
Technology Workers Are Young (Really Young) - sonabinu
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2013/07/05/technology-workers-are-young-really-young/
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lkrubner
Amazon.com has been around for awhile, and it has been successful for awhile,
so I find this especially surprising:

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Amazon.com, notably, has a median stay with the company of just one year, a
figure Ms. Bardaro ascribed to the intense pace of work there. (The study did
not include workers in Amazon’s warehouses, where skills and turnover are
different.) “We’re based in Seattle, and know a lot of people at Amazon,” she
said. “The consensus is that you are run through a gamut there, make money,
burn out and leave.”

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I would not have thought that this was sustainable, but if this is accepted
practice at Amazon, then perhaps this is sustainable. I am somewhat surprised
that Amazon finds this productive. But perhaps they get enough out of that 1
year average that it offsets the costs of having to hire new people every
year, and the cost of teaching them how the company works.

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hristov
The little dirty secret of the tech industry is that if you put yourself in
the right time at the right place and get the strategic advantage you can make
so much money that a lot of mistakes can be hidden.

Warren Buffet says that when the tide goes low you can see who is swimming
naked. The opposite is true, when the tide is high you cannot see who is
swimming naked, so one should not make too much assumptions about their
clothes.

In the late 90's everyone thought that microsoft had found the perfect way to
manage programmers and run a software company. All kinds of companies would
try to emulate microsoft methods. But in reality, that clever fox Gates guided
Microsoft into the perfect strategic position. Once microsoft had to compete
in fields that were outside their monopoly the results were not as dominating.

Similarly Amazon is in a great strategic position nowadays, because they have
built out the infrastructure that the US uses to shop online. Their stock is
flying high, so everyone assumes they must be doing something right. And they
undoubtedly are.

But that does not necessarily mean that their practices of managing
programmers are optimal or even good. In fact if you look at Amazon's finances
you are stricken at how little profit they make. It is unclear why, because
their financial statements are very opaque.

But it is entirely possible that they are hemorrhaging money because of the
way the hire and fire programmers but the whole thing is hidden by their
strategic position. It is not like a company that does software development
better can come in and beat Amazon at selling things on the internet.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _The little dirty secret of the tech industry is that if you put yourself in
> the right time at the right place and get the strategic advantage you can
> make so much money that a lot of mistakes can be hidden._

I wish I could staple this to the top of every discussion about the management
practices of dozens of companies that come up on HN.

When you're floating down a Mississippi made of money, the sheer current of
cash will move you along. You require none of the complicated and difficult
additional mechanisms and culture to cope with the dangers and difficulties of
the deepwater maritime world.

An injudicious observer might conclude that all the guff that comes with
facing the open seas is unnecessary -- why, look at this luxurious barge! They
have no need for the drills! No need for a captain! Navigation is a wasteful
chore!

The problem is that success is not a discrete, directed acyclic graph. It is
integral calculus over fuzzy numbers.

~~~
MaysonL
And to continue your metaphor, when there's a bit of a cash drought, your
steamboat may run aground on a suddenly not-hidden sandbar, or get stove in by
a no-longer drowned tree corpse.

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pfisch
"One reason for this, she said, was a function of skills. “Baby Boomers and
Gen Xers tend to know C# and SQL,” she said. C# is a software language, while
SQL is a database technology. She added, “Gen Y knows Python, social media,
and Hadoop,” which are newer versions of those things."

Umm, what?

~~~
lwhalen
It's an acceptable simplification for (presumably) a non-technical audience.
Rather than write a paragraph or three about 'what is a SQL and why should I
care', then another paragraph or three of 'what is a Hadoop, why should I
care, and how it compares to SQL', they just say "it's newer". It's kind of
like telling my grandmother "Yes, I work in computers". It saves a good 60+
minutes of glassy-eyed explaining.

~~~
wging
The strange thing is that if you just say "newer technologies" it's both a
simpler sentence and less obviously wrong. (As someone's pointed out already,
it's still wrong because Python's comparatively older.)

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el_fuser
Everything wrong with our industry, in a neat little capsule.

We have the obvious age discrimination... The confusion over faddish languages
being innovation... A hasty generalization fallacy...

A good testament that economists shouldn't actually try to apply their
theories I'm the real world.

~~~
jacques_chester
... where'd the economists come into it?

~~~
icebraining
Well, in the article, the interviewee that talks about the technologies that
each generation uses is "the lead economist at PayScale."

~~~
jacques_chester
I see.

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HaloZero
How many people were entering tech 20 years ago vs now though? Could it be
attributed to just more people having access to computers which means more
people entering the field than before?

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Kiro
I'm surprised to see Epic and Blizzard there. I thought making triple A titles
was one of the most challenging things you can do requiring years and years of
experience. On the other hand I can understand why gaming companies are filled
with youngsters.

~~~
muyuu
The highly technical work has got commoditised and outsourced to very
specialised professionals ("engines").

Making a game in the 80s and 90s meant doing basically everything. In the 70s,
even the hardware to run it. Now it's increasingly using tools and hacking
some customisation.

The spectrum from making a game, a mod and using gamemaker or something of the
sort is getting more diffuse.

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jared314
Do the engineering professions (civil, chemical, etc.) have the same issues?
There are a lot of parallels between the type of work the programmers and
engineers do. So, what is the difference?

~~~
jacques_chester
Other engineering disciplines tend to evolve at a more measured pace and have
a stronger institutional memory. They also tend to have structured pathways
for taking a fresh grad and moulding them into thoughtful, cautious masters of
the problem and solution domains.

In our field, technologies largely align on generations. Older coders have
deep experience with tech X, throwing that away seems dumb. So they don't
follow up on tech Y.

Meanwhile, younger coders, frustrated with the accumulated cruft of X, seize
the freshness of tech Y and become masters at that instead.

One day, along comes tech Z ...

This cycle has already appeared in Java or Perl -> PHP -> RoR -> Node.

~~~
jared314
Having now gone through several cycles, I partially agree with your view on
the tech side. But, I just do not believe things evolve at a slower pace in
other fields. Especially the fields that have used computers to enhance their
efforts.

How have the CAD and CAM tools transformed the classic structured mentoring
process? How has more accurate software simulation changed the view of
"experience" in older workers?

I'll stop asking questions now.

~~~
jacques_chester
Civil and structural engineers don't periodically reinvent mudbrick and then
go about proclaiming it as a revolution that will sweep non-agile muck like
concrete away.

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dasil003
Gen Y knows Hadoop instead of SQL? Bwahahahaha. -wipes tear-

~~~
disgruntledphd2
The really sad part of that statement is that Hadoop is a storage and
processing backend, and you can run SQL (like, sortof, not really) languages
on top of it, like Hive, for instance.

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rdl
Apple is also mostly older people (and at least from my informal sampling, a
larger-than-normal-even-for-silicon-valley number of non-heterosexual people).

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mililani
really, is anyone on HN surprised by this???

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shacharz
repost...

