At Google, You're Old and Gray At 40 543
theodp writes "Google faces an imminent California Supreme Court decision on whether an age discrimination suit against it can go forward. But that hasn't kept the company from patting itself on the back for how it supports 'Greyglers' — that's any Googler over 40. At a company of about 20,000 full-time employees, there were at last count fewer than 200 formally enrolled Greyglers working to 'make Google culture ... welcome to people of all ages.'"
Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the belief that IT workers are washed-up at 40 is fairly widespread. Some believe that the H1B flooding is actually designed to get rid of older IT workers.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Some believe that the H1B flooding is actually designed to get rid of older IT workers
I think that's just to keep wages down in general. Our universities are pumping out plenty of CS and MIS grads as well as math and engineering graduates to keep up with demand. The companies that say there are shortages are just saying that to justify going overseas or to bring in H-1bs.
My father in law in quite an accomplished design engineer but as he got older, he has been gradually moved into testing positions.
It starts off with a lay-off and he gets it, finds another job that's not quite what he did before, lay-off, then another job not quite like what he did, and so on until now where he's writing Perl scripts to take data from testing equipment and putting that into Excel spreadsheets. Pretty beneath him, but he's grateful to have some sort of technical job at 70. All his contemporaries went into management (if they could) a long time ago, changed careers or they're now retired.
In my programming experience, I've known very few folks who stayed in programming after 40. One was well into his 50s but he grabbed onto a product and stuck with it for years. When I left, he was still programming C on Dos. But folks came and went because they didn't want to work on old shit and he was very lucky to have gotten a product with a very long market life - cash register software.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's just to keep wages down in general.
Age discrimination is about one thing: companies would rather have a 20-something desperate for work working 60 hours a week at $40K/year than they would a 50-something with some financial security working 40 hours a week at $70K/year. There are also some factors involving health insurance that can make it cheaper to have younger workers as well, but that's the basic story.
It has nothing to do with whether older workers are productive, "get" newer technology, or fit into the company culture. From the point of view of your employer, you are an expense, and their goal is to minimize expenses by hiring the cheapest workers they can capable of doing the job (or at least not failing too badly).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
If you haven't saved enough for most of your retirement by the time you hit your 40s, you kind of deserve to have to worry about it.
WTF are you talking about? Do you have any idea how things work in the real world?
I'm still in my 20s
Ah. Carry on, then.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In reality, a lot of people just recently had their savings halved or worse. Given the mathematics of compound interest, that's equivalent to at least a halving of their working life, and since all the greatest absolute gains occur in the last few years of that life, that's a substantial amount of money they'll never ever see du
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait 'til the next recession wipes out 70% of your 401k. If you've been around long enough, you got wiped out in 1987, then again in 2001, and then again in 2009. So you really aren't ahead unless you've got your money in something like bricks of gold.
In 2000, I almost had enough to retire on. In 2002 I basically started over; by 2008 I was doing great. Not so much in 2010...
Anyway, you haven't been working long enough to have suffered any sort of setback so don't get too complacent. A lot of arrogant p
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My masjid is full of programmers over 50. For example, one of them just start working at NIST, another worked for ages supporting Cobol code, third one works for private government contructor. Since I do not see apparent correlation between religiosity and coding till your beard is gray, I assume that there are plenty of them outside the masjid as well. (The only bias I could see is that it's DC area and a lot of government related jobs which is less agist than a private sector - I do not know though if it
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Our universities are pumping out plenty of CS and MIS grads as well as math and engineering graduates to keep up with demand.
As someone who works for a large employer that recruits actively among recent college graduates... NO. This opinion is ubiquitous and ignores one important fact: most recent graduates are woefully less qualified than their college education would seem to indicate. There are kids coming out of college who are bright and can do the work, but they represent maybe the upper quartile of all bachelor degree grads.
I don't hire RG's without two letters of recommendation from professors or one letter from either the
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people under 40 don't want to spend 40hours+/week at work
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny thing about that. We are doing an SAP conversion and one of the principles on the project is in his 60's and outworking the consultants who are working obscene hours because they are paid hourly. Many of the other developers in their 50's are putting in 60+ hour weeks (and have been for several months).
But generally, it's not a question of "too tired" as much as "too smart".
Pay me hourly and I'll work the hours you want.
Why should I work 60+ hours a week for a 10% bonus?
Why is your emergency an emergency? Sure an emergency can go on for a few weeks but if you are talking 18 months-- you are understaffed. It's not an emergency. You are using me as a slave and a battery to toss away when I get to be "old" at 40.
Especially when I know the managers are going to be getting 33% bonuses if the project goes in?
Also, the younger people get 30 years of career payoff for (in some cases literally) killing themselves. On our last big push 10 years ago we had a fairly young developer die when an other wise mild virus wasn't taken as sick time and he worked and worked and finally it crossed the blood brain barrier. The doctors apparently said he was so worn down he couldn't fight the illness.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Interesting)
I can totally relate to this. I had an internship last year (as a Junior in college) where I was told I would have to work 30 hrs/week at least. This is already a lot for a part time job, but I was going to get $400 a week. Of course this sounded enticing. Well this was November and shit ended up getting hardcore. I dropped out in the beginning of April; by that point I was making $600 a week (this was all flat rate, not hourly), but I was working up to 70 hour weeks (this was BEFORE school factored in, classes and homework). I spent pretty much my entire winter break working, weekends and all, along with spring break (I worked weekends consistently through January and February until I finally spoke up). My transportation wasn't paid for and when you have 10-14 hour days and work across town, you end up taking expensive cab rides so my salary already lost $25 a day, for the most part. I wasted away and my girlfriend was depressed, I couldn't hang out with my friends and I couldn't lift at the gym and lost a lot of the muscle I had put on. I finally had to quit because finals were coming up and I couldn't handle it. Now, over the summer, I have to work on a paper that I didn't do well on but had a nice enough professor that she gave me an incomplete so that I could work on the paper after the term and get at best, a C in the class. My other classes I didn't do all that much better in, but luckily I get credit for all of them (even the major classes) so it's not the end of the world. However the stress literally made me waste away and push away people around me. My parents just assumed I hated them because I stopped going home as often.
