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...
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.
In my experience, that rarely holds true in the non-startup world.
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.
What a wonderful industry we work in.
BTW Chuck I remember NIS+!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.