Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

> The longer you are on this earth, the more wisdom and experience you will acquire.

Well, maybe. You get experience when things happen. The more you play it safe, the less happens. And you only get wisdom when you think about your experiences.

There are plenty of people with wisdom well beyond their years.

> The main problem with being young is that you don't realize what you've yet to realize.

Bad news! It gets worse. At some point, just when you start to feel like you know what you don't know, you realize that they are making new things up faster than you can keep track. Talking to people a generation younger than me can be a humbling experience. I have to tread carefully, as you do when you're talking with a person from another country.

View on HN

> There are plenty of people with wisdom well beyond their years.

I still haven't met any. I've met plenty of smart kids, and I'm pretty sure I was one, 15 years ago. However, I had no idea what I was doing, and worse yet, had the hubris to think I did.

I was insufferable, and I'd never hire 15-years-ago me. I also won't hire any other young engineers -- I'll let them find out how little they actually know on someone else's dime.

On the other hand, if I was in the VC game, I'd absolutely leverage young engineers as grist for my mill. They're the most amenable to the risk, and it doesn't really matter if the vast majority of small investments fail (and they will, especially given the inexperienced teams), if you hit just a few home run exits.

> Bad news! It gets worse. At some point, just when you start to feel like you know what you don't know, you realize that they are making new things up faster than you can keep track. Talking to people a generation younger than me can be a humbling experience. I have to tread carefully, as you do when you're talking with a person from another country.

That's unnecessarily defeatist. There are steady advances, but there's very little that's genuinely new under the sun, and quite a bit of what the youngsters get excited about is just the cyclic rediscovery of what we already knew.

> I also won't hire any other young engineers

Your loss, really. I've interviewed and worked with several young engineers who were really top-notch, who worked out great, and were mature in their approach to work and life in general. They also tend to come with a lower price tag. Some have not worked out so well, but I don't have any reason to believe that the failure rate changes dramatically with age.

As I myself get older, I'm not so sure that the maturity level changes all that much either. People are just better at hiding their flaws as they grow older, then you find out too late when there's an issue.

I've never worked with a top-notch young engineer. Brilliant, yes, top notch, no. Every single one has had misguided priorities, significant experience gaps (leading to both bad engineering decisions and misguided priorities), and -- even in the best of them -- hubris.

Despite their intelligence they've always required constant senior level supervision, and have generally been the ones most likely to create maintenance-heavy components due to inexperience.

I'm not sure why our experiences differ so substantially, but I'm happy to hire only senior engineers and let other companies pay to train the young ones. The senior engineers are more than worth the minimal financial premium.

"I'm not sure why our experiences differ so substantially"

Sounds like you have bad projects management and let people go cowboy and build bad things because you don't communicate with each other.

No, it's simply impossible to babysit junior engineers to a sufficient degree as to prevent bad implementation without effectively doing their job for them. It's not worth the effort.

It's called comparative advantage. Have junior engineers work on easy things that are a waste of time for senior engineers to do. Personally, I'd rather not have my $200,000 a year senior engineer working on debugging cross browser javascript or writing documentation.

Hopefully he's not wasting a bunch of time debugging cross-browser javascript because A) He already knows how to fix it, or B) It didn't break to begin with. JavaScript is hardly difficult material.

As for documentation, I'm not sure quite what to say. The best person to document code is the person that's writing it. The best person to document things that aren't code is a technical writer, not an engineer.

Those were just example of simple tasks that a junior developer can do. And a junior develop in my company is someone of any age who has less experience. What kind of industry would we have if we only hired senior developers? If we said junior developers have no value? I guess we'd be a bit like the fashion industry where anyone new is just supposed to work for free.

Ah, I love when "I can't think of a way to do it" turns into "it's simply impossible".

Not only can I not think of a way to do it, I have never, in 15 years, seen an organization that successfully managed junior engineers in a way that resulted in the production of code on par with what senior engineers would produce.

Getting good work out of junior engineers requires a management investment greater than the cost of simply hiring experienced engineers to begin with, and they still will not produce code to the same level of robustness and quality.

I can see from your company that you don't operate this way. I assume this choice expands the apparent pool of available applicants, but it also ensures that your company is likely completely uninteresting to senior, experienced, genuinely expert engineers.

In my experience, there are two kinds of engineering managers. The first is the kind that has figured out (or thinks they've figured out) how to get decent enough code out of inexperienced or just plain bad engineers. The second is the kind that realizes that they don't have to work nearly so hard or jump through so many procedural hoops if they just hire people that know what they're doing to begin with.

What's more, those experienced people tend to have extensive contacts and make it easy to hire their friends.

That said, I'm happy to let you spend the time, money, and energy training and managing junior engineers, while dealing with their subpar work output.

