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Another point to bear in mind is that us programmers can be a vain lot and since it is possible to be highly successful in software very early in your career. This can mean you will be put in a position of doing the hiring early on.

We will naturally prefer someone younger and greener than us that we can mentor rather than hire someone 10 years our senior who's experience we might find threatening.

I see this all the time, and I think it's the least useful way to further your own career. Sure, I understand that notion of the power grab, but why? What real world benefit will you see by asserting unearned power over a new hire.

Much better to hire someone who you can learn from, someone who perhaps can mentor you, and help you actually achieve more in your career.

Objectively that may well be true, however if you hire someone more experienced than you then perhaps they should be supervising you and not the other way around.

Also I think most geeks like to think of themselves as Jedi Masters. There is also the fear of someone tearing you a new one for the quality of your codebase.

I'd like to think in an ideal world we only ever hire colleagues, and our teams are, for the most part, meritocracies without hierarchy. Technical Leads guide development and mentor those less experienced, instead of directing it and passing down tasks. Management should be isolated from the team you work with daily, and should be there only to help long term progress (and other hands off management things).

Working with closely on a day to day basis with someone up the management chain from you is miserable.

Working with closely on a day to day basis with someone up the technical competence / experience scale from you is fantastic.

>Working with closely on a day to day basis with someone up the technical competence / experience scale from you is fantastic

Oh dear god yes. Masterful experience for engineers.

You and mchurch should start a YouTube sitcom or something, where you rant about all your horrible experiences.ike a Curb Your Enthusiasm for techies. It would be entertaining and more profitable than just posting on HN. Larry David should love to invest, you've nailed his technique of railing against the firstworldproblems facing people who can't be happy in the most rewarding and comfortable niche around, and brought it from the LA social scene to the Silicon Valley / Seattle office space. And you are good writers.

"He seems to have missed making the point in the title."

I think his title was more of a gimmick to catch people's eyes; I think it worked.

"I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on technology is laughable"

I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job. It's also very difficult for many programmers that I've known over the years to step outside of the language that they started with, and start learning and heavily using something new. (Maybe it has something to do with aversion to risk and experimentation? For me, the ease in which a programmer can jump from one language to another, is a key test for their longevity in the field.) Of course this also holds for younger programmers; it's just that their skills are fresher and in my limited experience they tend to be more open minded both technically and to things like longer hours.

That said, I've known two programmers in their 50's who could kick any 20 something's ass in any of the latest tech. Sadly in my experience, they are very very rare.

I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job

Your right. It is. Then again it's equally true of the 20 year old in my experience. Most people in their forties who are still cutting code have been through three or four "fashionable" languages and have done serious work in all of them. You'll be amazed a the number of fresh faced young folk I interview who just know Java.

more open minded ... to things like longer hours

Nah. It's just that folk in their forties have figured out that longer hours aren't more productive :-)

"Most people in their forties who are still cutting code have been through three or four 'fashionable' languages"

I'm not sure where you're located, but in my experience even in Silicon Valley this is very rare. Most of the older engineers are either all about C++ or Java. A few may tinker a little with a new language, but they rarely take a risk to do more serious work with them. Moreover, many of them just transition to managerial positions. This is even more pronounced in less progressive metros like the South Eastern US.

I feel that one main reason I've been able (and will continue) to avoid this trap of comfort is because I'm a neophile.

I'm not sure where you're located, but in my experience even in Silicon Valley this is very rare. Most of the older engineers are either all about C++ or Java.

My context: I'm UK based, but I know a fair number of US folk. I'm in my forties and most, but obviously not all, of my friends are 30-60.

The point I was, somewhat poorly, trying to make is that in my experience it's equally common to find a single language focus with folk in their twenties. Most young developers I encounter only know one language to any level of competence. Lots of people seem to come out of university having used nothing else but Java. Lots of folk who've self-educated seem to only know one of PHP/Ruby/Python/Perl/whatever. People in their twenties seem just as resistant to learning stuff outside of their particular domain as folk in their forties and fifties.

The mild advantage that older devs have is that they've seen languages come and go a few times. If you've got a Java developer in their forties or fifties now, then they were definitely using something else before 1996, and probably something else again ten years before that :-)

> The point I was, somewhat poorly, trying to make is that in my experience it's equally common to find a single language focus with folk in their twenties.

I definitely agree with that. My point is that newer devs tend to know newer languages that are in vogue. Eventually the cycle repeats itself once these 20 somethings get older. I've already seen this happen to most programmers that I personally know with very few exceptions.

This is very true (I'm UK based too).

When I did my CS degree we were taught Java and that was all most people knew. A few also knew PHP because they were interested in webdev or Visual Basic/Pascal because that was what they had done at A Level. I don't think anyone on the course knew functional programming until we did a module in it.

This was particularly pronounced when we were given an assignment to do where the tools to be used were not specified but it was to basically build a shopping cart system. Obviously the best tool to use would be either something like PHP or to use Java but with JSP etc.

What the majority of the students produced was a AWT/Swing application to control the shopping cart and used the file writing classes (FileOutputWriter etc) to output HTML.

Perhaps the difference though is that young developers would expect to be re-taught a bunch of different stuff when they started their first job.

Back in the late 1980's my degree had us use: assembler, Pop11, Common Lisp, ML, Prolog, C, and Module2 over a three year course.

