
The Plight of the Graying Tech Worker - qwerty242586
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-plight-of-the-graying-tech-worker/
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paulm1
This excerpt says a lot:

"Employers should be more cautious about pursuing strategies that discount the
contributions of older workers. In recent years, some companies realized too
late — after older employees had departed — that longtime employees possessed
critical knowledge and experience. Moreover, whatever cost reductions
companies achieve can be ephemeral if young hires move on to other
opportunities."

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SketchySeaBeast
The last thing my father was involved in at his work with a international
corporation was attempting to set up a better training methodology for passing
knowledge on from the retiring boomers to the new staff. It was met with utter
apathy - I don't know if it even continued after he retired.

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peterclary
Interesting. Was that apathy from the new staff, who weren't interested in
spending time acquiring institutional knowledge vs skills/experience which
would increase their value in the marketplace? Or apathy from the corporation
itself, which didn't understand the value of the knowledge it was losing?

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SketchySeaBeast
From the corporation itself - there seemed little reward to the investment by
their reckoning.

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raincom
Ask any Graying Tech Worker, whether (s)he wants to recommend the same career
path to his/her kids. Ask why they don't recommend the path.

Basically, the Industry has made it hard for Americans to seek tech a career
path--for the following reasons.

(a) get rid of older workers (b) offshoring (c) use H1-B to suppress wages,
even though Google/Facebook will pay $200K to junior developers. The industry
is not just Google/Facebook

When it comes to India, where offshore companies operate, you see the same:
(a) get rid of expensive workers, as delivery managers to show profit by
hiring cheaper warm bodies (b) Tech Industry, just like any other industry,
has lots of 'bullshit' jobs. Instead of getting rid of bs jobs, replace them
with cheaper warm bodies, and capture the profit. (c) For average Indians,
unlike Average American Kids, there are no better alternatives to seeking a
job in tech sector. So, there is more competition for 'billable hour' jobs at
offshoring companies.

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xref
>Ask any Graying Tech Worker, whether (s)he wants to recommend the same career
path to his/her kids. Ask why they don't recommend the path.

I’ve heard people say this for many, many professions, not just tech. Lawyers,
doctors, entrepreneurs, politicians, architects, bankers, etc. maybe once
someone spends a career inside an industry it has just lost all the glamor and
they only see it as mundane work.

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raincom
That's true. But I have seen many STEM students flocking to consulting,
investment banking, law, MD, etc.

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pmichelman
It's important to read this article w/out a political agenda as I don't the
researchers have one. Aging in a young industry is a topic worthy of even more
coverage.

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hinkley
Most of these old workers were young when they called it a 'Young industry'
and I expect all the old workers around in the 90's just shook their heads
about this being a young industry. Most of the really big discoveries were
done, documented and in some cases patented in the mid 1970's. That's 45 years
ago.

We are not so young, and I think a lot of the ills in our industry can be
attributed to characterizing us as young. It isn't _that_ young. We know
better about any number of things, and we excuse it as youthful indiscretion.

Most of the software activities we do today were laid out in the late 90's and
those involved stealing a bunch of ideas from older discoveries or other
industries's discoveries in the 70's and 80's. It's all old. We've just been
refining execution and improving tools (painfully slowly for my tastes) for
the last 20 years but it's really the same stuff.

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Dumblydorr
You're saying nothing is new under the sun. Okay sure, but there are
measurable demographic and numerical changes in the technology workforce and
certainly growing up with technology had led countless currently young tech
workers to where they are. That's not to say tech never existed or there were
never young hotshot. Millenials, like boomers, are a large workforce and its
possible we are describing a bimodal distribution.

There may be plenty of older workers but IMO, the sheer quantity of younger
folks, who are told truthfully that tech is a great wage in a bad wage
economy, those billion younger people globally and the youth of many
successful founders and high performers, those are the main contributors to
our perception as young.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
FWIW it goes boomers, generation X, Millenials (with a capital M). The names
except for Millenial (which is pejorating) aren't that good
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation)

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malvosenior
_They’re not overreacting. My analysis of employee-level U.S. Census Bureau
data and qualitative interviews show that U.S. tech workers over age 40 have
good reasons to be concerned about how globalization affects their career
longevity. In addition to competing with greater numbers of skilled foreign
workers, older tech workers are now also more likely than younger workers to
lose their jobs when technical work moves overseas._

 _All that said, it would be a mistake to rein in U.S. immigration policy.
Here’s why._

 _The largest and most prominent visa category for employment-based
immigration to the United States is what’s known as the H-1B visa. Some 90% of
H-1B visa recipients are individuals under age 40.7 Typically, economists
analyze the effects of immigration through an apples-to-apples comparison of
immigrants and nonimmigrants in the same general age and education bracket who
are looking for employment. However, peer displacement doesn’t appear in that
data set because the salary differences between workers with H-1B visas and
domestic employees of similar ages and skills are minimal (in part due to a
law requiring companies to pay an H-1B worker the “prevailing wage” for the
position)._

I don't see how it follows that adjusting the US immigration policy is a
"mistake". Isn't the increased supply of workers putting downward price
pressure on salaries? Even if H1B requires a prevailing wage, that wage will
go down to meet the increased supply of talent that additional developers
bring.

