

Now Hiring If You're Young (1998) - gourneau
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/26/opinion/now-hiring-if-you-re-young.html?n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FSubjects%2FD%2FDiscrimination

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paulbaumgart
"Employers justify shunting aside midcareer programmers on the ground that
they lack skills in the latest software languages."

I don't see what's wrong with that. Clearly, to command a higher salary, an
employee has to offer more than someone who gets paid less. And if in fact
that employee has less to offer than a more junior person, because their
skills are obsolete, it's even more of a reason to let them go.

I guess it's not a very comfortable position to be in- having to always prove
your worth to an employer- but I think it's unavoidable, especially in an
industry that changes quickly.

~~~
adamc
Practically, it means there is a lot wrong with programming as a career choice
-- for a large number of students, it will have been a poor investment. I
don't see much reason to sympathize with the employers, either.

~~~
paulbaumgart
It appears to me that it's more a problem of unrealistic expectations. If
somebody else is willing to do a better job for less money, a person's got to
either improve/update their skills or start asking for a smaller salary.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I _sympathize_ with the employers, but I
can certainly understand the rationale.

~~~
myth_drannon
The problem is the more experienced you become at some point the "worse"
professionally you will be perceived, unlike 90% of all the professions out
there that the older guys will ALWAYS be better.

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brc
Personally, when I started as a fresh young grad happy to put in 2x hours for
0.5x pay I would look at some of the older guys and say 'I never want to end
up like that'. I still feel that way. 'like that' refers to a bitter, cynical
attitude born of two decades in the cube farm, navigating endless rounds of
layoffs, restructuring, business-management fads and other nasties.

The key is to keep your skills up to date and avoid the sticky-trap that is
management roles. If you drift into hands-off management, the meetings-and-
flowcharts current will swiftly take you away from the technical shoreline and
you won't be able to get back. It takes a conscious effort to stay a technical
person in most companies, and you'd better be prepared to be looked down upon
from other people who go into management roles.

Of the people I started working with as fellow grads, I'd say that less than
10% are still actively writing software of any kind. I nearly gave it up
several times, but I'm glad I've stuck with it, because you can be so much
more creative in code than with management.

~~~
myth_drannon
But the point is that you never sure what is the next thing the management
will decide to use . Sure if you young you can spend your lonely nights and
weekend hacking Clojure or Scala but in the end of day your boss will decide
on retarded Java framework bla bla technology and all you hours were just for
nothing. And anyways when you have friends,girlfriend/wife and kids it becomes
very difficult to spend enough time jumping from one cool tech to another.

Some of my non-comp-sci friends and some programmer friends say that software
development is like prostitution the older you get the less money you make
until you are discarded , unlike for example accountant who starts low but
steadily reaches some status . All of these "rockstars" and start-up founders
can be imagined as elite prostitutes who just look better and do it better for
more money of course, can retire early and may be score a picture on tabloid
with some politician and then make a million bucks (EXPOSURE). In the end we
are just slaves of capitalist system whatever we admit it or not ( most of the
time our brainwashing won't allow us to do it)

~~~
brc
The silent point I was getting at was not to stay in dead end jobs. Keeping
your skills up to date doesn't mean learning new tech in your spare time while
pounding out COBOL at your workplace : it means making sure the projects and
technologies you're working on are current and on trend with the future. If
this means moving jobs every couple of years, then do it. If it means leaving
the cube farm and starting out on your own, even better.

------
tjic
> 57 percent of computer science graduates are working as programmers; at 15
> years the figure drops to 34 percent, and at 20 years -- when most are still
> only in their early 40's -- it is down to 19 percent.

That data is compatible with lots of things besides age discrimination:

* a job description that mostly appeals to the young

* a young and rapidly growing field where most of the 1988 CS grads are promoted to management, so that they can manage the 10x larger 1998 CS grads

* etc.

~~~
patio11
And a nation in which the average individual changes careers 3 time, for that
matter.

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phatboyslim
Does the report also analyze pure programming jobs, and not team lead, or
management roles which previous programmers 'graduated' into, not necessarily
became 'unemployed programmers'?

~~~
drawkbox
Or, because programming is a meta skill, did these engineers start companies,
products and are no longer programming because they are owners? Or did they
pick up skills in other industries that they wanted to get into which was made
easier because programming allowed them to peer into it from a unique meta
perspective?

Also, sure if you are just working for a big company making desktop
applications before the web as this article is from, then I can see there
would be limited opportunity. How does the web change that?

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danbmil99
I suspect the main reason MS or Google or anyone else prefers young
programmers is that they tend to be more committed and 'fresh', in the sense
that they are not yet bitter, cynical, and hopelessly opinionated. They also
tend not to have as heavy a set of personal/family obligations, so can work
cheaper, longer hours etc.

And of course on average, if you're too lazy to actually find out from the
interviewee, they probably tend to have more up-to-date skills.

OTOH, a seasoned veteran often has a knowledgebase in a specific problem
domain that can be immensely valuable. However, it takes a lot of work to find
the right person and ensure that his KB is the real thing, is up to date, and
that the personality attached to the KB is going to mesh with the culture of
the rest of the team.

When things are going gangbusters, it's easier to just ignore these subtleties
and hire the lusty, naive young waifs who will work their skinny little asses
to the bone for da man before they realize their souls are being sucked dry by
evil sorcerers.

------
robryan
At the time though the things that were happening with the internet were all
largely new concepts. New graduates who had been studying heavily web based
technologies would have had the advantage over an older person who may have
come from a DOS background.

These day's although still evolving I would say web based technologies are a
lot more stable.

~~~
alphazero
Now that's funny. "new concepts". "DOS". Its actually quite amusing for
hackers in my age group to watch the kids "discover" ancient programming
history (again (and again (...)))

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edw519
Great find! Scary how it's still so relevent...

"High-tech companies save money by shunning most midcareer programmers and
focusing their hiring on new or recent college graduates, who are cheaper and
can work lots of overtime."

Not just high-tech companies, almost everyone. So screw 'em. If they're too
cheap to value the contributions of their employees and don't want to treat
them like human beings, they why would you want to work there?

"And the skills issue is a red herring; any competent programmer, if given a
chance to learn on the job, can become productive in a new software technology
within a few weeks."

Exactly. Like almost anyone here with any drive at all already knows.

If I didn't know better, this doesn't seem like a journal article at all.
Seems more like a commercial for starting your own. Still spot on 11 years
later.

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Elcho
Can we cool it with the New York Times articles? I've noticed more and more of
these puff pieces and its lowering the tone.

~~~
paulbaumgart
I agree they can be light on content and oversimplify things to appeal to a
broader audience, but they're usually still a pretty good starting point for
decent discussions.

~~~
Elcho
That's a fair point, but a balance needs to be struck, at times it seems like
every other article is from a large circulation newspaper or magazine and if
that trend continues it could spoil HN.

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ironkeith
NY Times is pretty in touch with what's cool w/ the kids these days. Ie. "the
new Java language".

~~~
jrbedard
The article is from 1998, Java was 3 years old.

~~~
phatboyslim
Does that also mean the statistics provided by the author are meaningless
since they are 10 years old and closely tied to the dot-com boom?

~~~
akeefer
Since they're backward looking statistics they actually track what happened
before the dot com boom. They still might not be relevant given the current
marketplace, of course.