Frankly I find it incomprehensible that any CS degree doesn't at least cover using declarative, functional and OO languages.... but it seems to be common.

"I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job. It's also very difficult for many programmers that I've known over the years to step outside of the language that they started with, and start learning and heavily using something new."

I'm not so sure.

At one of my previous jobs I worked with a lot of people in their 50s and 60s who were used to assembly language, Jovial (it was an Air Force contract), and Fortran. They couldn't wait to transition to newer stuff because the old languages were so difficult.

On the other hand they were all really smart, so maybe you're right.

"They couldn't wait to transition to newer stuff because the old languages were so difficult."

I think this is just yet another really poor excuse for not learning something new, which further reinforces my point. There's no reason that any of them couldn't learn something new right now and years before. It's not like the middle class can't afford a really powerful computer. They've been affordable ever since the late 80's. You don't even need a powerful computer to program and learn something new. Nor do people have to pay to get access to new languages, and other related dev tools. Plus even the OS is free now. All you need is motivation to make time for it.

In their defense, this is a really hard habit to break and what makes it worse is that most people don't realize that they're addicted to one language. As for myself, I'm too addicted to the imperative paradigm even though I get my toes wet with functional from time to time since it's baked in with some of the stuff I use.

Okay, maybe I didn't make it clear.

The problem isn't that people weren't learning new stuff. Everybody knew the newer languages - how else would they know they wanted to use them?

Unfortunately, not everybody can drop everything and re-implement a large system in a trendy new language.

> how else would they know they wanted to use them?

By reading blog posts and articles about new 'hotness'. I often want to use something without having previously used it.

Good point, but here's the kicker: How many of these older folks couldn't wait to LEARN vs. USE the newer stuff? Too often, I've found that middle-aged programmers in gov't/defense jobs won't learn a language unless its a job requirement. In other words, they don't do any coding as a hobby at home. As other commenters have stated, they would have been able to have home PC's to code on at home since the 80's. If I didn't do home projects, all I would know would be Java. Hell, I had to teach myself Python at home just to be able to get my boss to allow me to use it for data stuff. Node.js and whatever fun, vibrant open source community is blowing up at the moment? Never if I didn't do it on my own time.

Me, at 20 years old: "Man, young people are so much quicker and smarter than older people."

Me, at 40 years old: "Just wait. You'll see."

I always loved the Mark Twain quote "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

http://www.toinspire.com/author.asp?author=Mark+Twain

My suspicion is that the "young" developers they speak of (not all of them, obviously) are faster in the same way not writing tests is "faster". You're taking on a lot of debt that you'll have to pay off sooner or later. For most startups, the bad technical decisions younger developers will make won't bite them in the ass until much later - maybe never if they go out of business for not finding product/market fit - and so getting somewhere, anywhere as quickly as possible is perhaps better than having expertise at writing "great" software.

Also, Moore's law helps folks ignorant of Big-O, algorithm design, memory management, indexing, etc. push off needing to know that knowledge until much later - if ever. When you can spin up thousands of Amazon servers for pennies it really "doesn't matter" (to biz people) if you improve your search algorithm memory footprint (or performance) by 100%.

I think it's possible to have both - older developers that know when to take on debt and how to responsibly manage it can be just as fast as the cowboy younger kids, but that's even harder to find.

Not worrying about algorithm performance and memory management means one of two things 1) you are making a prototype and couldnt care less, 2) you are a shit developer.

I'm still in college and the only time I don't give a hoot about either of those things is for class work when I am not peanlized for it. But anything that goes to production has as small of a footprint as possible. But that may be because I know all of my stuff runs out of an ec2-micro and not on a $100/hr sever cluster.

Or 3) You are an excellent developer who understands the cost as well as the benefit behind optimising for performance and memory.

Is the time spent optimising better spent building a new feature (i.e. the money saved through efficiency will be less than the value gained by doing something else)? Is the optimised code going to be less flexible in the face of change? Is the optimised code going to be less comprehensible for future maintenance? And so on...

Folk who spend their time making sure that everything has as small of a footprint as possible are a royal pain in the many situations where "small footprint" is not the biggest cost of the system :-)

"Why would software engineers work for english majors?"

Maybe it's just me, but I've "worked for" several English majors. OK, perhaps they weren't my direct boss, but I've been on many projects managed by Project Managers with degrees in areas like English and History. (IMO, whoever is managing your project is the person you're "working for").

And I didn't "choose" to work for these guys. Usually I go through a technical interview, then get assigned to a project whose PM is a non-technical person.

Perhaps this is unusual at places like Google, MS, etc. But outside of those types of companies, it's not unusual at all in my experience.

> Plus he seems to completely miss a separate alternative for software engineers over 35-- start their own businesses.

That's not a super practical option for most people. Not in a country where giving up your job means giving up your health insurance. Not when you have a wife and kids.

The first problem will go away on Jan. 1, 2014, if healthcare reform doesn't get repealed or overturned by the Supreme Court.

"He seems to have missed making the point in the title."

I hate to say it, but all Bloomberg editors seem to miss making the point in the title.

Zuckerberg was at Startup Weekend? Did you mean Startup School?

Yes, Startup School.

Age-related observations tend to be 1% fact, 99% confirmation bias. It is also a short circuit to actual debate by invalidating opposing viewpoints.

"John refuses to switch the project to MongoDB. They're too old and complacent."