My girlfriend constantly told me I was getting used, and I blew her off refusing to believe her and would get angry thinking she just didn't want me to succeed.
Finally, I saw the light and realized I didn't like where I was in life. The hardest part was breaking away from the "cool company" ideal every young developer dreams of in high school and realizing how full of shit it generally is when a business tries to appeal to your fun side and act relatable. It's worse than a high school assembly where some 20 year olds try and come in and act relatable so they can warn you about the evils of sex and drugs. If I'm in a work environment, then it should be relaxed but it shouldn't constantly pretend it understands where I'm coming from while feeding me bullshit.
I had to eventually "buy out of" the whole idea that the work I was doing was important; that our small dev shop was better than everyone else's small dev shop and all the other internal propaganda that gets circulated around. This is the hardest to do because the reason you work so many hours is because you are tricked into thinking that by doing so you are going to become the next 20 something year old billionaire if just put enough hours in and that everything your company thinks of is gold. In the end, just like every other small dev shop, it's people scrambling around in the twilight of the social networking boom trying to latch on to the one or two social networks that will remain relevant even after the bubble bursts (think the Amazons and Ebays of Web 2.0 compared to whatever the hell websites thought they had a future back in 1998 that no one remembers or cares about).
The good thing to come out of all of this is that I learned my lesson and got some experience. I want to make it, but I'm not going to listen to any management bullshit that I need to work mandatory unpaid overtime to get there. No one "makes it" putting their life into someone else's company. The only time working a job significantly more than M-F, 9-5 is if it is your company or partly your company. If you have an idea or you and a friend have an idea, then you put your life into it. If someone has an idea, don't let them hire you to put your life into it. There is no reason to ever do this much work for someone else because you will never reap the benefits. I was strung along with guarantees of a couple thousand here, a couple thous
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though, it's fine to _sometimes_ work long hours. But if it happens too often or too long, it means you're getting screwed.
It's not mainly about the money - because even if they pay you for those extra hours, those hours come from your rather finite life. Go work out how many weekends you probably have left in your life based on your estimated life expectancy.
Now if
Overtime ultimately destroys productivity (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of the other developers in their 50's are putting in 60+ hour weeks (and have been for several months).
Here's a graph you might find interesting: Productivity, 40 hours versus 60 over eight weeks. [lostgarden.com]
From the same presentation:
Working more than 40 hours per week leads to decreased productivity
- Less than 40 hours and people weren't working enough.
- Greater than 40 hour work week gives a small productivity boost.
- The boost lasts three to four weeks and then turns negative.
Ford chewed on this problem for 12 years and ran dozens of experiments. As a result of Ford's experiments, he and his fellow industrialists lobbied Congress to pass 40 hour a week labor laws. Not because he was nice. Because he wanted to make the most money possible. We like to think of a 40 hour work week as a 'liberal policy' when in fact it was hard headed capitalism at its finest.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure how well researched the studies referred to in the Wiki article on Working time are, but they suggest a 4-day, 32-hour week are even more productive than a 40-hour week when you take enough factors into account (e.g. worker's improved education, worker's improved heatlh, etc).
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
You would be dead by 30.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You would be dead by 30.
And functionally dead (as in, lacking any form of a life outside of work) all the while.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I would easily work 100hrs/week if it meant I could retire by 30.
Didn't work out so well for EA employees.
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're not working 100 hours/wk for yourself, you generally won't retire after 10 years at any company. Even working for yourself, there's a less than 1 in 10 chance it will work out.
Now if you got a second job, and banked that second income, you'd have 10 years of cash built up (minus extra taxes plus potential income unless you lose it all in that great gamble known as the stock market)
The long and the short of it is: work 40Hr/wk and have a life. On their deathbed, no one wishes they had worked more.
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Interesting)
You can work 40 hours and retire well.
All you have to do is spend less than you make consistently.
I make about 60k after all taxes are taken out. I spend about $36k a year. This includes a couple decent $1k vacations. Every year I basically build up a half year's retirement even without any return on the investment. Besides that, my car and house will be paid for in about 4 years and then my spending drops to $24k a year.
I drive a new car, with a warranty plan (so no unexpected bills for 7 years) and I have a warranty repair plan on my house (so no unexpected bills period). I dress well. I eat well (if I ate out less I could spend $30k now- I probably blow $500 a month on food).
I have one pet. When it dies, this will save me another $1k a year, until I replace it when I retire.
I suppose I could be blowing that $14k. I lived that life for about 6 years. It was fun-- but after a hiccup in the job market, I opened my eyes and said, "this is stupid".
I'm on track to be able to retire in about 8 years. Basically I have 4 years living expenses now- every year that grows by another 9 months worth (and if it starts growing from investments again like it did from 2000-2003, I could see 2 year increases each year).
On top of that I have social security- which currently would provide all my living expenses but which I may never see.
On top of that I have a pension which will be about the same as social security.
In some ways, once I finally start saving and retire- my spendable income will go up.
