Slashdot Mirror
Old Folks Can Code, Too
Ethelred Unraed writes "Wired News has a story about how "older" programmers and engineers--over 35--are having difficulties finding work, even though their skill level is as high or higher than the young guns out there. " We've heard this numerous times before, but it's still an interesting, albeit strange, phenomenon. I would say part of it has to do with the lack of lives that many of the younger folks have (I'm including myself). What do you folks think?
Remember that when you're still getting bug reports on a version you shipped three years ago. For that matter, when the code that is due in 6 months gets done in ontl 6.5, and the necessary re-write will only take another 5.
There is a need for more expensive veterans and less expensive entry and jr level in any shop. Ever notice that games companies tend to have the youngest staffs, and are the most likely to release way late and half done?
That's not to say the younger programmers don't have a place, they certainly do. It's just to say that an unbalanced department will always spell trouble in the end.
Some of the bloat I've seen made the code slower AND harder to maintain. Consider: There is a bug in the program. Do you want to look through 5000 lines of code or 10000?
Often, nasty race conditions that are hard to find seem to just go away when the code is made more efficient. It's not magic, it's just that bugs hide easily in bloat.
Keep in mind, it's experiance that tells me that a 10% slowdown here makes no difference, but a 0.10% slowdown here will kill the product.
most older programmers are looked upon as "old weight" by management. I.E. we suck up more resources because we want a pension, insurance, dont want to work 90 hours a week, we actually take those vacation days... etc... It's as hemos said... we have a life and a family. and that isn't in the plan with the "company". at 30-40 you have only 20 more productive years left. then you will retire and become a burden on the company... they dont look at the fact that you gave your LIFE to them and they can give you a nice little reward, they look at it as that the company is doing you a favor by hiring you in the first place (they are not, you are doing them a favor) and that you should worship them...
It's all the new/old corperate management idiocy.. no brains all pocketbook.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's not the skill, it's the pay. Programmers are in high demand. Young talented programmers will often take thier first few jobs with a "wow, look how much they are going to pay me" attitude. The corporate world sits back and thinks "heh, they don't know how much were _were_ willing to pay to get this job done."
Of course it sounds all screwed up, but I think the older the potential employee is, the less likely a company is to think 1) here is someone we can exploit, 2) here is someone who doesn't know what we actually can offer them to work here.
MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Althought I know a few programmers as friends and/or family, I am not one, I am a chemist, so, what do I know? :P
In my department here there are 5 of us. I'm the youngest at 24, but the others are 27, 45, 51, 55. Me and the 27yr old could leave and there would be a burden on the others, but nothing that dramatic. Any of the older people leave and we're screwed. They know too much about how this place works (its a factory with a lot of automated stuff). My company would never knowingly get rid of them. I on the other hand....
As for hiring - the 51 yr old was hired 2 years ago.
-cpd
Heh. Speak for yourself. While I'm more expensive than a puppy just out of college, I don't earn $90K either (or even $50K, for that matter).
Of course, out here in the hinterlands $35K to $45K is real money... as vs. in the Silicon Valley, where that would not pay the yearly rent on a studio apartment in Sunnyvale!
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I've started programming a "mere" 15 years ago.
We used to live in South Africa, and in 1980 the company she worked for had a dedicated line built to our house (to connect a terminal to their mainframe), so she could work from home while raising us kids. First time this happened in the country I believe. That's how much they valued her. (such things are far cheaper these days of course...)
"Respect your elders."
A local friend of mine (via the SCA) is a software test engineer at a large local company. She's also old enough to be my mom.
She can also code the pants off of any of my local contemporaries. And while she is single (giving weight to the argument that she could do this because she has no life), she finds the time to: sing in her church choir, participate quite actively in the SCA, make most of her own clothes ("everything but underwear, jeans, T-shirts, and shoes," she claims -- I think shoes are next on her list), and work a good bit on her woodcutting/furniture-building hobby.
She recently got recognized for 25 years of service at a company that is continually "downsizing" its people out of their jobs. (Anyone from my neck of the woods knows which company, and possibly even the lady in question.)
As you can see, I have a heck of a lot of respect and admiration for this woman. So do most of my friends my age. And she seems to like having us around, since she has no children of her own and likes passing on knowledge about everything from computers to drop-spindles.
