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Old 03-01-2015, 06:59 PM
MJ7
 
6,221 posts, read 10,684,258 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GrandviewGloria View Post
Your deplorable grammar and punctuation hint at the quality of the work that these "efficient" young things frequently do (at a supposed "fraction of the price"). If I lose clients because of mistakes, and if I have to pay to have software rewritten, and to have damage fixed/compensated-for, then am hardly making money, am I?
I have 27 PhDs, I can speak and write 9 different languages, and I am the CEO of 6 F100 companies. I have over 900 years of experience and I never make mistakes, like a robot, I am perfect.
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Old 03-01-2015, 08:42 PM
 
Location: La Jolla, CA
7,284 posts, read 16,600,795 times
Reputation: 11675
Quote:
Originally Posted by Loudmouth View Post
I was talking to someone who works in San Jose CA and has worked for a number of tech companies. He says once you are 35 or so, employers in Silicon Valley will look for reasons to get rid of you. You are no longer a good fit and you are made to feel like an outcast. If you don't get the hint, your supervisors will set impossible standards for you, which of course you will fail at- because they are impossible.

This sounds so bizarre and 35 seems so young. It can't be true, can it?

At your employer, if you work in tech, does this happen and if so how do they get rid of people who are old? (35+)
I don't doubt it. They just set goals that can't be achieved.

If it's any consolation, I am the 2nd youngest person in my entire technical group. My oldest and best employee is retired. I am asking way too much of him already. When he leaves permanently, I'm screwed. He continues to deliver more, better, faster. I would pay him TWICE as much. I'm not joking one bit. He is worth every penny, but doesn't want the commitment. He's so good I'd almost give him to a company better than mine to see him paid what he's worth.

I lost my 2nd best technical resource six months back. Age: 60. We are still hurting, but can't afford to recruit him back. He got tired of the hours, the expectations, and the unrealistic goals. He's rich enough to say eff you. He did. I love him for that.

Not the case in every business, but for those who need people who have been around for a while, experience trumps everything else. C-suite management thinks you can just go to India and hire the same thing for ten cents per hour. I guess it must have been great to be them, doing business in Y2K programming back when Bangalore was still a festering sewer. They're still talking like it's 15 years ago, back in "their day", and all of that.
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Old 03-02-2015, 08:43 AM
 
Location: Durham, NC
2,024 posts, read 5,898,889 times
Reputation: 3478
It is very easy in IT to hire young people who can DO things with systems, networks and technology.

What they lack is the experience of the impact of their work. For instance, what are the risks if I make this change? What could break? Or, what DID break once so we always watch out for X, Y and Z?

Ideally, I think you look for a mix of ages and experience. Newer workers in IT can sometimes bring greater facility with new technologies and are "digital natives," which can be helpful in breaking out of old molds. For instance, a lot of the older, 90s/early 2000s client-server systems have terrible UIs and aren't web-friendly at all; younger developers will have a greater knack at building winning, modern interfaces.

On the other hand, I find that a lot of our best systems, applications, DBA and network/voice support folks are older and have a wealth of experience and knowledge in providing good quality, reliable services.

And of course, there are exceptions teeming amidst both of those two buckets. There's room for all age ranges in IT.
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Old 03-02-2015, 10:12 AM
 
Location: Florida
4,103 posts, read 5,394,147 times
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It could be that what some of you are seeing in IT is the "move up or get out" mentality that corporations also apply to accounting/finance. A lot of times those that choose to just be employees and not management will find themselves subject to very well structured layoffs down the road.
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Old 03-02-2015, 12:03 PM
 
3,026 posts, read 4,973,898 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MJ7 View Post
Younger people can do the same job, if not more efficient and cost a fraction of the price. If you were a business what business decision would you go with? It's not necessarily age discrimination as it is pay discrimination. If I pay Bob 125k/yr and I can hire a Steven for 60k/yr that does the same job, well I could hire two Stevens for the price of Bob.

Why pay a top athlete millions when you can have a dozen or so couch potatoes for a fraction of the price?

Why pay for a lawyer when you can use the public defender?

Why hire an SAE mechanic when you can get that friend of a friend of a cousin's neighbor?
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Old 03-02-2015, 12:09 PM
 
63 posts, read 80,759 times
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Are there any IT jobs that someone with strong skills, education and ten years of work experience (age 35) can't do?
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Old 03-02-2015, 12:29 PM
 
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
6,288 posts, read 11,724,998 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sware2cod View Post

The youngest guy on the team doesn't understand half of what's going on...he cannot keep up with conversations about complex technical things and he misses bits and pieces in everything he does. You have to check his work and it almost always require tweaking. And then you get into painful debates with him when trying to get him to fix stuff. He'll argue with you and refuse to do work and sometimes you have to go over his head to get it corrected.
Yes and this is nothing new, nor is it limited to the software industry. It's true for any engineering and any scientific work: government defense work, national laboratories, medical research .... all of these environments are populated with older people who really know their stuff.
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Old 03-02-2015, 01:09 PM
 
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
6,288 posts, read 11,724,998 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Suburban_Guy View Post
That's good to hear.

So am I just being swayed by negative propaganda?
The media always focuses on certain nonsense to fulfill whatever sensationalism sounds good at the time.
Quote:
I find it hard to believe there's no age discrimination in the industry. ...Admittedly I don't work in the industry so I don't know.
I live and work in Silicon Valley. I have worked at Yahoo, Microsoft, and various small and large startups. I work with people who have been at Google, Apple, Walmart, Cisco, Juniper, Netapp, SquareTrade, Netflix, and all other manner of company, large or small. Other people on this thread who also work here in the Valley have responded saying that there isn't any age discrimination, and we've given good reasons why there isn't. So, take it from those who know.

