have great advantage in a job that practically requires all-waking-hours of involvement if you want to be really, really good.
I'm 63. I design and build my own computers, I do heterogeneous parallel programming, something which this jerk undoubtedly can't spell much less understand what it is or do it. I program FPGAs and experiment with various pieces of hardware, software and shit he can't imagine. I just came back from VLDB (the Intl. Conference on Very Large Databases) in Istanbul where I attended a workshop on hardware accelerated databases, which is my interest. I work with Oracle Exadata Machines. I've talked with developers of Hadoop and from Yarcdata (a subsidiary of Cray), while this guy was jerking off some VP at a large corporation trying to make a sale. $100 says he doesn't know what a TLB is or why it exists. Yes, things are changing at an exponential rate so reading voraciously and getting your hands dirty is what keeps you ahead. In a technical debate I could cut him to pieces. Oracle is working with Fujitsu on a new processor specifically design for databases - their Exadata systems, which I have worked with, are specifically designed for databases and already have such capabilities as moving part of the query processing to the storage node reducing the disk reads required. SAP doesn't stand a chance against a company that can deliver hardware that run the software much faster than general purpose machines. I mentor little shits like him.
I question that because the 20 year olds need a hell of a lot of training to come up to speed. And by that point you've chewed them up and spit them out. Oh, I get it, it's because they can pay 20 year olds less money!
This is nothing but the usual corporate blindness. Corporations are looking for drones and don't care about quality or creativity. They just want someone to crank out tons of low quality code and not complain. They like young dumb programmers with poor social and communication skills.
I started my first software company when I was 40 and did most of the programming myself for the first few years. I sold this and "retired" after 8 years then started another software company targeting a different platform using a different language and also did most of the programming myself. I'm now 65 (and still "retired") and thinking of starting another software company targeting different platforms and using different languages.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
"Techie" != Software Engineer and with 40 you shouldn't be calling yourself software engineer anymore. Software Architect and Consultant maybe. ... It's partly marketing but there's also more to it:
With 40 one should be well their way to becoming at least half way familiar with management procedures. Not because it's cool, but it's the only thing that causes more wisdom and experience to make sense to anyone who would want to make use of it. I may be way smarter and more experienced than most of the people I work with, but if I can not leverage that experience by providing some sort of usefull leadership, I'm of lesser use that the 20 year old coder who sits in the corner doing stuff, simply because I'm more experienced, ask more money and put up with less shit. ... I bicker more than my comrades, but I should be in a position where this is an *advantage* to my boss.
As far as the general observation of software developer shelf-life, I'd basically second what is said in the GP.
Bottom line:
Always have a fallback and be prepared to proactively work on your career, also in terms of leadership and softskills and be prepared to move in to a position where you don't get paid for the work you do but for the responsibilities you take. Then software engineer shelf-life isn't a problem, it's simply a stepping stone on the usual career ladder.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Over 40 = Contract work only!
Over 50 = Independent "consultant"
Over 60 = Absolutly not gonna happen!
And since "retirement age" does not happen until 65/66, what homeless shelter will you stay at?
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Or C. Or C++. Or whatever an implementation calls for. I have been writing software since age 15, I have no kids, my houses are paid off, I don't really need money anymore, and I love to code so much that I'll be doing it until I die. If somebody doesn't want to interview me because of my age, then I'm going to assume that he's actually after young guys for reasons that have nothing to do with programming.
In reality this concept is not new. It has been happening in the "tech" industry for the last 50+ years. The harsh reality of life is that the half life of your technical education is 5 years. Now for those of you who will argue that work experience counts, I have found that, at best it is 10% for the first 3 years then decays by about 2% for every year after that until you hit 1%. Now the bad news is that 75% of the tech folks don't realize this until about the 10 year point in their career. By then it is tough to go back to school in their original career path. So where do they go? Management, tech support, quality assurance, or more often than not that cubicle in the corner where they get dragged out only to attend meetings with their cronies who took the management path. So all I can say for all of you hot shit I am going to change the world young techies...... If you play your cards right you too will end up with your own cubicle in the corner eventually as well.