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throwawaystale
A related effect is that almost _all_ H-1B's count as "diverse" in HR
statistics. If so, then currently there would be intense pressure to hire the
H-1B candidate over a citizen, even if the former required a _higher_ salary.

I have some skin in this game. I was rejected at Google for mysterious reasons
after passing the all-day and hiring committee. No way to know, but I am
indeed pale, male, and stale (and a citizen). If you look at Google's own
diversity reports, their fraction of people like me has falling like a stone
for several years now.

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jarsin
No comments on your take on why they did not hire you but just curious who can
override the hiring committee at google?

Seems weird they go through so much trouble hiring and it still comes down to
one person giving their ok?

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bduerst
Google's hiring process is set up to prevent as many false positive hires as
possible, at the expense of false negatives. It's pretexted under the
assumption that a bad hire is more detrimental/harder to fix than missing a
few good hires. Eric Schmidt talks about it in _How Google Works_.

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stirfrykitty
It's an intense process for sure. I interviewed with Google and made it
through the process for a Linux admin job they had at Ashburn, VA, which was
near to where I was living at the time (Reston). I had worked at the UUNet
data center for almost 5 years at this point, but I took a job with a
government contractor instead, as the pay was over 10k higher and the job a
better fit. Google interview processes are no joke. It takes forever and the
interview questions and practicals you get can make you doubt yourself. I
don't regret not taking that job. I knew the guy who eventually filled that
role and he said the job was very intense and very busy.

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sharadov
Ageism is very much an issue in Silicon Valley ( they want young workers with
not a lot of responsibility, make the office look like Disneyland, ply them
with free food and then work them to death). I work for an AI company in
Boston and we have engineers all over the spectrum - from 20s to the 60s. We
work hard, but we also have a work-life balance.

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casper345
This has already perplexed me on this shift - on discrimination on older tech
workers and woman in tech compared to now- because 40 years ago THEY were the
predominant tech force. The idea of the young white-asian male being dominant
in this work force is relatively new, correct? What shift happened?

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Izkata
Looking at degrees in the US, IIRC, the shift did happen in the mid/late 80s.
I have no idea what might have caused it, but basically the male/female ratio
was pretty consistent until then, when male degrees suddenly skyrocketed while
female rose slowly, at a pace very closely in line with the previous pattern.

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pteredactyl
To add, in regard to H1B, In some instances it's a national security issue.
You have highly paid foreigners who can't quit (unless they want to go home),
working on sensitive, sometimes morally questionable projects.

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stirfrykitty
I'm apologetically opposed to foreign workers. The US has PLENTY of tech
workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This
is nothing more than companies getting _cheaper_ labor. Full stop. I find all
the excuses just that.

Years ago, I worked for a rather well known security/dev company in Northern
Virginia. We had two arms to the company: the gov contractor side, which
required security clearances and the dev side. The dev side hired a few H-1B
visas and within a year, the boss, a former H-1B visa holder himself, now a
citizen, slowly, but surely purged the Americans from the dev team in favor of
people from his country. We all complained, but to no avail. Six months later,
the place had two Americans: the good looking admin assistants. That was it.
This happens all the time. I have friends in Northern Virginia that I still
keep in touch with and they say nothing has changed. The IT payscale has been
run down because of this. Same thing is happening with a certain large HW
vendor here in Houston. Filled to the brim with H-1B visa holders while native
sons and daughters are given the brush off.

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chasingthewind
This really doesn't match my experience. As a tech lead / team lead over the
last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty
finding competent Software Engineers at any level. I changed jobs a year ago
and got lots of interest from a wide variety of employers from a big
enterprisey place to a small local startup, two smallish local fintech firms,
and a SV software company's regional dev center where I landed. I'm in my mid
forties. I can't really explain the difference in your experience vs mine
other that perhaps the location.

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ThePawnBreak
> As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast
> market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers
> at any level.

Pay more. Google and Facebook use ridiculous interviews because so many people
want to work there. They still hire thousands of people every year. Why?
Mostly because they pay mid-level engineers over $200k. Can't afford that?
Then we're not talking about "not finding people" anymore, just about not
affording them.

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southphillyman
Doesn't this assume that the interviews even get to the offer stage? How does
paying more remedy 80% of your applicants failing fizzbuzz on the phone
interview? If you don't have the name recognition of the FAANG you're probably
getting subpar applicants regardless.

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a_c_s
Paying more attracts more applicants.

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souprock
It does not attract more applicants because they won't know about it unless
you advertise a specific amount, which then creates other problems. You'd get
a flood of useless people if the number is high. Some other people,
underestimating themselves, would not apply. You remove the flexibility to
hire both junior and senior people because one single pay number can't fit
both. Even if you provide a range, you have the problem of pessimists and
optimists assuming very different things about where in the range they might
fall.

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dmckinney242
Great read!

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tgsnyder
Great article!

