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:4, Insightful)
Most people under 40 don't want to spend 40hours+/week at work
young company (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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: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)
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?
Re:Maybe Google are right (Score:1, Insightful)
"But they don't want it today, and that's why they make better employees, plain and simple."
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm no. It makes for self entitled employees who feel that because they have they should be.
Many younger employees get distracted by the hip and now not the stable and then....
Having older mature employees who have life experience typically provides a balance and insight that youth cannot provide or compensate for
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!".
Work / Life Balance (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just going to throw this out there... (Score:2, Insightful)
"Greyglers" sounds like pure HR bullshit.
Google sounds more and more like a crappy company to work for as time goes by.
Posting as AC because I'm too lazy to create an account.
Re:Not just Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
You would be dead by 30.
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:Not just Google (Score:2, Insightful)
Every hiring practice is designed to drive down wages. Period.
Re:Not just Google (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: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.
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.
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: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'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: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 the latest/greatest tech stops being important.
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: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.
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: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.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
To summarize:
Old people are no more lazy than young ones, but much less naive.
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.
Old but not obsolete (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not 40 yet, but I can attest that I don't have then energy that I used to. Not only that, but I can smell a crap idea earlier that I used to and I'm not afraid to make my opinion known. It does seem to me that a lot of the older folks are rather complacent, but appearances can be deceptive. That old dude who appears to be just idling along is possibly just very efficient. For example, with my experience now, I can do the work that would take two or three of me when I was in my 20's.
There is a perception that older employees are dinosaurs, which I think is wrong. I think it has more to do with shit management that doesn't know how to tap into those resources.
Re:Not just Google (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 useless bullshit designed to let the cell phone companies monetize dead space in network packets and let the site owners sell masses of personal information for data mining.
Honestly, if I wanted a code monkey or someone to design the next kind of brand new useless crap, I wouldn't hire me either. I'm too selective about what I'll do and who I'll do it for.
OTOH, by the time someone hits 50, they should be on their own. Consulting pays much better, the working conditions are absolutely spectacular and there is much more of a sense of accomplishment when you can help businesses grow and become (more) profitable, instead of grinding out code. In the distant past, I could say "See that network driver? That's mine!" now I can say, "See that company expanding and hiring people? I did that."
Anybody who has been in this business for 30 years or more has a ton of expertise to offer and shouldn't be pissing their time away at Google anyway. I like Google. I own their stock. But I'm certainly not going to work there.
Re:Not just Google (Score:2, Insightful)
It depends on the sort of work that is available. Older people are certainly good for a certain things: Ideas? Sure. Concepts? Of course. Writing the code to see those in the latest "in" language? Not probably so much.
Basically this. I'm personally pushing 30, and I realize I've still got another decade before I hit these cliches, but I like to think I understand my own abilities and my own limitations. I have lost a significant amount of my concentration and coding ability over the past three years. What took me a two weeks to do when I was 25 would take me two months to do now. Perhaps I'm selling myself short? I don't know for certain.
The truth is that my job requires significantly less of that two-week mentality now. I haven't had a heads-down month long coding blitz in about 3 years - my role doesn't include that anymore. They have me advising a lot - pulled into all sorts of different projects, not really owning any.
I think the current career lifecycle actually causes age-based obsolescence:
1. You start out young an inexperienced, so you're learning like crazy, working on very narrow, specific jobs for short to medium stints.
2. As your skill set diversifies, you become more valuable in more areas, and you start becoming an authority on some technologies. You build up a wide, yet specialized, set of skills.
3. You get dragged around to be the authority on those skills.
4. And you stop using them, because you're too busy being an authority on them. As time goes on, the business thinks you're most valuable as a resource to others.
5. Your skillset degrades over time.
I hit my skill peak around 25-26 years old, and now I'm in the middle term of the lifecycle, which should last until my late 30s.
So, hopefully I'm somewhat right about this, and I can try to avoid it. The problem is that it requires doing things that your employers think someone else should do while you work on the "big problems". And I'm not one to dedicate my personal time to maintaining my skill set - because I have the other thing that comes with this period of ones life: kids, wife, house, responsibility.
*shrug*
Re:young company (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 from Stanford.)
