Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

Reading this made me think why there are so few middle-aged engineers in tech. There have been several theories for this, such as ageism and the field's rapid expansion. Reading this made me wonder if they just get sick of it and leave.

Friends had reached out to me. "We need a director for our reliability software engineering stuff". They asked for my help. They wanted to build something good, like the early days of a few former places I had worked at. I was willing to help out, but honestly, only as a contractor. I had enough of the full time tech thing for one lifetime already.

Tech has an image of itself as a magical place where we're changing the world while getting to indulge our inner geeks. And yet a director title for an individual contributor and top 1% pay is not enough to close a hire. The top people are essentially taking early retirement. People in other fields (doctors for example) continue working long after retirement age. Maybe tech is not such a magical place?

I can relate, I'm in my late thirties and I hate tech. I love technology, mind you, I hate "tech", the SV culture of "we're changing the world" (when it's very often for the worse) and all the patronizing stuff Rachel describes in the article.

Sure, it's not like that in every company, but I don't really care enough to try and find one that's fun. I'd rather hang out with my family, and make outlandish devices and services I'd like to use.

I think the only thing saving me at this point is that I am obsessed with mathematics, not with tech.

I have a lot of other hobbies that save me, but the math vs. tech mindset is very real to me in the workplace context. I am not saying all mathematicians are good, or good people, but it helps to have something more real to hold onto.

I think the same holds for hacker culture. If you are a hacker more than a "techy" (Edit: I think there should be a better word here.), sometimes that distinction is what saves you.

I'm much more of a hacker, but that's the problem for me, I'm not doing anything interesting. It's all the same things I've done a billion times before, again and again. I guess my problem is that nobody wants to promote a remote developer who lives in Greece to anything other than code monkey, so eh, these are my choices.

No one wants to promote a developer to anything in general. One mechanism to achieve that is to simply promote everyone, e.g everyone claims a senior title, claims fullstack, etc. That’s one way of keeping developers roughly where they are.

That's generally a transparent non-event, but I agree, I don't see many developers being promoted to much.

Maybe supply is still way lower than necessary, considering that proficiency requires several years of training and practice on technology that changes very often. Maybe the supply pool is still effectively limited to certain “socioeconoethnic” groups, and often companies self-sabotage by requiring candidates to live in certain areas.

In my experience, the attitudes of software developers, as seen all over the web, are basically the definition of “privileged” in a way that does not match almost anything else. “I didn’t like my manager, so I quit and spent a few months counting my $$$ until I found something I liked more” is something that very few other professions can flaunt. This is, incidentally, why old-school managers are basically incompatible with the sector: in any tech hotspot, you literally cannot threaten or bully a tech employee, unlike any other employee. I bet lots of people high-up hate this so much.

Ask Susan Fowler whether you "cannot threaten or bully a tech employee" in a tech hotspot.

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Fowler

"I had a new job offer in my hands less than a week later."

The minute her boss actually told her she was "on thin ice", she was out. Despite her being effectively outside the preferred "socioeconoethnic" groups that most companies self-restrict to, she was practically free at all times to walk out and get an equivalent (or likely better) job. That's a massive privilege.

You missed the part where she was subjected to systematic intimidation by Uber and private investigators working on their behalf after she left.

This can happen in any sector - but in most of them it's also pretty hard to find a well-paid replacement job in a week, so it's more effective and less reported.

And yet, lots of software developers do quit and spend a few months off, and then go work somewhere else. Because managers do threaten and bully employees. This is considered 'normal' for the field. One running joke in my circles is that developers never 'take vacation'. They simply wait a few months between jobs, because they're never at one job for more than a year or two.

The other way to look at this is: companies pay programmers ridiculous salaries because the working conditions are so hated. Junior programmers (even those who have never been to college) are paid about as well as dentists, and they still often quit after a couple years. This is way above the $75K happiness threshold. We literally can't pay them enough to stay working for us!

Hypothesis: software development is one of the few industries that I've interacted with where the workers haven't organized yet. When there's no union for collective bargaining, what lever does an individual employee have, other than asking for yet more money, or quitting?

P.S., In what industries do you commonly see managers threatening or bullying workers? I haven't seen that at all.

