
MIT alumni in their 50s - zootar
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/
======
sixtypoundhound
If we reverse the clock back to their 30's, the underlying math of these
career choices isn't so kind...

\- The academic is completing their PHD program, with it's associated vow of
poverty and about to start a multi-year tenure cagefight, in low-wage contract
instructor roles. Only a small fraction will make it to full tenure; the rest
will drop out to pursue industry jobs, 10+ years behind the engineers who went
directly into industry.

\- The young doctor FINALLY completed their training, with a truckload of
debt. In the horizon, they see many sources of downward pressure on medical
pay (rising power of insurance companies, malpractice liability, lower
reimbursement rates due to Medicare and Obamacare, etc.). In 20 years, will
Medicine be a $300K/year job or a $125K/year job? Oh...and a bunch of their
peers already dropped out, loaded with debt.

\- Meanwhile, the 30 year old MIT engineer has good odds of making six figures
as a senior tech or technical lead. They are young enough to start a business
and bounce back when things don't work out. Young enough to start a big
family. If their spouse is also a middle class professional, they have a
decent chance of saving $1MM by age 45 for a solid start on retirement. Making
enough to pay down their debt early.

Yeah...the back end of the engineering career has a shelf life; you get your
money up front. Using it wisely is up to you.

~~~
imjk
Agreed. Also, I think the article is more a reflection of the engineering
landscape 30 years ago than a comparison of career choices that the author
seems to be implying. I think it'd be foolish to make career choices based on
the 30 year outcome of people in the previous generation.

~~~
ghaff
My understanding that law in particular has gone from being a pretty solid
career path, especially for liberal arts majors who want some structure to get
started in the workplace, to one that's relatively bleak for many who don't go
to a Tier 1 school (or excel at a Tier 2), land a job of a big city firm, and
either make partner or land a good corporate law job.

------
rayiner
> The medical doctor was at the peak of his career and in no danger of being
> fired. The university professor had the security of tenure and was looking
> forward to a defined benefit pension starting six years from now. The
> corporate attorney was finishing up a prosperous career.

I do think tech undervalues experience and overvalues familiarity with
technological fads. That said, there are two sides to the coin. Those other
fields the author mentions all aggressively put people into "tracks" early in
their careers.

Take the corporate lawyer, for example. His job is secure because most of the
competition for his job from his cohort was tracked-out in earlier filtering
stages. If tech was like law, you'd have job ads for people with 10+ years'
experience saying "top undergraduate school (MIT/CMU/Stanford/Caltech or the
equivalent) and top company (Apple/Google/Facebook or the equivalent)
required." That would certainly create a lot of insulation for people who went
to MIT, interned at Google, then put in 3-5 years after graduation to earn a
credential they could bank on the rest of their careers. I'm not sure we'd all
prefer that to be the case.

~~~
kvcc01
If you get some ghastly disease and need a surgeon, you may not necessarily
prefer a fresh graduate operating on you. I may personally filter for an
experienced physician, in their 50s, 60s all fine, who has done thousands of
the same procedure with good track record.

Similarly, if I were a defendant on jury trial, I wouldn’t prefer a new law
grad to represent me. I’d filter for an older, experienced attorney, with good
track record in the courtroom.

I think the above is common sense. But somehow most people get it completely
backwards in our field of software. Why is it that people’s mental image of a
competent developer biases towards 20-something whiz-kids as opposed to older
devs? Doctors and lawyers have verifiable track records; is it because that
most developers, especially in big corporations, don’t build such auditable
track records that attest to their competency?

I’m very curious about this. A 60-yo surgeon who continues to operate every
day, is revered, has job security, doesn’t worry about ageism, outsourcing,
obsolescence, etc. A 60-yo dev who hasn’t moved onto management bears stigma
of failure. (Not my thinking, just the common attitude I see in society.)
Something is broken somewhere.

~~~
sjg007
Depends, sometimes you want a young pioneering doctor. Also sometimes you want
an established software consultant.

