The manifest justifications put forth here for overt age discrimination as well as Vivek Wadhwa's attitude toward older workers from the article (come on - a person making $150k and only knowing C or COBOL is a caricature, not something based on an actual tend in IT - and he had to trot out the much despised COBOL to make it stick, playing to people's ageism) are reminiscent of episode 21, season 2, in Sliders, "The Young and Relentless":
Quinn impersonates his recently deceased double on a world where the young dominate society and middle-aged people are prohibited from working and are subject to curfews.
Yeah - that's IMHO the true face of the "land of equal opportunity" (disclosure: I wasn't born here and thoughout my lifetime Americans have invariably snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on the issue of equality - we finally got rid of segregation (at least legally) in 1964, and now LGBT people have been deemed to be human so there has been some progress but legalized age discrimination based is just as abhorrent [and de facto age discrimination is virtually a legalization]) .
And when the old guys who have walked develop revolutionary productivity software and restrict it's usage to the second and third world - what then? No more need to import labour at all - the capitalist exploiters will be able to farm literally everything out. The people who walked will have what they need to survive. This can be a race to the bottom and people on the losing end of what is in effect an economic can still have a few cards to play legally (cards that the bosses currently don't expect). And that will be the end of the software industry as an industry in the post-industrialized world.
Given that there are no ages discrimination laws to protect younger workers, I can't blame them for being somewhat suspicious of older workers. Especially considering that age does not guarantee that a person has more to contribute..... Whereas younger workers have to work harder because there is no protection or job security.
I mentioned the same thing when I was in my 20's-30's.
The simple fact is that once a worker gets to be 40, it can be really hard to get rid of them due to age discrimination legislation.
Nope - it's actually quite easy esp. since the EEOC isn't doing their job.
Well that's not capitalism that's exploitation. Then American capitalism isn't the only economic system on the planet and people have feet to vote with. Keep that attitude and you won't be able to import enough workers from impoverished places.
However even massively underemployed now I work 80 hrs a week (just not getting paid for many of them). When I was employed and highly paid I almost always worked about 80 hrs a week so I really don't understand the statement. We work to solve interesting problems. Sometimes it takes less than 80 hrs and then we move on to another problem. Time doesn't really matter per se but people need time for their families for sure and to relax to invent new and noivel solutions to interesting problems.
That's excellent, except for the no sleep part. We need to manage the complexity, maintenance and reliability better so that you can get some more sleep.
Here's the question then, if it isn't much work when you have the fundimentals of coding to pick up python, ruby, go etc... why not just learn them? That again sounds more like inflexibility for the person, more then age. If the next line of skills can be picked up on demand, why not pick them up as your job or possible future jobs demand them, rather then playing the discrimination card. If they are saying you need 2 years experience working in python you have a valid point, but if they are saying you need to know python, then you should learn it.
I have picked them up (Python - Ruby I haven't done much with and Go - has it actually been released from the Google labs yet?). I teach Python (and Java and Perl and C++ and C, etc.) to graduate, undergraduate and industrial students/clients (often IFSM people who help on projects and have never produced an application or taken part in application development) - it's how I've managed in the current underemployment situation. But interviewers tend to inflexibly rattle off 5, 10, 15, 20 yrs experience in this language and in environment X and that's it.
The inflexibility IMHO is with the interviewers and HR people. That's my experience. I was tutoring an industrial student in Spring and he said "Hey all you need is 60-75% of the list depending on the interviewer and they take you." I responded that that was not my experience at all (and it wasn't before I approached 45 either - my interview experience has always sucked but still it used to be that jobs came to me anyway).
I have a couple of things to show but it's not for prime time today. The main thing is a reworking of software I did for a Fortune 100 company that another Fortune 100 company (more like Fortune 5) failed at. However I still have to rework the application. I was stunned when I noticed that the latest version of the major business OS still doesn't have this capability. So more than ideas to kick around. I did this before and made a little money but never released applications commercially (which is also NOT my strategy, BTW). So three months of intense work and an alpha release on 24 December 2011. I don't eat much and will only need a few part-time workers for some testing (and I know that the general approach works because of the work for the Fortune 100 company - with the reworking and added functionality I'm not stealing their idea and anyway it was a toy when I got to it - I made it go and that made their project go).
