[JabavuAdams]

You should hire young ... but not to get the best technical ability. You should hire young because we older developers, while being technically superior to our younger colleagues, don't want to put up with your bullshit.

I've been on enough projects that can best be described as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic that I don't put up with management dropping the ball. The challenge for more experienced developers is to recognize when some extra individual effort would actually save the project and also be compensated, without getting burned on another fucked project.

In every software company I've worked at there's been no feedback loop for poor management tighter than project failure, or ultimately company failure -- but that takes a long time. Also, it can be attributed to many confounding factors by bosses who are less than self-aware.

[squozzer]

Now that I'm 49, here's my 2 yen.

After a certain age, I didn't care as much about the "challenge" of a new position so much as the money and power I would receive. Shocking, I know.

I also acquired a certain ruthlessness born maybe out of my observations of corporate life, or from a sense that my life's candle is burning ever shorter.

Sure, I would still make the mouth noises and refrain from keeping it real. And I would occasionally succeed.

The problem with revealing a taste for money and power is that it puts you in competition with the company suits - who consider money and power as much their birthright as their perfectly coiffed hair and their legacy admission to Hahvahd. So if given the choice, the suits will always choose less-experienced people who don't value money and power over better-qualified people who do.

Put another way, suits have a sense of inadequacy that only Freud could appreciate.

[fleitz]

It's deck chairs all the way down.

You rearrange them to the best of ability, get some commendations on how well the chairs are arranged, and get promoted to the next sinking ship before the current one sinks.

If you're lucky you'll become an expert deck chair arranger and get lucrative consulting gigs on how a different arrangement of chairs could have saved the ship.

[JabavuAdams]

Bingo. Every so often, you do ship something and gasp people like it and pay money for it, though. That keeps me on the ship. The moment that becomes institutionally unlikely, I'm gone.