Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> The medical doctor was at the peak of his career and in no danger of being fired. The university professor had the security of tenure and was looking forward to a defined benefit pension starting six years from now. The corporate attorney was finishing up a prosperous career.

I do think tech undervalues experience and overvalues familiarity with technological fads. That said, there are two sides to the coin. Those other fields the author mentions all aggressively put people into "tracks" early in their careers.

Take the corporate lawyer, for example. His job is secure because most of the competition for his job from his cohort was tracked-out in earlier filtering stages. If tech was like law, you'd have job ads for people with 10+ years' experience saying "top undergraduate school (MIT/CMU/Stanford/Caltech or the equivalent) and top company (Apple/Google/Facebook or the equivalent) required." That would certainly create a lot of insulation for people who went to MIT, interned at Google, then put in 3-5 years after graduation to earn a credential they could bank on the rest of their careers. I'm not sure we'd all prefer that to be the case.

If you get some ghastly disease and need a surgeon, you may not necessarily prefer a fresh graduate operating on you. I may personally filter for an experienced physician, in their 50s, 60s all fine, who has done thousands of the same procedure with good track record.

Similarly, if I were a defendant on jury trial, I wouldn’t prefer a new law grad to represent me. I’d filter for an older, experienced attorney, with good track record in the courtroom.

I think the above is common sense. But somehow most people get it completely backwards in our field of software. Why is it that people’s mental image of a competent developer biases towards 20-something whiz-kids as opposed to older devs? Doctors and lawyers have verifiable track records; is it because that most developers, especially in big corporations, don’t build such auditable track records that attest to their competency?

I’m very curious about this. A 60-yo surgeon who continues to operate every day, is revered, has job security, doesn’t worry about ageism, outsourcing, obsolescence, etc. A 60-yo dev who hasn’t moved onto management bears stigma of failure. (Not my thinking, just the common attitude I see in society.) Something is broken somewhere.

I wonder if we have a circular problem here. Aside from the truly exceptional, the Ken Thompsons and thereabouts, and the Wallys that cling to sinecures, if we brutally purge from the field the older masters who don't quite walk on water, that would reinforce the perception that older programmers generally aren't capable, or at least worth senior salaries.

Depends, sometimes you want a young pioneering doctor. Also sometimes you want an established software consultant.

The money per se is not in the technical individual contributor but delivering some new value that someone will pay for.

From what I've heard, good surgical outcomes correlate more with experience in doing the procedure than anything else.

So unless you've got a problem amenable to surgery but without procedures with good outcomes for someone like you, you should prefer experience.

It may not be "new", but there's value in the higher probabilities of good outcomes.

In that, software development is very similar, except of course the stakes are fantastically lower.

> I may personally filter for an experienced physician, in their 50s, 60s all fine, who has done thousands of the same procedure with good track record.

Side note, probably irrelevant...it's been a few years since I looked at the numbers, but when I worked in Continuing Medical Education I learned that the group with the highest success rate for surgeries was docs with 3-5 years experience.

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