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> But after a while, it seems to be a lot more important to tell people they are wrong

Honestly, this is one of the main reason I see that a lot of hiring managers LOVE young, inexperienced, recent college grads. They do not want to be told they are wrong. They want these people to shut their mouths, buckle down, and just continue with the death march.

Even if the end result is failure, which it typically is, it's way easier to fail in this manner than it is to work hard at succeeding...

If the end result is failure, the company goes bankrupt and the hiring manager no longer has the ability to hire. Moreover, the guy who picked the job picked the wrong company, so he failed as well.

Hard work is a necessary but not sufficient component of success. Too many older folks equate passion or hard work with "death march" and foment a negative, lazy, can't do attitude. That is particularly poisonous at a startup where persistence in the face of rapid change and uncertain requirements is key.

>If the end result is failure, the company goes bankrupt

In my experience, that rarely holds true in the non-startup world.

Sadly in manager buzzword bingo they are a success, they "built a team" and delivered " thousands of lines of code."

Everyone needs to stay current. And people who do stuff in their own time often have no trouble finding work because the "off time" work often is more relevant in the next job than their 10 years of experience on their employers proprietary system.

The warning sign should be if all you do when you get home from work is watch tv or play video games, you are falling behind the skill sets of those entering the market.

So, in effect, you should work all the time. Half of the time you should work for free, so you can get hired again after you get laid off, and half of the time you should work for pay at your current job.

What a wonderful industry we work in.

I don't think that's what Chuck meant. I think you need to have a passion for the industry and show it in some way. If you're not passionate about tech then maybe you should switch to some other industry.

BTW Chuck I remember NIS+!

We're professionals paid 6 figures or more. It's reasonable to expect we 'work' (study, learn) outside of the office.

The extra time, 10 - 15 hours a week, keeps you current. Would you want to visit a doctor that only put in 40 hours a week seeing patients, and never studies recent medical advances? Or a lawyer whose case law knowledge did not extend beyond their own experience?

If you work in tech and honestly expect to only put in 40 hour weeks for your profession, as you get older you will end up in a dreary IT department -- not a software company -- and eventually be laid off.

An interesting way to look at it, but no. In any professional career (Law, Medicine, Accounting, Engineering, Etc.) the field is constantly evolving and changing. To stay current you have to go to conferences, read papers, experiment. You need a 'learning lifestyle' which, for folks who are passionate about what they do, is natural. An Electrical Engineer who stopped learning after they left school in 1990 is not a desirable hire, just like a lawyer who hasn't bothered to keep abreast of the changes in the law for 20 years.

What I'm saying is that if you're a professional and you're not keeping current, then your lack of currency, more than your age, will hinder your employment.

That being said, there are age biases out there. Young managers can be intimidated by hiring an older person, especially if they are insecure. And like the antecendent of this post older people who have 'been around' can sometimes see the reality of things which are uncomfortable for others to admit are true.

I've been through several death marches and I still work hard and have "passion". The signs of a death march are different from those who are working hard because they're excited about what they're doing.

Death marches usually happen because shared suffering becomes more important than creativity and insight. You might notice that this is how a lot of organizations run. Poor managerial or group performance leads to more of a sense of urgency, which means that one needs to suffer and sacrifice even more in order to keep up with the group. Eventually, there's a lot of effort but minimal effectiveness and group performance goes from transiently weak to objectively bad.

Some death march signs:

* People feeling they "have to" spend unusually long hours in the office. * People coming to work when sick. * Hard deadlines on short timeframes (i.e. the 4:30 work drop). * Low employee autonomy on what is done and how. * Full-time workers dedicated to maintenance efforts (instead of maintenance being a minor chore shared by the group). * Wide disparities in measured performance: one or two people being "manic" and generating 1000 LoC/week, with the rest of the team struggling to keep up with their changes. * Lots of moving targets, scope and feature creep, and unstable interfaces that come from sudden unnecessary couplings (premature optimization).