The money per se is not in the technical individual contributor but delivering
some new value that someone will pay for.

~~~
hga
From what I've heard, good surgical outcomes correlate more with experience in
doing the procedure than anything else.

So unless you've got a problem amenable to surgery but without procedures with
good outcomes for someone like you, you should prefer experience.

It may not be "new", but there's value in the higher probabilities of good
outcomes.

In that, software development is very similar, except of course the stakes are
fantastically lower.

------
justonepost
Ugh. Confirmation bias and sample size aside, these are MIT alumni. Aren't
they already supposed to be above average?

That being said, he didn't exactly say what sort of engineers these folks
were. Electrical? Software? Big difference..

Also, one thing that didn't jive, if they are in financially uncomfortable
retirement, why exactly are they showing up at a donors gathering?

~~~
calinet6
Alternatively, these are MIT people, so perhaps the problem is that their
education and career are both overly specialized.

Breadth would certainly be an asset to deal with change over a longer term.
It's another great argument for a broad liberal arts education.

~~~
brlewis
An MIT bachelor's degree includes a decent amount of liberal arts. The HASS
requirement has been around for a long time -- 1980s?
[http://web.mit.edu/hassreq/](http://web.mit.edu/hassreq/)

~~~
ghaff
I don't know when that particular name for it dates to, but some sort of
liberal arts requirement has been around for even longer. To be sure, if you
take the minimum and take courses that aren't _really_ liberal arts (e.g.
accounting or microeconomics), it's fairly minimal. But the opportunity is
certainly there to get a fairly broad education.

~~~
madcaptenor
Feynman writes about having to satisfy a liberal arts requirement in _Surely
You 're Joking, Mr. Feynman_, so the requirement goes back at least to the
late thirties.

~~~
mcguire
It's been a while since I read it, but I seem to recall his approach to it was
what I assume to be the normal MIT student's: take the minimum he could get
away with and complain about how useless it was.

I could be misremembering, though, and that was written much later in his
life.

~~~
madcaptenor
You're pretty much right, according to:

\- this oral history:
[http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_2.html](http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_2.html)
(search for "astronomy", which apparently was considered a humanities course!)

\- this transcription of the relevant section of _Surely You 're Joking_:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Paranoid/Feynman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Paranoid/Feynman)

------
pixelscript
This post reeks of confirmation bias or at least the sample size is too low to
draw any conclusions. What if that software engineer didn't want to progress
his career and was happy at the level he was? What about those engineers that
did go into management? I could be wrong but if you choose to stay in a roll a
30yo can fill why would it be strange that you would be expected to compete
with those younger to get a job?

~~~
moron4hire
Why wouldn't that also apply to doctors? Maybe a surgeon enjoys the surgery,
doesn't want to manage a surgery department of a hospital. I think the
relative comparison is still relevant.

~~~
Spooky23
Most doctors build/join a practice, take on partners and hire PAs and Nurse
Practitioners. They build a book of business and referral network and when
it's time to retire have a bag of money and business equity.

That's changing now, and my guess would be that twenty years from now, we'll
hear the laments of employee doctors in a similar situation.

------
thewarrior
This post really scares me and part of me wants to quit this industry even
though I enjoy coding.

Ageism is a brutal reality.

~~~
plg
In my experience if an older engineer/programmer is more expensive than a
younger one --- but the older one is better --- the older one will be hired.
You get what you pay for. As long as your skill set isn't basically a
"commodity" (generic web design for example) you will be ok. Put another way
---if your decades of experience _don't_ give you some appreciable advantage
over a 20-something new guy, then yes maybe you are in the wrong business.

~~~
mcguire
One of the most entertaining conferences I ever attended was Usenix, several
years ago. The paper sessions typically went like this: a grad student would
stand up and present his and his advisor's research. In the sbsequent
question-and-answer period, one of a small number of grey-beards (you'd
recognize their names, but I can't remember who exactly it was; I'm old, too)
would come to the mic and ask some variant of, "when we tried that back in the
'80s, it didn't work because of.... How are you dealing with the problems?"
There was never any real answer. (To be truthful, there were also a number of
responses along the lines of "Why didn't you cite our earlier work?" which
were more annoying since the typical true answer would have been "Because you
only published it in a single post in rec.arts.no-one-reads-this." Bah.)

Since then, I've learned one thing: experience in this field _doesn 't_ give
you any advantage. Or, more precisely, Cassandra, it doesn't give you any
advantage that anyone will pay attention to.

I've had many similar conversations since that conference, usually along the
lines of:

Them: "We should do X."

We: "That didn't work the last time; A, B, and C happen and only super-genius
levels of D will get you out of the mess, which we don't have."

Them: "But X is the hot newness and everything's different this time, anyway."

Or sometimes:

We: "We're doing Y."

Them: "That's stupid, everyone is doing Z now." (Them almost never has more
than 2-3 years of experience, by the way.)

We: "No one we've hired in the last ten years knows how to do Z, Z offers no
actual advantage over Y, and I'd personally prefer not to have to deal with 27
different ways of doing the same thing."

Them: "I'm doing Z."

We: "Great. You'll be solely responsible for that project until you quit, then
we'll throw it away and rewrite it. Just like last time."

Sure, you can keep up with the technology fashion; that's fairly easy. But
it's a bit dispiriting to see the same problems in the new tech from the last
time the dharma wheel rolled around. And to be unable to convince the new kids
not to try to cross the railroad bridge because the 12:15 really does have a
good on-time record. The entertainment value of watching projects hit the same
shoals eventually loses its charm.

