Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Anything to do with the traditional world of get a degree, get a job as well as its alternatives
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Sclass
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Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by Sclass »

This is kind of a silly human interest article but it had enough of a reality shot to motivate ERE.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... d-for-this

No fun getting old in SV. I actually used this as a reason for retirement at 43. It didn't go over well with my peers. Getting old in tech is like getting old in prison. Better start digging your tunnel when you're young. As a young HP engineer one of my coworkers used to ask why I saved and invested so much when we'd "be making more money as time went on". He is a survivor but he never increased his take home.

I lost a lot of friends when I retired. By the time it became obvious that my decade long plan had paid off they were in too deep to ERE not to mention RE.

When I started acting like the old guys I hated when I was a struggling young engineer I knew it was time to leave the game.

Not that I don't see value in older tech "wizards" because the good ones are priceless. It just seems that working in SV is young persons game. Ironically the younger you are the greater a disadvantage you are at in terms of housing. Maybe this drives the positive feedback in career aggression.

BRUTE
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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by BRUTE »

when brute was young he thought young people were smarter. now that he's older, brute thinks younger people are just cheaper and they'll work overtime for beer and pizza.

ironically, software quality and maybe productivity would likely be higher with a more experienced work force that was working less overtime.

Did
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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by Did »

I quit the law at 38 after having finally climbed the greasy pole to Partnership.

For many, almost all, that is just the beginning of a lifetime of the snout in the trough before dying unfulfilled.

I think I could return to the law just fine. A few grey hairs actually helps.

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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by jacob »

As far as I understand, it's somewhat field dependent.

There are a few fields where one ostensibly gets better and better with age as long as one keeps up the activity: writing, golf, kendo, fishing, hunting, ...

Then there are fields where age begins to become a liability: athletics, trading, war, ...

I'm not sure where software or for that matter physics fits into this exactly. If you judge by the median age on the front line it seems that the answer is "rather young", though. I do think that the former group is characterized by "wisdom" or "experience" being an important contributor to success and the latter group is characterized by "energy" or "intensity".

Rare is the person who will be wise at an early point or who will retain their energy at a later point. Hence age becomes a useful discriminator. Oftentimes an older and hopefully wiser/more experienced person will try to outsource their lack of intensity to younger subordinates. Conversely, youngsters will outsource their lack of wisdom by accepting instructions from someone older.

BRUTE
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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by BRUTE »

that's the weird part - it would seem that software development is clearly all the way over to the "wisdom" vs. "intensity" side of the spectrum. even more than writing. if pushing keys on a keyboard required extreme athleticism, brute doesn't think anyone would be surprised if the age was low in average. but it's almost exclusively about experience and just about the least physically demanding job possible. and there isn't even an element of reaction/stress like with trading.

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Sclass
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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by Sclass »

BRUTE wrote: ironically, software quality and maybe productivity would likely be higher with a more experienced work force that was working less overtime.
True. Nothing like watching a rookie engineer a product recall. Young guys have a particular way of messing things up. The old guys never tell you they made the same mistakes once. :oops:

On the other hand I've had some older engineers who were just lazy clods who knew how to work the system. They cannot win. They want a cushy job to coast in called "comfortable" but then their skills get old and they run into the threat of layoff which makes things uncomfortable . It's hard to win. Just when it starts feeling really good it's about to end.

What is a comfortable job? Sometimes it's the one where you're paid a lot to do little with little risk of failure. After a decade at the same place (like HP) this catches up with people. I personally saw it happen there. HP used to be a nerd retirement community. It was like working for the government while being in the private sector. I've seen some lucky guys coast to retirement and others crash and burn in a layoff. It's funny the article refers to them because they have traditionally been the old man's company. Things change.

ducknalddon
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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by ducknalddon »

I'll be quite interested to see how this pans out as the large number of recent entrants to the industry age. When I started 34 years ago it was quite a small industry, the numbers have increased massively in recent years.

