Silicon Valley In 2013 Resembles Logan's Run In 2274 432
theodp writes "The 1976 science fiction film Logan's Run depicts a dystopian future society where life must end at the age of 30. So, it's a world that kind of resembles today's Silicon Valley, where the NY Times reports that the median age of workers is 29 years old at Google and 28 years old at Facebook. The report that technology workers are young — really young — comes on the heels of other presumably-unrelated stories that Silicon Valley execs can't find enough skilled workers and no one would fund Doug Engelbart in the last four decades of his life. On the bright side, at least old techies don't die in Silicon Valley — they just can't get hired."
Re:29 years old (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure if you're a silly troll or just too young to realize that most people don't retire until 60-65. vThat makes 29 less than a quarter of the time someone will work if they went to college.
Re:29 years old (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd just reckon that the job market sucks no matter what the age even in SF
Hahaha, keep thinking that if it makes you happy. Everyone I know who actually is there or NYC thinks it's about as close to the dot com boom as you can get. Maybe better because the giants have a lot more money to throw around this time. Everyone I know who was looking for jobs had better offers than their old jobs within a few weeks and usually were booked solid with interviews. Usually people have interviews at decent companies the next day if they put themselves on the job market.
aren't most of their a lot of their workers technically just phone answer droids working low wage customer support, with high turnaround?
Neither one has much in the sense of tech support or call centers from what I understand.
that explains how average fb guy is just 1.1years at the company.
Are you even in tech? Promotion in tech means you find a better job somewhere else and everyone wants to hire ex-fb people. The shorter people stay in a tech position the better the job market.
It's a trap! (Score:5, Insightful)
Those three words describe Silicon Valley. Really they do, I've seen that and heard that description for decades from people working there, and more to the point from people no longer working there. Silicon Valley is a trap for the young, once you hit 30 you are no longer employable and either have to move out or scrape by on temp job to temp job.
Silicon Valley is a great place to be from. Ageism is getting so bad in technology that were rapidly reaching parity with strippers. Combine that with H1B and how can anyone in good faith ever recommend a career in technology in the United States?
Re: 29 years old (Score:2, Insightful)
Remind me not to hire you with your attitude.
Re:29 years old (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you even in tech? Promotion in tech means you find a better job somewhere else and everyone wants to hire ex-fb people. The shorter people stay in a tech position the better the job market.
Ummmm, that's not called promotion. Promotion means you move up in the same company. Jumping ship to another company only works for so long. For instance, before too long, you find that you are 30 in Silicon Valley and evidently nobody wants to hire you. Hopefully in all of those jumps you develop some management skills along the way because by 40 you'll need them to keep your job from going to some kid.
Just saying...
Re:29 years old (Score:5, Insightful)
You're a kid, kid. You're my kids' age, and I was five years older than you when I had kids. I'm twice as old as you; compared to you I've lived two whole lifetimes so far. Having served 4 years in the USAF before school I was just getting my Bachelor's at your age.
My daughter's your age, and in college.
You're just getting started.
I do understand your thinking, however -- I was your age once. When I got out of the service, having gone to Thailand, I thought I'd lived more than most 70 year olds.
I was wrong. So are you.
NoSQL (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends how you define NoSQL. DynamoDB paper was published circa 2007 but the product is not open source. What open source product did you have in mind that defines NoSQL? BerkeleyDB?
NodeJS, PHP, Ruby are the village idiots... not really worth bragging about :) But beyond these, yes, some very impressive platforms are open source.
Re:29 years old (Score:5, Insightful)
On topic, no wonder Google's services are going to shit. Every single change that has been made to those services in the past five years has been annoying and unnecessary. It's indicative of the youth mentality of change for change sake rather than actually improving upon the old. Google Search, Gmail, Google Talk and YouTube have become utter jokes compared to what they once were.
Re:This has drawbacks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now who's being ageist here?
Re:At 48, I got an offer from FB, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think 45-55 is the worst age. It's when money demands because of kids in school and getting married are the highest, and technical jobs are precarious. The combination is horribly stressful.
I'm 63 now, working in software development after a career change at 50 from a traditional engineering field. Thank God I don't live in a dysfunctional place like Silicon Valley. I've had no problem finding decent and even fun jobs, although the names are nothing you would recognize and there are no useful stock perks.
Once I hit 55 or so things got much easier. The kids are out on their own and the house is paid off. With the recent run up in the stock market I'm sitting on a 7 figure nest egg - if I got laid off now I'd probably retire.
The idea that life is over at 30 seems to be specific to a particular type of manager who mostly lives in one small part of the country. It just isn't the case when I've been out looking for jobs. In fact some of the managers I've worked with have told me that dealing with the sub-30s is a giant pain. Giant egos and can't relate to coworkers, customers or managers.
Maybe they should move out of Silicon Valley (Score:2, Insightful)
One reason there aren't many jobs for older people there is that there aren't many new jobs in California, period [battleswarmblog.com]. Companies are moving out of high tax, high cost states like California to low tax, low cost states like Texas.
Texas is still hiring people of all ages for high tech jobs. Austin has startups, giants, and government jobs (though you won't get the ridiculous, bankruptcy inducing pensions [california...center.org] unionized California's state employees get), and Houston and Dallas have high tech and oil and gas (lots of hardware and software engineering jobs that pay very well). And the cost of living here is radically lower; someone who makes $50,000 a year here can easily afford a house.
If things suck where you are now, maybe you should move someplace things don't suck.
