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Why Companies Should Hire Older Developers
Nerval's Lobster writes: Despite legislation making it overtly illegal, ageism persists in the IT industry. If you're 40 or older, you've probably seen cases where younger developers were picked over older ones. At times we're told there's a staffing crisis, that companies need to import more developers via H-1B, but the truth is that outsourcing and downsizing eliminated a subset of viable developers from the market. Those developers, in turn, had to figure out if they wanted to land another job, freelance, or leave the technology industry entirely. But older developers still have a lot to offer, developer David Bolton writes in a new column: They have decades of experience (and specialist knowledge), they have a healthy disregard for office politics (but can still manage, when necessary), they're available, and they're (generally) stable.
Here's why I advocate for hiring older developers. I'm in my mid-30s now and I've seen it happen so many times. Some kid comes in fresh out of college thinking he or she knows all the answers. They don't. I don't. They are so trigger happy to re-invent the wheel and over engineer everything.
You know what I've learned after all these years. I may not know "what works", but I sure do know what won't.
The problem with older developers is that they have too much experience. Or at least, that is what I was told by the HR persons who did not want to interview me when they saw my resume.
Capitalism should sort out the underperformers.
Greed and executives' immunity from the consequences of their bad decisions cause a lot of bad.
You really think that a college class is the only thing that can make you aware of all the threats out there. I mean, you honestly believe that.
Interesting.
What on earth.
I expected some reasonably sensational comments, but this one really stands out. Why would you think this? Are modern CS classes somehow better at security? In my ACTUAL experience, the only people I've ever had thinking that declaring a member variable as private increases the security of the product or enforces an actual restriction in the compiled code are younger. Certainly I haven't seen attention to security as being present primarily in the young or old.
Expecting capitalism to select for high performers is like expecting natural selection to select for really long lived red blood cells. If your selection criteria are on the organizations, you select for organizations, and the individuals are just a function yielding that.
In a lot of sports there are salary caps. Players develop, get more experience, and the good ones get a really big raise when their entry level contract ends. Eventually teams have to trade off players to stay under the cap and they rely on the draft to supply them with serviceable players on entry level contracts to fill the holes. The cycle repeats.
I see companies do the same thing. They aren't just going to continue to give out raises until every person in a department earns a much higher than average salary. Companies have a few people with experience and skill that they keep and compensate well, and they let a lot of people walk and then hire younger cheaper people to back fill. Eventually those people develop and deserve a higher salary and they are either retained or enter free agency and go somewhere else.
There is a reason most young people can get huge raises by job hopping every few years where if you stay at a company you most likely wont see as much of a salary increase. Companies don't want to pay people what they are worth, they want to pay people what is required for the company to continue to make profit. Most companies don't need a team of super experienced and skilled devs. They get by with a core team of talent and a bunch of cheap supporting players. Just like a lot of sports teams.
Just my observations. YMMV
It's like that old joke about the young and the old bulls ... Hey, let's run down there and fuck one of those cows. No, let's walk down and fuck them all.
Instead of asking your employees to knock their brains out, read the fucking Mythical Man Month and realize that the death march is an idiotic way to do things which doesn't really work.
Too many companies are being ran by MBAs who have no understanding of how to build stuff, and think 9 women can have a baby in a month. Or even that 4 women working really long hours can do it in half the time.
The problem is companies are being ran by short sighted idiots who don't understand the nature of their business.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Do you want your corporate culture to be like that? Then by all means only hire kids. Any healthy human society needs an age/gender/personality diversity of contributors to thrive. There are certainly brilliant 20 year old programmers, but they don't have practical experience keeping a project or a team alive and working well for a decade. And once they acquire such experience, they will leave your company because it'a not friendly to their needs.
Older people have families, experience and have been around the circus before.
Young programmers are much better. Firstly they often have nothing better to do. Their living expense tend to be lower and they often cannot tell when they are being screwed over for pay until they are are feeling the shaft for a couple of years.
They have no family commitments and when the big boss man smiles and asks if you can do this one extra thing for the team you say "sure boss!" and not "My boy has this thing at school..."
Why hire old programmers? they question the logic, they see through the corporate bullshit, they won't work for peanuts and often cannot do overtime. Forget that they actually know what their contract means and exactly what you can and cannot get them to do. They are not cool. They don't any Justin Bieber songs and they don't play COD.
Why bother with those old people when you can have fizzy drinking kids willing to bend over backwards? -code quality? -efficiency? -less re-work? most managers have very little grasp of how those looks like & those people make "suggestions for the business".
Old developers...as old as 40...they are practically dying already, why hire their kind? -makes no sense I tell you.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
I'm showing my age here, 38, but no talk is complete without mentioning the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I have witnessed this first hand, even with myself. When you are young and full of vigor, you charge forth into the great unknown t eagerly writing lots of code. As you gain experience the code decreases but is of higher quality. I've now taken to assign a valuation to each line of code as liability vs added value. because in a few years some kid will come behind me other the other side of Dunning-Kruger and change this without really knowing what it is doing. I also spend more time doing research on what I am doing so my execution is flawless. Experimentation is rare. In the Art of war, the battle is only the last step and the preparation is really what determines the outcome. Similarly, code is only written when the planning is complete. This is the difference between code monkeys and engineers.
