[cageface]

Do it ridiculously better than they do.

That sounds nice on paper, but there are a lot of extremely talented and productive young programmers on the market now. The kind of education you can provide yourself if you really dive into the open-source world and things like github simply wasn't available even ten years ago. So yeah, do your best, in the old fashioned sense of the word before people became so enchanted with non-sequiturs like 110% performance.

[Silhouette]

> That sounds nice on paper, but there are a lot of extremely talented and productive young programmers on the market now.

Really? There are certainly a lot of young programmers who think they are extremely talented and productive, but 'twas ever thus. I'm still waiting to meet the 20-year-old who is as smart as I'm sure I was when I was 20. :-)

> The kind of education you can provide yourself if you really dive into the open-source world and things like github simply wasn't available even ten years ago.

And why would you assume that people who have access to that and ten years' extra experience would be somehow inferior to those who have access to that without the extra experience? The availability of open source code to explore is a potentially useful resource, but it's only one resource. Reading is still no substitute for doing, and it's not like many of the older programmers today never worked on hobby projects before the Internet came along.

[cageface]

And why would you assume that people who have access to that and ten years' extra experience would be somehow inferior to those who have access to that without the extra experience?

I don't. I just don't assume I'm superior either.

[nostrademons]

So that's when you do things ridiculously different than other people. If you fail, you've still got this baseline of skills to fall back on, and you're indistinguishable from everyone else. If you succeed, you're very much distinguishable from everyone else, and that's worth a lot of money.

The same explosion of knowledge that open-source and github has spawned has created a wealth of new niches that are quite promising but generally underexploited. Everybody's piling into Ruby on Rails, Django, JavaScript, iPhone, and Android development. How many people are piling into things like computer vision, large-scale data mining, wearable computing, or robotics?

Search was not sexy in 1998. E-commerce was sexy. Everybody piled into E-commerce, which left the field wide open for Google to come in and clean up while Pets.com withered away and died.

[cageface]

Agreed. That is my current plan exactly. I'm heading off for 3-6 months in SE Asia to spend travelling, living cheaply and studying math & machine learning with the goal of coming back to the States later to either pursue a graduate degree or a gig doing ML/analysis.

[tptacek]

Can any of them reliably find SQL injection, write a fuzzer, or spot an integer overflow? I'll pay you multiple thousands of dollars to refer them to me.

If not, re-read Patrick's comment with that in mind.

[Locke1689]

I only know the basics of these (SQL injection and integer overflow for kicks in high school, dumb context-aware codec fuzzer for a memory allocation bug in FFmpeg), but I'd like to take your quiz to see what I'm missing. I'm co-teaching NetPen at Northwestern this fall and want to know what I can focus on.

I'm turning 21 in a couple months, for whatever it's worth.

[tptacek]

Email me, and we'll figure out a good time for you to come buy and visit; I'll buy you coffee. We're super easy to get to.

[cageface]

Plenty of them can. I've worked with several myself. As you might expect, they don't need jobs. I worked with a 20-something at my previous job that was as productive on his own as some entire teams.

[tptacek]

If they are making 60k a year, you can make several thousand dollars right now by getting them a rather large pay raise. Otherwise, re-re-read Patrick.

I seem to have been bitten by the radioactive spider that allows me to reliably post the highest-ranking "who's hiring" comment here, and your perspective on the availability of domain expert programmers doesn't square with my reality.

[cageface]

I know several 20-somethings making well over 100k/year coding and managing teams of much older engineers. For the most part they got the domain expertise that implies doing real research in top undergraduate CS departments, but they do exist.

Of course, the smartest thing you can do as a senior programmer is build domain expertise and get out of the more commodified areas, like web app dev. If that's what you & Patrick are suggesting I agree, but you underestimate your juniors at your peril.

[tptacek]

You're doing a really good job of evading the point here.

If your friends are making $100k/yr, they are squarely in the same hiring demo that 40 year old senior devs are.

The whole thesis behind the article you are commenting on is that companies are hiring young because young devs are cheap. You made a comment to the effect of, "watch out, young cheap people can be domain experts too". I think you're mostly wrong, but I'd love it if you were right, and I'm very much putting my money where my mouth is.

I know that there are anomalously capable 25 year olds out there. I'd love to talk to them, too. But the idea that all of Silicon Valley is built around those people rings false. It may very well be built around 25 year olds, but not the weird ones that run High Frequency Trading Engine teams.

[cageface]

A lot of senior devs are making that kind of money not because they are domain experts but because they have been in the same spot collecting raises for a long time. Those are the kinds of people my warning was intended for and I think a lot of these people wildly underestimate how hard it would be for a bright young somebody to walk in and do their job.

I'm not denying that older, experienced programmers with strong domain skills are in demand, of course. I'm just saying that beneath that level the competition is heating up.