How AWS Cloud is demolishing the cult of youth | Hacker News Reader

How AWS Cloud is demolishing the cult of youth

redmonk.com

108 pointsSoulMan37 comments

> When you sit down with one of the AWS engineering teams you’re sitting down with grownups. At a guess median age would be 40-45, someone like Andi Gutmans, now 41, one of the original creators of PHP, who now runs Search and New NoSQL for the firm.

Ha... All the senior managers, directors, and VPs at Amazon may be in their 40+ years, but everyone who's actually building the day-to-day code isn't. On any of the teams I worked for, the average age was probably ~24, and that was without interns.

This isn't me dismissing the wisdom, skills, and benefits of having seasoned tech talent, but it's definitely not that way at AWS.

Source: ex-AWS Employee.

Current AWS Employee, and it's not that way where I'm working (Security). At 23 I'm the youngest person on my floor (excluding the intern), there's a couple people within a year of me, but everyone else is older than 30. On my team I'm the only one not married, and one of two that doesn't have kids. Two of the people on my team are the same age as my parents. If I ever want to make people on my team feel old, I remind them I'm closer in age to their kids than them :).

Maybe security skews towards an older demographic, but that's been my experience.

When I was 23, at my job, I was the youngest person on the cyber security team. Not AWS but US Federal Cyber Sec. I imagine moreso for US Federal but also for other realms of Cyber Sec., there's a rather dry aspect to both knowing the "rules" and measuring "compliance" which aren't so attractive to younger people. That's my supposition, anyway.

Maybe, though compliance is handled by a different sub-division of security than me. My personal opinion is that what we do requires a wide range of background knowledge: you need to know assembly, cryptography, networking, OS, browsers, etc all from a security perspective. And there's a lot of things you can only really learn from on-the-job training.

I must agree that on-the-job training is effective and possibly underrated in the field of cyber security. The one domain where it didn't stand out IMO was cryptography. Being taught how PKI and HTTPS work as a lesson in a course is valuable on it's own, however, when I think about all the coworkers that I've encountered who don't quite grasp how that stuff works, such a lesson has proved to be even more valuable. Would you say your on-the-job training covers PKI effectively?

This doesn't really contradict the author; the army of young coders doing the "day-to-day" work are not the ones envisioning or driving the successes of the company. Any large firm is necessarily going to have a great number of less-experienced grunts than seasoned managers and executives. The implicit point here is that some tech companies seem to fill their higher ranks with kids while AMZN maybe not so much.

It seems the author is not aware of past examples.

Google hired Eric Schmidt at age ~46. Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg at age 38.

As for engineers, Microsoft hired Dave Cutler age ~46 to develop Windows NT. Google hired Guido van Rossum ~age 49. Peter Norvig was also hired in his 40s I believe. Netflix hired Adrian Cockcroft in his mid-40s.

Basically, as startups mature into more established companies, they will hire older 40+ for specific needs. Same thing that Amazon/AWS has done. This doesn't change that fact that new garage startups and YC Demo Days will continue to be dominated by 20-somethings.

@jasode all excellent examples. i wasn't trying to be comprehensive but rather point to a few recent ones. Cutler is a fantastic example. He got a shout out at Microsoft Build, for "still slinging code" on one of the teams. i don't expect startup/VC culture to change. I just hope more firms value experience a bit more. Also though 61 is a fair bit older than 41.

> It seems the author is not aware of past examples.

Because the author is plucking one set of anecdata and comparing with another plucked set of anecdata.

Nowhere in the entire article is any actual demographics about any of the companies.

All of them publish staff demographics (EEO-1 reports) for gender and race. As far as I can tell, none publish for age.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=10080092011 (search for 'demographic')

Google: https://www.google.com/diversity/

Facebook: https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/eeo-1_2015....

Exactly. Basing an article entirely on famous people over 30 that companies have hired is stupid, but even if you wanted to use that as your yardstick for some stupid reason, AWS still doesn't win. Sure, they have James Gosling (age 62), but Google has Vint Cerf (age 73).

Misleading title; Amazon is hiring experienced engineers for their experience. They can do this because they can afford it, and they are doing it because they want to enhance their services.

None of this demolishes "the cult of youth". If you're running a startup, hiring young people with no families and the stamina to give 110% to their job is still the way to go. As experienced as James Gosling, Tim Bray, et al. are, they're not going to be working 12 hour days, nor are they critical to Amazon's survival.

That's what most startups do. But, it's not clear if it's a net benefit because most startups also fail.

Another way of looking at it is finding a group of motivated 20 somethings is almost trivial. Find a motivated group with 20 years experience is vastly harder because it's a smaller group who have less interest in joining a startup.

PS: IMO, it would be a really interesting experiment, but I am not sure how you would go about it.

I think you're looking at this wrong. It's not that a startup chooses between young/inexperienced/cheap vs old/experienced/expensive. It's that a startup doesn't get to choose because startup life is brutal. It basically requires you to have no family and kids, so only young single people are willing to do it.

Being 40+ does not prevent you from being single. Further, long hours and lack of skill are related. I am not saying you would always rather have say ~35 hours a week from John Carmack vs. 80 hour weeks from 2 or 3 awesome 22 year olds, but adding 22 year olds also scales poorly.