Should the fool company she works for be ungrateful enough to downsize her, any place else would be incredibly lucky to have her. But they'd take one look at her (since she does not exactly look young), or see her "25 years of service," and ignore her in favor of new blood.
Indeed, that will be a sad day. *knocks on wood that The Company leaves her job alone*
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
The problem with code bloat is that it's that much more code to maintain. Simple, elegant algorithms are much easier to maintain than huge amorphous masses that splash all over the place. The huge algorithm may actually be FASTER -- in fact, to get ultimate speed you often have to use sophisticated but bulky algorithms that make the code extremely hard to debug and maintain -- but it will be that much more "stuff" to maintain.
This isn't rocket science by any means. The number of lines of debugged code that a programmer can write in a day is fairly constant no matter how large the program or what language is used. Thus it makes sense to use simple compact algorithms whenever possible (sometimes, due to performance requirements, it's not possible). But that, alas, appears to be a dying art.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Learning the ins and outs of a particular industry is years of work. If I am an expert in, say, factory automation, I can share my knowledge as freely as I like with the youngsters, secure in the knowledge that it will be years before they have the knowledge to threaten my job and by that time I will have moved on (either professionally, or knowledge-wise).
Older folks who have experience in fields outside of the computer industry are especially valuable to many companies. For example, if you spent ten years as an insurance agent, and now are entering the computer field, you will be very valuable to every company that writes software aimed at the insurance industry.
The problem is that these companies are usually in rather boring places like Memphis or Dallas, rather than being in the Silicon Valley. This means that people who have invested their entire career into walking that Silicon Valley treadmill are poorly situated for making the transition to later-life geekhood, especially since they probably know little about business practices in already-established industries, which is the one thing that makes older workers valuable. And especially since they'll have to take a pay cut from the bloated Silicon Valley salaries (a $90K Silicon Valley salary suddenly becomes a $40K Dallas salary), meaning that many who have run up large credit card debts or bought houses that have lost half their value or etc. are in bad position...
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The problem is that it's not the employees doing the pigeon-holing, it's the employers.
....
For example, I spent three years programming in a dBase-style environment. I wanted to do SQL because I'd done some prototype demos of a next-generation of our product using MySQL (the production version would probably have used Empress, but the project got cancelled), and it was a ton faster, easier, and NEATER than doing dBase. With the HR mechatroids it was "hmm, you don't have experience with Oracle version X on Solaris version Y? NEXT!".
The point being that the skills were there, but HR stuck me into the "dBase guy" rut and said "nope, sorry, no SQL for you."
Anyhow: I'm currently working at a job where I was hired for one thing, then pressed into service doing another thing entirely (something somewhat new to me but well within my skill level) and having a blast. If we want to keep people in the computer business that's what has to happen -- employers have to look at these expensive people that they're hiring, and realize that hey, just because he's a great C++ programmer doesn't mean he wouldn't appreciate the chance to learn Java. If diversity is the salt of life, too many hackers are on the bland diet, doing the same old same old day after day after day after day
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I had a greying geek... come to my NT workstation and have difficulty navigating to the floppy drive.
Hey, I resemble that remark! I remember the condensation from our oh-so-wise NT sysadmins because I had trouble doing several basic tasks under NT.
They thought I was a stale old fogey; I thought it was proof that NT has serious useability flaws when experience with several other OSes is an active hinderance to a newcomer. (Quick, where do put the control to turn off the system?!)
But if I'm so out-of-touch, why were they terrified -- to the point of attempting to get management to stop me -- when I got fed up with their bullshit and picked up a couple O'Reilly NT/MSCE books? To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchhill, the next morning I was no longer ignorant, but they were still incompetent.
More generally, with experience you realize that the same things have to be done by every system. The only differences in how they are done. A lot of us fogeys (I'm 38) strongly dislike MS applications because the heavy emphasis on GUIs and "wizards" (a horrid corruption of hacker term) gets in our way *and* prevents the youngsters from developing the experience necessary to distinguish between the solution to the problem and the tools available to implement that solution.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
OK, that's certainly true. A team usually needs more coders than designers and only one lead. On the bright side (for those approaching or past 35) There are less of us than when we were inexperianced coders. I suppose the question is, which narrowed more, us or the jobs that need us?