40 years old and flexible (Score:2, Insightful)
It's great that these middle-aged geeks are experienced and all but (and maybe I'm wrong) isn't creativity kind of important? It strikes me that the exact kind of person you are looking for is a young engineer. Sure 40-somethings can be creative and they probably have a better percentage of quality ideas than younger people. But they are also far less likely to bend the rules of computing and I imagine that's exactly what a company like Google wants.
You want 40-somethings to critique the ideas, not to make them. Management, not engineering.
Re:Not just Google (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:Not just Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Not just Google (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:Work / Life Balance (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.
Re:Maybe Google are right (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 wants: they want people who live to work.
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?
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, 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.
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.
Re:Not just Google (Score:2, Insightful)
Your argument could be used to argue against e-mail, telephones, telegraphs...
Perhaps it is reasonable to simply accept that different people communicate differently?
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:3, Insightful)
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!
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.
Re:Not just Google (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. :-)
first hand at google (Score:2, Insightful)
I worked at google for a few years.
I don't think google discriminates based on age.
The founders feel strongly that intelligence is more important than experience.
So they believe that they discriminate based on intelligence.
The problem I had working for google is that the company wants to employ only the "A" personality type engineer.
The "googly" engineer accepts no compromise, makes no mistakes and is driven to produce the best solution at any cost.
After 20+ years of working in the industry, I'm willing to compromise and to produce a great solution now until I can produce a better one tomorrow.
At google, the founders have stated that great is not good enough.
I'm an "AB" personality type and that "B" part is not good enough for google.
Google has amazing benefits and so working there is amazingly lucrative.
I would work there again if I could but I fear it would end the same.
At google, you need the approval of your peers.
The "A" personality types are the majority and as such they don't want any other types around.
(There are exceptions if you're charismatic or attractive but that is the same at other companies.)
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:Not just Google (Score:3, Insightful)
The only place that age actually does fit in is that older workers are more likely to realize that working unreasonable overtime hours ultimately benefits them less than it should.
Re:Maybe Google are right (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:Not just Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not just Google (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 channels.
b) Go to sleep
c) Read a book
d) Listen to music - Z choices/channels
e) Play one of Y games on my computer
f) Write programs on my computer/Learn programming
Now:
a) Watch TV with 10X channels
b) Go to sleep
c) Read stuff online - wikipedia, wikia, gutenberg press, blogs, reviews, news etc.
d) Write stuff online - tweet, FB, blog, discussions, etc
e) Read a book
f) Play one or more of 1000*Y possible games on my computer (yes some people play more than one game at once
g) Play a game on my phone
h) Play a game on my game console or handheld gaming device
i) Watch TV or videos online from a choice millions of possible videos
j) Listen to 1000*Z possible music choices and chill
k) Write programs on my computer.
The options are just an example (I don't have a game console etc) but I hope they show how having more choices can actually make it harder for certain things to happen even if the "barrier to entry" has dropped
Before that my parents in their youth were more active in certain areas than I was: they did a lot more sports, cycling trips to nearby towns, hung out at church with friends, did more useful stuff in many ways...
That said I know a youth who despite dying young not too long ago, did way more than I'll ever will in my whole life (even his parents and friends didn't know he was involved in so many organizations, projects and events).
Re:Not just Google (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 you really really enjoy your work then it's not so bad, but it's good to keep some balance in your life. What happens if you lose your job or unable to do it anymore?
Anyway here I am wasting some of my life on Slashdot
"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.
Re:Not just Google (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 than 1,000 pages per day, and of those, 999 will be bogus status messages. Friday afternoon will include an emergency status meeting, where at 5:40pm you'll be told to report at 8am, and will work until Midnight, followed by an identical day on Sunday. As you'll discover soon enough, "emergencies" are not emergencies, they are poor company planning, and emergency weekends are the standard, not the exception.
If your wife doesn't leave you, or your girlfriend doesn't dump you, because you've been too busy to see them, you'll be very happy to see them in one of the quarterly non-emergency weekends, where you're actually allowed to take a moment of personal time. Don't get too comfortable with those though. Somewhere mid-coitus (if not earlier), your phone will start ringing incessantly because you're needed to work on yet another "emergency". If you're attentive, you'll find that the call frequently comes from an upper manager who's comfortably sitting at home with his wife, sipping at his margarita, with nothing better to do than ask you to put in a few extra hours.
