Comment by screwturner68 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by screwturner68 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a lifer my self (21 years so for). The thing is I'm not even close to senior, we have lots of guys with 30+ years sitting at the head of the table. The biggest problem I see is with the older lifers not wanting to leave, not carrying their weight, not keeping up with changes and doing the bare minimum required of them. They are a wealth of knowledge, knowledge about things we haven't seen in a decade or more. I understand why they stay, they are paid very well and not much is expected of them but they are also 70+ years old with full pensions & 401Ks doing the job that a college grad could do. To me it's not fair to the young guys who we should be training and mentoring, instead a guy in his late 40's is the youngest guy on the team....sorry for my rambling but the point I'm trying to get to is longevity shouldn't be the reason you are at the table, it should be about what you bring to the table. That said like you having a wealth of contacts is invaluable -who needs to open a ticket when you can call the developer who you've known for a decade or more and who's happy to take your call.

If it's all about "what you bring to the table", older folk will always be at a disadvantage due to their obligations to things that isn't just the company (and disabilities as well). This is the bordering on ageism, brought on by meritocracy thinking that everyone starts from the same spot.

>older folk will always be at a disadvantage due to their obligations to things that isn't just the company

You're talking about kids? I would think kids require less work over time. I would think a 30-year-old employee with a 1-year-old kid would have more home obligations than a 55-year-old employee with a 26-year-old kid.

As someone whose age starts with a 5, I don’t think it’s at all ageist to judge people on what they bring to the table at work. In fact, it would seem “reverse ageist” to have lower expectations for someone who was older.

If you can (and will) do the job, you should be welcomed, respected, and rewarded without regard to age, race, gender, degree, veteran status, parenthood, height, weight, or any of 100 other irrelevant characteristics.

Even if you're in your 50s, you have to acknowledge that eventually you're going to tire out just by how our biological mechanisms wear out. Hopefully, you have a nest egg of sorts by then. And if you don't, well you can't do the job and according to your standards, be kicked/compensated less.

> If you can (and will) do the job, you should be welcomed, respected, and rewarded without regard to age, race, gender, degree, veteran status, parenthood, height, weight, or any of 100 other irrelevant characteristics.

I used to think in this way, that everything should be pure merit. Unfortunately reality doesn't work that way, inputs and rewards are hard to quantify, and the pareto principle exists. Eg. Your work powering millions, yet you're only paid a month's salary and have to meet next month's expense. Furthermore, if things are left to pure meritocracy you'd have more and more in-groups and imbalance. So in some sense you'll be doing society a favor by uplifting others that are not part of the in-group of meritocracy purists.

Let’s imagine it’s performance review time at our company and everyone agrees (or perhaps an infallible oracle tells us) that @like-oreally is contributing meaningfully more than @sokoloff to the company success.

But the wrinkle is @sokoloff is mid/late-50s and @like-oreally is mid/late-30s. Who should earn more pay? Who should be promoted to lead the next major initiative to drive the company forward?

Deciding to pay me the same or more for less value certainly makes things better and more convenient/comfortable for me. It does exactly the opposite for @like-oreally. Should they continue to over-contribute relative to their compensation in hopes that they’ll one day be in a position to receive more for contributing less? Does that provide the right incentives?

Does promoting me to lead that major new initiative put the company in the best position to succeed in the market and, via that success, continue to provide income for all employees?

It all depends. Has @sokoloff contributed the same in the past? What is the value that age/experience has brought him in the things he does do and does not do? Performance reviews will always omit some aspect of the value the reviewed person brings.

> Deciding to pay me the same or more for less value certainly makes things better and more convenient/comfortable for me.

Of course it's going to feel better just looking at the numbers. But then we get back to the same old problem - how do you define value and contributions and say A goes over B?

Sure, I'll admit that it doesn't create the best incentives for people who want to optimize their paycheck and standing, ie. ambitious people. However, this is fine in some circumstances when you're aiming to create a self-sustaining team.

> Does promoting me to lead that major new initiative put the company in the best position to succeed in the market and, via that success, continue to provide income for all employees?

'Best' is an ill defined, extremist term. For many tasks at hand, there are checkboxes that they have to tick, and for all you know, they might need not to be the best, but just at sufficient level to check those boxes. And that is enough.

Take an example where a dungeon boss needs a certain amount of damage dealt to it within a certain period of time to beat him. There are many class specialties, some doing more damage than others, but these are rare, and all of them meet the requirements. Are you going to spend extra time trying to grab that rare class specialty or take one of the abundant ones? Of course not.

What kind of place has 70 year old technologists sitting around doing nothing?

IBM? Oracle? SAP?

BTW did you know the above are the number 2, 3 & 4 largest software companies in the world respectively[0]? Also I suspect "doing nothing" is a bit of an exaggeration and/or OP isn't 100% privy to what these people actually do. It's probably a relaxed pace but not literally "nothing" & their experience and knowledge still make that valuable for the company.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_c...

Universities.

Politics, knowing where bodies are buried and entrenched bureaucracy can be just as much "tenure" but for staff.

It can be pretty bad, and often is.

Sounds like an easy solution. If they do the bare minimum, that’s not a problem.

If you want to get rid of them or take advantage of their expertise, raise the bar. Require more work in some way so that the jobs they do 6 months from now isn’t something that could be done by a new grad.

If they follow you, great. Everyone wins. If they do not, here’s options to exit, take a pick, have a good life.

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