(The lines represent the 10th, 50th and 90th percentiles of the sample)
Posted on 09/01/2010 8:33:44 AM PDT by a fool in paradise
An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?
The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers.
And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are. Why would any company hire a computer programmer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate—with no skills—for around $60,000? Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”. As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters.
At least, that’s how the thinking goes in the tech industry.
(The lines represent the 10th, 50th and 90th percentiles of the sample)
In their book Chips and Change, Professors Clair Brown and Greg Linden, of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics and census data for the semiconductor industry and found that salaries increased dramatically for engineers during their 30s but that these increases slowed after the age of 40. At greater ages still, salaries started dropping, dependent on the level of education. After 50, the mean salary of engineers was lower—by 17% for those with bachelors degrees, and by 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs—than the salary of those younger than 50. Curiously, Brown and Linden also found that salary increases for holders of postgraduate
degrees were always lower than increases for those with bachelor’s degrees (in other words, even PhD degrees didn’t provide long-term job protection). It’s not much different in the software/internet industry. If anything, things in these fast-moving industries are much worse for older workers.
For tech startups, it usually boils down to cost: most can’t even afford to pay $60K salaries, so they look for motivated, young software developers who will accept minimum wage in return for equity ownership and the opportunity to build their careers. Companies like Zoho can afford to pay market salaries, but can’t find the experienced workers they need. In 2006, Zoho’s CEO, Sridhar Vembu, initiated an experiment to hire 17-year-olds directly out of high school. He found that within two years, the work performance of these recruits was indistinguishable from that of their college-educated peers. Some ended up becoming superstar software developers.
Companies such as Microsoft say that they try to maintain a balance but that it isn’t easy. An old friend, David Vaskevitch, who was Senior Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer at Microsoft, told me in 2008 that he believes that younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative. But there is a lot they don’t know and can’t know until they gain experience. So Microsoft aggressively recruits for fresh talent on university campuses and for highly experienced engineers from within the industry, one not at the expense of the other. David acknowledged that the vast majority of new Microsoft employees are young, but said that this is so because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with. It was all about hiring the best and brightest, he said; age and nationality are not important.
So whether we like it or not, it’s a tough industry. I know that some techies will take offense at what I have to say, but here is my advice to those whose hair is beginning to grey:
My advice to managers is to consider the value of the experience that the techies bring. With age frequently come wisdom and abilities to follow direction, mentor, and lead. Older workers also tend to be more pragmatic and loyal, and to know the importance of being team players. And ego and arrogance usually fade with age. During my tech days, I hired several programmers who were over 50. They were the steadiest performers and stayed with me through the most difficult times.
Finally, I don’t know of any university, including the ones I teach at, that tells its engineering students what to expect in the long term or how to manage their technical careers. Perhaps it is time to let students know what lies ahead.
Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa 
is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University.
Hey, adapt or die. Blue collar workers have had to deal with this sh_t for decades, no reason why white collar workers should be spared (because they’re supposedly “better”). From a mid-30’s system administrator. ;)
The only safe jobs anymore are government jobs.
Adapt or die.
Bring on the flames.
Young Liberal Workers and Managers HATE and LOATHE people with real world experience and that includes a lot of greybears and greyheads. This is because they hate to have their “reality” shattered by people who know better through experiance and also because they loathe their own parents as they are selfish, childlike demeanor.
I don’t know if this is too much of a tangent, but...
We just put in Windows 7 machines. As someone who has been supporting Windows since it was bundled on a few floppies with Aldus Pagemaker, my experience has been that an awful lot was changed for the sake of change. No one likes changing their routine, but it seems this “upgrade” is fundamentally different than previous ones.
Some is good, some is bad, some defies explanation, but my point is that an uncomfortably large portion of my experience just got chucked into the trash heap because it’s no longer relevant - and that, for the most part, is not due to any sort of technical or practical reasons. In fact, some of it has become a hindrance as I waste time trying out what worked well for years only to find that the solution is not only not where it used to be, but is no longer relevant. Now, this is always a part of any upgrade. It just seems to me that this time, it’s more widespread and inexplicable.
If this becomes a trend, then it will severely dilute the value of experience because everyone will be equally baffled. It’s a big bonus for the training industry, however!
why hire an old person when you can import an H1B for peanuts and all you have to do is manipulate the requirements and the government never does any follow through to check.
bookmark
Hire more scab labor and offshore more jobs to import the work through wires instead of shipping a “product” through customs.
It’s all good for business. Right?
People spend tens of thousands of dollars to attend a college. Their performance is based on their own effort. But when the industry lobbies congress to change laws to benefit the corporate heads (not the investors or the employees or the economy), it is a violation of the “trust” that was entered when people first invested in their education.
No one is saying that an industry must “exist” to employ those who trained in it. Here the industry still exists, but crooks like Gates for decades claimed there were not enough “qualified” applicants so the pool had to be “expanded”.