~~~
hga
Indeed. I've worked for more than one company that died because it didn't
listen when I said, e.g., this won't work because math. In that case, simple
multiplication and comparing the result to currently available IOPS.

A lot of people just don't care until they actually crash into the brick wall,
but in a start up that's frequently too late, and never fun. Our host pg has
commented that more than a few dot.com failures were in part inevitable due to
technical failure. I'm sure that's still the case.

~~~
mcguire
Frequently, it's not technical. I have in mind one individual who still
maintains a project management position at a former employer, who has
repeatedly made every last project management mistake possible, right down to
"adding people to a late project makes it later." It got to the point where I
was uninterested in his latest fiasco because it was like 1980s sitcoms---a
minor variation on something that wasn't all that funny the first time around.

------
peter303
Note Phil hasn't been in the corporate world himself. He struck it rich with a
dot.com in the 1990s boom and worked on several interesting projects since.
Among them was photo website, a Thiel-like coders academy, and flying. He has
had one of the first and longest running blogs of my fellow MIT students about
tech, business, travel, flying and politics.

~~~
papercruncher
I took Phil's class (6.171 - Web Development Lab) in college. It was a
ridiculous experience, regularly had to put 40hrs/week just on this class and
I'm not exaggerating.

Story time: As part of the class we were working with real clients to develop
a web project for them. One day during class, he talked to us about the
"technical sidekick", typically a friend of the client's that is somewhat
technical and is behind-the-scenes advising the client and typically
contradicting all your architectular choices as a developer. Well, to noone's
surprise, a few weeks later, our client rolled into a meeting all of a sudden
knowledgable as to why .NET was inferior, SQL Server bad, etc. We later found
out that he took the time outside class, to take the client out for dinner and
act like an adversarial technical sidekick just to teach us that lesson. I was
pissed off at the time but now deeply appreciate that lesson

~~~
quickpost
Could you share any lessons he taught you about how to properly deal with the
"technical sidekick"? I often encounter them in web consulting and I'm curious
to see what Phil's advice on the topic was.

~~~
calinet6
Ask to meet them, and befriend them. Do it genuinely.

------
mcguire
Dave Winer's response:
[http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHire...](http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHiredDougBut.html)

------
stillsut
Beyond the the ~7year business cycle, career stability in Medicine vs.
Engineering is subject to long-term trends.

For the current 50 year old cohort, the end of the cold war has to be the most
relevant factor in the opportunities available to them. There's nothing like a
bunch of missile projects to get MIT-er's some work.

The spending rate on US healthcare is probably not sustainable over the next
thirty years, and many physicians could see Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements
plummet. In short this observation of career disparity could be reversed after
several decades of unforeseeable future occurring.

------
mathattack
One point he admits in the beginning... _There was a slight selection bias in
that all those present were people whom an on-campus group was hoping to get
donations from._

This doesn't include doctors who quit medical school, academics who got pushed
out of the funnel, and lawyers who couldn't get good law jobs. The engineers
also may have already been victims of age discrimination by the first dot com
bubble.

------
wimagguc
The other conclusion is, always be hireable. I guess it’s hard to be 50 and
pride yourself to work for senior-senior level salary when a 30 year old can
easily do your job.