Plain and simple: if you're 35, and you're still being told what to do, then you've forgotten how to grow. You're no longer contributing to society, and you've become a burden. You're no different than a 20 year-old who just can't tie his shoes (injuries and disabilities appreciated, obviously).
By the time you're 35, having years of experience, you'd better be capable of delegating, teaching, instructing, managing, or directing others. It's time for you to be making executive decisions -- since, you know, that the important part of any business. You ought to be accountable at that point. That means taking the risks, having something to lose, using your own dollars and your own decision-making to actually make things happen.
At that point, if you're also the one doing the work, that's cool.
But if you're 35, and aren't making your own decisions, well, maybe you should go back to velcro shoes. They really do make more sense, after all.
...engineers who want to work an 8-hour day and then go home and spend time with their wife and kids rather than play video games and hack on open source projects. I'm not less sharp at 40 than I was at 25, but I do have different priorities. And frankly, my depth of experience means that I pick up new tech faster than I did in my 20s. But I don't spend all my free time checking out the latest tech and I'm nowhere near as likely to jump on some new tech bandwagon simply because it is the latest and greatest. Many a naive employer thinks that having a dev team where everyone is eager to jump on the latest buzzword concept automatically makes them more relevant, but it really isn't true. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard about people using 'nosql' and other 'web scale' database technologies in order to build a website that never has more than about 50 simultaneous users. The only real advantage a 25 years engineer has over a 40 year old one, from management's perspective, is that it is vastly easier to convince the 25 year old to work a 65 hour work week for a 40 hour salary, and the 25 year old's salary will be lower, too. That is certainly one way to measure productivity, but is it really the direction we want management-labour relations to be going? The 25 year olds will eventually be 40, too, and they'd do well to remember that
sap consultants are the highest paid, now we know finally the reason.. I wish they were more companies around like that: I'd be rich much before 30.
(Looks around the cube farm at all the gray and white hair in one of the largest financial institutions in the U.S.) Wow, looks like we gotta fire a whole bunch of people with 30+ years of experience then.
Clearly, this clown has never had to maintain a complex application with 4 or 5 9s uptime requirements. Nor has this idiot ever had to keep said application in compliance with a dozen different regulatory regimes. Or tried to figure out how he was going to interface his brand new, spiffy mobile Web 3.0 application with other complex applications that may have been written before he was born!
Trust me. There isn't a large bank anywhere in the world that doesn't value its experienced people. When you have to protect your customers' life savings, you absolutely do NOT want a team of nothing but young hard chargers. You need us old timers to look out for the pot-holes we stepped in a long time ago so you don't see your company's name splashed all over the 5:30 national news.
You also need us old timers around to teach the youngsters that working 60+ hours a week needs to be the exception, not the rule. It's been shown time and again that at that point, you're beyond the point of diminishing returns. The mistakes made when people are exhausted from overwork will require so much re-work that the pace simply isn't worth it at least 80% of the time.
Of course at my age I stick to the easy stuff, Microsoft MVC, SQL Server, Entity Framework, repository pattern. All of the old standbys.
After many years in this business, I am certain that bad projects come from bad management, not bad programming. Good programmers are good programmers, and bad (or inexperienced) programmers are whatever. It has almost nothing to do with age. Some of the young programmers I have worked with can code rings around me, but I know WHAT to code. That can make us a good team.
So you can guess that, in India, techies over 40 have just as little experience with computers as techies in their 30s, since they all started 10-20 years ago! No wonder India managers found older techies giving them no additional value.
You've hit the nail on the head. For nearly 20 years, a meme of 'younger IT workers are a better value than older workers' has held true because of two factors: the personal computer revolution, and globalization.
As a 34 year old, who was one of the first generation of children to grow up with a computer in the home (Apple II computer in 1983, when I was 4), I've always had an edge on older workers who started using computers in their teens or 20s, because I started using as a child, and often had an extra 10 of experience by comparison that put me on a more equal footing. When I was 20, I could walk into jobs with 15 years of computing experience; which put me on par with 30 year olds who had been introduced to computers in highschool
ut that experience advantage is asymmetrical, to my benefit. A 24 year old nowdays, who got their first computer at age 3, isn't going to have that extra 10 years of experience, because they weren't at the forefront of the personal computing revolution. They're simply going to have 20 years experience, to my 30 years. We all grow up with computers nowdays. Only those of us at the beginning of the revolution and had families who were early adopters will benefit in that regard.