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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by Tyler9000 »

There's definitely age bias in SV, but I still have a tough time relating to those desperate to hold on. My own experience was that SV is burn-out central where companies depend on a perpetual young, single, childless engineering workforce whose personal lives are relatively simple enough to buy out or ignore. I always respected the many older ex-Apple/Google/Amazon workers I knew who deliberately left to build a personal life outside of work. There's a reason that many people move to SV, and a reason that just as many leave within a few years. And it's not all about cost of living.

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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by GandK »

I remember Zuckerberg saying "Younger people are just smarter," and I thought at the time, "What an asshole." He's 10 years my junior, and I too was working in IT then.

I think what he had neither the wit nor the polish (in spite of his youthful "intelligence") to say at age 22 was, "Technology is about innovation, and the older people get, the less they tend to innovate." Which I do agree with. Also in the same vein, the older we get the more possibilities we've ruled out, and while almost all of the time that stripping away results in life efficiency, by definition it also means there are whole families of things that each of us will no longer even try as we age. And buried at the far end of one of those trees may be a very lucrative new app, or a wonderful new way of accomplishing something. And a young person may bump into that sort of thing, but an otherwise equally qualified older person likely won't.

However, I think what prior Z was clueless about and what current Z has hopefully picked up on in the decade that has since passed is that most of the things we older people have ruled out and the areas we don't innovate in now are because we've already figured out that 99.9% of the time, those types of things don't make any fucking sense. And younger people are utterly clueless of that reality. I mean, all you 40+ folks: pause for a moment and think about the decisions you made between 20 and 25, when you were the same age as the students Z was speaking to, and ostensibly at your intellectual zenith. Now raise your hand if you made Big Stupid Mistakes then that there's no way you'd make today. Your career, your relationships, your purchases, you name it. Yeah. Exactly. We all came out of school with a whole lot of theory and absolutely no street smarts. And we all spent the better part of the next decade flailing around trying to get our act together.

I think there's a strong argument that age/experience has several advantages, even in SV software companies. Particularly in areas like project and personnel management, documentation, testing and user education, where one is a member of a development team but is not actually innovating. And these companies are only shooting themselves in the foot by ruling older people out as a rule, because they're ruling out most levels of human wisdom, too. I don't see it changing, though. How can the 20-somethings in these organizations that are hiring new people base their decisions on life information that they can't have collected yet, because it only comes with age?
Last edited by GandK on Mon Sep 12, 2016 3:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

BRUTE
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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by BRUTE »

GandK wrote:a member of a development team .. innovating
95% of development work brute has ever seen has as much in common with innovation as a juggling bear riding a unicycle.

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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by SavingWithBabies »

As a software developer, I tend to see two overall domains I can focus on: business and technical. The best way I have found to learn to clearly see the two is to work as at a consulting company.

The business domain is interesting however the knowledge there is often limited in value to a single employer. I suspect many who pursue domain knowledge in business and stick with the employer long term can reach very high salaries. However, there is the risk of layoff and the reality that often that knowledge is not transferable so it has a lower market value. It typically seems to involve some office/company politics too.

The technical side tends to be more straight forward in terms of market value. It requires a fair amount of effort to stay up to date both at the day job and at home. I chose to focus on this side. My goal is to age out of being-employed-in-tech to employing-myself-in-tech. So far, that has led to switching employers every couple of years to continue to pursue knowledge I value towards starting my own companies. I chose to come to SV and work in early stage startups to get a better handle on practicing the skill of making technical tradeoffs in order to ship.

I see ERE as a way of giving me more time to bootstrap my own projects/companies and softening failure.

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Re: Article on getting old in Silicon Valley

Post by Andre900 »

I never worked in SV, but started out, right out of undergrad, as a software engineer in the mid-80s for a large government defense contractor in the Northeast US. By age 30 I realized I didn't want to do that anymore and went and got my MBA from a top-50 program. The MBA has allowed me to break out of the code-monkey business and opened up a broad range of industries for me to do more interesting work. Though, due to a couple of layoffs and blown opportunities, the "Great Recession," and crushing competition, my salary is exactly what it was before I started the MBA program, almost 20 years ago. Nonetheless, due to reasonably low expenses, I reached FI at age 50. I'm still fattening my nest egg in a reasonably secure, low-stress job, facing no age discrimination, with excellent benefits, and that is not intolerable.

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