Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically useless for years.
I think it's probably just VC bias driven by the number of unicorns which had young founders (VCs aren't after 'moderately successful startups', where founders tend to be older, they're after wildly successful unicorns).
Those young founders hire "people like themselves" which naturally means people their age or younger.
There's a certain degree of implicit age discrimination baked into the default hiring process of most startups too - all of those questions about reversing binary trees or implementing quicksort biases hiring toward recent grads who have just learned it and away from the experienced devs (because 99% of devs simply never use this kind of theory).
tl;dr VCs cargo cult and end up investing in young founders, young founders cargo cult their interview process and hire people "like themselves".
That hasn't completely escaped, but with a family and 25 years experience, I put that into a different perspective now.
Startups need to start realizing that it’s okay to have diversity and different cultural groups. By putting yourself in the stereotypical startup culture box you greatly limit your ability to hire and create diversity. If everyone thinks and acts the same you miss out on valuable perspectives and ideas.
Unforunately, they are. A large proportion of the tech industry is startups / small businesses. I'd be surprised if Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft make up even 10% of tech workers.
My current employer employees more tech workers than all YC startups combined, for example.
Facebook - 25,105 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook)
Amazon has 566,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)), but it's unclear how many of those are actually tech workers. Amazon has a lot of retail and warehouse workers, many of who with wages so low they qualify for food stamps.
Apple - 123,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.) Apple's 2014 SEC filing said that half of their employees are retail workers, so let's give Apple 62,000 tech workers.
Microsoft - 124,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft)
There are around 7 million tech workers in the USA (https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/201...)
Even if we pretended that all 566,000 Amazon employees were actually tech workers (they're not) and the above numbers were US-only employees (they're not), that would total to about 860,000 tech workers.
860,000 / 7 million = 12.3%
That means that at least 87.7% of American tech workers do not work at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft, despite these companies being five of the richest tech companies in the world.
Oracle
Cisco
IBM
Dell
HP Enterprise
HP Inc.
Lockheed Martin
Northrop Grumman
Raytheon
General Dynamics
General Electric
Intel
AMD
Qualcomm
Texas Instruments
United Technologies
Analog Devices
Samsung
Phillips
Toshiba
... I'm gonna stop listing all the big tech companies I can think of. I madey point.
Most SV companies talk a big game about "diversity," but that never extends to diversity of age.
It's funny how so many people in the valley don't understand that discrimination based on age is just as illegal as discrimination based on race or sex or any other protected class.
Only if you discriminate against old people, it is legal to openly discriminate against the young.
I guess I'm biased because I'm young but it's a little non-sensical since young people are the ones with student debt and record-high housing costs to pay for while 50-year-olds have decades of savings and stock market and real-estate appreciation to fall back on if they find themselves unemployed.
That's a lovely stereotype, but far from the truth; which is why so many people are working into their 70's these days and why reverse mortgages are on the rise.
There was an article in the newspaper (You can Google what that is) recently that noted that more than half of Americans have less than $5,000 in retirement savings. A similar number live in apartments.
The whole "decades of savings" thing is a cultural myth that Millennials use to make themselves feel like victims. Somehow they think they're the only generation that's ever been through hard times.
Not sure how you inferred this from my comment. My parents went through much harder times when they were my age.
However, unemployment would be a trivial inconvenience for them now at 50. They’d probably just retire and not bother looking for another full time gig. I don’t really know any 26-year-olds who could say the same.
Edit: I looked at the data and the median 55-59 year old in the US has US$150k in net worth vs. US$19k for the median 25-29 year old. Why would the former need extra legal protections against employment discrimination and the latter not?
And insight gained from a world of experience that a junior or intermediate devs doesn't have.
They will work more hours for less money. This is nothing new. My first job out of university in the early 1990s was for one of the "big" consulting firms. 50-60 hour work weeks were the norm. I made decent money (they paid overtime) especially for a first job, but I wouldn't do it at my age now with a family and kids.
Lack of manager ability to measure productivity based on anything else. Between POs, BAs, business representatives, and IT managers there are a lot of people who don't seem to be able to grasp why two relatively simple to describe tasks can require such vast differences in time. So it becomes hard for them to judge if their developer is wasting their time or not (and let's not even begin on overall lack of trust to begin with), so the only fall back measure is if they have their butt in the seat and appear to be working. And even if you are lucky enough that everyone you directly deal with either understands the basics on why sizing varies so greatly or able to accept it without question, you still have to deal with middle managers walking the floor who measure productivity the same as they would in a factory. And if you are lucky enough to not even have this problems, you still have to deal with cultural norms set in party by all the jobs which aren't as lucky.
