Article: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders

https://onezero.medium.com/ctrl-alt-delete-the-planned-obsolescence-of-old-coders-9c5f440ee68

When I was a young coder, I was often confused at the seeming dearth of coders who were over the age of 35. Where did they go? What would happen to me? Would I just disappear? It's definitely more concerning now that I'm 32, because I've already been on the run from the fiery ritual of Carrousel for two whole years.

Where Do They Come From? Where Do They Go?

First of all, I wasn't looking in the right places. I was at a lot of young companies with low pay and very poor work-life balance — Electronic Arts, DeviantArt, web startups, that sort of thing. Most sensible coders wouldn't be found within 30,000 yards of the places where I worked as a young developer.

When I worked at TELUS, a great big telecom, I found a lot of the old coders. SFU had a few more. The benefits were good, the pay was _good enough_, the work-life balance was good. Most of the developers I encountered at TELUS had been working at the same job for over a decade. The pace of development and progress could be _glacial_, but that was okay because that was how everybody liked it. Slow, safe, thoughtful, no surprises.

When I left both TELUS and SFU, I left thinking "I hope you have a place for me in 20 years, when I'm tired of the sisyphean task of keeping up with the tech industry."

IBM is the Literal Actual Devil, Never Work There

Between shooing out everyone over a certain age, definitely probably using technology to grease the wheels of the holocaust, and using AI to lie to cancer patients, it's possible that IBM is the worst company I have ever encountered. Imagine a company so evil that Oracle looked at it and said "we're the David to that Goliath".

Transition into Management

It seems like the only way to advance the career past "developer", but I have some pretty deep antipathy towards this whole idea. I guess I lead a small team, now? It seems like if I keep building things that people want me to scale up, I'll end up a manager out of sheer necessity.

I get cranky when I go too long without coding, though. I like building things. Rands has written a number of good articles about the relationship between management and coding — but I see my value as different from that of a manager.

What I Want Senior Development To Be; And What It Definitely Isn't

"Proven engineers who occupy the most senior roles should be deployed to solve the hardest problems on the most critical projects. Their roles should emphasize technical leadership through writing, speaking, and mentoring."

I am a code wrecking-ball. I can be deployed to solve hard problems, and I will blast through them at high speeds and make a bit of a mess. I think of that as valuable. I picked the other developers on my team for their careful, thoughtful approach to development, to try to balance out my more incautious tendencies — and am then often frustrated by their careful approach to software development. I want good engineering so long as it doesn't interfere with my fast engineering.

The Strength of Age Diversity

When I started working at VRChat, I was surprised by the age diversity of our team.

Around a campfire, one of our most talented developers revealed how excited he was to attend the premiere of Star Wars — which surprised me, because I had heard that very same story from my father _(a man who, even now, still regards computers as a bit of an unfortunate fad)_.

Some of our other teammates were born _after I graduated from high school_. We're a very small company that's quite well distributed about my age, the scientifically proven correct age to be.

A good balance of youthful energy and the skill and focus of experience is very much an asset to a company. Too much youthful energy and you end up doing something stupid — too much cynical experience and you end up selling middleware to telecoms.

A Crowd of Cheap Youngsters

In "The Soul of a New Machine", Tracy Kidder describes an ambitious computer hardware design project — a lot of it wouldn't be possible without a bunch of underpaid college grads given impossible goals, under-managed, and worked to the bone. The project manager was fond of mushroom management.

This book is a well-loved staple in the industry, unfortunately.

It would seem that the soul of this new machine was cruel and exploitative, although that's hardly a surprise.

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