Re:29 years old (Score:1, Insightful)
+5 Insightful? What would you do if a 120-year old told you that you were a kid? You clearly don't think of yourself as a kid, so agreeing with the 120-year old in some attempt to relativize "kid" would be disingenuous. What's really going on is that people of all ages have tremendous creativity in finding ways to elevate their own status above others and calling other people kids is one of the ways to do that ("You're a kid, kid"). Your whole post is about comparing yourself to the OP. Your experience of yourself relative to the OP has no bearing on whether the OP is a kid or not. It only becomes relevant because the post is really about you and your status. Which of course it has to be, because you don't know anything about the OP - he could be 12 or 112 for all you know.
One thing I've learned, having only traveled a modest part of the way towards the decrepitude of old age, is this: don't ever let anyone put you down or say that you are not ready because you are too young or too old. The worst thing that can happen is that you fail, which usually is not a big deal, not in the grand scheme of things. Much worse to stay on the sidelines because someone told you that you were too immature or too wizened. Most of all, don't let people teach you to put yourself down. Calling people kids is exactly the kind of thing that holds people back in that way. As it elevates you, it deflates them.
Re:29 years old ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Amen. It's obvious that most "modern" interfaces and "apps" are being designed by people who have no real idea of what they are doing, delivering, and are simply winging it on bluff.
Engelbart's tradgedy is the same tradgedy that is giving us substandard tablet interfaces, less usable UI's like Unity, and which is walling us off in restricted private gardens like Facebook instead of offerring us the wider potential of the web.
Re:It's a trap! (Score:4, Insightful)
if you want a stable tech career ... good option ... the large consulting firms (IBM ...
What about a stable career in the US? IBM stands for India Business Machines.
After reading your post, (Score:3, Insightful)
I realized that the career "advice" I've been reading on Slashdot all these years was worthless.
For years, I thought it was my tech skills and I kept pounding away at them - but still no job after several years. Yes, I've been out of work that long and from the feedback that I (rarely) get, I am unemployable - in any field, now.
I've tried changing careers but when folks see that I was a software engineer, they look at me funny and wonder why I want to do what they do. Folks in 2013 still think it's 1999 and all of us are getting a new job offer everyday with a $10,000 pay raise.
Try explaining that somewhere somehow you screwed up and made yourself unemployable. No one gives you feedback. And fellow techies just keep pounding the same drum "It's your tech skills! That's all that matters!"
And then there are the ad hominems - "You're out of work because you are no good." or "There must something wrong with you."
Maybe. I've been doing everything I can to fix whatever problem(s) I may have.
But once you're out - you're out. There's no getting back in.
Then there's the snarky comments from people "What!? You don't wanna work?!" or "What are you?! An alcoholic?!"
And then there's the lame advice of "Keep your chin up!" and "Have a positive attitude!"
How? When I'm basically called a screw-up?
Getting into software was the worst thing I ever did.
It's too bad I have too much student debt - I'd go back to school and get a nursing degree. The nursing job market still kinda sucks but nursing has a long history of career changers and they have the crap we do in IT/Software Development hiring.
Re:29 years old (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:29 years old (Score:5, Insightful)
"At 40 I still run circles around most people, younger and older. I never understand the 'young tech' thing."
It's nothing but club mentality. They think that young people are the ones who have fresh ideas. When in reality, it tends to be the people with experience who see new, better ways to do things. (Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it.)
Study after study have shown that older programmers are on average more productive.
Re:29 years old (Score:5, Insightful)
It's got everything to do with the fact that the majority of young people don't realize what they're worth, so they'll take substandard pay, work longer hours, take fewer benefits, and are much less likely to complain or fight for their rights. They're the perfect human resources in the corporate eye. Even better if they're foreign H1B holders who can be threatened with deportation.
Re:29 years old (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: 29 years old (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, then perhaps your generation should have done a better job of teaching us manners. Or generally not cut back on funding education, worker's rights, and generally making things shitty for us, because you got yours, the hell to anybody that comes after.
We're going to be spending a shit ton of money and effort clearing up the messes that the elderly caused.
Respect does go both ways, but you guys should demonstrate it first, because all we know is the douchebaggery that you've shown us.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I am polite and kind almost to a fault. Well, except that I don't suffer fools gladly. My generation? Yeah, sure. My generation will be the ones that are the first to get the shaft with Social Security. My generation is the one that made those shiny phones and created the network infrastructure that makes your job possible, boy.
And I do emphasize the word "boy." Because you clearly aren't acting like an adult. Hence the term "douchebag" in reference to you. Perhaps I should have said whiny child, but douchebag seems to flow quite naturally in this case, don't you think?
In any case, since no one seems to read Santayana any more I'll remind you that if you don't learn the lessons of history, you're doomed to repeat them. I'll break it down into small words so you'll be sure to understand. Yes. There are assholes of every stripe, including older folks. However, look around you -- some of those who came before you clearly knew what they were doing or you would still be up to your knees in pig shit on the farm.
It would behoove you to seek out those who have more experience and try to gain from it, rather than denigrating those who have lived longer than you have. Soon enough, you'll be the old one and there will be young people who might benefit from the experience you've had. It seems clear that you're (at least at the moment) too immature to get that, but perhaps that will change in the future.
Re:29 years old (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but as a 41 year old, I consider Billy Joel to be music my Mum would listen to.
Re:29 years old (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:29 years old (Score:4, Insightful)
Productive != creative.
At least the places I've worked older workers are more interested in keeping the status quo. When you consider that the hot new thing all the startups want to write in changes every 5-6 years it's no surprise that older workers don't hold as much value.
Creative != using the latest buzzword-compliant language/framework.
The older workers just realize that switching to a new framework will usually end up wasting time that could be spent actually coming up with some interesting ideas for novel features that customers might actually care about. The productivity gains of new environments are marginal if you spend most of your time learning how to use it effectively. You're not going to hit your 10,000 hours to master a skill (per Gladwell's suggestion) if you switch to a new one every 5 years. Or at the very least, you're not going to have chance to do very much with that knowledge once you've obtained it.