That being said, the younger generation is going to kick my generation's ass with the personal genomics, personal robotics, and personal 3D printing revolutions. I'm meeting 20 year olds that now a crap more about 3D printing and robotics than I do.
Yes, guys with 20 years experience are going to be less of a value proposition for things you'd outsource to India, which involve tirelessly scouring the web for code snippets and banging them together till they compile.
I'm sure we all know those lifers who've let their skillsets stagnate, but if you want it done right the first time in half the time give it to the old guy who still enjoys his career.
Every job interview I go to wants me to harken back to comp-sci 099 and code a linked list. I learned long ago that linked lists are to be retrieved from libraries unless there is a serious and overwhelming need for something that is "very like a linked list but isn't one exactly".
They also want you to write it out on a white board, which is like attempting to sautee with screwdrivers on tinfoil over open flme.
Job interviews select against experience.
If you hire a 40+ year old based on his instant ability to scale back to 101 level programming, you likely didn't get a well-experienced programmer, you got a "good interviewee".
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
See my post below by two or so.
Being "old" and being "experienced" are different things. And many old people who jump from job to job do so while adroitly avoiding gaining any experience. These are to be found littering "startups" full of inexperienced managers.
Some get old by never leaving a company because it's safe no matter how much they suck at their job. These are found at hide-bound institutions full of ossified management.
Lots of us old fogies know both institutions for what they are and woudln't take the job. For instance if we say "MixedCase Literal".toLower() guy during our interview we would find a better offer.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
This doesn't work.
That's not the way it works, you have to do this instead.
No, you do this.
Yea, but that doesn't work because that's not how it works.
I read the manual, this is what you are supposed to do.
You are all so cute when you are young. That's not how it actually works, the manual is wrong. That's how it was intended to work and kind of how it worked at first, but it never worked well like that, so that's not how it works any more. It works like this.
*sad* *face* *of* *disillusionment*.
Sorry. I don't own the vendor, I can't make them fix the manual.
Moral: knowing _when_ to doubt is an important life skill. Some don't doubt soon enough, and many doubt way too soon especially face-to-face.
Caveat: People often mistake "jaded" for "experienced". Becomming jaded is the death of learning.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Pure rubbish! I work doing up systems more quickly than I ever did because the peripheral knowledge cuts through time wasting!!!
I am 46 and have been programming for money since a young teenager, but I studied electronics. I have made my own computer boards from chips, and done a bit of designing with bitslice (make your own cpu from complex chips). I am competent or better in a few languages. I am starting to appreciate that C# is better than Java in many ways, but I prefer C++. A bit of javascript or phthon doesn't scare me; I'd have to take a weekend off to remember Lisp or FORTH properly. Right now I am cleaning up the mess from developers from China. They have done very clever things, but also very broken things - that hang the whole computer. Too much doing the latest cool thing, not enough KISS and experience. It isn't that they aren't smart people, it is because outsourcing makes them not care that it gets the job done - you can get the same experience at home. The Chinese and Indian outsourcing is getting more expensive. Good developers who are close to what matter is why I still feel secure in my job. It isn't paying a superstar salary, but it is decent. This is a small company. I hope if I make it work as well as I can I'll have a team under me again. The sales guys here seem good - you need them to grow the company, and to have a mutual trust with them.
Here's a corner case that might help to define the space of possibility for people who want to maintain a durable technological career.
This is my 42nd year of writing software. After about five years of that, and halfway through an honors degree in CS, I had gotten seriously into systems programming, because it was cooler, deeper, more sophisticated, more interesting, and because in those days there was a such a painful lack of good development tools that to do anything else struck me as a waste of time.
In such a long career, I've gotten to try my hand at all kinds of wonderful things. I've designed global networks and programming languages. I've covered the range from architecture to operations, I've instrumented kernel code, written device drivers, and directed supercomputer facilities. I've worked in research, industry, and government. I've worked in several countries.