Hierarchies worked very well in the uni prof’s favour, but engineering
companies tend to apply flatter structures. If there’s nothing that keeps the
young folks competing, they will. So for us, engineers it may be a good idea
to move to supervisory roles, a field with harder-to-aquire skills, or start
teaching later on.

(+1 for small sample size and confirmation bias though. /re: @pixelscript)

~~~
gcb0
good programmers can always consult.

old managers can't do nothing unless he is hired at a big company, which is
exactly what won't happen according to this

~~~
ExpiredLink
> _good programmers can always consult._

as if ageism didn't exist in the consulting business ...

~~~
eropple
There is, but maybe not in the direction you think. Almost every independent
consultant I've ever hired or had hired into a company I was working at was,
at the earliest, late thirties, most late forties/early fifties. On the other
hand, as I'm starting an independent consulting business at 27, I'm finding it
a little hard to be taken seriously (comments about age, "possible"
experience, etc.). I'm getting there, but it's a process.

------
druml
The link of the OP points to the blog. The link to the post is
[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-
in-...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-
their-50s/)

------
adebtlawyer
The calculation of total lifetime earnings / career track is tough to make in
advance. It's important to remember that the licensed professions (doctor,
lawyer) have significant costs to enter. The advantages are that the fields
change more slowly, cannot be done remotely, and are licensed. This allows you
to more easily accumulate knowledge and experience over time, and prevents
competition to some degree. Theoretically, that should lead to a stabler
career, but a higher earning one is harder to be sure about.

I have a CS degree and used to be a decent programmer, but became a lawyer. To
maximize my lifetime earnings, should I have simply moved to California and
gone into tech eight years ago? Right now, things are doing well now in tech,
and there are too many lawyers, but would that have meant I'd be completely
out of a job at age 50 due to ageism/competition? That was my fear, and not an
entirely irrational one, since these discussions keep coming up.

------
sixtypoundhound
Regarding the lawyer, there's a more complex bait and switch going on here...

As you progress in the practice of law, you spend less time working on
document review and trial / transaction prep. Due to the nature of law firms,
senior lawyers tend to either be focused on client development (sales!) or
various forms of cat herding (project / business management!)...

Wait... tell me again about the career prospects of engineers in their 50's
who (successfully) switched into sales and management?

[um yeah, nothing to see here....]

------
gcb0
or: the successful programmers do not bother to show up to pan handling events

and/or: even the failures still make lots of money until 50, while the
failures on other fields aren't even invited.

or: I'm just in denial :-(

------
Zigurd
I can provide a data point that might be less biased toward the successful. At
a recent informal reunion of my dorm, I saw much the same thing as Phil saw
(in fact he was there). If you're not running a business, or in a professional
role where age discrimination can't touch you, you better be exceptionally
well-known in your field. If you are doing the kind of technical work, like
coding, design, etc. you did most of your career, the only way to be
compensated in line with your experience level is to be in a senior technical
management position (VP Eng., or CTO) or consulting.

Based on what I saw then, I think Phil's observations are accurate.

On the other hand, consulting isn't so bad. There is such a lot of bad
engineering out there, there is an infinite market for old guys (and the few
women of our cohort) to fix things that are fucked up.

------
JoblessWonder
I'm curious to see if this is as big of an issue 20-30 years in the future as
it is now. 30 year olds in America were raised with computers in the schools
(if not the classroom and home.) 20 year olds were raised with computers in
the home and in their pockets. [1]

Will we continue to see people over 50 (or even 40) as unable to grasp new
technology if they were raised in a society that placed such a high value on
technology being an integral part of life from a young age? Part of me says
no, part of me says yes.

[1] I'm not saying it won't be an issue. Just as sexism and racism are still
around in the workplace, ageism will continue to be an issue. I'm just
wondering if it won't be seen as the norm.

------
danielrhodes
None of this should be particularly surprising: if you choose to be complacent
in your career you can't expect stability or increased prosperity over the
long term. The path from a junior engineer to a lead engineer is quite short
relative to a your typical career length. If you don't wish to move into
management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except
laterally. After a certain point the impact of a person's improved programming
skills does not get significantly better over time, at least for what most
companies need. Therefore a company becomes incentivized to hire younger
engineers who cost less as they still get similar or even better output.

