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."

Comments

Did I hear that correctly?

[Glasswire]

There's a debate about hiring JAMES GOSLING because he's too old? Seriously?

Re:Did I hear that correctly?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Exactly. Hiring older superstars who are well established and widely recognized in their field is hardly breaking a lance for the fight against age discrimination or the "cult of youth". Let us know when they start hiring coders in their 40s or 50s who are not superstars but regular joes who are nevertheless competent, with up to date skills, and who come with a lot of experience.

Re:Did I hear that correctly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that he doesn't work for Google.

Yes, Google has hired some people over 40, but demographically speaking (number hired vs number available in the job seeking pool) they are heavily slanted toward the younger generation.

Over 40 here and I won't even submit my resume. Not because I don't think I can get hired, that's not even a consideration, but because I just don't give a fuck about working in the SV culture. Been there's done that; let some other poor bastards do that and participate in the agile drama and all night coding marathons--fuck that shit, I have better things to do with my time.

Never understood bias against the olds

[hsmith]

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.

Maybe

[fahrbot-bot]

From TFA:

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.

Re:Maybe

[doom]

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.

Let me guess: you don't drink.

A lot of what we've traditionally thought of as "the natural effects of age" were really the natural effects of lots of booze.

Re:Now it's discrimination against young people?

[Maxo-Texas]

Your definition of young is so funny.

Age discrimination starts around 40 in the top of the field and is in full strength by 50 even in small shops.

The supreme court gutted protection against age discrimination in 2009.

Everyone gets old. Only the geniuses and the lucky won't be discriminated against.

And it's dumb. Because young people make the same mistakes, are much more likely to leave sooner (no roots, building their resume), have less loyalty than the current older people all did themselves only 15 to 25 years before.

Which results in losses of hundreds of millions of dollars for companies. Over and over.

sprint or marathon?

[petes_PoV]

Sure the "kiddies" are good for pulling all-nighters. But the "grownups" use their experience to avoid having to.

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.

My Experience

[tylersoze]

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.