If you seem upset about the hours, you will receive a pep talk from your manager, who will remind you about company loyalty, and how they've taken such good care of you.
By the time you're 30, you are looking forward to finally getting a promotion, salary increase, and some real free time. Instead, you'll find that the company has decided you haven't been working hard enough, and you (and all your peers in the department) will be replaced by some fresh out of highschool kids with a fraction of your skills (at a fraction of your pay). If people at the company tell you about your replacement, you'll soon hear that they can barely do the job, but the company is happy since they work for so little money. They'll find out the harsh truth of how this works when their job is outsourced overseas a couple years later.
Over the following months, you'll receive the occasional call from your old employer, asking for some free advice about things you were an expert in. Maybe (just maybe), they'll bring you in for a few hours and pay you at an outrageously low negotiated hourly rate. Your old salary check will look huge in comparison to the check they were kind enough to cut you for 3 hours working on their site.
Now that you're 30, and free of the company, you can consider yourself retired, or just unemployed. Either way, you don't have an income, and will fill your days trying to find new employment, as any hobby costs money. Your wife will have long since left you, since you couldn't provide for her the way she wanted. The demands of a new car and bigger house were explained to her as "we can't afford it", and she always countered by "you aren't working hard enough.", and the day she left you was accompanied by her simple statement "you didn't love me, you didn't try hard enough to make me happy."
Enjoy your retirement at 30.
Re:Not just Google (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:1, 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.
someone whose alternative is unemployment
Re:in other words (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.
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:Not just Google (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 people who had money and looked down on those who didn't are now in bankrupcy.
How do you self actualize? (Score:1, Insightful)
I think age often determines how you self-actualize. While a young people may seek to empower themselves through their workplace, older people realize that corporate entities don't really give a crap about them as business trumps any meeting any employee needs. A 40 something will seek to actualize through manageable and control-able means; hobbies, family, interests, etc. I think there are very few 20-somethings that are self aware enough to make the distinction of where they can achieve fulfillment.
I think it is possible to employ people of all ages if you can manage their needs which may differ by age as well as profession (power sources, social, behavioral types, corporate culture, etc).
Re:Not just Google (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 due to the recent banking crash.
If you're not incorporating at least one serious financial catastrophe on average every 30 years in your calculations, then you're doing it wrong.
correlation =!= causation (Score:1, Insightful)
You've confused correlation and causation.
Wisdom does not come from age, it comes from experience (and not in the sense of the same 1-year of experience repeated 30 times). While wisdom is highly correlated with age, it is not caused by it and it is both possible to find a young (20's or even teen's) person with much experience and possible to find an older (50's and up) person with very little experience.
some positive discrimination. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:similar thing almost happened to me 10 yrs ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Wish I could mod you up.
AC said this: .com when I started feeling sick. I'd be DAMNED if I was going to call in sick 3 days into my 1st on-call so just tried to gut it out (pun pending). by Wed I finally called my Dr who basically said: you have APPENDICITIS, you F-tard! drop what you're doing & get to the nearest ER _NOW_!!!. after they took it out the surgeon told me it had "perforated" (analogous to running over nail vs having blow-out) & that I was lucky I didn't have peritonitis/wasn't looking at a much longer recovery or worse. I'm pretty sure they don't name buildings after or make holidays in memory of people who (literally) get themselves killed for their jobs...
I had recently started at & was on my 1st on-call week for a major
---
Notice- he almost died young for a company that probably no longer exists.
Don't give your loyalty or love to a company. ANY given day, your manager, (and their managers) can change and the company you knew is gone. Everyone upstairs walks out with tons of money and you get laid off as a cost cutting measure.
Re:Young people dont last here very long. (Score:1, Insightful)
Colleges never have (and I'm old enough to know) been about vocational training even in something like CS. It bothers me to no end that so many companies want 22-24 year olds to come in with 5 years effective professional (full time job) experience (but won't pay what someone with that experience makes). I once rejected a new graduate with a decent GPA because I could tell he had no real interest in CS. My feeling was that college only educates you to the point where you have the skills to teach yourself on the job what is needed, and if you don't really LIKE CS then your not going to make the required effort.