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Age Discrimination In the Tech Industry
Presto Vivace writes: Fortune has an article about increasingly overt age discrimination in the tech industry. Quoting: "It's a widely accepted reality within the technology industry that youth rules. But at least part of the extreme age imbalance can be traced back to advertisements for open positions that government regulators say may illegally discriminate against older applicants. Many tech companies post openings exclusively for new or recent college graduates, a pool of candidates that is overwhelmingly in its early twenties. ... 'In our view, it's illegal,' Raymond Peeler, senior attorney advisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws said about the use of 'new grad' and 'recent grad' in job notices. 'We think it deters older applicants from applying.'" Am I the only one who thinks many of the quality control issues and failed projects in the tech industry can be attributed to age discrimination?
What? Group X deserves Y for any reason Z? How about: 'Fratboys with Ferraris have car manufacturers and dealers, they come first. All those people and jobs depending on them.'
Nobody deserves anything, particularly not for the responsibilities they chose (hopefully) to make. The only person who "deserves" the job is the most capable person for it.
In reality, neither - older people or the best for the job - get the job. Because if it were the most capable for the job, then new college grads would never get hired, would they?
It takes a couple of years experience to become good and productive.
The truth of the hiring in tech is that its capricious and based on fads - firms are lemmings.
Some big currently successful corp starts basing its hiring on some metric someone pulls out of their ass, and then everyone does it in the hopes of aping the success of that firm.
Google and Microsoft has fucked up hiring for everyone with their idiotic interview questions that they ended up getting rid of anyway.
See, the fact is companies have no clue how to get the best. They make metrics up, buy cute tests, hire consultants with their Ouija boards or whatever, and follow what currently successful companies are doing - who are also pulling shit out of their asses.
The best way to hire? Get a development manager with a long contact list in his smart phone and have him start calling people he knows can deliver and throw money at them.
Never fails.
If you or your company can't get "qualified people", it's because YOU suck - pay too low, having HR recruit or just being lemmings and following the herd on how to hire.
...it's about pay scales - employers figure recent grads will work for less.
OOP has never lived up to it's hype. No matter how "object oriented" a system is, it is still just as likely to be late and/or broken as in pre-OOP days. Development, maintenance and modification is not automatically better with OOP.
The lessons of good language design might as well not exist. PHP is a cesspool of bad design and implementation. JavaScript, even though it has some nice features (closures) has an obscure object model that is difficult to understand and is a wreck just waiting to happen. (Any body can overwrite the basic implementation of built in functions. Really? ObjectHasOwnProperty. Really?) C++ finally got a reasonable memory management model after C++03 with RAII/smart pointers. What did that take, 30+ years? Python and Lua are reasonably good, but they seem to be niche players. Java isn't a programming language, it is a self contained universe. Like a black hole, once you go in you never come out. And even if it's OK now, the fact that Oracle in in charge means that it is like Middle Earth if Sauron won. (Yes. Ellison is that bad.)
I can't be certain, but I strongly believe that one of the reason for the lack of progress is that there are not a lot of old programmers still in the profession. Unlike other engineering fields, say civil engineering, chemical engineering, etc careers tend to be short. There are not enough people around to say "we tried a version of that 15 year ago, and it had these pitfalls." The result is that the same mistakes keep getting made over and over again. This fits in with the observation that as a profession we have not improved much on estimating project requirements and being on time and on budget.
That's one of the reasons I hate the term "Software Engineering". We are not real engineers because we can't deliver on time with predictable results and a predefined cost. It's not that this happens all the time in other engineering areas, it's just that it rarely happens with software.
Why is Snark Required?
I'm young-ish (~30) myself and have also not seen a discernible creativity/novelty advantage among younger people. Among people I've worked with there's no clear trend with people in their 20s being more creative and coming up with more good new ideas than people in their 50s. A lot of great stuff comes from people who have enough background to actually spot an opportunity for innovation.
You can see that even at big tech companies. New ideas coming out of Google largely come from their older staff. There are a ton of 20-somethings at Google, but the major projects tend to come from people like Rob Pike (age 58), Peter Norvig (58), Ken Thompson (age 71), Lars Bak (age 49), etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10