This thread has grown somewhat stale but I never replied initially and I think I can probably address some of the differences in our experience. I don't run a company, so I almost certainly have a different viewpoint, but senior engineers are often great at displacing blame/CYA, so it may not always be apparent to management what is really going on in an organization. I've never worked at a place that had particularly well-engineered software to begin with, and there were those who were either capable (and willing) to do a little bit of ad-hoc coding with an eye towards refactoring on a larger scale, or those who weren't. I've had really bad experiences with 'senior engineers' being left to build something semi-autonomously, thinking they know the best solutions a priori, etc., and seeing nothing functional at the end of months of effort. I've seen it happen way more than with junior engineers who are at least a little unsure of themselves. I'd probably take a good senior engineer over a good junior one for many of the hand-holding reasons you point out, but I really have worked with several young folks who did not have the problems you've encountered.

Fascinating! Please tell me more about how I run my company, and all the things I apparently believe. Plus more about what kind of manager I am.

You certainly have an active imagination, so I'm sure the next things you make up would be just as interesting.

Sorry, apparently somebody downvoter prefers dry prose to sarcasm. A more temperate reply:

Flatline3, you're wrong in pretty much every particular about how I work and how my company works.

It's certainly possible to mentor younger developers well and at low organizational cost. It depends a lot on your process. In particular, I think pair programming, frequent commits, good unit tests, and collective code ownership together make it entirely safe to hire somebody younger, and you get substantial benefits.

I also think it's shortsighted to say, "Hey, let the shitty shops train junior developers." Great senior developers have to come from somewhere, and I think they'll never get great working at places that don't have their acts at least somewhat together. I benefited a lot from people taking a chance on me when I was younger, and I think I have a professional obligation to return the favor.

Except Engineers have a fairly narrow cost range. Something like 50k - 200k except add in Benefits, Management Overhead, Resources (computers, software, office space etc.) are more or less flat and it's really only about a 2.5x cost increase from fresh from a no name school to some of the vary best in the field. Add in communication overhead if you let the team grow and unless you have really simple problems easily solvable by recent graduates it's best to focus on an experienced team.

Yes. Good young engineers are very amenable to learning new approaches. And I love the raw energy of somebody who is 25 and sees every project as a fresh! exciting! new! challenge!

I would never publicly post opinions that could put me or my current or future employer/company into legal jeopardy with respect to discrimination against protected classes.

Yet, there seems to be quite a bit of this on here.

In the US, age is only a protected class for the range of 40+, as per federal law.

However, what we're talking about is experience. Those with little experience are not members of a protected class.

For example, a CEO getting up on stage saying "We never hire anybody older than 28 years old!"

As far as I know, nothing ever happened because of that.

Are you replying to yourself below? flatline responds to flatline3. Suspicious.

That said, I hate ageism. Always have. However, as I get older, I find it more annoying that 22 year olds think they are "old." I'm 35 and Know I'm not old so 13 years my junior as old is just silly. Certainly 22 year olds can be mature. Old... no.

> Are you replying to yourself below? flatline responds to flatline3. Suspicious.

No. Caused me to raise my eyebrows too.

Doubly eyebrow-raising three hours later: http://i.imgur.com/jL7m2.png

I'd never hire old engineers, they're stuck in their ways and insist on using SOAP. Software engineering is a young man's game as people on slashdot were apt to say. Old programmers are always complaining about being forced into management. Plus they insist on things like having time for their families. Old engineers can't focus %100 on the company like young geeks satisfied with foosball and beer.

Ageism cuts both ways, and it's never an excuse for winning an argument or evaluating a person. You evaluate people on their merits or you pass over valuable people and pay the price for it.

Older people can be full of hubris too, using appeals to experience and authority arguments to shortcut rational thinking.

Using the I'm more experienced than you argument is the same as people saying you insist on C++ cause that is what your comfortable and experienced with, and you'll cost the company millions in lost productivity.

I'd never hire old engineers, they're stuck in their ways and insist on using SOAP

Just as a nice case study...

I was "old" when SOAP got popular (late twenties early thirties). Most of my (age) peer group seemed to agree with me in that it seemed over complicated and messy. We were, of course, old stick-in-the-muds who couldn't adapt to the new technology :-)

It was the "young" developers who jumped on it more than anybody else that I saw - the everything-in-xml crowd.

Ten years on, of course, the "young" crowd are now seen as "old".

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose :-)

Ageism cuts both ways, and it's never an excuse for winning an argument or evaluating a person. You evaluate people on their merits or you pass over valuable people and pay the price for it.

Amen. Young and old both have stick-in-the-mud types. It's just that the young folk haven't had the time to demonstrate whether they are stick-in-the-mud types. You don't want to hire them whatever their age.

