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Is Amazon's AWS Hiring 'Demolishing The Cult Of Youth'? (redmonk.com)
Tech analyst James Governor argues that Amazon's cloud business is "demolishing the cult of youth."
It just announced it is hiring James Gosling, one of the original inventors of Java... Meanwhile James Hamilton continues to completely kick ass in compute, network, and data center design for AWS... He's in his 50s. Tim Bray, one of the inventors of XML, joined Amazon in 2014. He's another Sun alumni. He's 61 now. He still codes. When you sit down with one of the AWS engineering teams you're sitting down with grownups... Adrian Cockcroft joined AWS in October 2016. He graduated in 1982, not 2002. He is VP Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, a perfect role for someone that helped drive Netflix's transition from on-prem Java hairball to serious cloud leadership.
Great engineering is not maths -- it involves tradeoffs, wisdom and experience... The company puts such a premium on independent groups working fast and making their own decisions it requires a particular skillset, which generally involves a great deal of field experience. A related trend is hiring seasoned marketing talent from the likes of IBM. Some other older companies have older distinguished engineers because they grew up with the company. AWS is explicitly bringing that experience in. It's refreshing to the see a different perspective on value.
In a later post the analyst acknowledges engineering managers are generally older than their reports, but adds that "If AWS sees value in hiring engineering leadership from folks that are frankly a bit older than the norm in the industry, isn't that worth shining a light on?" In response to the article, XML inventor Tim Bray suggested a new acronym: GaaS. "Geezers as a service," while Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tweeted "There is no compression algorithm for experience."
Great engineering is not maths -- it involves tradeoffs, wisdom and experience... The company puts such a premium on independent groups working fast and making their own decisions it requires a particular skillset, which generally involves a great deal of field experience. A related trend is hiring seasoned marketing talent from the likes of IBM. Some other older companies have older distinguished engineers because they grew up with the company. AWS is explicitly bringing that experience in. It's refreshing to the see a different perspective on value.
In a later post the analyst acknowledges engineering managers are generally older than their reports, but adds that "If AWS sees value in hiring engineering leadership from folks that are frankly a bit older than the norm in the industry, isn't that worth shining a light on?" In response to the article, XML inventor Tim Bray suggested a new acronym: GaaS. "Geezers as a service," while Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tweeted "There is no compression algorithm for experience."
Not age discriminating is bad now?
There's a debate about hiring JAMES GOSLING because he's too old? Seriously?
Soon the only people you'll be allowed to hire without being acused of discrimination is anyone who is exactly 32.54 years old.
Old dude creimer has the biggest experience and he's ready to uncompress it all over AWS.
CAPTCHA dreamers
I get the SV mentality that old people aren't good fits. They don't want to work 90 hours a week for the hope of future stock which will more than likely be worthless. Older people will work hard and smarter, but not for peanuts and insane work weeks. If you are building a real company - older people have experience and value that come with having seen a slew of different scenarios.
So they want good engineers who can make the damn think work, not noobs they can brainwash as they underpay them?
Good for Amazon.
Be Famous
Be a Rockstar
Don't Not be a Rockstar
It should come as no surprise that the Generation Jones CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is hiring his cohorts and others of the Baby Boomer generation to top positions.
It is also not all that different from when Google hired Vint Cerf, or other notable "Internet Pioneers".
The only place it might differ is in comparison to Facebook, with their millenial CEO preferring top people of his own generation. But is that really different, or isn't it the exact same?
Not news.
who invented something important when he was young. For the rest of us? Starve.
Younger founders and employees are willing and able to work longer hours, and really grind it out. They have higher stamina, and generally don’t have families they want to spend time with. They can completely commit to the job at hand.
That may be specifically true, but probably not universally.
I'm 54 and can still crank out a productive 36 hour work day (yes, seriously) at crunch time, but that's me; I've always been able to stay up and be productive for long, long periods of time - showering and eating to get refreshed. But when it's over, I need 10 solid hours of sleep. It probably started when I was a college research assistant programming LISP and Prolog at 3am (as it was the only time I could get serious computing time on the VAX 785 (running 4.3 BSD) and/or our Xerox LISP system.
In addition, I had a wife, who was a teacher, who understood being professional and committed to a task and didn't complain about any long work hours, as she often put in some serious hours to teach her Gifted students. (She died in 2006, so now I'm single: Remember Sue...) We had no kids -- we met in 1985 when I was 22 and she was 41 -- so we were able to dedicate our down time to each other.
I imagine my stamina -- and 30+ years of experience, programming in many languages and administrating Windows, Linux and Unix on everything from PCs to Cray systems -- would still fair well against most youngsters now.
I thing the main thing is that older people have a greater sense of perspective, perhaps not shared with their younger managers, that there are actually more important things in life than whatever is going on at work or even work itself. Case in point, I'd give everything to have Sue back.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"you're sitting down with grownups... Adrian Cockcroft" ...but I giggled. Editors do you not pay attention to submissions at all?