Conversely, I work with a guy who is just a few years older than me and is likely on his way out of this industry. Differences? He's *completely* unwilling to learn anything new; I joined this firm in part to help them modernize their web stack -- ColdFusion -- and promptly recommended Rails (which I hadn't worked with previously) and learned enough to do functional Rails coding in a couple of weeks. This other guy, however, has been whining about having to learn something new, asking why ColdFusion isn't good enough (the answer to that question is too long to begin!) and saying he doesn't want to have to "learn Linux" (he's an old Microsoft guy; we're in the Pac. NW)
Well he's an idiot who is cutting his own throat. I have seen some people like that but not many. The case is more that people gang up on another and project their views in order to justify terminating the person. But if those are really his attitudes then the manager or another developer need to confront him and work with him. If he's really unwilling to change then there's the door.
Couple his utter unwillingness to learn and keep up with technology with the fact that his family is always the reason he can't work late and sometimes is out of work, and I could see passing him over at hiring time. I stay current, or at least try to, love to learn new things, and don't have a family that I'm beholden to (not that there's anything wrong with having a family, but come on-- if you're picking between two employees, one with a family asking him to leave work early and take little Missy to the dentist, and one without, all else being equal, who are YOU going to hire?)
So I could definitely see some age discrimination going on, but also... it's complicated.
We have to make accommodations for people's family life. We are not just utilitarian widgets to be used at corporate whim.
It's not that they don't want to hire older workers. It's that older workers don't want to take a job at the new wage levels that are popping up all over.
That's not true at all. Many older software engineers would be happy to take lower pay even if the project weren't interesting (although interesting projects help of course).
Younger people, just out of school, are happy to take anything. Finding out that your $150k job now pays $60k sucks, but it's the new reality for lots of people.
Look - in the Second Great Depression $60k is better than $20k unemployment or even nothing.
Come on over to the dark side (management)... I've done that as a stopgap between coding projects, when necessary....., and one of my employers actually paid my tuition and books to go back to school at night and get an MBA. But I'd still rather be learning, designing answers to problems, and then coding them.
Most managers are idiots. Sorry but thats the reality.
Of course I exaggerated the management aspects of my times as a lead, so that helped open the doors
So you lied. What's next, murder? Oh I forgot, many people lie to each other as a matter of getting through the day. And no one sees a problem with this? I'm happy for you - but management? Couldn't you find something honest to do?
And it seems that you have turned management into something fruitful as you are still solving problems (as long as those are real problems and not the rash of fake problems I've seen most managers address).
So, a number of salary surveys have shown that engineers hit their peak salary around the age of 45-55, but it then declines. This is quite the opposite of very many fields - lawyers, doctors, etc can work until they are 70.
My son is planning to major in math and just take a minor in computer science, then work as a data analyst. What do you think?
So after imitating the Soviet Union and creating a bifurcated consumer-military industry after 9/11 we are now almost down to the Soviet/Eastern Block admonition of mathematicians to their sons/daughters/students: "Find the most arcane branch of mathematics. specialize in it and you'll have some freedom" - which in our case is translated to "job security". Does anyone else see a problem with this?
If your son's passion is CS then do CS. And do great things, solve great problems. If his passion is mathematics, there is much more available than being a data analyst. Data mining (which might be what you meant) is of course not arcane and is being tapped more worldwide. Data mining will provide a nice background in statistics and that will be a useful tool for problem solving going forward since even now most people are math phobic.
I'm trying to see where the age discrimination plays a part here..... You aren't doomed if you are older, you have to study and keep up with modern languages.
Take another look at that statement - you have assumed flat out that if you are older you aren't studying or keeping up with "modern languages" (by which you mean what is currently popular - the concepts behind Python, Ruby and Go aren't new).
So the assumption is discriminatory. BTW - problem solving abilities and techniques and fundamental technologies are far more important than the intimate details of the framework of the week (the framework of the week can be picked up in short order).
News at 11, technology moves fast, to work in technology you have to keep up with it or be replaced.
News at 11:05 - technology doesn't really move that fast, details on the next or latest version of Oracle or any relational database for example can be picked up on demand. However if a person had never developed a complex database application to begin with then there could be a problem.
Yeah but you sir are an idiot (don't worry - most managers born and raised in the US are and to some extent you are forced into being idiots because you report to technical idiots and as a culture tend to be extremely conservative and risk adverse). You are apparently only looking at a very narrow skillset and perhaps not looking at transferability of skills from one environment to another and are not looking at the problem solving ability of a candidate nor their ability to rapidly learn and adapt to the technical environment. So you are costing your company in those terms. This sort of extremely narrow dinosaurish hiring practice may result in your company rapidly becoming non-competitive.
However very soon there are going to be thousands of unemployed contractors on the street, scratching their heads as to why they can;t get a job... becuase they have forgotten that a security clearance is not a substitute for competance, and they can no longer use it as a crutch.