Using node.js (or whatever) doesn't make you cool, hip, and open to new ideas. I can guarantee that, if this forum is still around in ten years time, there will be somebody complaining about this old fker who wants to do everything in node.js :-)

Did you seriously refer to late twenties as 'old'?

Parts of the industry certainly do. I've observed it going down from 40 years to 35 years and now to the early 30s.

In the same way (not industry-related) I've observed that people who are 50+ years are seen as "elderly". That was 60 or 65 some 15 years ago.

It's been my experience that there's quite a lot of folk in their late teens/early twenties who see 29/30/31 as "old" :-)

There are always bad engineers, which is what you're really describing above.

All other things being equal, I'll always pick the older engineer with more experience and maturity than the young engineer without.

My work place must be fucked up. Me as the old guy is still baffled why the young guys implemented our API in SOAP. a few of us older guys are. And this was in the last couple years. Way after SOAP lost its cool.

This stereotyping reminds me of stuff that was said about women in the past.

Woman are this, women are that, we don't want to hire women because they are XYZ. People don't say it as much explicitly anymore, but I see it in their attitudes.

Every woman is different, as is every 18 year old. We should not have pre-conceived notions about what they are like, we should have a hiring process that is a meritocracy where we will let anyone prove to us they have what it takes. Just because you haven't met a young person who would make a good engineer at your company doesn't mean they don't exist. Young people, like women, have often not been aware or been encouraged to seek opportunities in engineering.

quite a bit of what the youngsters get excited about is just the cyclic rediscovery of what we already knew

This happens _a lot_.

> You get experience when things happen. The more you play it safe, the less happens. And you only get wisdom when you think about your experiences.

In some ways, yes. But just mundane everyday life teaches you a lot -- the hundreds of coworkers you've interacted with, the stories you've swapped about dealing with projects and bosses and clients and customers, your romantic relationships, etc. You pick up on the patterns of failure and success and, above all, good judgment, that can't really be learned any other way.

> plenty of people with widsom well beyond their years

Things like raw coding/product talent, pure drive -- sure. You can have these at any age. But wisdom beyond one's years? I wish it were true, but I don't think it is.

Running a whole product team, dealing with employees, stakeholders, deciding what to invest resources in, etc. -- that's where maturity and experience really provide their value, so you don't make all the really costly novice mistakes. Intelligence is very helpful, but it isn't a substitute.

> hundreds of coworkers you've interacted with, the stories you've swapped about dealing with projects and bosses and clients and customers, your romantic relationships

Yes. Those are some of the experiences I'm talking about. Take a safe job, don't date, don't interact much: you'll have a lot less raw material to turn into wisdom.

> But wisdom beyond one's years?

I have seen it. It's easiest to spot in people who've experienced early struggle or tragedy. It's not true for all of them (or even many of them), but they definitely have the raw material.

> There are plenty of people with wisdom well beyond their years.

Yes, there are. But not in the sense you want to mean. There are plenty of kids who have lived through great hardship, who have had to learn survival and coping skills which one would only expect of someone much older. Pampered, middle class American white kids don't have that kind of wisdom, never will.

What you are referring is cocky people who take their limited experience as some greater truth when all they are really doing is revealing how little they know.

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience requires you both to have done things in your life and to have had the time to reflect on those events. That comes with age.

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience requires you both to have done things in your life and to have had the time to reflect on those events. That comes with age.

... and with having those experiences, and with having the ability to reflect and learn from them.

I agree with William. I know some folk in their twenties who have done more (and reflected on what they've done and learned from it) that some folk I know that are my age (40s).

Wisdom comes from having experiences and the ability to learn from them. While that's roughly correlated with age there are:

* plenty of older folk who don't have many experiences, or don't have a good ability to learn from them

* plenty of younger folk who push themselves - or get pushed - to have a bunch of experience and learn those lessons very well.

I know people in their 20s who are wiser than people I know in their 60s. And vice versa. Personally I vastly prefer to look at people first rather than make assumptions based on age.

I am fascinated by your claimed mindreading skills. The sense I want to mean?

Thanks, I know what I'm referring to. As I explained elsewhere in the thread (and before you posted), some of the people with wisdom beyond their years are indeed the people who had to learn coping skills early.

Also, wisdom definitely does not come with age. I have met unwise retirees because they assiduously did not think about their experiences.

One thing you eventually realize is that experiences always happen and there's no way to prevent them. You really don't have to hunt them out. Instead you may eventually just notice and appreciate them when they do happen.

I ran all over the world with a backpack before I realized that everything is relative and my adventurous experiences weren't necessarily any more valuable than a friend's who stuck around and built a family (which I'm finally doing now myself too).

There are plenty of people with wisdom well beyond their years.

True. But they, in my experience anyway, they still end up way wiser at 30 than they were at 20 :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com