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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless you're Apple. Then you file for a patent.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't think he claimed he wouldn't be. But then again, his primary function is not that software engineer - it's Managing Director. So his shelf life may or may not be longer.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
"He will be forty one day too..."
He's 38, so it will be very soon.
Actually, we don't have to listen to that geezer.
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.
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
Yep. I'm a 55yo Sr Unix Administrator who uses my old coding skills to proactively monitor systems. I used my debugging skills to identify a problem Friday that had the younger folks scratching their heads (it was a cloned virtual machine and the original worked fine). And a tool I wrote to help make server builds more efficient across the various necessary teams (networking, servers, SAN, backups, virtualization, applications, and infosec) is going live December 1st. How's that for an old guy. :rolleyes:
[John]
Shit better not happen!
He also works at SAP, and his view of developers is from the big corporate drudgery perspective.
Actually, he may have a point in his particular context. If you give your staff the burnout on current tech and no time to develop new skills, you can do even better than "useless at 40" - "useless at 30" is also fully achievable.
Yep, at SAP they probably want someone cheap and with no experience that will do low-tech drudge work without complaining. But are you ever going to see someone designing the next NASA exploration vehicle asking for twenty year olds, or do you want your medical devices to be designed by the cheapest programmers? Hell, I don't even want someone called a "techie" to be working on machines that keep me alive.