Older people (as a group) don't have a "can't do" attitude. They just know the signs of a death march and they know what it's like to burn out, and they're not going to commit 120% until they know their efforts are going to pan out. That said, they shouldn't be required to commit 120 percent. You get 40 hours, minus whatever you take away in meetings and such. If you want them to work more than that on a project, it's your job to motivate them to do it.

  You get 40 hours

Then they shouldn't want to work at Google and Facebook. No one serious there works 40 hours per week. It's like Jamie Z said: the first wave at Netscape wanted to make the company great. The next wave, the one that ruined them, wanted to join because the company was great.

Make no mistake, people like the ones you describe -- listless ones who clock 40 hours while looking at the clock and describing every major shipping push as a "death march" -- are the ones you want to avoid like the plague.

  If you want them to work more than that on a project, it's 
  your job to motivate them to do it.

An alternative and far more successful approach is to hire young guns who are intrinsically motivated.

You just don't want to hire people who want to (a) be highly paid and work at the best companies in the world but (b) work only 40 hours a week on projects that are so unambitious that they are guaranteed to ship with no tricky bits.

I'm 28, so that probably puts me on the "young" side of this fight. But I also intend to be kicking ass into my 70s (or later) and that means I can expect to spend 2-3 times as many ass-kicking years as a geezer (40+) than my remaining pre-geezer years.

Then they shouldn't want to work at Google and Facebook. No one serious there works 40 hours per week.

Google New York is pretty 9-to-5 these days, except for people who are gunning for promotion... and it's pretty hard to build up the rolodex (due to the "2-up rule", which is that promotion from level N to N+1 will be decided by a panel of N+2's) to gun for promo every year. So most people work 9-to-5 (actually, more like 10-6:30, because of the dinner) except before a launch if they believe it will lead to promo.

MTV may be different, and I know nothing about Facebook, but I'd imagine that they'd be down to the typical ~50 hour weeks of stable startups. People expect founder status if they're going to be committing 60+ on a regular basis (i.e. not just a one-time push).

Make no mistake, people like the ones you describe -- listless ones who clock 40 hours while looking at the clock and describing every major shipping push as a "death march" -- are the ones you want to avoid like the plague.

Sure, but the problem with the clock-watcher isn't that he's only there for 8 hours. It's that if he had a better attitude, he'd be working instead of watching the clock. The fact that he leaves at 5:01 isn't the problem; it's that he's been mentally "checked out" since 3:30. Anyway, I don't know that that's an age problem. There are definitely 22-year-olds as well with bad work ethics and huge senses of entitlement.

It's also perfectly possible for a person to put forward 40 solid hours and accomplish an incredible amount.

An alternative and far more successful approach is to hire young guns who are intrinsically motivated.

You want a mix: young people who will support decisions they didn't make and put their heads down, and older people with experience who will push back, mentor the young, and try to keep them from burning out. The problem with the "young guns" is that they usually don't know how to pace themselves and that they won't push back against a bad idea. (No matter how awesome you are, some of your ideas suck.) Also, you have to question this "intrinsic" motivation. Is it because they have expectations of the job (or their career) that you won't be able to fulfill? That will become a problem later on, and it will blindside you when it does.

You just don't want to hire people who want to (a) be highly paid and work at the best companies in the world but (b) work only 40 hours a week on projects that are so unambitious that they are guaranteed to ship with no tricky bits.

What about category (c), which I think describes most good software developers: people who want to work hard on ambitious projects, but with high degrees of autonomy and without having to suffer unsustainable hours because of unreasonable deadlines?

You seem to have this black-and-white view where people either have an unconditional work ethic (i.e. either have never failed or haven't learned from it) or are completely listless and used-up. I don't think that accurately describes reality.

28 - Well, you aren't exactly a spring chicken in this industry, but I think it was around 35 that I started feeling like an elder statesman! That's kinda sad, but it seems to be a young man's game.

I have to say, first of all call me in 20 years and we'll see if you still feel the same! Burnout is real and priorities change. Second of all chances are pretty good that you will be kicking ass... but for another company. There's no guarantees with anybody, but odds are a young person is more likely to move on to another job.

