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.

Comments

not hype/trends followers

[Anonymous Coward]

bacause they aren't hype/trends followers. They will not tell you to rewrite your whole system in Ruby

Re:not hype/trends followers

[shawnhcorey]

...because they would rather work smart than work hastily.

Re:not hype/trends followers

[mellon]

But rewriting your whole system in Ruby is hugely productive! Look at the number of new lines of code!

Seriously, the managing director of a lab at SAP in India? They were really scraping at the bottom of the barrel here. Seems like link bait to me.

Re:not hype/trends followers

[Anonymous Coward]

SAP shouldn't be telling anyone about engineering until they figure out how to do it themselves

Re:not hype/trends followers

[deoxyribonucleose]

bacause they aren't hype/trends followers. They will not tell you to rewrite your whole system in Ruby

Speak for yourself.

I'll do it. And you'll come out way ahead. Ruby is a great language.

The implicit context was that experienced developers won't rewrite an entire system for the sake of using the latest greatest technology. If you think otherwise, I'd suggest that you have managed to absorb years while avoiding experience.

Because the 35 year olds have gained wisdom

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Because the 35 year olds have gained wisdom

[stevew]

Some other points not brought up - since the guy is in India, there are some specific Indian Culture issues working here too. The big one that has been pointed out to me by Indian folks I've worked with is that Mom & Dad expect their kids to be MANAGERS within a couple of years of graduating or the kids are considered failures! So even FINDING someone in India with 15 years of relevant experience is HARD. They DO exist, but more than likely, they came over to the US then went back home!

Finally - having just gone through a project with 3 oldsters pushing 50+ & three young guns just out of school (one a PHD & the other two youngsters Masters degree holders) I can tell you with certainty that the company took over a year recovering from the mistakes made by the newbies.

BS to the whole thing. I'm 56 and still a working technologist.

Re:Because the 35 year olds have gained wisdom

[MisterSquid]

The math of Obamacare for most businesses means less money will be lost if employees don't work more than 28 hours. What decision should a business make?

This is an idea that is getting traction now that the Affordable Health Care Act will carry as a result of Obama's reelection, and it is an idea that needs to be challenged.

Employees who are secure in terms of healthcare are a huge benefit to a company and to the society that supports the conditions for universal healthcare. Reducing the possibility of bankruptcy due to medical eventuality (not just crisis) means reduced money spent to train new employees and combat turnover.

Employees with access to affordable preventive care need less time off and are more productive than overworked and ailing workers.

In time, when the financial reality of universal healthcare normalizes, services and premiums will (with the proper administrative and legislative conditioning) hit a virtuous cycle where resources are commensurate to demand. People will not avoid seeing a doctor because it might be unaffordable and so will get proper treatment that may obviate the need for heroic but less-effective medical services at a later time.

A populace with access to universal healthcare will mean more financial resources available for discretionary purchases, investment, and education.

Employers and capitalists who think taking care of employees is too expensive are poor capitalists, indeed. While there certainly is more to life than money, in the case of universal healthcare there's economic sense to be had as well.

Quantity over quality

[hessian]

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.

Re:Quantity over quality

[aix tom]

A ping point there being "Shareholders". I myself (42 years at the moment) would NEVER (again) work for a publicly traded company. Small, privately owned, outfits are the place for me. Where Priority one is the customer, priority two are the workers, and the owners profit is priority three. (Funny enough, it seems the owners profit gets better when it's priority three than when it's priority two)

Re:Quantity over quality

[Anonymous Coward]

When I started my career, I nearly lived at work. And by nearly, I mean that I literally lived at work for weeks at a time. I did anything for the team, the project, the company. I worked holidays, weekends, months straight without a single day off. The 12hr days were the *light* days.

By my late 20s, I'd put in the better part of a decade. The company started having pretty regular layoffs as the solution to meeting financial needs instead of ditching shitty management. After they trimmed the fat with several rounds of layoffs, it eventually came to be my turn, too. It was done in a fairly shitty and impersonal way.

When I returned to my career a few months later, that passion and drive "for the team/project/company" was gone. I realized what most other people realize by their 30s --- that companies don't give a fuck and you shouldn't either.

Corporate value

[Anonymous Coward]

'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.

Re:Corporate value

[Anonymous Coward]

'The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do.'"

The shareholders of the company should note that the same observation is true for a Managing Director. There are younger men and women that would provide the share holders with significantly more value than V R Ferose, MD of SAP's India R&D Labs is providing them.

Re:I call BS on that

[gbjbaanb]

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.

That's funny because as a 20 year old I thought

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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.)

Or even older

[SteveFoerster]

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.

Re:Or even older

[CrudPuppy]

It also depends a whole lot on the area of IT. This article very mistakenly refers to "IT" and then makes a generalization that applies only to a subset of IT workers.

I can see where programmers may actually be better when fresher, but I have spent the last 20 years as a unix and network administrator, and neglecting a truly prodigious few, these areas are impossible to master without many years of experience. At the same time, I can say that many 10+ year admins out there have not invested in their own self-training and are every bit as worthless as a 20 year-old admin.