For many years following 9/11 an active security clearance was the only thing necessary....
>> Why are you still trying to code at 50?
Why are you an idiot (your statement is at least idiotic) ? Developing systems is the only secular job of any value for myself and many other people. Management? Why make such an idiotic move and remove oneself from the shere fun of software development? That makes no sense.
So the point is that different people have different values.
OK - where outside the Bay area? Where specifically. Because in the DC area there is just as much raw age discrimination. Also the Bay area is touted as having recovered from the 2008 Depression.
Or we could build AI tutors that could be accessed locally and inexpensively (and certainly at no cost to the local population) and go a long way to solving the education problem - we could test that in another 3rd world nation - the poverty stricken cities and regions of the US. Unfortunately this is a long term project because while work in AI tutoring systems has advanced we still aren't there yet although the ACT-R people have taken their cognitive rule systems out of the lab and did produce an efficient, dynamic and interactive math tutoring system that was able to engage about 60% of the students that used it at a school I taught at in DC. Then we had a teacher war.
Well if Open Office really produced 100% Word compatible documents then the problem would be solved. 98% or so just isn't enough - or did they not understand that there was a 98% free solution?
So what people really need are finished projects from mechanical engineers..... there was this rich Indian Communist in the 70's doing this kind of work when he wasn't running his company (he took time off to do simple projects) and there was also an article in the Washington Post within the past year or so addressing the OP's question.
In other words people don't test their assumptions or the results and don't think analytically or critically. They still generally don't BTW and at least hs students up generally are oblivious to these errors as well. People still aren't testing data or results nor are they thinking critically.
However it seems that 1000 innocent people had their lives intruded upon unnecessarily by the state. They could have taken other action rather than just pulling the licenses and informing the people after the fact.
And in the past people have actually died from data errors by police departments. In the 70's and 80's there were multiple instances, often perpetuated against teenagers, of police overstepping their bounds in cases of mistaken identity and killing people (the one that most readily comes to mind was a Hispanic teenager who was being taken in by police who had a computer generated report identifying a person with some characteristics that the teenager fit and one of the police officers was screaming at him with a gun to his head trying to get him to confess to something that it later turned out he definitely didn't do and of course the gun went off killing the young man).
Slashdot Mirror
Quinn impersonates his recently deceased double on a world where the young dominate society and middle-aged people are prohibited from working and are subject to curfews.
Yeah - that's IMHO the true face of the "land of equal opportunity" (disclosure: I wasn't born here and thoughout my lifetime Americans have invariably snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on the issue of equality - we finally got rid of segregation (at least legally) in 1964, and now LGBT people have been deemed to be human so there has been some progress but legalized age discrimination based is just as abhorrent [and de facto age discrimination is virtually a legalization]) .
And when the old guys who have walked develop revolutionary productivity software and restrict it's usage to the second and third world - what then? No more need to import labour at all - the capitalist exploiters will be able to farm literally everything out. The people who walked will have what they need to survive. This can be a race to the bottom and people on the losing end of what is in effect an economic can still have a few cards to play legally (cards that the bosses currently don't expect). And that will be the end of the software industry as an industry in the post-industrialized world.
Given that there are no ages discrimination laws to protect younger workers, I can't blame them for being somewhat suspicious of older workers. Especially considering that age does not guarantee that a person has more to contribute..... Whereas younger workers have to work harder because there is no protection or job security.
I mentioned the same thing when I was in my 20's-30's.
The simple fact is that once a worker gets to be 40, it can be really hard to get rid of them due to age discrimination legislation.
Nope - it's actually quite easy esp. since the EEOC isn't doing their job.
Tough shit, that's capitalism, deal with it.
Well that's not capitalism that's exploitation. Then American capitalism isn't the only economic system on the planet and people have feet to vote with. Keep that attitude and you won't be able to import enough workers from impoverished places.
However even massively underemployed now I work 80 hrs a week (just not getting paid for many of them). When I was employed and highly paid I almost always worked about 80 hrs a week so I really don't understand the statement. We work to solve interesting problems. Sometimes it takes less than 80 hrs and then we move on to another problem. Time doesn't really matter per se but people need time for their families for sure and to relax to invent new and noivel solutions to interesting problems.
That's excellent, except for the no sleep part. We need to manage the complexity, maintenance and reliability better so that you can get some more sleep.
Here's the question then, if it isn't much work when you have the fundimentals of coding to pick up python, ruby, go etc... why not just learn them? That again sounds more like inflexibility for the person, more then age. If the next line of skills can be picked up on demand, why not pick them up as your job or possible future jobs demand them, rather then playing the discrimination card. If they are saying you need 2 years experience working in python you have a valid point, but if they are saying you need to know python, then you should learn it.
