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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.
Most security attacks are iterations of the classes of attacks that have been around forever.
By the same logic, young developers are riskier as they are more likely to want to early adopt new frameworks and technologies, that have not even been vetted for security vulnerabilities and attack vectors.
Hiring older developers is the fastest way to put hundreds of security holes in your software. That's reality, people. They just simply don't keep up and don't have modern college training in the latest security threats and program hacking methods.
Remember that when you become an older developer.
Snide aside, while your argument has some merit, there is a flaw in your assignment of blame. Development is not a static process, you need to continually update your skills in order top remain relevant. And one of the major impediments to updating skills is companies not providing an environment when such updating is valued.
You could counter with a "well they can do it on their own time", but the rebuttal to that is two fold:
1. Older workers have a life outside of work and have other things to do.
2. Anyone who is forced to update skills outside of work hours because their company won't support them in work hours is eventually going to say "Fuck it, why should this company benefit from my self improvement - I'm going elsewhere."
And there you are .. back to square one. But of course an older worker would have seen this from the outset, due to all the workplace experience that they have gathered.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I technically qualify as an 'older developer,' though not old enough to embrace the title personally. On several occasions, I've worked with teams (as a contractor) made entirely of 'age-challenged' developers, and I'm always amazed to get kudos for saying things I consider obvious. Obvious, I suppose, because I have the experience the young'un do not, and experience does help.
While I'm sure that I have all sorts of limitations I'm not aware of, like I probably smell funny or maybe don't know why Euphoria is the most awesome programming language _ever_, or simply can't hold my own on the foosball table, I think that toddler teams should have at least one elder mentor onboard--someone whose been through the ringer a few times--because we do know stuff that you'll only realize you didn't know after we say it, and we tend to be pretty grounded, which helps if you're trying to do things like, I don't know, make money.
Just don't let us pick the music for the office hi-fi.
But not as fast as younger ones, and also if they got the habit of pissing on your favorite couch it will take ages to teach them not to
I know older developers and they are always eager to learn a new language, but they usually carry on with their old habits and programs in the same way, with the same workflow he's used to. They just won't adapt to new methodologies (TDD, BDD or even some newer Design Patterns). So you've got a guy that programs in Haskell the same way he programmed in C++, PHP or Perl.
I've got told by an older developer that I shouldn't bother testing my code because "you can also program it right"
Sorry for my poor english.
The people running the companies are absolutely short-term obsessed. The people buying the stocks are gambling and have long since stopped caring about fundamentals, and instead go on hype.
The irrational stock market and the terrible management both exist.
For some reason, people voluntarily throw reason to the winds when they see a startup. When a company is valued at 50 years worth of projected revenue, the market has become a farce.
All publicly traded companies are short term obsessed, but if you can keep the hype machine going loudly enough, the market will opt to ignore reality and stick with it.
The stock market doesn't seem to understand long-term investment in any meaningful way.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Get rid of the last two pages of job experience. Make it look like your job history is only the past 3 years. Then when you show up for the interview, you bring your full resume to show to the tech manager. This gets you around the HR weenies at least.
I'm 36, so I worry about this. But I think younger developers really are better because technology changes so quickly and they've had more free time recently. When I was in college, I'd stay up until 3 AM "hacking". I got really good at all the latest stuff. Now I work 40+ a week on what is now older technology (because if it's working, don't "fix" it). I have a family and house and all sorts of other time sucks that mean I simply can't "hack" until 3 AM on a regular basis. Some of my experience means I'll make better decisions than the wet-behind-the-ears crowd. And it also means I can probably learn new technology faster, despite my less-squishy grey matter. But even at a faster clip, the huge advantage in time a college kid smart enough to not need to study much has means he or she will simply be better at the latest technology than I can possibly hope to be. And the quick turnover in technology means the value of my knowledge is falling quickly while the value of the young guys knowledge is on the rise. He or she will get a job and a family and be in the same boat soon enough. But the claim that my "experience" is somehow universal and timeless is simply a load of crap. In technology, experience is an ever-fleeting thing.
That's why the guys who jump ship every few years do so well. They jump not just for higher salaries, but for the opportunity to learn the latest technology on the job before their existing knowledge becomes so completely useless that they can't get a new job.
To an employer, they have their best employees jumping ship frequently and see the just-out-of-school kids with a working knowledge of the technology they're moving towards. You can almost not blame them for crying about a broken labor market. Almost.
But employers know all this. Since technology changes quickly, they HAVE to train someone -- either their existing (read "expensive") employees have to learn new technology or some new hire (read "cheap") who knows the new technology has to learn the deeper engineering things that one gains only through experience. Since they're going to have to pay someone to learn something either way, who can blame them for choosing the cheaper option. Sometimes us old dogs would have done it better and cheaper, but its a risk and we all usually take the less risky option.
I'm not sure I have a solution to all this, but we need some system that encourages those of us with experience to help the young guys learn the timeless things and also gives us free time to learn the ever-changing things. Maybe an apprentice system like they have in Germany or something.
What's NOT the solution is importing cheap, disposable labor from overseas and then shipping them back home when their expertise is no longer the latest and greatest. That does nothing but help the rich get richer at the expense of both US and foreign workers.
In addition to your good point about experience, stability is also a key factor. I have been with my company nearly 25 years. In the past five years, I've seen some amazing kids come along who could do 2-4 times the work I do (and probably at half the price)... but as soon as they've buffed up their experience points and leveled up, they're gone.
My skillset may be largely obsolete, but I know the product inside and out from a user/business perspective, and although it takes me a bit longer to learn all this newfangled dot-net-this and agile-that, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to stay relevant and stay for the long haul.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to get back to studying up on this new language called HTML. <flash>Hello, world!</flash>
Bingo. If i had a dollar for every time I heard some windbag manager say that I would be retired right now. It's never one more push. Once you agree to the first one it becomes standard operating procedure. Project timelines will continue to get squeezed as long as they can get away with it.
For me the answer was to become a contractor. If you want me to work 80 hours a week you pay me for 80 hours. And if I decide I don't want to work 80 hours I find another contract. It's surprising how a crisis becomes a non-crisis once management discovers that they have to actually pay you for every hour you work.
As a 40+ developer getting job offers has (as of yet) not been a problem for me. Getting offers that equal my current salary (much less result in even a minor raise) is much, much harder.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.