Also, young people in a cutting edge field are fresh out of school and have more up-to-date approaches to things ... are more aware of new solutions.
I have noticed this in a lot of fields but especially my doctors. My younger doctors try newer things and appear to be in less of a rut.
Really, it applies to all but a few occupations.
don’t even get me started on this one......this whole thing has been making my blood boil for the last 8 years......in the 90’s tech was the place to be, there was a sense of security, learning a transferable skill and great pay... now, it’s all about how they can screw us over. And ever deal with an developer over seas? there is a reason they are cheap labor.
The wholesale displacement of over 50 workers in Silicon Valley is really about race-replacement. The older workers (who built the products that built the companies that created the valley) were almost without exception white men.
They have been replaced by low cost (at least initially) Indian and Chinese H1-B workers. Both Tandem and HP hired hundreds of ‘contractors’ from Tata Consulting starting in the early 1990s. These workers were paid a small monthly stipend (something like $1000 a month) by Tata, and a $50,000 bulk payment at the end of their contract, upon return to India.
Tata thus avoided paying millions in payroll taxes, and Social Security for these “contractors”. HP saved $50,000 or more per employee per year.
White Americans who built an industry that provided much of the growth for the American economy were sold out by politicians and greedy management. Carly Fiorina, current Republican hopeful for US Senator is a poster child for this class. Personally, I’d just as soon leave Boxer in there.
The American elite doesn’t like the large, hornry White professional middle class and will continue to find ways to replace us with more docile Indians and Asians. Plus, they like more variety in their lunch restaurants then we can provide.
In a short period of time I was writing more code, and doing it several times faster than the older, more experienced programmers.
Hmm ~ !?
Was it because I was being paid "entry level" wage, or something else.
Probably not because this was a government agency and I was actually hired into the shop doing this work at a higher wage than those already there.
On the other hand I was willing to come into work at 2 AM to pick up a report identifying errors in the code, and then immediately fixing those problems and recompiling the job.
That always gave me a day's advantage against the competition.
The other thing was I could stay awake for 2 or 3 days at a whack so I could keep "things" in mind about the programs I was working on.
It was great, and then I noticed that as I celebrated my 29th birthday I didn't particularly like showing up at 2 AM, nor did I care for the all-nighters anyway. I also bought a television and found out about the evening news, the morning weather report, and reruns of Star Trek.
Yeah, all those things, and people I know in the programming racket advise me it's still the same old thing, and the guys who do the night stuff, and get up early, and push, push, push, and keep their minds on every single last itty bitty detail of their projects still get the work.
The others move on into other stuff.
We use young men as soldiers for the same reason ~ even with the UAVs ~ the job does its thing on its own schedule, and the individual has to be able to set aside all worldly concerns and focus.
That stuff gets old though.
You may have a point with H1B’s, but it’s a larger problem of
lobbying. If we the public elect these boneheads then don’t we get what we deserve.
Otherwise if your skills are outdated or you’re asking too much in wages, it’s your own problem, I’m sorry to say. Everybody competes... except for government workers of course. Their jobs are absolutely secure.
Like I said, blue collar workers have had to deal with this for decades now, so we should protect white collar workers because they’re “better”?
In short, I have no sympathy for whining. DEAL.
Never hire a union man then.
DEAL
There’s another reason for not hiring people over 40. State disability insurance is higher than hell for those over 40. Companies know this and use it to their advantage. For instance, in Oregon, disability insurance for someone in their 20’s could cost about $2,000.00 a year. For someone over 50, it could cost around $10,000.00 a year. Medical insurance is higher also for those over 40.
Excuse my spelling. “hornry” should be “ornery”, as in: stubborn, individualistic, unwilling to be subservient.
Most people work an “8 hour day” If you are working 22 hour days for 3 days at a time, then you are being worked to death.
Just because young people have energy and some salesmen do cocaine is no reason to make it the “norm”.
Everyone works on “spec(ulation)” in some industries as well (you do the first couple of jobs for “free” to see if it works out).
It’s exploitation. Nothing but.
>>>they tend to approach every problem in the same old way, with the same old solutions.
I agree. It works in the software area in spades. There, some comment that a programmer can only tolerate 3 language changes before he/she refuses to change again.
If you live long enough, you'll understand how it all works.
Now, what did he do to keep up with technology and programming? Well, he was a bright guy and he read computer magazines, studied the technology, came into work early, left late, and would have used viagra if it'd been available ~ if he'd needed it.
One day he decided he needed to learn C ~ before C was popular ~ and he did. Then C+, then "object oriented programming", then a background program you needed to know to manage the overhyped relational data base programming systems, and so on.
He just kept learning this stuff and staying ahead, and they kept him around because he was AHEAD of the curve, not because he was good. After all as you get older you start making mistakes, and that trend continues as your vision deteriorates, but if you stay ahead, "they" don't know about your mistakes.
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