I have picked them up (Python - Ruby I haven't done much with and Go - has it actually been released from the Google labs yet?). I teach Python (and Java and Perl and C++ and C, etc.) to graduate, undergraduate and industrial students/clients (often IFSM people who help on projects and have never produced an application or taken part in application development) - it's how I've managed in the current underemployment situation. But interviewers tend to inflexibly rattle off 5, 10, 15, 20 yrs experience in this language and in environment X and that's it.
The inflexibility IMHO is with the interviewers and HR people. That's my experience. I was tutoring an industrial student in Spring and he said "Hey all you need is 60-75% of the list depending on the interviewer and they take you." I responded that that was not my experience at all (and it wasn't before I approached 45 either - my interview experience has always sucked but still it used to be that jobs came to me anyway).
I have a couple of things to show but it's not for prime time today. The main thing is a reworking of software I did for a Fortune 100 company that another Fortune 100 company (more like Fortune 5) failed at. However I still have to rework the application. I was stunned when I noticed that the latest version of the major business OS still doesn't have this capability. So more than ideas to kick around. I did this before and made a little money but never released applications commercially (which is also NOT my strategy, BTW). So three months of intense work and an alpha release on 24 December 2011. I don't eat much and will only need a few part-time workers for some testing (and I know that the general approach works because of the work for the Fortune 100 company - with the reworking and added functionality I'm not stealing their idea and anyway it was a toy when I got to it - I made it go and that made their project go).
Thank the H1-B Visa situation for that. It is a real and serious issue in many places. BRIC will be taking over slowly but steadily.
Okay - suspend H1-B.
Conversely, I work with a guy who is just a few years older than me and is likely on his way out of this industry. Differences? He's *completely* unwilling to learn anything new; I joined this firm in part to help them modernize their web stack -- ColdFusion -- and promptly recommended Rails (which I hadn't worked with previously) and learned enough to do functional Rails coding in a couple of weeks. This other guy, however, has been whining about having to learn something new, asking why ColdFusion isn't good enough (the answer to that question is too long to begin!) and saying he doesn't want to have to "learn Linux" (he's an old Microsoft guy; we're in the Pac. NW)
Well he's an idiot who is cutting his own throat. I have seen some people like that but not many. The case is more that people gang up on another and project their views in order to justify terminating the person. But if those are really his attitudes then the manager or another developer need to confront him and work with him. If he's really unwilling to change then there's the door.
Couple his utter unwillingness to learn and keep up with technology with the fact that his family is always the reason he can't work late and sometimes is out of work, and I could see passing him over at hiring time. I stay current, or at least try to, love to learn new things, and don't have a family that I'm beholden to (not that there's anything wrong with having a family, but come on-- if you're picking between two employees, one with a family asking him to leave work early and take little Missy to the dentist, and one without, all else being equal, who are YOU going to hire?)
So I could definitely see some age discrimination going on, but also... it's complicated.
We have to make accommodations for people's family life. We are not just utilitarian widgets to be used at corporate whim.
It's not that they don't want to hire older workers. It's that older workers don't want to take a job at the new wage levels that are popping up all over.
That's not true at all. Many older software engineers would be happy to take lower pay even if the project weren't interesting (although interesting projects help of course).
Younger people, just out of school, are happy to take anything. Finding out that your $150k job now pays $60k sucks, but it's the new reality for lots of people.
Look - in the Second Great Depression $60k is better than $20k unemployment or even nothing.
Come on over to the dark side (management)... I've done that as a stopgap between coding projects, when necessary. ...., and one of my employers actually paid my tuition and books to go back to school at night and get an MBA. But I'd still rather be learning, designing answers to problems, and then coding them.
Most managers are idiots. Sorry but thats the reality.
Of course I exaggerated the management aspects of my times as a lead, so that helped open the doors
So you lied. What's next, murder? Oh I forgot, many people lie to each other as a matter of getting through the day. And no one sees a problem with this? I'm happy for you - but management? Couldn't you find something honest to do?
And it seems that you have turned management into something fruitful as you are still solving problems (as long as those are real problems and not the rash of fake problems I've seen most managers address).
I'm selling my condo and doing exactly that.
So, a number of salary surveys have shown that engineers hit their peak salary around the age of 45-55, but it then declines. This is quite the opposite of very many fields - lawyers, doctors, etc can work until they are 70.
My son is planning to major in math and just take a minor in computer science, then work as a data analyst. What do you think?
