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Comment by blogimus | Hacker News Reader

"The only middle-aged programmers we have are absolutely solid"

As a several year veteran in the government contractor space and from personal experience as a configuration manager, I strongly disagree this this. I've seen poor and mediocre programmers survive as programmers well toward retirement age. Part of the reason is that programming isn't the only skill that they provide. They provide domain knowledge on the systems which the gov (mil and civilian) rely. Then us poor sods have to clean up after them and clean up after them, and hold their hands on radical new ideas like object oriented programming. I could really rant on this topic if I wanted to.

Another perspective: I mean, how many coders do you know that make it through a few years working who have NOT developed some significant domain knowledge?

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That's in government though where the contractor is in many cases above all trying to fill seats to make sure they can bill the maximum amount of hours. They just call it "domain knowledge" to justify to anyone that might question why they are keeping someone who is bad at the job around.

When you talk about government and government contracting you are discussing an entirely different world devoid from reality.

While I cannot fully disagree, I would like to point out that a great many government contractors take their jobs very seriously and do very good work.

Of course, I may be biased since I work as a contractor.

Sure at the individual level there are plenty of people who do good work but I'm referring to the companies themselves. A government contract company's only real goal is to get more contracts in terms of numbers and dollar amount and run them in a way that maximizes profit. A contract companies success in the government realm has little to do with actual performance and a lot to do with salesmanship.

I'm not suggesting contractors beat their children. I am saying that if one wants to move up within a government contracting company they will reach a point when they will have to push a course of action that is not in the best interest of the government at which point the individuals and company are indistinguishable.

You have a certain logic, but all I can say is that I have not witnessed it myself after working now for 2 different contractors. Of course, in both of those cases everyone in my immediate management chain was, like me, a former military officer.

For the lucid moments he has, which people would argue about the frequency of, Alex Papadimoulis discusses something similar to this in one of his site articles, providing what I think is decent insight on why they make it to retirement age:

http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tur...

FWIW, I think there's enough people in this audience that wouldn't be happy holding on to a job they aren't particularly interested in keeping up to date on, simply because they have the domain knowledge to make them "safe". I could be wrong though.

Huh, combine two elements in the article you linked, quoting:

* The higher-up the position, the longer the curve. Changes tend to occur much more slowly at the top. For example, a basic “refactoring” of a department’s teams could take well over a year to implement.

* The greater the skill, the shorter the curve. Ambition and skill go hand-in-hand, and ambitious individuals tend to want swift changes, and quickly lose motivation when these don’t happen.

* The larger the company, the shorter the curve. Large teams are generally not receptive to ideas from the new guy, leaving a large part of contribution (i.e. past experience) wasted. Furthermore, promotions are often based on tenure, not skill.

* The smaller the company, the longer the curve. Smaller companies, on the other hand, are more receptive to change, allowing one to contribute past experiences for a long while.

* The less skill-demanding the company, the significantly longer the curve. Not all companies need top talent. For example, the company who needs only maintainers of an ancient COBOL application might be best fit with curves that are closer to the value convergence."

Notice what happens when you're very skilled in a large company?

I have seen some very poor coders stay in programming for a very long time as well. This is hardly unique to contractors. I think that in the middle of any large organization you will find a large number of people that just drift along either because they have one particular piece of knowledge that makes them hard to replace or else they are simply to much trouble to fire so they are stuffed into a sinecure and left alone.

You make it sound as if OO is a good thing. I regard everything which gained traction from the Smalltalk community as being crap.

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