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Comment by geezerjay | Hacker News Reader

> The wrong sort of skills? Like adaptability, strong diagnostic skills, pragmatism, self-awareness, and not being a massive diva all the time?

Yes, the wrong set of skills. If the market is looking for, say, React devs then you'd be a fool to accept a job where you are expected to work with, say, Delphi or AS400. Yes, maintenance jobs working on old established services are enough to make a living and even a profitable one, but let's not fool ourselves into believing that your odds of being the top candidate in today's or tomorrow's high-profile projects will be greater if you waste your time in outdated stacks.

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The market? What market? There's more than one. There's a market for React devs, and there's a market for COBOL devs. You look at the React market, and you see that it's growing. But so is the pool of React devs. The market for COBOL devs may be shrinking, but the pool of COBOL devs may be shrinking faster. Which is the better career choice?

And why do I care about being a candidate for a high-profile project? Pay? Yes, there can be good pay - along with lousy work-life balance. To steal a line from Agassiz, I cannot afford to waste all my time making money.

And why is an out-dated stack "wasting my time"? Do you have a utility function for my time? I deny the validity of it. I would say that chasing a high-profile project in React is almost certainly wasting my time.

Yep you're right as much as I wish it wasn't the case, if two candidates were identical except one had skills in cutting edge technology and the other had skills in older tech I would pick the newer

May just be the business we're in but I feel going with the old limits your breadth (but maybe with a higher price tag? COBOL?)

You wouldn't choose a top-tier React & AWS dev if your veteran Cobol dev had just died of old age and your business-critical Cobol & SAP monstrosity needs urgent changes to handle this years's tax compliance updates. In that situation, you'll pay the $20000/week or whatever oaiey quotes you.

All right, so maybe you feel bad now about not listening to the engineering team and maintaining a continuous migration of your business-critical code to modern platforms over the last 30 years. But that's all in the past and your million-dollar business will be shuttered by the tax authorities in three months if you don't get this sorted out right now.

Maybe we'll have a world one day where everyone knows the "obvious" fact of technology leadership that everything should be continuously migrated to the state of the art. But maybe we won't, and maybe this fact isn't obvious at all, or even correct. Who knows?

In the meantime, people with skills that have an extreme demand/supply factor can command the highest rates, even if they won't be hired at tomorrow's startup. That's not to say it's a bad idea to learn current skills (for diversification), and definitely say no to working with legacy tech for small money, but that's really an orthogonal point to the one oaiey was making.

> In that situation, you'll pay the $20000/week or whatever oaiey quotes you.

I looked into this recently, because I wanted to see if it would be worth learning COBOL to help maintain old banking systems. Unfortunately the pay is nowhere near $20000 / week, and experienced COBOL programmers typically make around $100 per hour, or $70k per year at a full-time job. Right now you can make much more money with modern web and mobile development.

Here's some previous discussion about COBOL rates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14083214

I was surprised to hear it was only $100/hr, but some people say it might go up to $1000/hr, and one person was making "high six figures". So I don't know. Maybe it's worth getting into if you have some good connections.

I hire about 150 COBOL guys and gals (as full time employees) and they are making in average 100k€ (European Bank) incl. 1 month holiday.

Big brand contractors cost us around the same.

DBAs, Sys Admins, operators, a bit more.

Having 30y experience myself, from mobile and Java to Mainframe Assembler, I find the older guys - both on mobile (few) and COBOL (most) to be much more focus on engineering a system that lasts whatever you throw at them, while (most, not all) young coders are about speed and hashing something together that works (but needs overhaul after 3-4 years).

Just my own experience, not saying is the only perspective.

> I find the older guys - both on mobile (few) and COBOL (most) to be much more focus on engineering a system that lasts whatever you throw at them, while (most, not all) young coders are about speed and hashing something together that works (but needs overhaul after 3-4 years).

I've noticed that tendency in younger developers too and it's utterly infuriating. Do you do anything to discourage this and, if so, what?

Not the person to whom you replied, but: mentorship. Code review. Talk about means, not just ends.

I was fortunate to be a young developer with a desire to write things that could last, so I skipped a few steps and found myself doing the mentoring perhaps sooner than most, but instilling the notion that this thing needs to continue to function, and rejecting work that isn't in service of that goal, is doable.

> Yes, the wrong set of skills. If the market is looking for, say, React devs then you'd be a fool to accept a job where you are expected to work with, say, Delphi or AS400

Only if you expect to leave that company in the next few years like an SV-style webdev. Some of us like the stability of working for an organization where employment time is measured in decades.

Honest questions: what has that stability done for your career earnings? And what does that do when your boss decides you aren't needed anymore?

I ask because I tend to find that we are generally incentivized both to stay on the leading edge and to, if not running a consultancy, to be regularly moving on to new positions. And it is rare, to the point of IMO barely worth considering as a possibility, to find a company that won't get rid of you given half a chance if it makes short-term numbers better.

If your goal is to make as much money as possible, then you probably have to live in that mutually predatory environment, but if your goal is to have a more stress-free existence and feel like your work is actually helping people then there are alternatives.

I have little fear of being laid off at my company because they didn't even lay anyone off during the last recession. It isn't publicly traded, and has a very flat managerial structure, so the typical 80s-guy bullshit doesn't really fly here. We don't make software and get our revenue from selling ad space, we make real things for real people and we charge real money for them.

> but if your goal is to have a more stress-free existence and feel like your work is actually helping people then there are alternatives.

I've interviewed devs with over a decade of experience who clearly opted for a stress-free existence feeling like their work was actually helping people, and now here they are in their mid-40s looking for a job with an obsolete skillset and an obvious track record of not adapting to changes.

It's great that you lead a stress-free life in your 20s and 30s, but how do you expect to cope with the problem of being obsolete and useless and no better than a 20yo fresh out of college (and in some regards far worse) when you reach your 40s and 50s?

The guy sitting next to me at this company is in his 60s. Stability does not preclude learning new things.

When I see someone's resume who jumps from engagement to engagement I usually sort them out. Not a good sign. They learn on my cost and jump as soon as responsibility kicks in. These people have to make career somewhere else.

I mean, that's fine, but you also kinda gotta understand that that is exactly what the industry rewards. If somebody's there longer than two years, there is a very real chance that they have passed up at least one significant salary bump (up to a point, of course, it doesn't continue forever).

If you're offering 10%-a-year raises, etc., what you're saying makes sense to me, but otherwise people are going to leave because it's stupid and self-harming not to.

How do you square that circle?

Whats the cutoff for you?

This isn't an experiment that can be run both ways, but I find it seems to work. I've been here 13.5 years, starting from about 5 years of prior experience. Increases are irregular, but look to be about 7.3% compounded per year. Note that the earliest years of my career are excluded, which is when you'd expect to see the largest increase.

I've never seen layoffs. A person who regularly moves on is quite undesirable, because they would leave before being useful. It typically takes a year before we can really put somebody to use, and two years isn't uncommon.

Do such organizations really still exist?

Yes. They're all over. They just aren't venture capital funded valley start ups.

Both major organizations I've worked in have had ridiculously low turn over and everyone I talked to in both had the assumptions of everyone being lifers. I only left the first because I was tired of doing maintenance on old technology and wanted to experience new dev.

Yup. My last job was at a large corp and one of my previous managers was in his late 50's, having been there since he graduated college. He was a bit of an exception, but we had many people in their 60's & 70's who had been there for decades.

I left after 15 years.

I dunno. Cool technologies positions pay less, because more people want to do them.

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