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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

>To stay in the game, these readers urged, make sure your skills are up to date, especially in areas like coding, and be prepared to work longer hours and get paid less than you're used to.

I think that's what many young software engineers have to endure, therefore it's also the young who face ageism.

Anyway, if you can only get hired for less than you used to, then your effective market rate is actually lower than what it used. And that's "fine". Perhaps the market rate for a software engineer follows a kind of bell curve. That specific issue is not ageism.

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Is experience (of more than a few years) actually useful in technical fields? I think that's the underlying question. For web-development, the market seems to be saying: no.

Anecdote: I recently learned that Facebook and Amazon have teams dedicated to rebooting crashed servers - it's cheaper and simpler than writing solid code. (As told to me by someone who does this as his full-time job.)

When "doing it right" no longer matters, because cheap hardware allows massive redundancy, maybe experience does become less important.

It doesn't matter if you're building silly websites trying to get strangers to dine with each other.

If you're building anything at all complicated, a few years of web-dev work isn't going to cut it bro.

The benefit of experience is you gain a more holistic understanding of wtf is going on, so you're not writing code in a vacuum of ignorance.

Experiance, technical and other, is actually the only thing that is unique and can not be commoditized or automated.

Of the seven billion people living on this plant none has a set of experiences such as yours. In a world of mass produced everything, uniqueness as a property, is actually more valuable. Whether or not the all mighty market rewards you for such is another story.

Somebody has to write the code that handles the failure. You don't get this for free. Creating a system that can handle outages of arbitrary nodes is not an easy task.

Yeah, but that team of solid systems/backend developers would exist whether these companies paid a horde of "reboot button mashers" a pittance or a (smaller) horde of solid application code programmers a lot more. So in the end, even if the backend code has to be solid the middle tier and frontend code can be pure crap, and the company saves money by spending just enough on the solid systems programmers and then practically nothing on what amounts to internal tier 1 support.

> Anecdote: I recently learned that Facebook and Amazon have teams dedicated to rebooting crashed servers

That's a nice anecdote. I'd hate to think it was actually true. There is potential loss of data to think about as much as anything.

It is actually true. Unless both these engineers were lying to me when they described their jobs. (Or unless I'm confabulating or hallucinating, I suppose.)

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