On topic, I think a lot of the hiring younger people was both a monetary and marketing deal. When most people think leading edge, they think pop culture, which is generally lead by younger generations. So they had to show investors they had a workforce that new "all the latest" garbage. Investors know younger people work for less, they don't have the experience to know how to ask for more out of the gate, or to know that taking shares in a start-up is basically gambling. Then this attitude of "younger is better" worked its way to the MBA zombies who blindly accepted it and began edging older programmers with real experience and problem solving skills out of the workforce based on a lack of understanding about why it was done by the start-ups.
So, I think its good that one of the leading and largest tech companies out there is showing these programmers are still not only incredibly relevant but also incredibly valuable.
Cockcraft *giggle* I feel as bad for him as I do for Dick Trickle. Why do people name their kids these things?!?!
OJ got parole!
You need to hire older workers when the younger workers are too busy re-inventing the wheel without the experience to know how to build a better wheel.
The biggest problem with IT - not just the tiny part that involves coding - is that it values quantity over quality. "Move fast and break things" being the prime example of this dumb idea. So while the fresh, new, intake of IT people work with gusto, many of them spend a large amount of time reinventing the mistakes of the past.
However, when your management team rewards "presentee-ism" and "heroic" efforts, rather than dull, predictable, progress: what should you expect?
Maybe this is the start of the IT industry getting just a little maturity. If it keeps it up, it might actually get to be a profession, one day.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Soon the only people you'll be allowed to hire without being acused of discrimination is anyone who is exactly 32.54 years old.
32.5 years old Black Woman.
I'm a contract programmer and usually work with a loose collection of older-ish programmers like myself (mid-40's) on various contract projects, all remotely. We all get along well, we're professional, no-nonsense, 40 hour work week kind of guys that just get the job done. Lately during a little slow work spell, I took some work with one of these young hipster-ish development firms. The code they were writing was just total garbage, I couldn't wait to be done with the contract. Lots of that off putting company enthusiasm, dude it's just a job not a lifestyle. I came into their office a couple of times, total hipster open plan style, I don't see how they get any work on done.
Rockstars are rockstars. You are not a rockstar.
There's a reason why Operations and Maintenance techs skew older. They aren't reinventing the wheel, but they have to operate and maintain it. Younger folks want to work on hot technology and try new things. When you're running something that has to have solid uptime you don't experiment.
63, just started a Mac project in Swift.
says no. Gosling is the hood ornament. They still need lots of young squirrels run in their cage to make the car go.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yep, the preference for people in their 20s, preferably foreigners from cheaper nations. They have the energy to work insane hours. They don't have family to tie them down, and they don't have experience, which can be used to demand higher pay.
OH, boo hoo hoo. Cry a river for the toddlers. They have to live in the same world that every generation before then has had to.
They is nothing NEW here. Nothing but more whining from an ignorant and uneducated "reporter". Still, Rotflmao.
Amazon doesn't generally hire US citizens. Most of their employees are foreign nationals. And they're not that young either. Silicon Valley, especially, has been substantially cleansed of US citizens under the age of 40, since the late 1990s was the last time that US citizens were hired in any significant numbers.
a productive 36 hour work day
Maybe .... once.
But that is only in response to a crisis. You cannot do that every day (apart from for the obvious reason) and neither can anybody else, irrespective of age. My personal experience has taught me that these long sessions are far less productive than they appear, when you take into account the number of errors introduced. And when you further consider the "recovery time" after a spurt like that, the actual productivity over a longer period is no better than someone working regular hours.
While it is occasionally necessary to do a long shift to meet a deadline - indicating that the manager who set the deadline made a mistake - or to resolve a crisis, they are not a badge of honour. At best they mean that someone messed up, at worst they are simply just a waste of everyone's time.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
a productive 36 hour work day
Maybe .... once.
But that is only in response to a crisis. You cannot do that every day (apart from for the obvious reason) and neither can anybody else, irrespective of age. My personal experience has taught me that these long sessions are far less productive than they appear, when you take into account the number of errors introduced. And when you further consider the "recovery time" after a spurt like that, the actual productivity over a longer period is no better than someone working regular hours.
While it is occasionally necessary to do a long shift to meet a deadline - indicating that the manager who set the deadline made a mistake - or to resolve a crisis, they are not a badge of honour. At best they mean that someone messed up, at worst they are simply just a waste of everyone's time.
All true. I've only really worked that long a few times a year, usually in response to (a) a problem discovered just prior to a release, (b) a hardware problem that involved working w a vendor to get something fixed on a production system. One of the type (a) problems required a 9-hour three-way conference call - that was fun (he said very sarcastically). I do have the physical benefit of not fading out as the hour get late, so that helps.
