This really confirmed visually for me something that I started to think was just in my head: I miss working with adults.
Since I've been in tech over 35 was "old", even among "senior" leadership. I had memories of when this wasn't the case (I even worked in a old style office where literally everyone had their own office with a door), but I thought maybe it was just a function of me being much younger then.
What's remarkable in these images is that there is a range of ages and at the same time it's obviously not a gerontocracy. I can't remember the last time I worked with someone that had gray hair.
The last several teams I've worked with I remember a constant sense of everyone trying to figure out what to do. When you look at resumes you can see why, nearly everyone has worked at one or two places and only worked for at most 5 years. On any of these teams everyone would still be considered "kids" with a lot to learn about patience and how to solve hard problems.
I seriously wonder what has happened to older people in tech, and sometimes wonder if one day I'll be taken out back and find out.
A big factor is the rise of VC doing spike projects. We fund a group of very young, energetic people, gas them up on an idea, and burn them to validate a concept. Sometimes they make out well, and sometimes they fail completely, and sometimes they get fully screwed by liquidation preferences and other ridiculousness. It rises to the level of exploitation in a lot of cases.
The median Netflix employee is definitely close to 40, and probably still up there if you only look at individual contributors.
A lot of older engineers go into management, because as much lip service companies pay to "equal tracks for engineering and management", it's way easier to move up in management than engineering.
That being said, I've worked with a lot of Amazon engineers in their 40s and 50s, and same at Netflix, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
So it seems like the big companies that can pay the big salaries are where a lot of older engineers end up. That and hardware engineering. The places that actually make chips or software to design chips seem to have a lot of older engineers.
I worked at an R&D lab on the East Coast early in my career, and there was such a great mix of young and old engineers. Many of the older engineers were legends and they knew so much. The pay wasn’t great by Silicon Valley standards, but nobody seemed to mind, perhaps because the work was fulfilling and they knew they weren’t viewed as disposable. Of course, costs of living were much lower too.
Fast forward fifteen years and I work at a Silicon Valley software company staffed by a constantly churning roster of 20-somethings. I’m the old man in my late thirties. It really is bizarre.
I think there's more than just ageism involved as to why there aren't more older folks in tech.
I think a major reason is simple demographics. There weren't a lot of folks graduating with CS degrees in the 90's, and quite few before that. There simply weren't a lot of older folks to hire.
That said, I've been fortunate in my career. I currently work for a FAANG/MAANA company. I'm in my mid-40's, and many of my colleagues and report chain are older than myself.
At a former employer I still keep in touch with, the software team has 1 in their 50's, 1 in their 60's, and 1 in their 70's. They all have other engineering or physics degrees.
Not only are they not all in their 20s, they also sport some ladies. And if I'm not mistaken, they all appear to be my fellow nerds. No tech bros in the bunch. I bet their office gatherings didn't involve shotskis or beer pong!
Praise be to COVID, the returner of offices with doors! I really missed mine. No views of the mountains anymore from my middle of the country office window, but I'll accept it. Also, praise almighty COVID for delivering me from office drinking games.
> On any of these teams everyone would still be considered "kids" with
Yeah, this is a problem. And theyre all senior engineers because they shipped some k8s integration junk at their previous gig.
Wonder how this started... someone must have identified the talent inefficiency and realized there are young people out there with massive talent doing non senior level work. They optimized for this and just as netflix is running out of subscribers so is true that this talent pool can also be exhausted. A bunch of me-too companies wanted in on the cheap talent gravy train, started age discriminating and it was too late. but worse, didn't know why they were doing it.
I think the job market has just grown so much that their share in it gets diluted so strongly. Trying to hire senior engineers is harder than hiring juniors
many of us are still here, and wonder why these young'uns are reinventing the wheel everytime :-P
Other times, I wished to go back to the simpler days of X windows, latex/postscript, instead of this newfangled another-react-framework-that-promises-to-make-things-easier ala xkcd 927
I'm a data science department head. I've been trained to divide the world into supervised and unsupervised learning problems. Over the past few years, I've started reading old books, and it's amazing how clever pre-WWW computer scientists were. A few pages of Knuth can reveal a deterministic and fast-running algorithm for a problem that I would otherwise approach with some ML library.
Since I've been in tech over 35 was "old", even among "senior" leadership. I had memories of when this wasn't the case (I even worked in a old style office where literally everyone had their own office with a door), but I thought maybe it was just a function of me being much younger then.
What's remarkable in these images is that there is a range of ages and at the same time it's obviously not a gerontocracy. I can't remember the last time I worked with someone that had gray hair.
The last several teams I've worked with I remember a constant sense of everyone trying to figure out what to do. When you look at resumes you can see why, nearly everyone has worked at one or two places and only worked for at most 5 years. On any of these teams everyone would still be considered "kids" with a lot to learn about patience and how to solve hard problems.
I seriously wonder what has happened to older people in tech, and sometimes wonder if one day I'll be taken out back and find out.