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by athesyn
2669 days ago
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I think ageism is too overstated in tech industry. If graduates with zero experience can get work, then it doesn't make sense that senior software engineers should struggle in the job market. Personally, I see the opposite with many job posts asking for minimum X years of experience. If a programmer with many years of expertise is jobless it says more about their personality and their ability to fit culturally speaking. Perhaps they're just applying for the wrong jobs, or use the wrong rhetoric etc. Too many programmers are concerned with their skill level and less with their ability to communicate their potential. That's what it comes down to when everything is taken into consideration. |
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Two people are applying for the same job. One is a guy with 2 decades experience in relevant technologies, the other is a fresh graduate who did an internship at a tech company. One of the big differences here are expectations. The experienced individual is going to demand substantially higher pay. They also are going to be less willing to live their job than a fresh grad due to a better understanding of the employer:employee relationship along with the fact that they likely also have more obligations outside of work, such as family. The fresh graduate is going to underestimate his own worth, be eager to please, and have fewer obligations as well as likely being more willing to put those aside for the job.
Because of this you're going to end up paying substantially more for the more experienced employee. How will that affect your product? It'd probably be good, but that's not a given. And even if it does result in a better product or a more efficient deployment time, how does that contrast against your increased labor costs? And this is all talking about things in terms of a meritocracy. In software, hype and marketing play a huge role in many product's success, meaning there's even less reason to optimize for the most capable teams.
As an aside this is also the reason for the huge push for getting [x into computer science]. It's great optics for public relations, but increase the labor pool and guess what happens to labor prices? Mega corporations such as Google and Apple are pushing upwards of 100,000 employees. Reduce average labor costs by 10,000 a year and that's well over a billion dollars of recurring profit per year - keeping in mind that when a company pays an employee e.g. $10,000 they end up paying substantially more than that in various compensation-scaling taxes and other disincentives.
As our capable labor market has exploded relative to the quantity of desirable jobs, many wages have stagnated. Tech is the exception. It's a field where demand is still in line with supply which keeps wages going up. This [1] is an archive link to Glassdoor's reporting on Google salaries. The inflation there is remarkable. In 2010 a senior software engineer made $125k. Today, 9 years later, they make $165k, a 32% increase. Inflation during that period has only increased by about 15%.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20100601000000*/https://www.glas...