And I'm not particularly smart. This is the main point I want to make. I have a lot of breadth and depth to draw upon, but no brilliance. I reason carefully and explicitly rather than relying on brilliant leaps of intuition. I write beautiful code that's a pleasure to read and maintain. Very rarely is it clever or hard to understand, because among other things I'm committed to clear documentation, and there's nothing quite like trying to document a flawed design to make you want to go back and fix the design. So I think I represent an edge case for a certain kind of excellence that challenges the prevailing - and false - dichotomy between rockstar leadership and rockstar development. There is a middle way, and I bet that a lot of you are travelling on that way. But because it's not about drama, it doesn't call attention to itself.
This year, I'm working at a very cool place that's deeply committed to open source, and is rapidly making a name for itself in private PaaS. Compared to every other career experience I've had, the level of intelligence at this place is fucking off the scale. In this group, I'm nowhere near the smartest guy in the room. Yet, in their wisdom, the management here somehow picked me from among all the other hopefuls for this senior position.
So, here I am, surrounded by all this amazing talent, trying to keep up. To put a whole PaaS stack together is not a trivial undertaking, especially with evolving goals and such fierce competition in the industry. This in itself definitely constitutes another edge case. There's a need for real genius here, no question. We have to move forward very fast on several intersecting fronts, as fast as we can possibly go, and not trip each other up.
Somewhere near the intersection of these two edges is a zone of exceptional performance in which an abundance of genius is, I hope, tempered with something more reflective and methodical. Decades ago, I used to tell the young hotshots that it's no good designing something that nobody else can maintain. The group I'm in with today doesn't need to be told anything so obvious as that. They already get it. But still, their habits of thought cause them to be impatient, to miss details, to speed impulsively from one shiny new thing to another without regard for the turbulence left in their wake. I think this is probably a necessary cost for the kind of work we're doing. It may be necessary but it's not sufficient. You also want to keep everyone tuned harmoniously, make sure that the core areas are being solidly filled in, that reasoning is explicit, that risks are identified and mitigated, that we can sustain what we're doing and not become spread too thin.
I find that it's been hard to earn credibility in this group, particularly among the younger people, when you are not actively advocating for some sexy new thing. That's what they like to hear about, perhaps to a fault. And so, in my first couple of months, I was sniped at quite a bit more than I regard as proper to reasoned debate among professionals. What's interesting is that the situation is turning
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
the argument that people can't stay relevant is fucking bullshit - and harmful the economy. i've known very good, very systematic older engineers who do very good work - and you would have no idea how old they are, until they came into the office (or announced their retirement)
new engineers are crappier hires, because you pay for a learning curve, and then they move to the next job as soon as they realize the stuff you taught them is valuable.
older engineers are likely hired at their max pay anyway - so there is less of a reason to change jobs.
it is better to hire older engineers - most of the time - where the company can afford them.
As a Sr. Software Engineer, who is 40, I can say that I'm easily worth more than 3 20 year olds.
There are skills beyond banging out lines of code, and those include making sure the code I'm banging out actually matches the spec, the spec is correct, and I haven't missed corner cases.
Of course if you want to get a bug-ridden piece of shit out the door quickly that's pretty close, please use the 20 year olds, they will get you something, and you can always patch later. Right?
And of course those 20 year olds are going to be writing highly maintainable software so 5 years later its not going to be a problem to add new features or update it to a revised platform.
Its ridiculous for the computer industry to have standardized on such huge step backward in programming technology -- especially while continually claiming that some dynamic language or other that has been around at least as long is "the next big thing". The reason Java is dominant is because Vinod Khosla saw an opportunity to create a new platform that would require huge armies of programmers to get a simple job done. This he wanted because he's an ethnic nepotist who sees that the strength of his ethnicity is in numbers, youth and the ability for them to form families without the enormous and futile investment in non-sexist courtship behaviors -- so they can focus on acquiring their life titles of nobilities (known as "degrees"), thence on their careers -- rather than on a very basic survival need: reproduction.
