[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.

[tptacek]

It should cheer you substantially to realize that you have come around to what I believe Patrick's way of thinking has been all along.

[cageface]

I don't think we were in substantial disagreement to begin with. I just don't find language like Do it ridiculously better than they do. to be very useful. Certainly English superlatives have lost most of their punch at this point but for most people their best isn't going to be ridiculously better than everyone else's.

[tptacek]

Next time, read the comment carefully before fixating on a single word and starting an unproductive argument. I know it's hard; I do it all the time too.

Re-read Patrick's comment, but this time, take the Cliff's Notes with you:

* It's not enough to be better; you have to find ways to be measurably better; implied: better along axes that people who write checks care about.

* Learn to market yourself; implied; the business world is not like Github, and nobody is going to invest any effort into learning how awesome you are, because your awesomeness is not inherently interesting to most people who write checks. You have to make it interesting.

* Develop non-commodity domain expertise; implied: not only is "learning Merb" not a credible differentiator, but, all respect to Yehuda Katz who is smarter than me, it's likely that writing Merb isn't either.

* Own your company.

The fact that Patrick managed to pack this into 91 words and all you appear to have taken from it was "Do it ridiculously better" may account for some of the downvotes.

[cageface]

Were we arguing? I thought we were discussing.

Patrick's built a nice business for himself but I spent the last ten years working with some of the people that wrote the foundational research papers on computer graphics, not building bingo card generators, so maybe we're looking at this from different ends of the pipe.