If the ridiculous money is (partly) compensation for the bad circumstances, would you expect the compensation to sink if a union improves the situation?

I'm not sure how this is in different countries. I've not heard that many horror stories in Germany, but most work here is also not VC-backed startups, and the compensation is much lower in comparison. The non-vc-investing might of course also be a reason for lower compensation, when your valuation can't explode, attracting the top developers is less of a priority.

> P.S., In what industries do you commonly see managers threatening or bullying workers? I haven't seen that at all.

Sales (a lot!), restaurants (pretty much every line cook I've ever spoken to mentions it, and what I read in comments online sounds like it's the same in all countries), call centers, transportation off the top of my head. The main difference is that they're usually not paid well.

> companies pay programmers ridiculous salaries because the working conditions are so hated.

I think any blue-collar worker would be laughing his ass off at this statement.

> paid about as well as dentists, and they still often quit after a couple years. This is way above the $75K happiness threshold.

Fuck-you-money actually enables this sort of freedom, since you're less scared of going jobless for a few months thanks to all the fat you've stored. So might as well quit and think about things for a while. Over certain levels, the meaning of one's job can take priority over immediate compensation.

> We literally can't pay them enough to stay working for us!

In the end, everyone deep down would rather not have to work for someone else, or to not work at all. Programmers in tech hotspots are lucky enough to actually be able to do it, and pretty often too, without any serious repercussion. For many, this is a golden age the likes of which we've never seen.

> In what industries do you commonly see managers threatening or bullying workers?

All of them - we wouldn't have unions otherwise. There is a reason the word "boss" has negative connotations.

> In the end, everyone deep down would rather not have to work for someone else, or to not work at all.

I very much disagree. I like that my company cares about things like sales/marketing/HR/finance so I don't have to. And anyway, for most jobs, you need a supporting structure that has your back, like a company or a government agency or whatever. Sure, you could start your own company, but at that point you'll most likely spend more time doing management rather than actual work. I like that I can focus on my technical role since I'm very much not a manager type.

If you didn’t have to earn money to live, you wouldn’t need to have a company or whatnot - that is my point.

You still want to accomplish goals, and most goals require some sort of organization that bears the initial/ongoing investment and provides you with the back office etc. For instance, even if you're the best surgeon in the world, you won't be about to run a hospital all on your own.

> You still want to accomplish goals

why do that when Civilization V exists?

Developers have that attitude because it’s a technical creative profession. You are tied to what you create so it has emotional impact if you don’t put in the emotional framework to deal with business realities.

Very very few people writing software knows how to do it well. I'm talking from a cultural perspective, not from a technical one. Young people are either hungry enough or not jaded enough or both to put up with it.

By the time you hit your late thirties you're already too tired for this crap. By your forties you're looking for an exit. By your fifties, you're one job loss away from semi-retirement.

Late 30s here, tech lead. I hear myself saying, "I'm too old for this shit" under my breath almost every fucking week. So.. What you're telling me is that I'm in for more of the same. Great.

Tech rapidly burns people out, the people that survive either get someplace where they can quietly hide, play the dominance game, find some way to duck out from time to time or some combination of all three. You either follow the crowd or people tell you that your wrong at every opportunity, if you want to prove yourself right you get saddled with impossible goals to do so.

The constant churn of the actual technology has many people running to catch up. What worked today no-longer works tomorrow because there is no considering in the engineering, if that even happens, of permanence. Because of the heavy involvement of software the hardware is often burned at the end, some products took longer to bring to life than they lived, because its all disposable. The software, the hardware, the people.

I think to see why women and older engineers are few and far between we should be looking at these issues, because in some technology companies outside big tech we see plenty of women and older engineers, but since those companies don't "innovate" every quarter and pivot like a top, they trudge on outside the limelight, some doing great things we take for granted.

I told my manager (yes, it is a generalisation): There are two people in life, those who think you solve problems with technology and those that believe you solve problems with humaneness.

It's funny to me that people think the first options "sounds good". The second option didn't even sound like it was an option at all (to tech people). My silent reaction was along the lines of: "Do you really think I am kidding about the second option?"

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