Young people have lots of energy but the majority lack breadth, education, and are rather stupid. Many are highschool drop outs with programming monomania and highly inflated egos. Older programmers tend to be better educated, have a deeper skill set, write technically better code. They make a lot less noise too. I see no problem in our market with experienced people in their 40's and 50's landing senior level programming jobs.
Something that was mentioned in the Wired article which I found particularly interesting was the mentioned lack of "salient skills" in older programmers. It seems strange to me that a programmer wouldn't continue to upgrade their skills over time. I mean, if you're not interested in the management career track, then you must be coding because you *like* technology, right?
I think that this might be in part due to the "pigeonholing" of people based on skills. Once you're known as the C++ guy or the VB guy (no flames please!), IMHO it's hard to bridge over to another language and even harder to move to completely different technology.
I think you are bang-on. People who are still in programming at the age of thirty-five are either a waste of space or extremely expensive (sometimes both :) compared with young, eager, cheap types a few years out of school.
:) make almost ideal employees in programming environments - they don't ask for much money (relatively) and they are prepared to work long(ish) hours.
Young men with no lives (and I'll include myself in this
Here in the upper midwest at a Medical Device manufacturer, I am one of the younger people on my team, and I am 39. We're developing critical life-care embedded code (implanted devices.) I guess in more volatile fields where quality doesn't impact safety as much, maybe they can hire people right out of school. There seems to be a shortage of embedded-system techies, and I don't see that being addressed in schools. With the further 'mainstreaming' of Computer Science and programming curriculums, there just aren't as many people coming into the field of programming right down to the wire, on hardware platforms, as there are the more office types. I know there continues to be a real shortage of people who can sling embedded code, and I don't see much draw to get people into it, as opposed to higher level programming.
It probably doesn't have as much to do with their actual age...
it probably has more to do with the fact that older, more experienced programmers, because of their experience, will command a higher salary. In this world of a million and one high tech startups who don't want to/can't pay somebody like this what they're worth, that's the way the chips fall.
That doesn't mean it's right, though. If I had a chance I'd hire one of these "old" guys who could probably read a page of assembler and tell you what it was over some MIS/business school, point-n-click trained Windows weenie any day. These are the guys when faced with a command line go "uhhhh....Where's the Start button!!!???"
Kind of like the old guy who you take your car to, he'd listen to it for a second, and tell you exactly what's wrong...as opposed to the kid who has to get out the scan tool and the meters and plug it in and look up all the codes in the book....yadda yadda.
They're *more* likely to have 'hacker-like tendencies' in my opinion. More likely to *not* be marketing controlled droids, and more likely to know more about the 'real world.' Hire 'Em!!!
Blech. Signatures.
Sure, there are girls who can code, just not a lot of them. Just from my own experience, all my computer science classes have been around 90% male. About half of the males, but all the females, didn't have a clue what was going on. Apparently the girls who can code don't attend my school.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Let me start off by saying that I'm 26.
Now... At a previous job (a jr. H.S.), I've worked with people half my age. It was their job to design a web site, and mine to channel them. They were eager, but knew less than necessary to be dangerous. And I was an old fogey to them.
At the current job, as a S.E. I work with people who have been with this company longer then I have been alive. Some have trenchmind and are severely threatened by younger workers who have new and in-demand skills. These folks are scared of being discarded, and rightly so. They've given their lives to a company that would drop them like a bad habit, if they see profit in doing so. After working your whole professional life in a niche, there's no where else to go, and retirement looms real large at 55+... Fortunatelly, the mentally hamstrung are a minority within the set of older developers.
Here's the point of the post, older developers (not 35+ but 45+ in my case) have so much domain knowledge, so much experience, and so much professional common sense that they are effectively priceless to the company. Even if the company doesn't see it that way. These guys (and gals) have decades of experience that can not be replaced with OOP, CASE, RAD or any other buzzword.
They serve as sages, mentors and wells of knowledge to us, the junior developers. They are responsible for system architectures, legacy system migration and evolution guidance and sanity checks for the rest of us.
They do not pull the 60+ hour weeks, nor should they have to. After I beat my head against a problem for a week, and can't account for some old quirk that makes no sense to me, all it often takes is a couple of questions to one of these guys, and the light dawns. They know where we came from, and they're better judges of where we're going then we are.