As far as 40 hours - I have to agree with you. Some guys punch the clock, do incredible work, then leave for the day on time. Other guys will stay all night and the next day you come in to find a huge mess of shit code. I'm of the opinion that you only have so many hours of productive work in you per week. And if you try to exceed it one week, eventually you'll have a week where you don't get anything done. It all evens out.

In fact any big company no matter which company that is, is full of 95% of the people fall into 9-5 category.

The remaining 5% work like crazy, expect to be rewarded extra and find out sometime later that is not going to be the case and they will just have to the burden for the rest of the company. Frustrated those 5% leave, and that 5% keeps shrinking.

I'm a geezer (50) at Facebook. It's not the hours, as Indiana Jones might have said had he been a programmer, it's the lines. (I don't know what that means--it's just too good a line to pass up.)

There are ways I provide leadership and ways I accept leadership from my peers, and the mix is different than it might have been twenty years ago. My code reviews focus on strategic issues ("could this be divided up into N diffs?") instead of sorting out complex behavior. I pass off many of my ideas since I'm slower than I was at implementing.

I am as engaged by this job as anything I've done for fifteen years. A positive, curious attitude goes a long way, as does the expectation that I need to earn the respect of my team and give them respect where due in return.

We're close to the same age and that sounds a lot like my attitude as well! Only I'm at a small company and essentially am the boss of my department. But I would like to see myself the way you describe.

Hey, what you lack in speed you can make up for in wisdom and mentorship.

I'm mid-career (30), and finding more and more my real wins come from outside pure ability to cut code. They're tending to come from outright theft of ideas and concepts from other industries and domains.

> If the end result is failure, the company goes bankrupt and the hiring manager no longer has the ability to hire.

This is NOT what I've seen, first hand.

Usually were talking about a series "X" round of funding. Hiring is scaled out. When the end result is a failure (many times over), usually you'll see someone like the VP of Engineering fired and replaced.

This does not equate bankruptcy.

> If you've had ten years being a manager at BigCorp, maybe you'd better sharpen up your coding skills

This runs into the "overqualified" problem, though. If you haven't been a programmer for a while, you probably can't be hired as a particularly senior programmer just based on programming skills, but companies also aren't willing to hire you as a junior programmer if you have 10 years of managerial experience, because you're too senior for that. Even if you really genuinely are fine with an entry-level position, most companies won't be willing to hire you into one.

Basically it's really hard to fake being a 25-year-old, even if you are 100% as qualified as a 25-year-old for a job (or even more qualified) and aren't asking for any more money than they are, because companies view the 25-year-old and the 55-year-old as fundamentally different when evaluating hires.

My uncle was an engineering manager at a large multi-national. He's in his mid-50s, having worked there for over a decade.

In 2008 his company moved all their engineering to India. He stuck around to complete the transition, train the Indian devs etc, and took the package just as the recession started.

He had a helluva time finding a gig. But last I heard he went back to being a contract programmer (probably a pay cut) and he's working on a project on the side. Happy as can be.

Not what I'm finding. I'm midcareer myself, trying to build up consulting work, but without coding experience (I've teaching myself to code). Clients seem most interested in what I can do, and how reliably. It feels slow starting, but I've only been at it a couple months and I'm seeing traction.

Mind, I don't worry much about rate just now. I'm more interested in the portfolio and the relationships. I figure if I can fill up my calendar, I can start to raise the rate.

I suppose it sucks to be doing "junior" work, but you know something? At this stuff, I _am_ junior. If my background and experience and whatnot mean something to a client, then it will show in the work and relationships. They'll be that much more willing to find a rate that works for both of us as I get busier. But I certainly don't bother talking about them, because they have nothing to do with the relationship I'm proposing.

Now if we're only talking about a coding _job_, no. I doubt could get one, and don't know how quickly I could grow the salary if I did. But I think even that might be be in a different position in a year or so.

That's an interesting alternative; thanks for mentioning it. Yeah, I was thinking of regular jobs, not consulting, but that's definitely an option, since it lets you sidestep some of the broader generalizations about age and under/over-qualification, and home in on what you can do for a specific client in this specific moment.