Unfortunately, I may have to work longer than I want due to medical issues but only about 15% of the population has to deal with that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I dunno...you gotta make sure she WORKS!!
With dual income you can have a nice home and squirrel away a lot of money towards retirement. Besides, it is nice to have someone do the laundry, that saves on the cleaners bill.
But seriously, just make sure and choose well, so you don't get the stereotypical spendthrift type chick.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, in today's market, the monetary incentives are minimal at best.
You can work for $30k year salary, 9am to 6pm, Monday through Friday. We will also need you to work additional hours on emergencies on an as-needed basis.
What they don't tell you is that "emergencies" come all day and night, and frequently on the weekends. The end of your work day will be extended from 6pm to midnight daily. You will be carrying a company owned pager that will receive no less
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Interesting)
There are more experienced techies who understand new technology than there are young ones who understand old technology. Or how their new technology works behind the scenes, for that matter.
And no, people aren't old at 40-50. With a normal work life lasting from 20-25 to 60-70, that's only halfway through, and is more likely to be near the peak of performance.
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm over 40 (almost 50) and get all new technology except for mobile phones. Maybe it's just me. I just don't have the social network I used to have in my 20s. By get, I mean motivated/interested in developing applications for. Not many new graduates seem to understand web services, SAS or SOAP.
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Funny)
Especially the hippies!
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone whose 25 I have no interest in mobile phones. I don't think its an age thing.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or grammar, apparently... ("Who is" -> "who's", not "whose".)
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
I think many of us "old" techies have no problems getting how cell phones or Twitter works.
What we have a problem getting is why. TXTing is as important to the evolution of communication as the pogo stick is for the evolution of transportation.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Informative)
Texting is useful in lots of circumstances, but perhaps they're not relevant to your lifestyle.
- Communication without disturbing anyone nearby (on public transport, during lessons at school, in the office)
- Communications when the recipient is busy, or might be busy, but can respond later
- A note that doesn't need a reply when the sender doesn't want to be drawn into a conversation (e.g. text parent/partner to say you'll be late)
All of these could be done as well or better by email, but all phones support SMS and only some support email.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Interesting)
I like how this comment ignores the generational gap between digital natives and digital immigrants.
Note
but perhaps they're not relevant to your lifestyle
Communication without disturbing anyone nearby (on public transport, during lessons at school, in the office)
There exists a mental technique called 'patience'. The huge downside to instant communication, and instant gratification from it, is that we fail to realize that half of our thoughts aren't important enough to actually send. If/when you have to wait 20-30 minutes to communicate it, you tend to condense things down. Your brain chews on them a while. Try it. Even with the digital tech, you may find the practice to be enlightening. This is what people used to do before cell phones, because, believe it or not those situations did pop up within their lifestyles.
Communications when the recipient is busy, or might be busy, but can respond later
See the above. And as you said, email might be better, and would likely be less intrusive. Texts tend to be small and very, very frequent. Again I assert that a great many of them are 'junk' that are only sent because they can be, rather than because they actually benefit either the sending or receiving party.
A note that doesn't need a reply when the sender doesn't want to be drawn into a conversation (e.g. text parent/partner to say you'll be late)
This is actually a decent example, but you may be surprised to note that before everyone had a phone in their pocket, people used to just try and not be late. They'd let others know to expect them well prior to the event, rather than twenty minutes beforehand. And on the flip side, we'd typically just stop inviting people who weren't dependable in this way. Life would happen, as it does today, and the party who arrived late would typically have a story to tell, which often garnered some sympathy, etc. Today it is "I got a text from Jim, he'll be late," and it has become just a bit too mundane.
The point being, people haven't changed much. The technology exists to prop up a certain level of impulsiveness that is the trademark of youth, but even the youths of yesteryear got by without such things. I think, too, that there are benefits of both points of view. And I think many of the older generation can see the benefits of the newer tech. On the other hand, none of the youngsters seem to get it, and I worry that society is feeding their sense of self-importance just a bit too quickly for our collective good.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Patience and frequency come down to the user -- that's not a problem with the technology. I disagree with you about patience, anyway: if you make a phone call you're implicitly wanting an immediate response; not the case for a text message.
Your grandparents (or great grandparents, perhaps) would think the same about you telephoning friends when you were a teenager, and could make the same arguments. Their social engagements had to be arranged in person, or by letter!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you considered that, at some point, new technology might reach the point of being "enough"? Is it possible that communication that takes months is not as good as communication that takes days, which is not as good as that which takes hours.... but at some point there is no actual benefit? to shortening the timeframe, and maybe doing so becomes detrimental?
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 58, and kids half my age come to me to help them figure their phones out for them. The trouble with mobiles is these damned kids don't know how to design a decent interface. Once you figure out that the phone is designed by someone with no sense of logic, it's a lot easier.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Very insightful. As someone in his early 40's I can honestly say most of the 'kids' I encouter know very little of the low level details of how things work behind the scenes. Their depth of knowledge is often severely lacking. There are exceptions of course but by and large that's what I've encountered.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That is a bizarre statement and one that I generally hold to be the opposite of the truth. I find that the least willing to do overtime are the younger crowd. The older crowd tend to do the "early to bed, early to rise" routine whereas the younger crowd are the "party all night, show up late in the morning" people. (YMMV)
As for older people not getting the new technology? Wow. That is quite an assertion. There are and always will be people on both sides of the [arbitrary] age line that will get it and
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There might be a reason for their distractions. See this article [hbr.org] from the Harvard Business Review which talks about the differences between the current and former generations when it comes to work.
Then there is this article [businessweek.com] from Bloomberg Businessweek which talks about the same issue. Both came about because of the Washingt [washingtonpost.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Those two articles you cite debating the conclusions of the Washington Post article are the same; Business Week reposted the Harvard Business Review article. I'd like to see more than one source, especially when the source reads like a defensive rebuttal by someone who felt insulted by the conclusions of the Pew study (or at least Washington Post story about the study).
Having taught some college classes and labs over the past several years, I can say that the sense of entitlement and poor work ethic (howeve
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only place that age a
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Insightful)
There's the old people who use age as an excuse for not bothering to learn. They just don't want to.
Then there are the grandmas who are tech savvy. They get the internet, webcams, texting, and the shabang - then they tell their kids and grandkids, "I got internet, webcam, texting and all this connectivity. What's your excuse NOW for not calling?!?"
Besides, most people over 40 don't want to spend 60hours+/week at work.
That's because we got burnt too many times with the line of: "Work your ass off and there will be rewards." only to get a pink slip or just a cost of living raise with the rational that "you missed some of your metrics" or "you missed a deadline" - regardless of how unreasonable it was and the fact that the deadline was made by the marketing department to make a trade show or because the salesmen bullshitted to make the sale.
We also learned that if you have to work 60+ hours a week regularly, it is the result of incompetent management.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
To summarize:
Old people are no more lazy than young ones, but much less naive.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it? Or do the old-timers just not get new technology?
The kids think some rehashed ancient concept from the 70s or 80s with a new marketing campaign, or same old stuff tweaked by the engineers now with improved specs, is "new technology".
I know about IBM VM OS from the 80s, so I know everything about Xen/KVM/etc except the new marketing spin and the command line syntax.
I know pascal p-code virtual machine system from the 70s, so I know everything about the java virtual machine concept except the new marketing spin and the command line syntax.
The kids are trying to wrap their heads around the very concept of virtual machines, or the very concept of clustering, or the very basic concept of parallelization/threading. I did that back in the 80s, its old technology to me, not new.
Same &#!^ different day with "high level language of the week (tm)", client-server processing, middleware, packetized data networks, etc.
Is there any "new technology" out there to get, that I didn't get decades ago with a different marketing campaign and different command line syntax?
yes! (Score:3, Funny)
cloud computing!
(kill me now)
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm only 33, have already transitioned out of IT for a living, and have a LOT of respect for the older generations, especially the mainframe engineers and the people who created the BBS scene. I agree with most of your post.
Is there any "new technology" out there to get, that I didn't get decades ago with a different marketing campaign and different command line syntax?
MediaWiki (Wikipedia) was really new. We had had user-generated content before (e.g. BBSes) but wikitext, history, discussion pages, integration with email, and concurrent revisions IMHO made a really new animal.
But beyond that, I'm kind of drawing up a blank too.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
capability of the new technology compared to 80s technology is worlds apart.
Other than because you say so, can you come up with any details to your argument or any concrete example? Just one?
The address bus has more bits. The clock cycle time is shorter. Oh wow man I'll never be able to wrap my ancient mind around that. Oh wait, I've been doing just that, every year, for decades.
Like I posted, find me a NEW technology. You can't.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How is the capability "worlds apart"...? Can you quantify it or express it in some way so that comparisons are possible?
I'm an old and gray 47-year-old who juggles (Unisys in my case) mainframe transactions systems, C and Java stuff, and perl/PHP web stuff for a living, and most of the stuff I see on the web side tends to be OO reimplementations of the same stuff we were using 20 years ago on airline systems.
Many of the same ideas on the web, though somewhat less mature at this point.
Even Unisys MAPPER sup
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Multi-tier systems have actually existed in various forms for decades, though that might depend on definitions, and complex networked systems have existed for much longer. Airlines have been sharing data for over 60 years in some form. :-)
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people over 40 realize that in the end it's just a job. Families are important and when you reach a certain age you start to understand what's important in life. Most corporations will drop you short of fully vetted and with not so much as a "thank you very much" to save the money.
20 somethings are great because they'll work long hours and think nothing of it. The problem is quantity does not equate to quality. Google might not be in so many new court cases if they had a little wisdom present when some 20 something said "Hey, lets put WiFi sniffers on our camera cars!".
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Or do the old-timers just not get new technology?
Funny, my young friends come to me for help with their tech. Maybe I'm not your normal geezer, but most other nerd geezers aren't so normal either.
Besides, most people over 40 don't want to spend 60hours+/week at work.
Damned right, suckers. With a few years (hopefully) one gains a bit of wisdom. I don't live to work, I work to live, and sixty hours a week doesn't leave much time for living.
I think it's a damned shame that you young people are willfully giving up what my and previous generations have fought and striven for.
Again -- SUCKERS!
Now GOML.
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Insightful)
I produce more results (as measured in meaningfull ways, such as # of functional requirement points implemented) per-week nowadays working 40h/week than I ever did when I worked 60h/week.
A tired developer rushing his work because he's already late will just code in many more bugs and create harder to maintain and update code, thus causing the kind of problems that make him run late and work longer hours to try and catch up - it's actually a vicious cycle.
In fact, at the moment, working with an international team, compared with other people of an equivalent seniority in geographical location where working long hours is traditional (US), my personal productivity is 2 or 3 times better because I work smart and steady while they just work hard and dumb.
This is an insight that experience brings to you as long as you get a change to work in an environment where management is wise enough to be knowledgeable about the impact of the side-effects of working long hours in intellectual professions.
Fifteen years ago I also used to think that I was so "elite" thanks to my capability of doing lots of work fast - nowadays I can see how such a huge percentage of that work was wasted becuase I didn't ask the right questions up front, because I didn't carefully checked a design decision up-front and went down a wrong path and had to throw down weeks of work, because I produced crappy code that later I had trouble to maintain and extend or simply because my rate of introduction of bugs was so much higher due to being tired all the time.
Wisdom is something you gain, not something that can be taught: I'm afraid that those with only a couple of years of experience in software development don't even know enough to understand how little they know.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy crap, are you serious? First of, who really wants to work a 60 hr week? For that matter why forty or even a flippin' 8 hr day. programming is not assembly work, it is craftsman work, more art then anything else. Since I started in this industry over 29 years ago I found that the idea of turning on creativity at 9 and turning it off at 5 was laughable. For accounting purposes I appreciate the need for some set time frame of measurement for payment of services, but if it takes you 60 hours to accomplish tasks in a week then either you cannot do your job well, you are way over worked thus abused in your job, or a workaholic that cannot comment on how normal people approach their job. I do not want to spend 60+ hours a week working because at 49, I have a life.
As to understanding new technology? How frickin' pretentious can you get? Define "new" technology? Show me a language that is radically different from most other languages that only "young" technicians understand. Are machines that more sophisticated today then five, ten, fifteen years ago or have they just improved in speed, storage space, and simplicity. I don't use an Iphone so am I just an old geezer or a person who does not want to toss his well earned salary on Apple/AT&T for a bunch of toy apps. Ipad, slates, notebooks, these are not "new" technology, just repackaged current technology. New would be along the lines of neural links, bio-integrated technology that free me completely from carrying around some plastic, silicon and wire.
Grow up, think for a moment. One day you will be me, a 49 year old, active, knowledgeable IT professional with the potential to work, add value to a company while enjoying a life. Step away from the narcissistic attitude and consider your future when you say things like "do the old-timers" and then don't say it unless your purpose is to sound stupid in public.
Sit on my lawn all you want because (1) I bought it with my salary (2) I can enjoy it because I work to enjoy it and (3) because it seems you need a place to remind you that life is more then work.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't speak for all "old timers", but I'm north of 50 and can speak for a lot of us. We get new technology just fine. I beleive large tech companies don't like us because we've already seen a lot of the "new technology" before, dressed in slightly different clothing. Sometimes more than once. And generally we aren't all that impressed with a lot of it.
Google Maps? Pretty cool. Twitter and almost anything to do with text messages? Complete usele
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is too easy. I almost feel guilty.
If you cna fir ta use for it, that's your problem.
Ummm. . . Yeah, what you said. I think.
If someone is interested in somethign else, twitter is a great way to stay in touch. I have a twitter account with several other people for the sole purpose of posting grams of fat we eat. Since none of us really know each other, we can get on someone case when they don't post or eat too much fat. It's been a great
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Please share your wisdom with your fellow generation. Work will be a much better place if more people were astute as you are.
On that note, most of the 20-somethings that work for me (I'm a middle manager of 5 developers) know more than me, because I'm not a software developer. Not a single one of them can do the weekly things I do that need to be done to ensure we continue to have jobs. I think the reason us 40+ start to get out of touch with technology (or the perception that we do, at least) is because t
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Not convinced. I'm 46 and when I grew up I knew a lot of people who really got into home computers. Heck, I started with programmable TI calculators in the 1970s. My friends now span around 44-55 years old and 70% of them are still really into IT and can build PCs, program in various languages etc. Some do it as a hobby, some professionally. There *are* people in my age group and much lower who play the 'well, we didn't have computers when I grew up so I can't learn them' card. This is just pure bollocks. They might not be interested in the things but don't blame your age for it. I'm not interested in cars but I'm not going to say 'Well, we didn't have fuel injection when I was young so I just can't understand them'.
FWIW, since I hit 40 I've learned Java, XHTML/CSS/PHP/mySQL and built my own CMS. Just before that I learned C# when it first came out. At home for fun I've played about with XNA and I'm now looking at Android development. Workwise I'm still cranking out C/Unix or VB/Windows stuff. At my last count I've worked on 8 OS's and 30+ languages and to be honest, new ones get easier because they have so much in common after a while.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Kids today still have to go out of their way... Using Facebook and Twitter doesn't count as taking an interest in technology in quite the same way as learning BASIC and ASM/machine code from the manuals and writing your own programs.
When there are 100 times more possible directions, going a particular way can be more out of the way than when there were fewer ways
Back then:
It's night, should I
a) Watch TV with only X ch
Maybe Google are right (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm rapidly approaching 40, and I'm becoming more risk averse by the day.
Here's why: I know that when companies over-reach, then it'll be me who's pulling the late nights and weekends to deliver, not the guy that over-sold the product.
Younger guys either haven't learned that yet, or don't care as much, because they think that Arbeit Macht Frie. Well, I put in the Arbeit years ago, and I want my Frei now - just as today's young turks will want theirs tomorrow when they have families to take care of.
But they don't want it today, and that's why they make better employees, plain and simple.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm rapidly approaching 40
Not more rapidly than others.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually he is approaching it more rapidly than a 20 year old. See, the older you get, the faster time passes. When you're five, it's forever for Christmas to come. It's a full 1/5 of a lifetime, while for a 20 year old it's only 1/20th. A year goes by twice as fast for me as it does someone half my age, so the closer you get to 40, the more rapid the approach becomes.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm 26 and already experiencing this joy.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends how you define risk. My experience has been that the practical definition is "over selling in order to make big money for salesmen and senior management, at the cost of developers' lives". You can call that jaded, or you can call it experienced.
Personally, I'd rather under-promise, leave at 5pm, and invest my still copious, stallion-like energy on my wife, kids and hobbies. While I still enjoy my time in the office, I don't live to work, I work to live. And that's not what a smart employer wan
Working on a long term project (Score:4, Interesting)
It's amazing the differences, working on a long term project. How long term? Our first released version was in the mid-nineties - and yes, we're doing more than just maintenance, even now. It's a defense project.
I'm on a team (within the larger project, which is 70-100 people) of seven people. Four are over forty, in some cases by a lot, one is about to turn forty, I'm thirty-three, and then we have our one, shiny just out of college person. We're pretty representative of the project as a whole, with the UI team trending younger than the others. The idea that older people don't know what they're doing, even on new languages, is pretty silly to me.
young company (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:young company (Score:5, Insightful)
A company staffed by newly graduated graduate students explains a lot about their interview practices. A Google interview session is typically an oral exam - solve hard problems on your feet as if you had recently taken a course in the material - because it is the only form of evaluation they know.
They can use any style of interview they want (interviewing is sadly a very flawed evaluation process anyway), but only recent graduates, or people who specially refresh their oral exam skills in advance, will do well in these types of interviews. And often the expectation of the interviewer is pretty unreasonable: if he is a fresh expert in X, then you should be a fresh expert in X, otherwise you get the fatal interview veto and become a no-hire; given that there are are an awful lot of X's in the computer world, this is going to eliminate a lot of excellent engineers. This stuff has little to do with on-the-job problem solving and programming skills.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Right on the money. That was my experience. I'm 49 and I was invited to an interview with Google (Approached). This was
initially flattering. However, when I got there the only person I saw all day that seemed anywhere near my age was the security guard at the front. not that this bothered me at all. During the interview they asked me to write a binary search algorithm on the whiteboard in whatever language I liked. Now all this some it was feeling somewhat insulted as these things are elementary, I also fel
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Somebody, please Read The Fine Article! The person filing suit was a professor at Stanford before being hired by Google. He lasted less than two years at the company. There is no statistical evidence that this is a pattern at Google.
My wild speculation is that the guy just didn't like corporate culture; he was accustomed to the academic environment, which was possibly a better fit for this guy. (Also consider, he may not have really "fit in" at Stanford either, which may be part of what led to his departure
Re:young company (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The same is true for many other companies as well, Qualcomm for example. In 2001 I bought a small condo in SoCal from a single lady who retired from Qualcomm and moved out to a mansion on a hill overlooking a heavenly SoCal valley. I have heard a phrase "qualcomm millionaire" quite often.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Elders of the internet (Score:5, Insightful)
There is always the talk of how older people don't get new technology, but i think this only described the people who grew up without IT and were confronted with it at a late age for the first time.
This might be naive, but i think now is the time where people grew up in this high tech scenario and for the first time actually grew old with it, too. Society needs to understand that the "new old guys" are just as proficient in adapting new technology as the young ones because adapting is what they did their whole life.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a difference between knowing programming languages and knowing how to program.
Similarly I've met people who could speak six languages but didn't have coherent thought to express in any of them.
Obligatory Primer quote: (Score:4, Interesting)
Clean Room Technician: You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty?
[to Aaron, who shakes his head]
Clean Room Technician: They take them out and shoot them.
Age Discrimination is Reality in IT (Score:3, Insightful)
This case is not cut and dried (the guy was already over 50 when he was hired), which is unfortunate because age discrimination is very, very real in IT and especially in the software industry.
If you in IT, and are at age 40, and have not been promoted to management, become an independent contractor, started your own business, taken a government job, or switched careers... well, you better look good in blue, because you are one pay check away from having no other choice but to become a Wal*Mart greeter.
Re:Age Discrimination is Reality in IT (Score:5, Insightful)
If you get too comfortable in your position and stagnate, fail to thrive and achieve and make a name for yourself in the industry, then yes, you will be pushed out by cheaper labor that will eat your lunch. I doubt any of the above guys tremble in front of 20 year old kids that come to work with them. It's most definitely the other way around.
I'm 54 and not grey (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm 54 and not grey (Score:5, Funny)
Work / Life Balance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now are the [sic] a bad company?
No, because AFAIK, Google & EA don't discriminate against blacks or women. What companies like Google and others do is present a culture of many hours in the office with the compensation being perks and cool toys. You can either choose to work there or not. As a 40-something I choose not, because I'd rather have a life.
Speaking as an old geezer (Score:5, Insightful)
The bad news is, I probably don't pick up new crap as quickly as I used to. The good news is, I don't need to because most of it is like the old crap I've already learned.
Real geeks don't age. (Score:3, Funny)
Real geeks are constantly excited by new tech. Real geeks are too busy to have families, so they have no problem with 80-hr weeks. Hell, real geeks can put in an 80-hr week from home. Google doesn't know what they're missing.
If anything it's the kids that are a problem. Most of the 20-somethings I've worked with are irresponsible, couldn't show up on time if you held a gun to their heads, don't understand the word deadline, and tend to overestimate their abilities big-time. Sure, a few of them turn out to be better than expected, but that's the minority.
I'm 45 and I'm still willing to kill myself for the job. I feel like I'm making a difference every day. I know people are depending upon on me. Sure, I've never been married, but I never wanted to be married. Why anybody would want that is beyond me. All that does is take away from time that could be spent being productive.