But older engineers often get complacent. I too went through this phase. Many get comfortable with one technology, (Java, .Net) and no longer keep up with new efforts. But in the past 2 years alone, I've taken to learning Machine Learning, Node.JS, mobile platforms, Big Data.
My advice is if you're old, don't get complacent, keep learning. If you're interviewing one of us veterans, keep an open mind. We might not be as cheap on paper, or outwardly enthusiastic. But if we're still in it after 20 years, we love what we do just as much as a new guy, and we will pay dividends in the long run.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
You assume the "selection" is a one way street. Good companies and good employees will find another in a free system, and as a result, they will prosper in the long run. Like evolution, it doesn't happen quickly though. Most good employees in any discipline have a set of criteria they demand from an employer. Developers are no different. If you don't believe a free system doesn't benefit those that hire and pay intelligently, then you are simply ignoring reality.
Here's the fact of the matter: There are MANY, MANY older folks now, and they're already hurting for work. Guess what? There's going to be MANY, MANY MORE, sooner than anyone wants to believe. Turning us into Soylent Green isn't an option, kids, and despite what some of the edgier of you post online, we're not just going to 'kill ourselves' to make way for YOU. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I'm actually getting stronger, quicker, and overall healthier as I get older, not fat, decrepit, and addled-brained. There won't BE any 'retirement' for someone like me, I'm going to WORK until I drop dead., most likely. You think there's a homelessness problem now? How about it being multiples of ten times worse, except it's all people who had professional careers at one point, and have been kicked to the curb for the 'new hotness' that will accept a fraction of the salary and twice the abuse with a smile? Meanwhile even Social Security means nothing, it's all going to collapse into dust long before someone like me and my contemporaries will ever be eligible to collect on it, despite paying a nice sized chunk of our earnings into it our entire lives. To make matters worse I see people getting stupider and lazier instead of smarter, more skilled, and more active; I see a recipe for disaster in the making, all so some dickhead CEOs can improve this quarter's bottom line, and get a bigger bonus. You want to see the U.S. get back on top with regards to innovation and tech in general? Stop pushing out the experienced people so you can hire know-nothing twenty-somethings for less pay.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
A younger developer will often need 40 hours to write the same code that an older developer will write in 10 hours. The only problem is when management sees TIME_SPENT_CODING as equal to QUALITY_OF_WORK. So they prefer the younger coders who will put in 60 hour weeks over the older coders who do that same work and more in 40 hours and then go to spend time with their families.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There are two kinds of approaches to profit. Short term profit, risking long term viability, and long term approach to profit, that risks short term viability. A third kind, using a balanced approach, risks some of both; short term profit, long term profit in exchange for viability.
Realizing that profit, viability and so on is neither good nor bad, but how we measure things is key to understand economics. Arguing "morality" in economics is simply a fools errand and distracts from free flow of commerce. PEOPLE on the other hand are supposed to act morally.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I believe he understands it perfectly. He's just using the same "take it to the extreme" that the OP is using when doing a full and total damnation of capitalism.
And if capitalism decrees that workers older than 40 should not be allowed to work any longer, we should salute capitalism because it has achieved optimum performance? Capitalism does a lot of things well, but it does a lot of things poorly as well. It underlies uninsurance companies cherry picking only healthy people, leaving government to pick up the tab on the uninsured and sick leftovers. Them includes many of those over 40 which no longer have jobs.
Capitalism doesn't do well with pollution, it rewards passing that pollution onto someone else to clean up, probably government. It doesn't do well with global warming where it cannot point the finger quickly enough at those causing the problem since it may not be a problem until 40-50 year after the pollution that causes it, leaving government to figure out what to do.
Capitalism doesn't do well in funding poor people to go uni so they'll get better jobs since they have precious little capital to secure the loans necessary to go, leaving government to provide those loans in its stead. Capitalism gives us payday loan sharks so the gullible get gulled more often, many of these tend to hold low paying jobs with little education leaving government to pick up the tab.
See a trend here?
The reason to work sane hours under normal conditions is so you will have something in the tank for the crises weeks.
If you work in 'constant crisis' mode a real crisis will sink the company. To say nothing of what the stress does to the people involved. Soon they are zombies doing negative work and not seeing it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A small part of Amazon is a computer company. The part that designs and sells their consumer electronic devices. But by in large, they are just a modern day catalog sales organization. They've made great use of computers to improve their efficiency and as a result are very competitive. But just about every company in the country uses computers to one extent or another. Hell, junk yards coordinate with each other on a big network to help each other sell used car parts. That doesn't make them computer companies.
Another datum proving that what Americans know of socialism is exactly what a Good German (tm) knew of Jews in the late 1930's.
Yes, evil socialism. We know how nasty the socialist dictatorships are in, um, Norway and Sweden, and under the British Labour Party, and the French socialists (the ruling party).
mark "there are two kinds of Republicans (and libertarians): millionaires, and suckers"*
* And since you're posting here, we know you're not rich....
Arguing morality in economics is critical for understanding real world systems though. It is only the simplified toy systems where morality is dropped in order to make the models easier to work with.
So, if I grow, make, create X and you're willing to pay for X what is the harm in that? Must everything (like kids selling lemonade) be documented, regulated and approved by a bureaucrat? You sure you want to live like that.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond