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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...
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.
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.
and I'm sure you get a lot of hassle from the kids who come to you to ask how various things are done.
Its the same everywhere I've worked, there's always a group of older workers who are the go-to guys if you need to now how something works, or if you need advice on how to put your stuff in the bigger picture.
The biggest problem for me is the crap the kids come up with - for example, I recently was shown a new web service that had 1 method on it, which was implemented using 6 interfaces and 10 files. And this had a comment saying "I didn't use dependency injection because this is such a simple project". It was the hallmark of someone who's taken on every OO way of working with factories and wrappers and decided to use them all without the experience to know when to use them.
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.
...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.
...above a certain age they just start telling me to fuckoff, to my face rather than behind my back.
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
I don't have mod points, else you would more than deserve your full five on this topic.
One thing that happens as one gets older is their bullshit tolerance goes down.
Take a person, stick them in a call center for PC support, have people sacked by their badges not working, or have them physically dragged out by security, force them them to have "optional" OT (which means that if they don't take it, the CC will not buy out the contract from the crummy temp agency, and anyone on the temp agency rolls for more than 90 days gets shown the door), have to wear a full-on suit just to sit on the phones (since the people were offshore), have every single call second-guessed [1] and penalties assigned, and offer zero benefits other than the job takes up space on a resume. A 20-something would do this, as they don't know better. After 30-40, unless there was absolutely nothing else out there, the older guys will laugh in the hiring manager's face and tell them to just cut the BS and walk out the door.
There is an age where commutes are wearing (especially after knowing that eventually you will be in a wreck, so the less one is on the road the better), health insurance is a concern, there are family issues, and one realizes life is just too short to deal with that, even if it means a radical change in lifestyle.
It isn't about working hard; as one gets older, it becomes about working smart, especially as retirement age looms ahead.
[1]: There is always the time item. Explain something clearly to someone, you get yelled at for being too long on the phone. Get them off the phone and they call in on the same item, you get yelled at because you were too "stupid" to do it right the first time. The constant whipcracking on phone stats is a good way a company can guarantee zero employee loyalty.
We should thank the young Indians. If it weren't for their poor quality software, the older folks wouldn't have a carrier fixing it or making work arounds. Salute the young Indians and please continue your low quality of work.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...