Old nerds don't die, they just turn into pros. (Score:4, Insightful)
A few months ago I left a job at a web hosting company, where at 24-25 years old, I was an "old man" by comparison. I was the only non-manager on the tech side of the company to have a degree, and had been programming C when most of the kids I worked with were in elementary school. Yet, they looked at me like I was some sort of "n00b" for not knowing PHP. Partly, I didn't have any desire to know PHP. My co-workers looked at "add more memory" as the solution to all their performance problems. Not one of them had ever programmed in a compiled language, never had to tweak out more memory, or anything like that. It was incredibly frustration when we were doing maintenance reboots against the memmap 0 bug that was out at the time and the senior admin and myself were the only two people in the department that knew why the bug was an actual problem, the difference between kernel space and userspace in memory, etc.
Anyway, I eventually left for a company that does its own hardware design, writes everything in C and Perl, runs FreeBSD instead of CentOS and has actual engineers. I'm the youngest, greenest person on the block again, and so I actually have to start learning again. Luckily, I'm learning in my own comfort level. They could have doubled my pay at the hosting company and I'd never have been happy there. Maybe I'm stodgy; maybe I'm a curmudgeon; maybe kids today really aren't as smart as they used to be. Frankly, though, I think that when you reach a certain point in your life, free pizza and the ability to keep a nerf gun next to your desk don't compensate for low pay, long hours and having to put up with idiots who are fat, white and loud yet somehow think they're ninjas. It's the difference between the kid running Ubuntu at home and a professional AIX admin. As you get older, your professional goals change, your life goals change, and you take a different direction. Most of the "cool" companies are started by kids who are still in their nerf war stage. A company like IBM or Juniper is probably a lot less "ageist" than one that uses terms like "agile" as if the term is domain-specific with no other meaning.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Oh, PHP. It's like PERL, only without the powerful regular expression syntax." Then when they don't get the joke (and the real joke is it's true), mutter about getting off your lawn.
Try to replace 'em (Score:5, Interesting)
My department wanted to hire me (46 y.o.) a younger "assistant" to help with all my duties. Mostly they're nervous that I'll leave and be hard to replace.
So HR asked for the skills and qualifications I have that are needed for the jobs and projects that I do.
After getting the list and doing some research, HR told them they would need to hire 3 or 4 younger people to meet those qualifications, at a cost of at least 2 to 3 times my salary.
So yeah, experience beats youthful enthusiasm every damn day. Get yourself some experience, kids.
Oh, I got a raise out of the deal.
ageism, as opposed to sexism or racism (Score:5, Insightful)
has a built in karma
if you are white, you'll never be black. if you're a man, you'll never be a woman
but if you are 20, some day you WILL be 50. therefore, all of the hatred you dish out will be visited back on you... by your own self. karma still applies to sexism and racism, but it comes back in the form of other people's views of you. not the special hell of a self-created low self-opinion
if you are 20, and have a bad attitude towards the aged, someday, you will have a bad attitude towards yourself. self-hatred is something all of us carry around to some extent, but to have self-hatred gradually grow as you get older must be a terrible weight to bear, and it keeps growing
you can see it on the street: the guys with the ridiculous fake hair and the women with the ridiculous facial plastic surgery: this is self-hatred. who wants to walk around broadcasting their lack of confidence and stinking of desperation, to telegraph that you want to be something you can never be again? to worship youth, but then turn into someone old, must be a terrible experience to go through. to simply look at yourself in the mirror and be filled with anguish: built in karma for being an ageist. this also might explain some suicides by people in their 40s and 50s
meanwhile, if you always treated the elderly fairly and gracefully, then when you yourself are older you will still be confident, and still like yourself, because you will treat your older self the way you treat older others today. built in karma still applies, but in the positive: you age gracefully, and have a full happy life
so the cost of being an ageist is to have an unhappy older life
don't be an ageist. look at the elderly and see yourself as you will be someday, and smile, for the sake of your own future happiness. you want to age gracefully, you really do. so prepare yourself psychologically now for aging gracefully, by treating the aged you encounter today with the same grace you want to treat yourself with later
misleading? (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes it sound as if they are saying Google is a company of 20,000 with fewer than 200 employees of age 40 or over, but that isn't true. It's just that fewer than 200 of them have joined this specific group to make Google culture welcome to people of all ages. Seems like we've made a "news story" out of thin air. Slow news day?
Experience Matters (Score:4, Insightful)
If they're over 40 and good at what they do, senior technical people are a huge asset. They can spot the disaster before it happens, or cut through the complex requirements and identify what it is the customer really needs before you waste six months of development time. Because they've seen it before.
They also tend to be tired and kind of grumpy, because they've seen it before, but a savvy manager will cling to these folk for dear life.
Mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
For some, experience works against you (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the biggest reason that there aren't more people over 40 working in IT and software development. For me anyway, it was the realization that technology keeps changing but it doesn't really improve. Sure, there is more "eye candy" and "cool" interfaces but how is it really improving our lives? The challenge to get some technology to work when your young can very appealing but after a while you get tired of fixing the same problems over and over. Especially when the benefits of the new product is marginally better, or maybe even worse, than the previous product.
The problem seems to be phrased most of the time as "older people can't keep up with the technology" when the real issue is "people with experience realize the futility and silliness of most of the new technology". Technology like social web sites and mobile phones have become almost pure entertainment pretending to be a useful tool. The CEOs of these high-tech companies don't want people around that keep bringing up the fact that "the Emperor has no clothes". Young people can be easily entranced with shiny objects and not realize that there are wasting enormous amounts of their lives. Especially when they're getting paid to waste their time.
I'm sure cognitive dissonance will keep most Slashdotters from accepting any of this but if I can help free one mind then it will have been worth it.