So after imitating the Soviet Union and creating a bifurcated consumer-military industry after 9/11 we are now almost down to the Soviet/Eastern Block admonition of mathematicians to their sons/daughters/students: "Find the most arcane branch of mathematics. specialize in it and you'll have some freedom" - which in our case is translated to "job security". Does anyone else see a problem with this? If your son's passion is CS then do CS. And do great things, solve great problems. If his passion is mathematics, there is much more available than being a data analyst. Data mining (which might be what you meant) is of course not arcane and is being tapped more worldwide. Data mining will provide a nice background in statistics and that will be a useful tool for problem solving going forward since even now most people are math phobic.
I'm trying to see where the age discrimination plays a part here. .... You aren't doomed if you are older, you have to study and keep up with modern languages.
Take another look at that statement - you have assumed flat out that if you are older you aren't studying or keeping up with "modern languages" (by which you mean what is currently popular - the concepts behind Python, Ruby and Go aren't new). So the assumption is discriminatory. BTW - problem solving abilities and techniques and fundamental technologies are far more important than the intimate details of the framework of the week (the framework of the week can be picked up in short order).
News at 11, technology moves fast, to work in technology you have to keep up with it or be replaced.
News at 11:05 - technology doesn't really move that fast, details on the next or latest version of Oracle or any relational database for example can be picked up on demand. However if a person had never developed a complex database application to begin with then there could be a problem.
Yeah but you sir are an idiot (don't worry - most managers born and raised in the US are and to some extent you are forced into being idiots because you report to technical idiots and as a culture tend to be extremely conservative and risk adverse). You are apparently only looking at a very narrow skillset and perhaps not looking at transferability of skills from one environment to another and are not looking at the problem solving ability of a candidate nor their ability to rapidly learn and adapt to the technical environment. So you are costing your company in those terms. This sort of extremely narrow dinosaurish hiring practice may result in your company rapidly becoming non-competitive.
Bah, DOD work varies wildly.
However very soon there are going to be thousands of unemployed contractors on the street, scratching their heads as to why they can;t get a job... becuase they have forgotten that a security clearance is not a substitute for competance, and they can no longer use it as a crutch.
For many years following 9/11 an active security clearance was the only thing necessary ....
>> Why are you still trying to code at 50? Why are you an idiot (your statement is at least idiotic) ? Developing systems is the only secular job of any value for myself and many other people. Management? Why make such an idiotic move and remove oneself from the shere fun of software development? That makes no sense. So the point is that different people have different values.
OK - where outside the Bay area? Where specifically. Because in the DC area there is just as much raw age discrimination. Also the Bay area is touted as having recovered from the 2008 Depression.
Or we could build AI tutors that could be accessed locally and inexpensively (and certainly at no cost to the local population) and go a long way to solving the education problem - we could test that in another 3rd world nation - the poverty stricken cities and regions of the US. Unfortunately this is a long term project because while work in AI tutoring systems has advanced we still aren't there yet although the ACT-R people have taken their cognitive rule systems out of the lab and did produce an efficient, dynamic and interactive math tutoring system that was able to engage about 60% of the students that used it at a school I taught at in DC. Then we had a teacher war.
People would quickly grow accustomed to the suffering and tune it out.
Well if Open Office really produced 100% Word compatible documents then the problem would be solved. 98% or so just isn't enough - or did they not understand that there was a 98% free solution?
So what people really need are finished projects from mechanical engineers ..... there was this rich Indian Communist in the 70's doing this kind of work when he wasn't running his company (he took time off to do simple projects) and there was also an article in the Washington Post within the past year or so addressing the OP's question.
Of course I meant 0.015%. So the system is only 99.985 % accurate and that if only 1000 people have had their licenses capriciously pulled.
In other words people don't test their assumptions or the results and don't think analytically or critically. They still generally don't BTW and at least hs students up generally are oblivious to these errors as well. People still aren't testing data or results nor are they thinking critically.
However it seems that 1000 innocent people had their lives intruded upon unnecessarily by the state. They could have taken other action rather than just pulling the licenses and informing the people after the fact. And in the past people have actually died from data errors by police departments. In the 70's and 80's there were multiple instances, often perpetuated against teenagers, of police overstepping their bounds in cases of mistaken identity and killing people (the one that most readily comes to mind was a Hispanic teenager who was being taken in by police who had a computer generated report identifying a person with some characteristics that the teenager fit and one of the police officers was screaming at him with a gun to his head trying to get him to confess to something that it later turned out he definitely didn't do and of course the gun went off killing the young man).