In the long run, though, I think experience generally beats energy and enthusiasm. Like the old exchange:
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm a 49 year old chief architect of a pretty prominent $10bn+ company. Age has both pros and cons, and I hope that my value equation carries on until i'm 70. Who knows... I think a key part of my view is colored by the fact I'm an engineer at heart and hope to be until I die. I'm currently at home experimenting with some newer Go web frameworks to find a good match for the tool I want to build.
Pros of age:
Experience springs straight to mind. I see the code written by younger engineers and I'm amazed in parallel at their energy, ingenuity and also their sheer naivety. I reckon I could halve the effort they put in and get superior results. In many ways experience (of the right sort) allows you to circumvent all sorts of inefficiency. Of course, you need the right experience and the right mindset - or else experience can also be synonymous with closed mindedness & looks like bitterness to outsiders.
A second pro is that programming rarely introduces truly new ideas - they tend to be rehashes of the old ideas in a different skin. The Node.js async model is not really any different from the asynchronous call out smalltalk stuff we were doing in the early 90's. If you've used lisp then python and javascript look pretty much like old hat. It often makes learning new stuff ridiculously fast.
Cons of age:
My memory for detail is starting to get worse. I noticed it in the last year, and it spurred me on to start getting fit again after a long period of inactivity. I can offset a lot of the need for detail via abstraction (a good program is one someone else can understand, and as I get older that someone is frequently me ;-) and cleaner code, but it's still a concern.
Fatigue over "new" technology - I mentioned above that truly new ideas are rare in programming and engineering in general. However, the repackaging (node.js again springs to mind) of a set of ideas into a new, detailed ecosystem is often more annoying than inspiring.
Lack of tolerance for complexity - my PhD professors (they were well into their 60's) had 0 tolerance for complexity in all its forms and they called it out when they saw it. I have a similar approach as I get older - which to be fair is both a pro and a con. It's a pro in that I often see the simplicity of a situation and dive straight into the heart of the matter. It's a con because I often get tired of complex systems even though I have to dive in and fix their architectures. Sometimes it makes me sad seeing it, which makes me a bit less effective because I might even avoid diving in
47yo here, started programming on the 8bits.
I manage projects and there are some awesome young programmers; They don't have experience and that's why there are a few people like me to steer the ship, but most of them are good to work with.
The moment we're dealing with the FrontEnd of our company, all hell breaks lose and it becomes hipster fest; they all know "the right way" to do things and are ready to crucify one another if one does a mistake.
We're serving a massive amount of video content from windows servers while they're all allergic to Microsoft, because their image would suffer otherwise, despite the fact we have a very reliable infrastructure where failing disks and motherboards are more common than software faults. None of them is able to articulate any argument about problems with our tech choices but "it sucks" because it's not using "standard" and "open source" products. At the same time, it's always the department that is falling behind.
Tesla talking shit about clear thinking...LOL.
You realize that Tesla and Edison were both very accomplished _tinkerers_. Neither understood electric fields, Tesla demonstrated just how poorly he understood electric fields in his later years with his unworkable suggestions for wireless power.
They both had to work their asses off as they were 'trial and error' inventors.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So if we establish experience cannot be compressed, and younger people aren't being hired to *gain* this experience, then what's really happening is the depreciating value of the "geezers" knowledge because they'll be unable to pass it to a newer generation unless that newer generation gets hired.
Now we start the cycle: not enough experience, seek job, need experience for job, need job for experience.
Welcome to being a millennial, where it's all your fault and nobody's willing to see the faults of the system enough to save you -- and their business -- from irrelevance. Watch -- in the next few years as all the "old geezers" retire, there will be a black hole in experience and nobody will be around to train the new people. The article attempts to make it about age; what it's really about is ego and believing you don't need younger employees to continue a successful business. People get old, they get tired, they retire. Young people are *meant* to fill that hole. You only need to let them try.
"Great engineering is not maths".
Great engineering is not only maths.
Most engineering usually involves a metric shit-ton of maths.
...about 2 years ago, 2x face to face. It was challenging. But man did I feel out of place and I was 35 at the time. I would say 7/10 people I interviewed with we're mid 20s males. No female interviewers. I got a distinct "out of place" feeling more than a few times. I felt like I had a rapport with my interviewers but that they were going through the motions, like they had made up their minds in the first few mins. "Hey cool man but it just isn't going to happen."
Does anyone know if AWS practices the Agile Scum micromanagement methodology? I doubt it, since they seem competent and their software actually works right. But it would be nice to know for sure. And if not Agile Scum, what development methodology do they use?
Bezos is getting older.
The Cult of Youth sounds 'idealogically driven' with a 'strong religious component'.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT
Anyone who has ever worked at Amazon knows this is B.S. Amazon hires just like any other tech company. The whole reason they started building their knew headquarters in hip, trendy South Lake Union was to attract young people.
The people you are talking about are rock stars. Any company would hire them, regardless of age.
Health benefits of moderate drinking may be overstated, study finds
Is moderate drinking really good for you? Jury's still out
Moderate drinking decreases number of new brain cells
And another interesting subject is "confirmation bias":
See! I was right