~~~
vanderZwan
> _If you don 't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't
> anywhere else for you to go except laterally._

I find it almost insulting how you imply that "not desiring to be a manager"
is the same as "being complacent in your career"

Were the doctor, the professor and the attorney forced to move onto
management?

~~~
arethuza
When I worked in a UK university for a Professor (a title which only the most
senior academics have) his role was arguably almost entirely "management" \-
he was a very bright guy and did get involved in the research his team did
(about 15 of us) but it was obvious that 98% of his time was effectively
"management" responsibilities.

Similarly for medics and lawyers - certainly for lawyers (in the UK anyway)
getting past a particular level is more about business development and
managerial skills than anything else.

~~~
madcaptenor
I double-majored in chemistry and math. I remember talking to a few of my
chemistry professors and finding that they missed actual lab work; managing
their research labs, getting grants, etc. was a full time job. This wasn't
true of the math professors; they actually had the time to do the research
instead of just supervising graduate students.

~~~
arethuza
I should be cleared about the use of the term "Professor" in a UK university
compared to the US - in the department I worked in that had maybe 50 lecturing
staff (i.e. full time permanent academic staff) and 6 or 7 people at the level
of Professor:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_ranks_in_the_United_Ki...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_ranks_in_the_United_Kingdom#Professors)

~~~
madcaptenor
That's a good point. Like most Americans I forgot about the US/UK difference
in nomenclature. I'd think the problem would only be bigger for UK
"Professors" than for US "Professors" because UK Professors are more senior by
definition.

------
whiteheat752
As an MIT student... should I not become a programmer? I do feel like I'm
nearing the peak of my programming ability, and now would be the time to
switch to a field with more "lock-in".

What would that field be? Medicine? Mechanical engineering? Consultancy?

~~~
sokoloff
If you love programming and are good at it, it is the best field there is, bar
none. You'd be a fool to turn away from it for a lifetime grind with epsilon
better prospects.

I'd do my job for half what I get paid; I just don't have to.

As for nearing the peak of your ability (assuming typical undergraduate age
and experience): BWAHAHAHA! You'll be even better than you are now in 5 years,
and again 5 years after that. Only then might you consider that you're near
the asymptote. These will be "not small" qualitative differences, in my
prediction. Come back and read this 5 and 10 years from, please. :)

(context: MIT '93; I just started my 45th orbit of our star.)

~~~
sanoli
> If you love programming and are good at it, it is the best field there is.

I read this and thought, he's right. Then I thought, this is actually true of
pretty much any activity. Hadn't thought of it this way.

~~~
Chinjut
Yup. Hacker News is full of silly "programming exceptionalism", but
programming is not all that fundamentally different from any other vocation.
Go to a site for, say, doctors, and find people singing many of the same
paeans to medicine that are here presented as specific to software
engineering. People in many lines of work think that their field is the one
thing truly worth doing.

~~~
gohrt
I love baseball and I'm good at it, but it will never pay my bills. I am on a
minor league team and I program to pay the bills.

~~~
sanoli
Sports is different, in that the number of positions available that are good
enough financially are very, very few. So for sports, you're just not good
enough. As an analogy, if you were a doctor in a smaller town, in a tiny
hospital, and you loved it and were good, you'd be fine.

------
kristopolous
Do people here anticipate programming being their lifelong career, or do they
in good faith, think there will be a switch later?

Personally, I've done this for 15 years and I keep doing contracting to pay
the bills but really I'm pretty done with it.

What about you?

~~~
wobbleblob
Yeah, that was my thought. If you're still a programmer at age 50, either
something has gone very wrong in your career development, or you're such a
legend in the field that it would be a loss to the world if you had moved on.

~~~
vidarh
Or you enjoy what you're doing.

I've had "director" or "head of" or similar in my titles for the majority of
the last 20 years, but I keep finding excuses to code because it's what I
enjoy doing the most. Whenever my job responsibilities doesn't let me code, I
spend more time coding at home.

I'm 40 now, and I can't see that changing. I first started programming when I
was 5 years old, and it's an integral, important part of my life.