So import huge numbers of life-titled Indians to get their MBAs paid for by the likes of HP, Microsoft, IBM not to mention the erstwhile Sun Microsystems -- and them move them into Fortune 1000 positions where they can dictate the platform that they used in undergraduate work in India become the Fortune 1000 standard platform.
Anyone who spent their career advancing their skills and tools to the most productive even as they pioneered the computer and network revolution, would then be told that their knowledge was "obsolete" to make way for young guys who have had their brains scrambled and are now "enlightened".
Seastead this.
That's funny. The vast majority of the code I've seen from 20-something Indians has been utter crap.
Perhaps "value" is measured in delivered LoC rather than quality and elegance.
And at 50 years old I was once paid nearly 100 per hour because I knew Windows NT.
All these years later I know a shit load more now than then.
But now I will work with people I like for free even, before I will work for assholes and jump through hoops like a performing seal.
Now sit on a global frame relay network with thousands of routers and get 10 bucks an hour Fuckum.
the person asserting that a 40+ yr old programmer isnt relevant is probably talking about sweatshop conditions where pointy-haired bosses measure productivity by lines of code.
my mentor as a programmer was over 60 years old — and he had more experience and knowledge about not only how to code, but deeper insight at how to set things up so that they worked in the greater context, and showed me 'how to fish' — by building functions to test other functions. without his help and insight, it would have taken an order of magnitude to finish the project.
his vastly superior knowledge came with almost 40+ years of coding experience. it was often that a short quick reply from 'the master' would save what would have taken me weeks or even monsh as a younger programmer to figure out.
older coders have a huge amount of domain knowledge and experience that cheaper newer workers cant match.
the software company would be better off if they sacked msr V R Ferose, and retained some real talent.
2cents
jp
I'm 64, still writing code, still learning something new every day. However, I won't pull an all-nighter anymore and I won't work 60+ hour weeks to hit an arbitrary target, though I will work OT to meet a real deadline, e.g. solve a real customer problem. I look for ways to avoid writing code rather than reinventing a wheel, even if I could make 10% better wheel. Am I worth what they pay me? I don't know, and I do worry that I'll be let go before I'm ready.
They should be killed and have it posted on YouTube.
"In time... financial reality" with "proper administrative and legislative conditioning" ..."HIT A VIRTUOUS CYCLE" ...and then, a person with zero experience in running an organization more complicated than a lemonade stands, proclaims that if you disagree, then you "are poor capitalists, indeed." You haven't been around the block too many times, have you? You're going to see every one of these assertions demolished before your eyes.
They quite clearly show the cost of keeping workers more than 30 hrs a week if you have more than 49 employees.
For employers that offer *compliant* health care, on any "full time" (30hrs or greater) employee without coverage:
Section 4980D, subsection B.1):
(a) on any failure shall be $100 for each day in the noncompliance period with respect to each individual to whom such failure relates.
(2) Noncompliance period
For purposes of this section, the term ‘‘noncompliance period’’ means, with respect to
any failure, the period—
(A) beginning on the date such failure first occurs, and
(B) ending on the date such failure is corrected.
(3) Minimum tax for noncompliance period
i.e: Employees 31 - 50 (20 employees x $100/day) == $2000 per day, or $730,000 per year.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title26/pdf/USCODE-2011-title26-subtitleD-chap43-sec4980D.pdf
For employers who don't offer health care: Section 4980H: /mo, or $3000 per employee per year.
1/12 of $3000
And people want to know why "unpatriotic" employers will drop their coverage:
$3000 in penalties per employee each year vs. 12,000K to 15,000K for a "compliant" plan as determined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Or, you can just drop every employee after #49 from 40hrs a week to 30hrs and avoid the whole problem.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title26/pdf/USCODE-2011-title26-subtitleD-chap43-sec4980H.pdf
As I approach 40, I find that valuable work time winds up being wasted chasing yoots off of my lawn.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
"'The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do.'"
What he means is that he gets more work for less money.
That's the only value he can measure on a spreadsheet, apparently.
Take it with a grain of salt.
