Young programmers are only idolized because they are the only ones you can convince to build your sausage app for pennies.
Speaking as a "senior" engineer today, I'm no better an engineer today than I was 10 years ago in terms of rote problem solving. What I provide as a senior engineer is if we're paddling across the lake, I'll keep us dry. Oh, and yeah, that'll cost you.
What I like about the article is they suggest the older folks have nothing to lose closer to retirement, and that makes them super valuable. I'd suggest that's true of the junior folks. It's the middling folks that have the most to lose, I suppose.
Why would I pull an all-nighter playing a video game? Same reason except for the well-paid part.
When they go home they're just playing Fall Guys and rewatching Blade Runner, wishing Cyberpunk 2077 was out already.
I meet that description and reading this thread I was beginning to think I was much less motivated than my peers.
If you're well funded (or if this is a new project in an existing company) I would make sure to allocate a reasonable portion of the budget for senior engineers or if I couldn't find any true senior engineers I would get the best motivated mediors and give them an enormous education budget.
My first couple of agile projects where like this - you can also bring in external consultants to help with getting up to speed.
I'm not using "a senior engineer" because it's not a given that somebody has some expected perspective simply because of the title or the time worked or even the education they had.
> Speaking as a "senior" engineer today, I'm no better an engineer today than I was 10 years ago in terms of rote problem solving. What I provide as a senior engineer is if we're paddling across the lake, I'll keep us dry.
This is an extremely narrow vision of the nature of engineering and engineers. It makes sense if the problems you're dealing with are whiteboard interview problems. Real world projects are much broader in nature and context.
At a very bare minimum, the experience on solving a broad spectrum of problems, and dealing with the related context, brings:
- more solid solutions
- simpler solutions
- more fitting models
- anticipation of dead ends
- stability in the long term
- etc. etc.
I think there was talk, some time ago, on HN on this subject - if the only difference in 10 years of experience is "keeping dry across the lake", then one is a junior engineer with 10 year of experience, not a senior engineer (and/or somebody who doesn't see the difference).
I am, at almost 20 years in. I'm not only better at doing things well and safely, I can do them faster than ever because I know what's a solved problem and what's not, where to look for pre-existing solutions and how to apply them, what the pitfalls might be etc.
some young software people are very technically adept, but far from all are.
See I'm waaay better at it. Not in terms of raw problem solving ability, but because I've solved so many unique problems by now that I can start a new one half way through.
That and my skills are a lot more refined, so there are a lot of things I will do the right way out of habit which I would have had to discover through iteration 5-10 years ago.
If you're not better at what you do than you were 10 years ago, it makes me wonder what you've been doing with your time.
Paying people even if it's below market is fine. We all have to start somewhere.