no, it only seems that way because the powerful silicon valley and finance giants are the only ones with access to the top-tier young talent. the rest of the young people out there are inexperienced and not that smart, and definitely aren't worth a six figure salary.
so everyone else just hires older people, but it isn't sexy and marketable to the impressionable technology crowd.
You also can't get away with demanding the same work conditions or work/life balance from an older person than you can from a 21 year old CS graduate who's very eager to impress and has little other commitments to attend to.
I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week. You build it, you support it so keep your phone and laptop by you at all times outside of work" shtick that a lot of tech companies beat the young guy devs with.
> I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week.
Yes, because we've fallen for that bullshit before, killed ourselves to meet the deadline, and found that the asshole manager made it artificially short to "motivate" us, and the other teams aren't even finished yet :)
I've read his Mythical Man Month book, including parts of the anniversary / silver jubilee edition, but it's been a while. A couple of questions:
- Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization?
- What was the second system effect about? I know I can google, but interested to read your take on it first.
"Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization?"
Yep. The benefit is efficiency. However, modern SCRUM advocates simply advocate grinding away at stories.
"What was the second system effect about?"
The glittering new rewrite of an existing system is usually overengineered and worse. Seen it several times.
Interesting about the 2nd point, thanks. Might make for interesting reading if there are any articles about that. Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned.
>Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned.
And at least in one case, it was: in a C database middleware product that I worked on, as the team leader. It did work earlier but had big issues of bugs, slowness, memory leaks, and maintainability. There were many reasons for that, including complete freshers put to work in it (a mistake). After me and a small new team took over, we improved it a lot and fixed all those issues. It went on to become a much more successful product, deployed somewhat widely within the company, for client projects ...
so everyone else just hires older people, but it isn't sexy and marketable to the impressionable technology crowd.