If you have spent a decade as a manager at a BigCorp, you are probably seasoned irreversibly to never ever go back to the nerdy life you describe.

Expertise is not something you just get one day decide to be something and voila within a month of effort your are. If it were that easy, most of us would be composing symphonies or we would all be astronauts by now.It can give you a good head start but nothing much apart from that. So 'polish your coding skills' doesn't work, because its not just about coding skills. There is a whole ecosystem you need to understand and get in tune with. Writing code is something just representing solution in terms of syntax, the actual work that is symbolic notation to problem solving with tools in hand is a craft that takes ridiculous amount of time to learn.

Most managers are tuned to way of life, a spending driven lifestyle which is properly matched to their earnings. They have a home, bills to pay, kids to take care of. They are going in a stream of life, going off track from that might be impossible.

Also in our society managerial positions are considered to be positions of authority and coders et al are supposed to be both designation and pay wise inferior to them. Unless you don't care about the world. For most managers this is like going backwards in their career.

I don't care how old you are, or where you live (well PST to GMT+5 is ok). We span from 30 to 50 years old in our developer team. If you are good at a combination of (any combo will do): Java, Google app engine, python, Django, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, dev/ops, Linux sys admin, QA, Wordpress (themes/plugin building/php); well, then I have open positions. Half time to full time. Working from home.

Will post these new positions at the end of the week, but here is where you can find us, and where these positions will be posted: http://www.akvo.org/web/jobs

Quite interesting. How, might I ask, is your work funded? Do you sell your products and services to various governments and NGE's? Do you get funding from the same to distribute to worthy causes and products?

Yes, pretty much. We develop open source software which we run as a service. We are about to expand into some interesting use of mobile phones in data collection for monitoring and evaluation of program effectiveness in the field.

The majority of our funding is in the form of grants, against which we deliver services on a contract. We also have some grants which are more of an investment to allow us to scale up and expand. We also do some CSR work and consulting work.

We don't distribute funds to worthy causes ourselves, but our partners which are part of our trusted network do. We just provide the software and services to make it easy to do so and see the results.

As if economies only exist to provide jobs for everybody, whether those jobs make sense or not. It's much more the situation that the world economy is evolving.

But is there a breaking point in the system? Across the board, industries are becoming more efficient through technology, and require fewer workers. At the same time, the birth rate is increasing. What is the end game here?

* Spend more time getting experience and learning strategies you can put on a resume and less time taking silly courses and waiting for the tooth fairy to come along.*

That's very easy to say when you're employed. I suspect that a lot of people out there would love to pick up some experience, but have no means to do so. Especially when you rule out "silly courses", too.

One possible, interesting and visible way to gain experience today is to contribute to an open source project. Or even create your own...

And volunteering as well. But these things take time and being able to spend this time requires income or savings which people may or may not have.

I guess that an unemployed software developer could find time to work on an open source project. I think that, on the other hand, it could be more difficult to find the motivation to do so (and not feel like you're wasting time), but it could also be considered an investment in your future - and probably a demostration that you're really an active/passionate developer.

If it takes n workers to create a widget, which before took x*n workers, then with a more effective system we can create x widgets with the same workers.

There isn't a hard limit on how much wealth can be created (at least not until everybody has everything they could ever want), so more workers are a good thing.

The secret is to have a skill that somebody is willing to pay for -- and to keep looking for new things all the time.

In developed countries the birth rate is negative. But you can pick up more relevant skills getting a $35 raspberry pi board and bringing up a Linux kernel on it then building a app for it than taking a "how to market yourself to techies" class.

Work skills are like other possessions though where, when it comes time to sell them, you have to know how valuable they are to the market which may be different than what you think they should be worth.

Bringing up a Linux kernel on a Raspberry Pi is not a relevant skill. Facebook, Zynga, and LinkedIn do not need kernel engineers.

I can't speak for Zynga or LinkedIn, but if you think Facebook runs on a stock kernel without a lot of internal tweaks you are sadly mistaken. If you are a hard-core kernel hacker looking for a new job then Facebook would love to chat...

https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...

(A Facebook job advert for Kernel Engineers.)

