Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

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ChrisMarshallNY

In today’s software industry, I’ve found that older technical specialists aren’t particularly welcomed; regardless of their ability or skills. Just being older is enough. If they have a significant reputation, or long-term employment at a single place, prospects are better.

I was a manager, in addition to being a technical specialist, for a long time. It was a fairly small, highly-skilled team. As time went on, my management duties replaced my technical ones, and I was forced to do technical work on the side (open source work), in order to maintain my technical edge. This resulted in my having a fairly significant technical portfolio, by the time I left my job.

I have encountered very few good managers, in my career. I have seen some great technicians destroyed by becoming managers.

I think the industry’s refusal to cultivate lifetime technical careers has resulted in a lot of problems, but it is not anything that has been studied, in any meaningful way (of which I’m aware). I only have personal anecdata, which, by itself, isn’t particularly relevant, in the big picture.

Simple problem:

Developers want more money for more experience.

At a certain point, more experience does not make them more effective developers.

If they want to justify higher salaries, but can not be more effective on their own, they need to multiply their experience by making other developers more effective.

The organizational problem is that most companies see management as the only way to do that, but not everyone can and likes to be a manager.

We as developers have to make sure we promote mentoring, tool and framework building, system architecture and such topics as viable paths upward. Otherwise, managers will only have managing as an idea of how someone can create more value.

Excellent point.

Training and mentoring are extremely important.

Last night, I had dinner with a friend of mine, who is a former Marine. He told me that the "best of the best" become DIs (Drill Instructors). He had tremendous respect for his DIs, and described them as "almost superhuman."

DIs are always noncoms, but tend to be highly experienced. They are also good trainers. Being a good trainer is a fairly specialized skillset, and many techs aren't able to adapt to that, either.

In my case, money has never been the point. I'm a high school dropout, with a GED, and never really got paid as much as even many entry-level kids are, these days. Nonetheless, I lived frugally and sensibly, and have been able to survive being tossed out into the trash. Many of my peers do not have that capability.

In the early years of my career I was the hot-shot developer that outproduced everyone. It was fun, but ultimately unrewarding. Some people don't mind but most people dislike others who are conspicuously better/faster than them. In a "team sport" like development, this was a bad strategy.

Now the analogy I like to use is a rising tide raises all ships. Instead of being the individual hot-shot I do everything I can to make everyone else a hot-shot. If they are talking in a meeting and I think a nudge needs to be made, I just 1:1 message them with a tip and then let them say it instead of speaking up. I do more training of juniors and even seniors, teaching devs how to think through complex problems. Now my teams are more productive, most of the people like me and want to be working with me, and my income has skyrocketed as a result. Of course, I did have to escape from traditional office hierarchies and go into consulting to really increase the $.

I agree with one caveat: the degree to which more experience means more productive depends to a large extent on two factors:

1) The experience. 2) The job.

Having 10 years hacking on one system probably won't make you anymore productive than 3. At that point you're a factory worker, and you can't only put so much expertise into flipping a few switches and following traces.

However, having 20 years of diverse technical experience will make you more productive than 15 if the job requires the breadth you've developed.

I'm 12 years in and have moved into Startups for just that reason. You get to learn more numerous things, and you get to use all of them. I've been at my current job 6 months and I've worked with 4 languages, more libraries than I can count, 2 third parties, blah blah blah. If I went back in time even 3 years of experience, I would definitely be less effective. If I went back 5, I'd be struggling.

I work for a small company, and one of the things I enjoy is we're always spinning up new ideas to see if they work. We tend to spend half time on new stuff and half time on maintenance.

This has given me a lot of exposure to different things over the years. It's mostly web stuff, but one of the more interesting ones was interfacing with hardware for a warehouse app that we built to make the shipping process less error prone and more efficient.

Often said as, you can have 10 years of experience or 10 one year experiences.

This ignore the immense amount of overlap various systems have, and the benefits of cross-pollination you get from the parts that don't. Even if you work on a completely different system every year, by that tenth year, you'll be up and running faster, and probably have something to teach the people who've been working on that system longer than you.

I took an alternative approach, I was living in london, so I moved to Portugal. a remote London Dev contracting, and the wage is more than enough over here

I wonder if the lack of cultivation is partially due to mismatched incentives: It's often impossible to be a successful manager without embedding yourself in a particular social network and organizational culture; making management the 'reward' for a good developer means that the good developers can be, for lack of a better term, brainwashed into corporate culture.

Older and more experienced technical specialists are more of a threat. Cultivating those people would mean giving them mentorship and resources, and older tech specialists are the population that's most likely to be a.) able to leave/have transferrable skills/not be as reliant on the companies as the managers, b.) old enough to stand up for their juniors - can't have someone on the team telling them NOT to work 14 hour days/killing themselves grinding to work at FAANG, and c.) they're most likely to have the organizational and long-term thinking/architectural skills to compete.

Cultivating older technical specialists could be seen, by tech execs, as training in and investing in their own competition.

The team that I ran was composed of experienced C++ developers, working on image processing pipeline stuff (propellor-beanie territory). They also weren't being paid particularly well, compared to what they could have gotten at other places.

As a manager, it was my job to retain them; which I did -quite well. I did this via a combination of maintaining my own technical prowess (on my own time, as my company was no support at all on this), empowering my employees, staying out of their hair, learning the individual drivers of each of my team members, not nickle-and-dimeing them, supporting their training and personal/career development, and not playing political games. I never lied to them, and used carrots far more often than sticks. I also -very importantly- shielded them from a rather rapacious HR department, and terrible upper-level management.

I didn't give a damn about whether or not they wanted to replace me (I don't think it ever crossed their minds).

Basically, I became the manager that I always wished I had.

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