Technology Workers Are Young (Really Young)
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
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Amazon.com, notably, has a median stay with the company of just one year, a figure Ms. Bardaro ascribed to the intense pace of work there. (The study did not include workers in Amazon’s warehouses, where skills and turnover are different.) “We’re based in Seattle, and know a lot of people at Amazon,” she said. “The consensus is that you are run through a gamut there, make money, burn out and leave.”
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I would not have thought that this was sustainable, but if this is accepted practice at Amazon, then perhaps this is sustainable. I am somewhat surprised that Amazon finds this productive. But perhaps they get enough out of that 1 year average that it offsets the costs of having to hire new people every year, and the cost of teaching them how the company works.
Having lived near Amazon & with many friends who have worked there, here's the secret: Amazon pays a significant premium for new grads.
Starting salaries are 20 to 40 percent higher at Amazon than at Microsoft, Google, & Facebook in WA. However, promotions and raises are also much rarer, so if you actually stay 5 years, it probably averages out minus the stressful pace.
If you plan to stay in the big corporate game, the smart move for a new grad is to leverage your one year at Amazon into a 10 to 20% pay bump in a move to Microsoft or Google.
Surely there is more going on here? This doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
The turnover does suggest that Amazon's reputation as a hellish place to work is well earner but it could easily be as profitable long term as Google's much more humane one.
Warren Buffet says that when the tide goes low you can see who is swimming naked. The opposite is true, when the tide is high you cannot see who is swimming naked, so one should not make too much assumptions about their clothes.
In the late 90's everyone thought that microsoft had found the perfect way to manage programmers and run a software company. All kinds of companies would try to emulate microsoft methods. But in reality, that clever fox Gates guided Microsoft into the perfect strategic position. Once microsoft had to compete in fields that were outside their monopoly the results were not as dominating.
Similarly Amazon is in a great strategic position nowadays, because they have built out the infrastructure that the US uses to shop online. Their stock is flying high, so everyone assumes they must be doing something right. And they undoubtedly are.
But that does not necessarily mean that their practices of managing programmers are optimal or even good. In fact if you look at Amazon's finances you are stricken at how little profit they make. It is unclear why, because their financial statements are very opaque.
But it is entirely possible that they are hemorrhaging money because of the way the hire and fire programmers but the whole thing is hidden by their strategic position. It is not like a company that does software development better can come in and beat Amazon at selling things on the internet.
I wish I could staple this to the top of every discussion about the management practices of dozens of companies that come up on HN.
When you're floating down a Mississippi made of money, the sheer current of cash will move you along. You require none of the complicated and difficult additional mechanisms and culture to cope with the dangers and difficulties of the deepwater maritime world.
An injudicious observer might conclude that all the guff that comes with facing the open seas is unnecessary -- why, look at this luxurious barge! They have no need for the drills! No need for a captain! Navigation is a wasteful chore!
The problem is that success is not a discrete, directed acyclic graph. It is integral calculus over fuzzy numbers.
Umm, what?
Out of the companies mentioned as having younger workers (Epic Games, Facebook, Zynga, Google, AOL, Blizzard Entertainment, InfoSys, and Monster.com), only two -- Facebook and Google are what most of the younger CS grads from my school would consider worth joining (not even Facebook so much; I know people declined internships at Facebook to do something more exciting).
"The best companies in techlology" (as determined by what, stock value?) aren't exactly the watermark which you judge the entire industry by. There can be a lot of other companies who are recruiting a good mix of older/more experienced, and younger/more eager workers.
I'm not sure if he's implicitly comparing it to the journalism industry in which (presumably) age counts for a lot more.
We have the obvious age discrimination... The confusion over faddish languages being innovation... A hasty generalization fallacy...
A good testament that economists shouldn't actually try to apply their theories I'm the real world.
Making a game in the 80s and 90s meant doing basically everything. In the 70s, even the hardware to run it. Now it's increasingly using tools and hacking some customisation.
The spectrum from making a game, a mod and using gamemaker or something of the sort is getting more diffuse.
In our field, technologies largely align on generations. Older coders have deep experience with tech X, throwing that away seems dumb. So they don't follow up on tech Y.
Meanwhile, younger coders, frustrated with the accumulated cruft of X, seize the freshness of tech Y and become masters at that instead.
One day, along comes tech Z ...
This cycle has already appeared in Java or Perl -> PHP -> RoR -> Node.
How have the CAD and CAM tools transformed the classic structured mentoring process? How has more accurate software simulation changed the view of "experience" in older workers?
I'll stop asking questions now.
And Java wasn't always the enterprise thundergod we know and respect today.
But in general, sure. It's not as common as other migrations.