Slashdot Mirror
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.
In the age of "screw everybody to get another quarter point from the stock", the ones in charge will never pay the older developers what they are worth. It doesn't matter that the inexperienced developers will make the huge mistakes the older people could have warned them away from. It doesn't matter that the degradation in product quality will likely have long term negative effects on the company. All that matters is short term financial gain by the executive staff in this country.
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.
I have a modern college degree, BS in CS from Purdue. I can't recall a single class that discussed security as a topic, let alone dedicated to it. Fuck. I just realized the classes I took were nearly 20 years ago. I'm an "older developer" aren't I...
I've been in the technology business for almost 20 years now. In my personal experience, older engineers are much more productive than younger engineers. Younger engineers are much more likely to partake of the "free" dinner offered by the company and work 80 hour weeks. They are also significantly cheaper.
To HR we (engineers) are a fungible commodity anyway. Of course they go for the younger people. Given that they command lower wages AND work more hours their effective hourly rate is much lower. So it's a no brainer.
Of course, I would guess from experience (although I have no specific evidence) that older engineers are cheaper in a productivity/dollar sense, but that doesn't even enter the argument in a modern corporation.
Unless we get into management, we older folks (Lord, is pushing 40 really older now?) are better off in .gov/defense jobs or working for small companies where individual people (may) value our contributions.
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.
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.
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.
I worked as a contractor at IBM a few years back. They had just changed their hiring policies to basically three types for engineering positions:
1. Foreign workers in areas with low cost of living that are paid location-adjusted wages
2. New hires fresh out of college (preferred if they interned with IBM previously) for about 30% below market cost
3. Individuals who were known in their field of study - acknowledged experts, basically, obviously a rarity.
Everyone else was being pushed out or required to do the work of the experienced engineers who were pushed out on top of their own work, while training their own replacements. As in, "You can still work for us, but you have to move to brazil and accept a location-adjusted $27k/yr equivalent".
This resulted in the majority of incoming employees being extremely young, low 20's, zero experience, with the older individuals being skipped not because of age, but because they were not willing to pay real market value for them, when they can get cheap labor that can be trained up to the same point for 1/3'd of the cost. Especially when the young kids are willing to put in 60 hour weeks because they don't have competing obligations.
This wasn't a case of IBM being evil; they were just following the industry trends. I've seen other companies do the same thing.
It's not that they aren't hiring people because of their age. If anything, they'd love to hire those experienced professionals. They just want them to work for below average starting pay for a zero-experience, fresh college grad. Someone with 20 years of experience is expensive, after all, and budgets are quarter to quarter - not 5 years down the road. Hard to justify long term ROI in just a single level of management. Got 20 years of experience and you're willing to work for 40k in San Jose? You'll have no problems finding a job. Want a more reasonable 150-200k? Well, there's 5 guys in vietnam that will do your job for 20k a pop, and that makes up for the loss in efficiency - on paper, at least.
That's a pretty ridiculous statement. My actual experience intuitively says just the opposite. I work at a security company that is largely made of guys who just got out of Israeli SIGINT (their mandatory service). The older guys write kernel code know what C compiles to, and see the vulnerabilities intuitively. The new ones have quite a bit more experience in high level languages, while being almost oblivious to abstraction breakage that leads to security holes. At best, I'd say that the older developers get stuck dealing with older code bases (that are making the money) and tools (because the newer ones can't deal with it anyway). But on security.... Prior to the mid 1990s, everybody in the world seemed to be working on a compiler of some kind. This deep compiler knowledge is the most important part of designing and implementing security against hostile input; ie: LANGSEC.
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.
Yeah to governments telling everyone what to do and putting you in jail (or killing you) if you disagree.
I think you may fundamentally misunderstand what socialism is ;)
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.
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'
Norway is socialist. UK is socialist. France is socialist. etc. You hve no clue what you just said. If you had said 'Stalinist' or Maoist' I would have agreed with you. In addition Chile and Argentina are very capitalist and yet did everything you said. Therefore all Capitalism is bad.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
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.
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>
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
It was and communism and totalitarianism, not socialism, that lead to Stalin's purges.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.