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It's Hard For Techies Over 40 To Stay Relevant, Says SAP Lab Director

Posted by timothy on from the cannon-fodder dept.

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.

10 of 441 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Quantity over quality by rtp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Youth is idealistic, therefore generally willing to commit much longer work hours "for the cause." Older adults understand the value in applying time toward family, raising children, and focusing more on quality solutions versus brute-force/take-the-hill/quantity solutions.

    And/or, do we have a generation shift where the 40+ year-old workforce today operates at a different tempo versus the newest generation? Is the next generation that enters the workforce committed more to work for a rapid increase in pay? The 26 year-old knucklehead in his mom's basement suggests otherwise, but perhaps he is the rare exception at the bottom left of the bell curve?

  2. Cost / Benefit issue... by kbonin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:India by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    20 years ago in school, I have a friend from India, who was worried that the computer skills he was then learning in the US would be useless in India when he returns because computers were too expensive in India at that time.

    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.

  4. Re:not hype/trends followers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's SAP and it's India. It's probably a lab that is one step up on data entry.

  5. Indian sweat shops by mrops · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Indian sweat shops by I_am_Jack · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Meanwhile if you had gone to business school you would be relevant forever and probably better paid.

      Nope, the same applies to business. People in their 20's are willing to worker longer hours and for less money than someone who is older, has a longer resume and is worth more in salary, and is less willing to devote stupidly long hours to a career which is already established. Those industries which can make their quarterly reports look good by throwing more workers at a problem will always be inclined to hire those who work longer for less. When I think back to my 20's and what I thought was a lot of money then versus what I know I need now, I realize why I was easily exploitable. It's not because you're good and smart, it's because you might be good, you might be smart, but they'll settle for how long you'll work for as little as they can pay. If you turn out to be a rockstar, they might promote you, but more than likely they'll use you for what they can get out of you, and then hire a replacement when you get a job that pays more for fewer hours.

      Not that correlation equals causality, but the fact an employee thinks it's a great idea to work hard to buy an expensive cell phone to take pictures of food from a trendy restaurant is not lost on upper management.

    2. Re:Indian sweat shops by ink · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You hit the nail on the head. I was willing to put up with a lot more bullshit when I was in my 20's. I was willing to "write to spec" at the behest of bad managers even when the spec was clearly ridiculous. I was willing to put in extra time at work because I did not have a family or much savings. Now, I prefer to do meaningful work and pursue my own interests in off-hours. The video game companies went through this problem about ten years ago (full disclosure: I work in that industry). They would hire a bunch of young, hungry developers and burn them out on a few titles, then shut down the studio. It turns out that doing that is not a long-term strategy because you destroy your capital -- and so they changed course (well, most companies did) and started investing in long-term, productive work forces.

      --
      The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
  6. Re:Because the 35 year olds have gained wisdom by Ramley · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm 48, self-employed, and spend a good deal of time putting out security fires, and/or filling in the gaps that the younger, (very) less experienced guys didn't think through their solutions.

    As one of my roles, I am the "go-to" guy for organizations which have development staff, but only have 1/2 of the required talent, if that makes any sense.

    The more companies begin to understand / evolve online, the more open their eyes will be when they realize they've had their first SQL injection, etc. This is when people like us come in -- but the key to our success is keeping up with constantly changing technology, and doing it well.

  7. Re:Because the 35 year olds have gained wisdom by Jawnn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    Precisely. Our shop is small, but I can tell you with certainty that most valuable developers are the oldest. Certainly, that's not a hard an fast rule - there are poor coders in all age groups, but the best young ones can't hold a candle to the best veterans. Not even close. Wisdom and knowledge are two different things. If I had a nickle for every time our most senior developer smiled wryly and shook his head when someone offered up some unworkable approach to this or that problem, I'd have a lot of nickles. The insight that allows him to immediately identify dead-ends is something that is born only from long experience. Sure, we'd all reach the same conclusion, eventually, but he's able to jump over the time-wasters because he's been down there.
    Then there's the actual quality of his work. Generally speaking, he can to in n lines of well-documented and easy to follow code what it might take the new guys 1.5n, or more. That ability has value that doesn't show up well in most metrics.

  8. Re:Quantity over quality by BenEnglishAtHome · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The people who are still around after 20 years ... are binary: they're either wizards or burnouts.

    What gets me is how quick they can flip. I was a wizard, though not a coder, more of a crypto specialist with a TLA who did lots of other stuff on the side.

    We went through a management re-shuffle from top to bottom that just about killed morale in the entire organization. In my case, no other function could borrow me for a project without a writ from on high. In the past, IT could lend me to another division to help them over a hump and build up favors that helped *everyone* the next time a new project came along and workload negotiations were happening. No longer. I got all my "interesting" work taken away. This was the stuff I did all day, every day, for years. I was re-directed to my core duties (which were fine...if boring) *only*. Literally, the last time I was lent from my division to another, the person who asked to borrow me had to take the request all the way up to the office of a presidential appointee to get me for two weeks (and I worked in one of the few TLAs where there are almost no political appointees except at the very top.)

    It took me less than 5 years to flip from wizard to burnout.

    They wanted to reduce staff and one day, out of the blue, offered me a few bucks and a reduced pension to retire early. I was out the door so fast, I feared the vacuum behind me would suck all the furniture out into the hallway.

    A few months later, I got invited back for a Christmas party. Management had been lying (of course) and they had not reduced staff. They had replaced me with 2 contractors. My old work partner described them as "#1 sits around and plays with his smartphone all day. #2 has a brain; in 10 years, we'll be able to get half the work out of him we used to get from you. Neither of them will ever have a clue where all the bodies are buried like you did." He then proceeded to tell me he was getting out within 6 months.

    Mod parent up; "...hire wizards and ...shift... burnouts into doing something they ... enjoy more, because older workers bring a lot of experience and realism to the game" is the best advice I've seen yet in all the replies to this article.