As people are noting on this thread, startups are their own thing. During my startup days, we were always the next sale or funding round away from going belly up. We pulled late hours to get in the latest features for our president to "sell" to investors.
Had a lowball offer from a company once - had some friends working there. I could see from some earlier code that some really basic web knowledge was being overlooked. I won't go in to details, but... this was something I'd pointed out to one of the managers there (met at a local meetup). Fixing it then would have taken about 2-3 hours, scanning all the code to ensure it was in sync. Instead, the problem spread as they grew, and it's harder to fix when there are dozens of staff and thousands of files in use vs 5 staff and a dozen files. It became a 'this has to be fixed in order to close mega-deal X integration with company Y', and it took multiple devs several weeks of full-on effort to rectify everything.
How do you quantify that? "Please, take my advice, doing this 4 hours of work now now will save you >$50k and weeks of opportunity cost in 4 years". Generally people don't seem to care.
Data import processes often seem to get shuffled to people usually least prepared to understand how to handle them.
2 anecdotes:
1. worked someplace years ago who would take in customer data, transform it in to our structure, then put in to mysql (2004 mysql). larger projects... this ended up taking 24 hours in some cases. I spent some time (a few hours), and had the whole thing working in under an hour. Working with a couple other folks there they got it down to around 20-25 minutes. The big secret was .... dropping indexes, importing chunks in to memory (vs disk), then copying the memory table to disk after a chunk. This was first met with "that can't work... we've already optimized everything... etc". Until it was demonstrated.
2. Colleague worked at a company which was primarily email marketing. They'd take in email lists, "import" them (which created some related metadata records, etc). The guy who wrote this importer had 'rewritten it to be faster' a year earlier, and larger imports (we're talking like... 10k emails) were taking days. Onboarding a client of 30k emails would take 2 weeks. It was literally insane code. My colleague rewrote the whole thing to work the 30k emails in under an hour, documented the code, had tests demonstrating weird edge cases... "Can't trust it - original dev needs to review it first". He (my colleague) was part of a group of people who was let go a couple months later (and was also approaching 40).
The phrase "big data" was also taking hold as a buzzword around the time of incident 2 (2 years ago maybe?). People think anything that can't fit in to excel is somehow 'big data'.
To be fair, I'd say this is only true if "excel" is generalized to "the largest non-distributed-computing tool they're personally aware of".
Granted, that may usually be a spreadsheet, but at least in the tech industry, people do know of DBMSes. They just happen to think an affordable single server is an order of magnitude smaller than is actually achievable, even if it's an order of magnitude larger than a spreadsheet.
But cheap and compliant.
I generally agree with your post, but this statement is just wrong (possibly there are a few counter-example domains). If a company cannot get value from new grads within, say, 6 months, it is the problem of the tech lead they are working for.
We routinely get very useful work from summer interns, who are gone completely in 8-12 weeks. This does require organization and a little effort though: pose work they can complete in 1 month, calm them that they do not need to do it quickly, offer support if needed and check progress weekly; and pay attention -- if they sense the attitude that they are useless to the team they will often work that way, too.
TBH, this works maybe 50% of the time (we get useful results from half the interns and nothing from the other half), but I suspect full time employees are not 100% useful either. Just my 2c.
My company has found a competitive advantage by doing blind hiring and getting super talented people (sometimes older, sometimes female) that other companies have undervalued.
Web forums are RIDICULOUSLY overweighted toward students and younger startup employees. Partially because older workers have jobs and families and better stuff to do than play online. Partially because the work they do isn't particularly worth writing about, and the latest fads aren't that relevant to their work.
But please don't have the misguided assumption that what you see on HN or Reddit is truly representative of the industry as a whole. It took me a long time, and a lot of unnecessary anxiety, to wake up and see the bigger picture.
Most people at my current company are >40 (and probably >50 - I don't know everyone's exact age but I can infer somewhat). ~90% are married.
I've worked a bunch of places and, quite frankly, none have had an overly young crowd. Experience has always been valued everywhere I've worked.
So in my experience its just not a problem for the companies I want to/do/have worked for. I live nowhere near San Francisco.
It's already here and it's called Java :)
https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-wa...
COBOL skills remain valuable because they're running hard-to-replace data processing systems at the core of large corporations. Java fills the same role.
Wait what's that about developer royalties?