Young people dont last here very long. (Score:5, Insightful)
I blame it on the current talent pool in the midwest. Most of the people we bring in now all have this "video game" degree from the nearby university. Not one of them understands the concept of designing practical solutions. They also do not understand testing. They seem to fall into the duct tape programmer category. Simple obvious decisions about user interface, input formatting, smart security decisions, anticipating user mistakes, these things just dont come with that degree they arrive with. The seasoned programmers here watch the same stupid mistakes getting made over and over again. On the one hand, we desperately need the help, there is so much work to get done and tons of money to be made, on the other hand, these kids that come in just make more work for us in the long run as we keep recoding and recoding the stupid shit that they do. In a few instances, these kids get a degree and find out its not really what they wanted to do with their life. They just got the degree because they liked playing with their wii and their parents were excited to have something their kids would actually pay attention through in school.
I would much rather bring in the mature, more experienced programmer that has been through it all and builds in ways that eliminates all the obvious problems, so we can stay focused on the bigger issues of a project.
That explains a lot about Google (Score:4, Insightful)
For a while I thought that Google's short comings were the by-product of uber nerd hubris and the belief that they simply know the best way to do everything. Their lack of maturity shines through most visibly when it comes to support, documentation and long term planning. Their pre-sales processes are about the worst I have dealt with.
Wisdom comes from age. As people grow and mature, they tap into different sensibilities during different phases of their lives.
An older person might not have the grasp of complex search algorithms, or the glue that ties Wave together that a 30 year old engineer in their prime might have. On the other hand, that 30 year old super engineer probably knows fuck all about actually running a company, or balancing a departmental budget, or dozens of other things that have to be in place if a company will have long term success.
I use my dad as an example. He's a 65 year old retired Harvard MBA. He could be taking it easy but he enjoys what he does. He consults with startups and small businesses. He helps them establish the fundamental financial foundations that they need to be successful. There are plenty of people out there who are good enough at something to start a business doing it. However those businesses often falter and teeter on the bring of failure because the owner's brilliance in providing a service or inventing a widget doesn't translate into running a company. In his case, one of his assests is his age. He has been exposed to decades worth of macro economic trends and worked across different industries.
I'm not saying that Google should be snatching up 65+ year old retired folks simply because they have a lot of wisdom and experience. On the other hand, they could use some maturity. Take a look at the wifi debacle they're in. That is a great example of what happens when people lack maturity. They simply don't care about the consiquences of their actions, or if they do they minimize them. Personally I tend to agree with the prevailing thought process that if a person is broadcasting an unencrypted signal they shouldn't expect privacy. On the other hand, I have enough maturity to realize that the law is vague in those areas. I wonder if Google even bothered to have any competent lawyers review their plans, or if their conversation went something along the lines of,
"Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we just snarfed wifi traffic as we drove along?"
"Yeah! It would be like war driving on a massive scale!"
"Why not? We're already taking pictures of every square foot of property along side every paved surface in the developed world, we might as well map every wireless AP out there too."
The Chinese have a saying to the effect of, "At the times when things are going very well, that is when you have to be the most concerned about danger."
Google is entering that phase in their life. Their IPO is behind them. They are sitting on billions of dollars. They are introducing new products that are having some success. But now everyone wants a piece of them.
Perhaps you are unaware of Brian Reed's skills (Score:4, Informative)
He invented the scribe text formatting language.
He invented the router, which became the first cisco router.
He co-founded what eventually became Adobe.
While at DEC, he and his group invented the altavista search engine.
There is more, but he clearly has serious computer science talents and vision.
"Poor cultural fit" (Score:4, Insightful)
Worker in their 40's and up are rather disinclined to work 120 hours/week and basically live on the Google campus, away from their spouse and teenage children. Free cokes and junk food only goes so far - about 26. So yes, there's a cultural mismatch: older workers have a life outside Google.
Tom DeMarco: Slack (Score:4, Insightful)
Fine, I'm forgoing the mod points I've already spent in this thread, since there's so much damn cluelessness about the "value" of overwork.
For everyone who thinks habitual working hours over a sustainable 35-45 hour pace (which varies by individual) is a good thing, go read Tom DeMarco's book Slack [amazon.com]. He neatly debunks the pointy-haired boss myths (and gullible, guiltable workaholic engineer myths) regarding overwork. Some examples: very quickly after working at maximum sustainable pace, your work output per hour starts to drop. Eventually, you've been pulling 60 hours or more for just a few weeks and you're not really getting any more done than you would have at your sustainable pace. For severe overwork, you're getting a LOT less done. Also, "undertime" becomes endemic at high workloads -- that need to "just pop out for a few hours" during working hours to deal with all of that life-stuff that's being neglected.
The larger points of the book surround how a concept of "slack" is vital to the success of any individual, team, and/or company that depends on knowledge work. This "slack" is an ingredient which supplies the ability to quickly respond to changing requirements, to seize opportunities, and to handle market shifts. One of my favorite distinctions that DeMarco draws in the book is between an organization's efficiency and effectiveness. In this context, efficiency is roughly defined as "how fast are we moving towards some goal?" while effectiveness is defined as "are we moving towards the right goal?" Many organizations optimize solely for efficiency -- moving forward at a breakneck pace -- and sacrifice effectiveness in so doing. The organizational ship becomes hard to steer, and often times ends up at the wrong goal.
Heck, Barbara Liskov (2008 ACM Turing Award winner) has a great quote on this topic... IIRC, to the effect of how she felt guilty for times when she worked less, until she realized that she was always more productive and energized during those times.
Re:i've seen plenty of older IT workers (Score:5, Funny)
yeah they LOOKED 40. Probably late 20ies on near-burnout.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Logan's Google?"
To heck with the Sandmen, did they clone young Jenny Agutter?