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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."
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