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These stories lead you to believe that engineering, as a profession, is broken. Like athletes and models, software engineering is one of the few career paths where your perceived value starts declining at a relatively young age. If a developer's value truly increases faster than their cost over time, why are software companies engaging in age discrimination? We can all tell ourselves that these companies are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run, but do facts back this up? Presumably, if another company hired all these valuable experienced professionals, they'd wipe the floor with these companies staffed by cheap college grads. Why hasn't this happened? I'm currently in my early 30s and working in a different engineering discipline, but I love programming and part of me would love to jump into professional programming. I interviewed at a few start-ups recently and got an offer for that money than I'm currently making. Ultimately, I turned it down because jumping into software this late in the game feels like possible career suicide. In my current occupation, senior engineers are valued and their accumulated knowledge and experience has demonstrated value. By comparison, writing software the HN way feels like building on sand. It's fun how a new programming language or database or web framework is announced weekly, but in the end everyone is chasing a moving target. I enjoy this now, but I can see how I might eventually grow tired of playing this game. I don't think Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc., have consciously been creating/adopting different programming languages to silo their workforce and reduce the fluidity of the labor market, but that might be a side effect. |