In most cases by the time a person has completed 15 years in IT, they have moved on to a managerial or quasi-technical role which needs a good grounding in technology but not hands on technical knowledge necessarily. There are a small number of people in their forties who are still coding, but they run the risk of age discrimination if they need to change their job. Everyone, including US/Europe employers looks for high energy geeks who can spend additional time on the job without encumbrances like wife/kids/home far away/relocation issues. Some of these issues get sorted out naturally simply by way of what employees are willing to pay for "programmer", where the job is and what benefits are available. If you are 40 plus you will be at a salary level which will make many of the programmer jobs unattractive. Of course, there will be a small percentage (10%) who will continue to do this till they retire, but they will be in the small minority.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
I guess hardware is different. I'm in my late 40s and valued more than ever for my experience. I can start a new design, and by the time the mid 20s guy has an initial concept, I can be well through my detailed design and talking with the board layout guy thanks to the fact that many designs have a lot of "boiler plate" sections that can be adapted from my many previous designs. I suppose it helps that I can design the hardware, write the HDL for the FPGAs, write the embedded C for the processors and write the C# on the computer that talks to the hardware, and even generate the initial layout and board stackup. There's a lot of related areas in hardware development that can be explored by a curious EE, especially in the R&D work I do. It helps that they can assign one guy to cover many areas of the design.
So you ask a couple of people in india about employees, and they tell you that the cheap young ones are a better.
In other news, the world has been found to resemble a sphere.
"Relevant" here means they don't argue with you when your ideas are stupid.
Maybe they should just hire guys over 50 who used to write code for mainframes (now known as "the cloud"). They know how to write really efficient code, not because of battery life, but because they only had a few kb of RAM. They also have loads of experience writing code that dumb terminals (now known as "apps") interface to.
...is hours if not minutes if the shareholders find out he is spouting such drivel.
They're cheaper and guys with business degrees are obsessed with cost.
Companies that use people and spit them out in this manner won't be around long.
It is the case in India, where quality of software doesn't really matter. I doubt an average 20 year old programmer can beat an average 35 year old programmer when it comes to quality of the code they produce.
Really?
F*ck you, too, buddy.
have you ever had SAP implement any thing? Cost over runs, poor code, revolving door on dev's, seriously has any one ever had a solution implement by SAP that was not over hauled in a 3rd of the time roughly a year later.
(Looks around the cube farm at all the gray and white hair in one of the largest financial institutions in the U.S.) Wow, looks like we gotta fire a whole bunch of people with 30+ years of experience then.
Clearly, this clown has never had to maintain a complex application with 4 or 5 9s uptime requirements. Nor has this idiot ever had to keep said application in compliance with a dozen different regulatory regimes. Or tried to figure out how he was going to interface his brand new, spiffy mobile Web 3.0 application with other complex applications that may have been written before he was born!
Trust me. There isn't a large bank anywhere in the world that doesn't value its experienced people. When you have to protect your customers' life savings, you absolutely do NOT want a team of nothing but young hard chargers. You need us old timers to look out for the pot-holes we stepped in a long time ago so you don't see your company's name splashed all over the 5:30 national news.
Or as one the youngest (at 55) of the best software guys I ever worked with put it, "Software Engineering is a circus, everyone likes to make a big song and dance show, but in the end someone has to clean up after the elephants." So while that young hotshot may work long hours and implement a hundred different versions of AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean and the like all in one codebase, we'll always need that old FORTRAN-trained duffer to test it, fix it and refactor it so that it's readable. And with retirement less than 15 years away, we don't need to obfuscate our work for additional job security. Hotshots are wonderful for young start-up companies and they're an excellent part of the mix in any good company, but if you want your company to last longer than pets.com and napster, you'd better look at the long term and for that there is nothing better than experience.
You also need us old timers around to teach the youngsters that working 60+ hours a week needs to be the exception, not the rule. It's been shown time and again that at that point, you're beyond the point of diminishing returns. The mistakes made when people are exhausted from overwork will require so much re-work that the pace simply isn't worth it at least 80% of the time.