Older developers are invaluable to those of us who work in legacy and mixed environments. These systems were designed from a different perspective. Their implementations were limited by storage and performance, and we often can not even think in these terms.
Just try to do Y2K work knowing C++ and Java, without the aid of the COBOL guru who nursed the system from punch cards...
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
We're in a tough market right now. 80% of the resumes we get are for contract work. Of those, more than half are outrageously overpriced and underexperienced -- "I've got 2 years out of school! I read a book on servlets once! Pay me $120/hr!" When we find a fulltimer who doesn't look like he'll make a powerplay to take over the team, we usually jump all over that opportunity.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Everything I say here is a generalization. There will be exceptions to every statement, but I hope we all know the difference between anecdotes and trends.
Older workers have several advantages over their younger peers. Foremost among these is that they generally have both a breadth and depth of experience that their younger peers. They're more likely to have seen something similar to the current problem, remember the tradeoffs and pitfalls of various solutions, etc. They often have better communication and interpersonal skills than younger folk. Lastly, there's nothing about coding that favors the young, unlike for example mountain-bike racing. It's a sedentary intellectual activity, and like any such activity people get better at it when they do it more, and older programmers have done it more.
There are also major downsides to older workers. They do tend to be more expensive. Depth of experience is of no (or even negative) value if it's in the wrong area. Single-machine FORTRAN or COBOL skills on an OS that hardly exists any more might not be all that valuable when programming is done in C++ or Java in a distributed environment using CORBA etc. With the rate of change in this industry it is essential for anyone to keep up with the latest technologies, even if it means that sometimes you'll "waste time" learning a technology that drops off everyone's radar screens when the next competing standard comes along. C'est la vie. Contrary to popular belief, old dogs can learn new tricks, but too many people both young and old don't make the effort; the only difference is that the young one's laziness hasn't caught up with them yet.
There's one area where I defy conventional wisdom: amount of work. Yes, younger people - especially single ones - are more likely to work longer hours. They're also more likely to spend half of those hours surfing the web, on IRC/MOO, playing Quake, etc. Older people are likely to work fewer hours because of family commitments and so on, more likely to take sick leave, probably have more vacation time, but in my experience they do have a better work ethic. 40 hours of "work" is 40 hours of work instead of 70 hours of "work" being evenly split between real work and play. Overall, I think the older folks I've worked with got more done on a per-week basis than the younger ones who put in longer hours. YMMV.
Overall, I think we need both. I've long since abandoned the "one size fits all" philosophy, and that applies to personnel too. I think the best projects combine the experience and discipline of a few older workers with the energy and exuberance of a few younger ones. I've worked at companies that were unbalanced in both directions, and both suck.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Maintaining a successful career as a programmer is not an easy thing. It is not like being a plumber, where you learn your trade and then perhaps do a little studying from time to time. You have to be careful and you have to be observant.
I found myself oh so close to trouble recently because while everyone else was moving towards Windows and the internet, I was spending my working time as an OS/2 programmer. Why? Well, they paid me gobs. It almost killed my career, though, as I found when I finally got fed up with that place. Recruiters looked not at my ten years experience, but at my relatively weak Windows experience. Fortunately, I was able to leverage what Windows I had and some application domain knowledge into a new job that, while is lower paying, will give me a killer resume.
The lesson? Money isn't everything. It is really easy to get sucked into high paying jobs that are death to your career. It is also very easy to become complacent, and say to yourself that you'll start looking for a new job in a few months.
Before the anti-Windows flames start, let me say that I am busy practicing my Linux programming at home. Which brings me to another problem. Off-time experience is no experience from the standpoint of most employers. You can be the biggest Linux expert in the world, but if you can't point to a job where your title was "Linux developer" or a test you passed with "Linux" in the title, many prospective employers won't want to hear from you.
(Actually, I suspect most Linux shops are better about this. My experience was with Windows, where I'd written much in my spare time only to be confronted with questions on my lack of Windows experience. However, as Linux grows in popularity, you'll find more "old-school" employers who think exactly like that.)
So even if you think you know technology "X", go take a class in "X". Sure, you'll be bored, but you'll have that all-important piece of paper saying you know it. Get any certifications you can, even if you think that tests are a poor indication of ability. Many employers don't, and that is what is important.