Quote:
Originally Posted by eyeb View Post
so you would rather no one 20-30 are given the opportunity to learn it instead?
Young people often think they know everything, they have a lot of energy which is great, but it blinds them to the fact that they don't know everything and it sometimes makes them ignore the older, more experienced people who actually know.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MJ7 View Post
Younger people can do the same job, if not more efficient and cost a fraction of the price.
This entirely depends on the nature of the job, and it depends on your tolerance for quality of work. If you're looking for someone to sling code where quality and performance are not the priority, then a young inexperienced person is as good a choice as an older more knowledgeable person. But where performance (of the product) and quality are a concern, then experience matters a great deal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tjasse View Post
Plus it's just very competitive, and almost every highly competitive arena favors the young. Experience counts for less than acuity and speed.
The opposite is true for certain things like high performance computing or performance tuning, where experience is what makes or breaks it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tjasse View Post
In general in Silicon Valley, there's sort of an undercurrent in the culture that suggests if you're not a multi-millionaire or invented something important by the time you're 30 you are a loser
I haven't seen this. This really can't be the case, because of all the people working here, maybe 0.001% have become millionaires or invented something important. 99.999% are going through the daily grind. The thing I have observed is that a lot of people here THINK they will get to that 0.001%. They devote their lives to their work hoping or assuming they will make it. Most people around here behave as if they are the smartest, most capable, most skilled, etc. Behaving in a manner contrary to what the statistics suggest.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MJ7 View Post
I agree with this, but what happens when a company no longer needs Bob to introduce new services? What if the company is already established? Then Bob's skills are no longer needed. A lot of experienced people will eventually fall into this category at one point or another in their career's.
this flat out doesn't happen. If you don't believe me, come to Silicon Valley and take a look around. Or go to any National Lab or anyplace where some type of scientific research or engineering efforts are being done. The reason is this: engineers and scientists and this kind of person in general are the type of person who are intelligent and adaptable by nature. If they weren't, they wouldn't have gotten through their college studies and become engineers. This trait of personality doesn't go away when you become 40 or 50 years old. It stays with you throughout your life. I've known many old engineers and scientists who are just as active and fascinated by things when they are 70 as when they were young. New technology comes around and these guys are on it. I know the guy who founded Twiki. He must be in his 60s now but he still works every day as a main contributor to Twiki, as well as other projects he has in the pot.
If you haven't been immersed in the culture of science and engineering, then you really can't know what's going on unless you spend time in it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kinkytoes View Post
Google contacted me too. I told them NO. Their business model is profiting off of other people's intellectual property...just like Facebook. In honor of the memory what the internet was meant to be before it was sold lock, stock and barrel to advertisers, I'd never willingly work there.
I also told them no, for a different reason: I don't want to work 12 hours a day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kinkytoes View Post
If I sold my house, what type of shack would I have to live in if I moved to Northern California? A 2000 K per month rented shack, I'd bet. The only draw is the plethora of cute smart guys who are over there. LOL but it is WAY too expensive.
Reword "cute smart guys" to "geeks and nerds" (some of whom are cute). If you dig that sort of personality, then I guess it's a draw. I personally find the nerd personality pretty annoying.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 43north87west View Post
C-suite management thinks you can just go to India and hire the same thing for ten cents per hour. I guess it must have been great to be them, doing business in Y2K programming back when Bangalore was still a festering sewer. They're still talking like it's 15 years ago, back in "their day", and all of that.
A lot of people don't know the cost of living in the big cities in India is now through the roof: real-estate over there is on par with NYC and Tokyo. Nowadays the standard of living (and salaries) for high tech workers in India is the same as it is here in the States.
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Old 03-03-2015, 01:47 PM
 
1,624 posts, read 4,854,335 times
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I think the OP is probably talking about start-up culture in Silicon Valley. A lot of start-ups or small companies that are in the pre-IPO stage backed by VC funds are very leanly run, don't pay a lot of cash (they use options), are starved for resources, and are running against the clock to produce results that generate cash flow before they run out of money. So the development cycles are brutally fast. A lot of the developers in these teams are younger and they work brutal hours. These places probably don't really hire a lot of 40-50 folks in their development teams because they can't match the pay and they don't want to work that lifestyle for the uncertain risk.

When big corporations buy these start-ups, a lot of those start up folks then became part of a bigger organization and that start-up culture can be part of a lot of new products or R&D units. I think these are where older employees have issues with, especially if they aren't in management running these units.

A lot of big tech firms actually have a lot of mature products and new products they offer are often only incremental improvements. I think for these units, there isn't the same push because they generate sufficient cash flow to prevent them from running a crazy start-up culture to work at lightening speed with little resources. Since it isn't make or break, they just don't have the same environment.

At a place like Google that is constantly developing new products and quickly dropping them if they don't show promise, that start up culture is a lot stronger.
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Old 03-05-2015, 09:42 AM
 
390 posts, read 822,048 times
Reputation: 670
I think it depends on the company. Start ups that work their employees crazy hours will typically go for the younger employees, since they may not have a family they need to go home too.

I'm in my mid 30s, and work is better now than it ever has been. I'm a web developer and I see lots of people getting into this industry for the first time in their 30s and even 40s. It's a pretty attractive industry, because it's one of the few you can easily make $60k+ (a lot more than that if you're good and have years of experience) with no college degree and working from home, so lots of older people try to switch careers paths and get into web development. My project manager at a previous job was a plumber until his early 40s, then got into this industry. I have a few co-workers who are in their 50s and still going strong programming away all day. One is even in his 60s. The industry is still relatively young, so I suspect the average age of workers in this industry will only continue to climb.
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