If Ferose were smart enough to look beyond this week's stock price, he might understand that one of the reasons IT has shifted to his part of the world has to do with the demographics of a high birthrate, there are many many people in that 18-25 age range who will put up with anything, work long hours, have no family obligations, no need for life in the work/life balance. But that all of these countries are going through demographic changes which will make it nearly impossible to continue to take advantage of the "long tail"/ race to the bottom wage that was once made possible by a high birthrate. This change has already happened in China and will soon take place in other parts of the world. Countries and companies with mandatory retirement ages of 70 and lower will be at a significant disadvantage.
SAP, Google, FB, LinkedIn, Siemens, MySpace, GE, Oracle... where corrupt programmers go to violate people's privacy.
From what I have seen, all the guys under 40 think this library based 4GL coding is the way to go, but I have seen nothing but garbage in recent years. If 10 people are working on the same product, and they are all using the same library that has the same flaws, then it's garbage in garbage out, and bloatware to boot.
...
custom systems design and implementation == programming services == bodyshop
staffing services == bodyshop
software publishing == real commercial off-the-shelf product development == shrink-wrap hardware/software product development
What's your hourly rate? == You'll never ever see anything like your former salary and total compensation package, training, education, vacations, duration of employment...
What a 21 year old would program. I would re-write more efficient, less code, more secure, scale-able, more object oriented (god have you ever decomplied sharepoint 2007 , polymorphism anybody?)
Totally false, if they want something done fast, i can code without thinking ahead too.
Michael Evanchik
I was 50 when I earned my BS in CS. Those were lean times, (1990) but I still had companies calling with job offers and I didn't have to start at entry level either. :-)) otoh We do tend to have a different outlook at 50 compared to 20. Many of us also become much more independent if we invested for retirement! "I think" we also tend to have more of a life outside of work.
What he meant was those under 25 will work for nothing, so they are worth more to his bottom line. And those with experience cost him more, and buggy software is not a concern.
They are just claiming that older people can't do the job.
But the real truth is that they don't want to pay the salary of somebody with experience in the field. Somebody who KNOWS what he/she is doing and have the knowledge to say that is stupid to the dumb ideas management throws around.
They want yes sir/mam employees that don't know better and can be paid in the cheap.
This has nothing to do with age and relevance. It is all about $$$ and control.
Posts like this one make me understand why some people refer to IT work as 'IT Janitor work' because that's what it really is. No matter how brilliant a coder, BA, DBA, tester, PM etc you are, as long as you work under the umbrella of the Corporate World entity, you will always just be a pawn in a chess game where the ruthless CEO and upper management do whatever it takes to secure their jobs/income at your expense.
Isn't it interesting how in law, medicine, and dentistry, it is quite common for individuals to continue working well into their 60s and beyond. Conversely, find me someone in IT who is 60+ and still working!
The best-of-the-best 20 something will have is ass handed to him by the best-of-the-best 40 something. And that's a good thing.
It's especially alarming to hear this coming from someone at SAP. Enterprise software takes a LONG time to master. It's not just learning to program in a particular language, it's learning the intricacies of a VAST application and all the modules that come with it. Of course he's in India so he has that sweatshop mentality. Guess what Ferose? I have seen the code that those monkeys produce and it's shit. We always have to end up fixing it State side...yeah, those more than 35 year old guys that you are so quick to write off.
The past few years have seen dramatic changes in technology. Computing is being increasingly done on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. These devices have lower processing power and storage capacity than PCs. And they run on batteries that require recharging . Hence, applications built for them must have smaller footprints and be highly energy efficient.
Excuse me?! I started programming on a 1 MHz CPU and 48K RAM computer (Apple ][+, later upgraded to 64K, and later still with marginally faster CPUs), which has a *smaller* footprint than many embedded boards now have today. The IBM PCs I used during the early years of coursework for my B.S. Computer Science initially had 128K RAM. During the mid-'90s, the safety-critical, hard real-time backup computers developed for the state-of-the-art C-130J transport aircraft used 68040s. These experiences teach you to write clean, efficient code as a matter of habit. The only difference now is more capable hardware can be held in the palm of your hand.
at 35 if you are not learning yourself, you will become redundant very quickly
Now, this statement is absolutely true. Any good engineer understands their career must be one of life-long learning. If you are a software developer and you have not continued to educate yourself, then I agree some of your skills will be getting stale, but these will be the trendy skills you learned in college and your first job(s): today's language of choice, today's IDE of choice, today's OS of choice, today's architecture of choice. But, the Computer Science education I received in the '80s included a lot of fundamental knowledge. This body of knowledge hasn't changed, though it has been added to since then. Are computer science and software engineering degree programs no longer teaching the fundamentals that transcend the trendy development tools?