No, VCs have told you that "startup life" requires this, and you willingly believed them without question.

It is possible to start a company without turning the first 10 employees into desiccated husks. It's just not possible to do that while also doing what your VCs think is necessary. Maybe that's a thing to work on changing...

I don't think that demographic exists (really motivated people with 20 years experience). I remember Paul Graham saying something along the lines that he would never do the startup thing again even if he was dead sure it was a good idea because Viaweb took years off his life. Why would he go back and do it again? Why would anyone with a career and a family want to do that? It's hellish.

This sort of demographic is definitely very rare, but it definitely exists.

The problem isn't that that demographic doesn't exist. It's that you can't hire them on as employees.

Driven, talented, experienced engineers have been paid six figures for a decade and presumably have saved some of it. If they don't want to do the start-up grind, they don't have to. If they do want to do the start-up grind, they can do so as founders.

You're absolutely right, but that's not what I was responding to.

Incidentally, that's one very solid reason to raise VC: the ability to attract and retain experienced team members that already have many options.

I still don't believe it's possible, at least not often. Hiring a senior rockstar/ninja/10x whatever means you have to offer them more money than they're currently making (which you have to imagine is a lot) and/or they need to really be so invested in your idea that they're willing to drop everything and join you.

I'm not saying this from a position of authority, I haven't founded a startup or anything like that. But the average age of a startup founder is mid-20s IIRC, and you'd have a hard time convincing an extremely talented individual, who's older than you, to sign on.

It's possible. I've had people older than me join me. I've got multiple startups under my belt.

The hardest part is not getting them to join you.. the problem is getting them to stick! Especially in the beginning at a bootstrapped startup without a salary. Simply put, they have other options -- a Real Job(tm) or career they can go back to; and those options start looking better and better when things are bumpy (esp at the beginning). But, you can compensate for that. (by aggressively compensating on actual profits.)

On that note...

If you're reading this thread and have lots of experience and looking to join a hot security startup, we're looking for both experienced and inexperienced rockstars/ninjas/10x/etc. Please email me at first.last at userify.com. We have specific needs in the areas of enterprise sales and marketing, as well as engineering, security, systems architecture, Go, Python, and we're also looking for a strong Windows lead.

Δ That's really insightful. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me!

Thanks as well Shannon!

Finding motivated 20 somethings is even easier when they're motivated by the opportunity of working with someone like James Gosling. He convinced me to work at Sun when I was in my 20's, and that was years before Java.

Yes. If AWS hired non-household names over 40 across the board, that would be a different story.

I get that they're hand-picked examples, but it's still a bit misleading when every "older" engineer in the article is quite a remarkable individual with incredible resumes. They'd likely be warmly welcomed at any tech company.

I'm more curious about the average age across the engineering organization, and specifically older engineers who are solid, good workers but aren't creators of popular languages or pioneered tech migrations for large company.

My experience is that age isn't necessarily a breaking factor in all but the most frivolous tech companies, but those are the ones you shouldn't care about anyways. The key skill/ability is mostly having the capacity and willingness to understand and accept new paradigms and techniques instead of being enamored to and clinging to "that's how its done" philosophy. Of course, I'm not suggesting dropping good practices just because they are old; simply having the willingness to do an objective analysis and comparison and make a rational decision... that is really important. And almost every older engineer I've worked with have shown precisely these qualities (maybe a survivorship bias?)

i don't know how to get that data, but i'd love to see it

Amazon has levels of developer (SDE 1,2,3, P.Eng, Sr P.Eng, Distinguished Eng.). If you've been in industry for 10 years or more, they'll only consider you for an SDE3 role or higher- which is a very hard interview.

So yes, Amazon does hire some older distinguished engineers and principal engineer, but if you aren't at that level, they aren't interested in you. Is that fair? Maybe. But they also don't fire engineers who never get promoted past SDE2.

Source: gave 60+ interviews for Amazon while I worked there.

What about non-developers in the tech industry that are looking to move into development; would 10 years of non-development experience prevent you from applying for an SDE-1?

Not sure really. Never came up.

> When you sit down with one of the AWS engineering teams you’re sitting down with grownups. At a guess median age would be 40-45...

As happy as I am to see AWS hiring industry veterans with awesome experience, this statement couldn't be more wrong. AWS is dominated by college hires and distinguished engineers are very much the exception, not the rule.

"Why 1955 was a good year to be born to shape our future."

Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidtt, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates, James Gosling, Dave Winer, Tim Bray, Ray Ozie

The center point of this rare astrological alignment in the mid 1950s was June 11, 1955.

James Gosling was born on May 19, 1955. So was I (note my username).

Whenever anyone asks for my resume, I just tell them I must be a great programmer because of my birth date and I send them this link: http://www.astrology.co.uk/news/1955.htm.

So far no one cares. But it makes me feel good to be in such company.

An interesting contrast with the widely held opinion that Amazon burns through development employees; something that mature developers are, IMO, less likely to put up with.

There are a lot of them around to burn through. And you bet trophy employees get treated differently.

> At a guess median age would be 40-45,

Why, because they hire some industry leaders? What is this guess based on?

just from my experience of working with their engineering teams. but in my follow up post i note that i mostly work with managers, so it's a skewed sample

Reply on news.ycombinator.com