See also: https://github.com/facebook/flashcache/ - a write back persistent block cache for Linux, written by some of the Kernel Engineers at Facebook.

(I work there.)

Are you saying that Facebook, Zynga, and LinkedIn are the only employers? In the future all restaurants are Taco Bell.

According to the U.N. statistics cited in Wikipedia, the population of the U.S. is growing by 0.97% per year, and there are only a handful of major industrialized countries that have negative population growth (e.g., Japan and Germany).

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population...

I'm pretty sure you are both right. The US population is growing by immigration, as are many other industrialized countries.

I guess I'm a young person, but I agree with what you're saying here. Thoughts from the other side of the divide.

I think it's universally true that young people don't have the benefit of experience (by definition) and so they regularly get into trouble. If they would wise up and listen to their elders, things would likely go better. There are a lot of "older" technologists out there who are still doing innovative things and schooling the youngsters in how to do things right.

On the other hand, and this depends completely on the individual, some older folks are...well, old. Meaning that they've gotten stuck in a particular way of thinking and doing things, and they've become so accustomed to it that they can't open up to a new perspective.

Sometimes - and I'm certainly guilty of this - young people spout off all kinds of craziness that should be rightly ignored. But sometimes, from the mouth babes, as the saying goes.

From the younger generation to the older: what I've observed really helps are when the senior engineers step into a mentorship role. That often means slowing down and being less productive, but if you're willing to coach, us youngsters can learn pretty fast (and we have to, in order to be relevant). In fact, if any of us think the tech market is competitive now, just wait another 30-40 years. It's going to be much tougher and much more competitive. Certainly more people will code, but it won't be as unusual as it is today (outside our Bay Area bubble).

So, there's no magic bullet. But it's a fact of life that older people are generally expected to be more mature, and so have to endure the foolishness of us young people. Until we (hopefully) get smart enough to listen.

I think the migration of the entire technology manufacturing sector to asia, supported by what's essentially slave labor, is a failure of the system. The workers in this article are described as the types that would be running factory floors, so obviously they are no longer relevant.

Does the system tell people the kind of things that you've just said? Nope. So while it's not necessarily a failure of the system, the system is complicit in continually trying to convince people that things haven't fundamentally changed. The system is willing to sell people this destructive notion because it really doesn't care about or need the excess humanity that has been made redundant by globalization and mechanization. The system's concern for these people generally runs so far as to the potential political threat they'll create in the future when they organize.

you've had ten years being a manager at BigCorp, maybe you'd better sharpen up your coding skills

Strawman. FTA:

many of the companies shedding jobs are technology manufacturers, while most of the companies that are hiring are Internet-based

LOL at the thought of today's Ruby "rockstar ninjas" learning chip design overnight, when the market swings back again. Everyone think's they're invincible when they're young. These guys in the article thought it too. They didn't plan on becoming obsolete...

This is all too true. I have seen exactly this go on where there is a young(ish) PM and at least one developer who is much older. The older dev really should be the one leading the project but they don't have any interest in managing as they prefer to just be a developer. The older dev has been around the block a few times and sees the shortcomings of a project and points this out but, just as you say, they are cast aside only to be proven right.

Fascinating analysis. I am in my mid-40s. My group at BigCo had exactly the PM you describe: younger and better looking than anyone else in the group. but somewhat clueless :-(

I tried hard to help in a nice way, but looking back I'm pretty sure I came across as a pretty grumpy guy. But what do you do if the product is being flushed down the toilet? Its hard to sit back and say "OK its just a paycheck", unless you're waiting around for a green card, or you're too young to know any better.

I was right, because the product has been canned and myself along with it. I got lucky though because I have ~3 offers even before the layoff has been announced publicly.

To summarize for us middle-aged/old farts I would say: 1. Keep that network going. 2. Keep your skills up to date. 3. Transition into a customer-facing role if you can because there is no better way to figure out where the market is headed.

Moving forward I'm not going to worry about seeming grumpy, patronizing etc. Its better to be the old jerk who complained about a bad product than the cynic who just sat around collecting their paycheck.