The seasoned pro learns to use the right tool for the job, instead of trying to pound the square peg (i.e. trendy) into the round hole. College can't really teach you that - it requires experience, and it is experience your young programmers may not have learned yet.
From the article:
I laughed when I saw this. Sounds like any battery powered embedded system. I was doing those in the 80's!
Seems like all the commenters are 35+ here. Where are the 20 year olds' perspectives? Maybe they're not wasting their time on slashdot so maybe there's something to this...
"Software engineer" encompasses a wide range of activities. I am considerably over age 40 yet I could never be replaced by (even multiple) 20-year olds. Two reasons are:
1. I have one foot in academic research, and have been not just following but advancing the state of the art and publishing hundreds of papers in scholarly journals and conferences for decades;
2. One of my job functions is to show up at the scene of a software disaster in my firetruck, assess the management and technical situation, make recommendations for how to recover, and (if allowed, which is not always) work hands-on with the engineers to help design and implement corrective software. After decades, you name it, I've been there and done that. No one much younger than I am can have had all that experience and be able to cost-effectively diagnose and solve software engineering problems. It's like internal medicine physicians: older ones have assimilated more and have deeper broader insights than younger ones.
Doug Jensen
Never heard of this guy "Ferose" in tech world. Who is he ? Has he invented Computer or iPhone or has he written great books on Computer science? lolz.. There are many like him who gets promoted to higher management when their bosses do not find anyone else. Only a true engineer can respect the experience , knowledge and efficiency of experienced senior engineers. He is acting like a businessman to impress the public and media but this is surely going to cost him. Why should we the "Senior engineers" bother ourselves with such a shitty stuff which he has written. SAP is a great company which has revolutionized the enterprise software world and a very respected employer in europe. I am sure he will receive a tight slap from SAP management.
Age has its value, but yeah some fields and companies value youth over all else. These companies tend to change over time as the founders age or they burn out. Does Elon Musk hire a bunch of fresh out of school engeineers to build his rockets or would he hire a mix of ages and talent? What about Google? Has the average age gone past 25 yet? If it hasn't, it will. If you find yourself past the golden age in an industry, look towards new skills and new avenues. Become the leader who gets those hyper cafinated sponge bobs to gell and produce.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
These articles were both written by people who think outsourcing software development to India is a good idea.
From today: SAP Labs India has announced that Anirban (Andy) Dey has been appointed managing director effective January 1, 2013. Taking over from his current role as VP, In-Memory Platform Technologies, Andy will further drive operational efficiency, speed up innovation and steer SAP Labs in its next phase of growth. Andy succeeds V. R. Ferose, who will take on a new global role in SAP. “SAP Labs India has showcased leadership that has driven the organization to excel in innovation and product development. The Lab has contributed significantly to SAP’s products and technologies and plays a key role in the SAP ecosystem. Andy’s leadership will be a great asset in taking Labs India to greater heights,” said Clas Neumann, SVP and Global Head of the SAP Labs Network. “We also thank Ferose for the positive contribution made to SAP Labs India since he took charge from April 2010 and wish him the very best in his new role
Perhaps Indian coders.... The younger ones I worked with weren't much value. Usually it was quicker to do things myself rather than try to get a Visa ring-in to cut any code. Perhaps the more mature software engineers just don't like the bloke? Can't understand why. Or perhaps the grown up coders don't want to work for $0.70c an hour. Has anyone SEEN the internals of SAP?! ROTFLMFAO! Anyone that works on that spaghetti should NOT be commenting about software engineering skills.
54yo in a few weeks.
use Moose;