Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Older workers have experience. Experience is expensive. You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. Age discrimination is rarely punished, and when it is, the penalties are minimal.

Incentives matter.

View on HN

> You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc.

It's not at all clear that there a net gain here, so the situation is at best complex.

In what way is the net gain not clear here?

It seems clear to me that "even factoring in" means that there is a net gain for the employer, at a net loss to employees.

The companies I've worked at have been very bad at measuring things like "this is how much that bug cost us in terms of people who tried the app once and then never came back." They're so focused on the data sources that are easy to collect that things like this are basically invisible. They know churn rate is an important thing to track, but look at it much more from a "what about this new feature, or changing the color of the icons" perspective, than from a "what if our software was less of a dumpster fire?" perspective.

If you want to build quickly AND have flexibility AND have some reliability, you're gonna need some experienced employees, but if that's not a thing you've ever seen cause you've only ever worked with people fresh out of school... you're not gonna know what you're missing.

Timescale.

An older employee with experience can often see and avoid problems before they occur. A younger, inexperienced employee will not and will have to find the problem and attempt to fix it, usually three or four times before the problem is actually solved.

So, for six or twelve months, the employer can sail along gloriously, enjoying the benefits of cheaper employees. Until the bill comes due. And at that time no one can really help them except their current employees, who are the only ones who understand the history-dependent system they've built.

Fortunately, the time scales that most employers operate at rarely exceeds six to twelve months.

"A net gain" implies that savings in a youngster's salary exceeds the losses due to their inexperience. You're saying you know how all these add up in the neterprise?

I sure don't. I doubt most employers do either, since IT productivity is notoriously hard to quantify. Generally, it's more important to know what not to do. And that's something that only comes with time -- making mistakes and learning from them.

  > It seems clear to me that "even factoring in" means that there is a net gain for the employer, at a net loss to employees.

It may seem clear to you, but it is neither well measured nor well understood.

Older workers have expectations of employers. Expectations are even more expensive than experience!

Who knew it's outrageous to expect work life balance and reasonable compensation for experience.

The incentive structure of unregulated capitalism is "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs."

The things to extract value from: employees, environment, government policy, tax code, if I was smarter I'd think of a few others.

you have my name, and my views. I don't know how to feel about this. there's some solace in knowing Mike Lyons is an extraordinarily popular name though.

What's in a name?

"Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs" is also the incentive structure of workers.

in the context of capitalism, sure.

In the context of humanity. People do this even in non-capitalist countries. Or do you think that when a country is not capitalist the people suddenly stop doing things to benefit themselves?

Worker's incentives seem more along the "do whatever those with resources say to trade your mind and body and time for survival"

Companies compete for workers. Don’t like your current situation, leave. Companies know this, so cannot simply do whatever they want.

Both sides have power, and the same incentives.

I would argue that this is a perspective of someone with power in the job market, and perhaps that perspective is limited to a small portion of workers' experiences.

I also find "don't like it, leave" to be a very unaware oversimplification of the situation many American workers are in.

> Older workers have experience.

Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack.

> Experience is expensive.

Fang Graduate roles pay > $200k. Lots of experienced people would love that but would never get hired.

> Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack.

Or the old "ten years of experience" versus "one year of experience ten times".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com