Another big cause of this problem is the way salaries top out for programmers. When I was younger, my salary grew with leaps and bounds. Now, I am pretty much near the top, which means most companies are loath to pay more. That can be hard psychologically if you've gotten used to the hefty raise every year. One way around it is to become a contractor, though that has its own pitfalls. (Biggest one: no one will pay to train you.)
Finally, don't wed yourself to a technology. Don't think of yourself as a linux programmer. Think of yourself as a programmer who is doing linux right now. Believe me, you'll be better off, regardless of how superior linux is, both because superiority is not a guarantee of survival and because something better may well come along. Lots of OS/2 programmers felt the same way. Stick your nose into lots of things, even Windows. (You'll need to hold it, believe me...) Take lots of classes. Try to get your employer to assign you a variety of tasks. And above all, keep a keen eye on those technological currents, even when you've settled down with a wife and a mortgage.
The cake is a pie
>Only yesterday, I had a greying geek, who was probably hot stuff in the mainframe days, come to my NT workstation, and have difficulty navigating to the floppy drive.
/etc/init.d, and those of us who've lived through a few rounds of such wars just roll our eyes.
While I generally agree with what you say, you do need to be careful about what evidence you use to conclude that someone else is clueless. Does not knowing a particular technique on a particular OS invalidate 20+ years of design experience? I know that's not what you're saying, but often what people think is based on very little more than that. It helps to remember that this guy might laugh at the way you stumble when you're in his favored environment.
There's a common tendency to assume that things we know are worth knowing, and things we don't know are just junk. It's an especially common tendency among young and technically-inclined people, which is why we see it constantly in the Windows vs. Linux flame-wars. The Windows zealots think you're an idiot if you don't know COM or config.sys, the Linux zealots think you're an idiot if you don't know CORBA or
The point is that the most valuable skills often turn out to be the ones that we ourselves do not have, that we might have considered obscure and useless until the very moment that we tripped over a situation where they were needed. Maybe someone else's skills really are useless and outdated, maybe that guy is a stuck-in-his-ways old relic, but we should be very hesitant lest we make that determination too quickly and have to eat our hats later.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
OTOH, I've run into the guru who keeps up with the latest tech, and knows the old stuff. He doesn't have to write a line of code to increase our productivity; he earns his keep just by helping the rest of us with our programming issues. Having somebody who has been there and done that is invaluable.
The smart employer will see the difference, and discriminate accordingly. Having a guru on your team may be worth two or three newbies; the guru makes the newbies more effective.
--The basis of all love is respect
There were two bulls standing atop a ridge overlooking a lush green valley where their herd were grazing. The young bull, eyes full of fire and a spring in his step, turned to the old bull, who was a little slower than he used to be, and said "I have an idea! Let's run down there and screw a cow!" The old bull turned slowly to look at the youngster and replied with a chuckle, "I have a better idea. Let's walk, and screw 'em all."
An overworked developer with no life, who is constantly "running down the hill," is likely to provide a lot of half-baked solutions and spend most of those forty extra hours each week correcting mistakes made in haste. It is much better to "walk down" and give oneself time to develop a properly crafted solution in the first place.
Having "a life" is important, too. Wasn't it Einstein who remarked that the key to his talents was imagination, not necessarily intelligence? It's difficult to be imaginative, creative, or thorough when you're burned out and sick of your work.
slashdot broke my sig
You need to learn some economics.
Your conclusion would be true only if there was some definition of value which held equal for everyone. The basis of economics is two people exchanging things for things they want more. For instance, to me a CD is worth more than the 15 dollars it takes to get it. To the store, the money is worth more. No one gets shafted.
In exchange for my time and labor, I get benefits, pay, and some intangible benefits such as meeting people, learning things, and job satifaction. I don't feel in any way shafted (at my current job anyway).
Further, the amount of work you produce isn't linear. Two people working together can create something that neither one seperately could ever do. The combined result could be worth more than individual work. The company can then give the workers what they would've earned seperately and still make profit. So who loses?
It is true that evil companies exist, but I don't agree that it is necessary.
P.S. I realize my buying a CD example ignores MP3, artist rights, monopoly, and other issues where people in fact are shafted, but that is tangent to my main point.