~~~
wobbleblob
Of course you still program, but your job title on that MIT gathering wouldn't
have been 'programmer'.

~~~
vidarh
Part of my point is that personally I would describe myself as a programmer
first.

Those titles for me has been a means to a higher salary, not something that
defines me, and often not something that have defined my roles very well.
Despite being "technical director" at present, I spend most of my time on
architecture and devops.

But if you care less about the money, then staying in a pure developer role
saves you the aggravation, and I know many people who have opted to refuse to
be promoted into management positions because what they _enjoy doing_ is the
programming and they've been less willing than me to take the titles and find
ways to program anyway.

I've personally offered people management positions more than once and had
them turn it down for that reason. Including people above 50.

~~~
wobbleblob
But that's not what the blog post we're responding to was about - this was
about anecdotal evidence that the MIT alumni who were still 'engineers' at 50
were worse off than their peers with more glamorous job titles. Maybe quite a
few of the ones who answered 'not an engineer' were actually like you. Chief
something, CTO, head- lead- something.

If you were interviewing an applicant for a dev position, have you never
wondered "you worked there for 15 years, why were you never promoted?". I
doubt the same would be asked of someone who had been working as a surgeon for
15 years.

------
ChuckMcM
Perhaps the insight here is that neither law nor medicine is advancing fast
enough?

------
mcguire
" _There was a slight selection bias in that all those present were people
whom an on-campus group was hoping to get donations from._ "

Slight?

------
shams93
Me I had no choice, now I essentially have no career at all because you reach
the end game where the industry stops talking to you despite all the money you
made people. Pivoting to education would be a logical choice in a civilized
society but this is no such place so instead of buying me off the market some
poor business is going to wind up losing all their customers because I have no
choice but to become a sole founder and learn business kung fu lol, its either
do that or wait for unemployment to run out and then die from starvation and
exposure basically unless I want to drive uber to pay them essentially 9 cents
per mile because 49 cents per mile is 9 cents less than the cost of running
the car in california lol.

~~~
sokoloff
The marginal cost of running the car is much lower than $0.58/mile. If you
already have a car and want to drive Uber with it, you'll (likely) be
financially better off through the "job".

Of course buying a car solely to drive Uber is a bad business plan.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
That dude's got a lot of weird bleep-blorp does not compute opinions about
human nature.

~~~
gohrt
He is one of the founding generation of technolibertarians.

~~~
mcguire
What's with his weird divorce thing? Did I miss some drama?

------
jimmcslim
I wonder how much of this 'programming is a dead-end' angst that seems to
cycle through HN fairly frequently these days is US-centric?

I say that as an almost-40 Australian software developer...

~~~
dyno12345
Perhaps it's less likely in jurisdictions where unpaid overtime is actually
illegal.

------
cyphunk
Missing an alternative option: migrate to, perhaps even become citizen in, a
country with a half decent social welfare system.

> Lesson: Unless you are confident that your skills are very far above
> average, don’t take a career path that subjects you to the employment market
> once you’re over 50 (and/or make sure that by age 50 you’ve saved enough for
> a retirement that begins at age 50 or 55

------
pasbesoin
For reference, this is the URL of the actual post (as opposed to the current
URL to the year/month entries):

[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-
in-...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-
their-50s/)

------
zaroth
Just keep reading the rest of the posts on that page. Wow, some true
entertainment there...

~~~
calinet6
My thoughts exactly. I have known people who looked at the world in similar
ways, and to put it lightly, it was frustrating to speak with them.

------
diminoten
I've always thought that the age discrimination problem in the software
engineering world will self-solve when the first generation of programmers age
into the discriminatory age brackets.

Besides, some of the best programmers I know are 50+.

------
peter303
"Lifetime jobs" changed in 1990s with corporate restructuring fad. Younger
employees should be adapted to present, fluid situation.

------
dba7dba
I can't imagine a programmer making enough $$ to be able to show up at an
event where the main goal is donation.

Granted some did show up.

Let's list the careers that were still considered safe age 50. Doctor. Lawyer.
Professor. All important, no doubt. But which one of those truly helped
advance our society or nation? As in improving GDP or trade balance?

Most likely not.

But the other engineers (some with uncertain future) are the ones who
designed/built/produced something for the society.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
> Doctor. Lawyer. Professor. All important, no doubt. But which one of those
> truly helped advance our society or nation? As in improving GDP or trade
> balance?

Ehh... all three? Try running a country without them and see where your GDP
ends up. As for 'truly helped advance' and linking that to just GDP is
incredibly myopic.

I have all the respect in the world for engineers but let's not fetishise over
them.

~~~
dba7dba
Eh, maybe I was a bit harsh. But still, consider this.

Doctor: Was the doctor in research?

Lawyer: No comment.

Professor: How good was his research? Or was he one of those the taught from
same note year after year and just took credit for work done by grad students?

And my mistake in linking it just to GDP. How about advancing the society by
building better tools, transportation, medicine, improve efficiency in
this/that?

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Sure I'll consider it

First of all, what's with that standard? 'if you didn't invent something new,
e.g. through research, it doesn't count.' Or, if you kept things together
without making progress, it doesn't count? So a police officer or a fireman or
a nurse, who cares about that, they're not advancing society because they
didn't happen to build a better tool or a new medicine. I mean what are you
even arguing here?

And second, alright so let's apply your standard to engineers who spend their
entire lives applying laws of physics they didn't invent or models that
existed for decades, sometimes even before they were born. e.g. designing the
10000th sewage system in just another city according to existing principles,
would you call that 'taking credit for work done by grad students / previous
engineers' and dismiss it as unimportant, when it's a truly significant part
of society? And how do you rate a software engineer building the millionth
crud app for some use case? Say like Hacker News? Unimportant? Of course not.

I mean the heuristic here to help think about value is to remove from
society/laborforce for a moment anyone who ever does something that's already
done before. And then keep anyone who's building something new. And then
compare it with the opposite. The former will result in chaos, the latter will
result in a more or less stable society with a lack of progress.

Now obviously you need both. If we didn't have the guys doing new stuff, we'd
still be living like we did 50k years ago. But we need both, and the
implication that it's somehow only engineers who do the new stuff just isn't
true. I mean hell just consider how far engineers get without the professor
teaching them all those lame things other people already figured out like laws
of physics.

Anyway I get the feeling I'm misconstruing your points but you kept offering
questions as things to consider so I just try to interpret what you're
implying as best I can. Feel free to just concretely make your point instead.

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michaelochurch
Ageism exists in the professions but it's legible and practically published.
If you start law school at 30, you probably won't get Biglaw unless you clerk
for a Supreme Court justice. You can get into a PhD program at any age, but
you're not going to get a tenure-track position if you're after 40. Midlife
career switchers generally don't get in.

The difference is that, in the professions, you have to get in early but it's
the norm to move up fast enough that ageism isn't a problem because, even if
you make a couple of mistakes, you'll be at an age-appropriate level. You may
not be a biglaw partner or chief surgeon earning 7 figures, but you'll be
substantial enough that you're still taken seriously.

In software engineering, there isn't a well-defined sense of what "up" is or
what's "age appropriate". There isn't a published career track and a legible
ageism. It's there, but it's hard to tell exactly _when_ it's there. Is being
a programmer at 55 age-appropriate? If you're an AI researcher at Google X,
then yes, absolutely. If you're checking your Jira every morning to figure out
which user stories you're going to be working on, then no one's going to
believe that you chose to be a programmer instead of a manager. (Hell, _I_
wouldn't believe you. I might still hire you, because I'm mature enough to
separate low social status in one theater apart from low ability. If you're 55
and still have to deal with user stories, it means that you managed your
social status poorly; but you might still be a rock-solid engineer whom I'd
hire in a heartbeat.)

If you look at the Valley's emerging professional model, it's not a kind one
and it's not one that ages well. You choose between (a) a "main sequence"
where each jump is a dramatically different job, from engineer to manager to
founder to investor, and where there are structural reasons why most people
will never make it; or (b) fighting for the small percentage of jobs that are
genuinely interesting and age-appropriate at any age.

I think it's much easier to deal with age if you're a consultant, because it
leaves you out of the political structure of a firm. It makes people
uncomfortable to have a 35-year-old "Software Manager II" overseeing a
55-year-old badass. With age, you just don't fit into the corporate hierarchy
unless you've climbed it. If you're a consultant and live outside of the
hierarchy, then age doesn't really matter.

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option_greek
Wow. Just shows why cogs and wheels are referred to so often in software
profession.

