Close. But I think it's more along the lines of:

"This kid (i.e., recent grad) reminds me of me. My shit doesn't stink. With my care, I bet his won't either."

vs

"There's no way I wanna be that old guy / gal. I deny the fact that he / she could be my future."

Basically, ego vs fear.

I suspect this confirmation bias contributes to various isms. Racism, sexism, etc. That is, they are not me, and I refuse to see they can be me.

"This kid (i.e., recent grad) reminds me of me."

Ah, "culture fit". Looks like me, dresses like me, educated like me, thinks like me.

> Looks like me

The classic signs of 2 words till racism.

> but the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already?

An aspect of this thinking is that people don't always know how to identify those 'wizards' if they can only evaluate someone against the company's own internal tech/lingo.

Someone very well might be a 'wizard' - demonstrably so with experience on visible projects. But if the interviewing staff can't parse out those skills in to something they grok, there's still a mismatch.

Another way of putting this: I've seen people in companies who were considered 'wizards' because they could do everything 'the company way', even though the 'company way' was demonstrable and horrifically both inefficient and insecure. Boat-rockers were not welcomed, regardless of the potential for positive impact.

I think that's one of the very crucial elements of the ever-so-mythical "cultural fit": namely that most companies hire people that look like the median value of all employees already hired. They often don't seem to look for the best they can find.

As mentioned by another commenter, it’s not actually easy to tell in an interview if someone is a “wizard”. And in fact if that someone has experience different from yours, you are even less well equipped to make that determination. It’s a sad irony that the person best equipped to contribute something new to the team is often overlooked exactly because the team doesn’t recognize their differing expertise as valuable.

The only dev I've worked with that I'd elevate to the wizard level... interview was a disaster, it was his first out of college, he was shy, answers were short, etc. We hired him anyways to get favor with his family, figured we would churn him out and keep everyone happy.

Best hire ever! The quiet shy kid could code circles around anyone id met prior.

Oddly he hired someone else with same degree from same well respected school, guy was not even one tenth as useful as the first hire. Third hire from same uni was junk too. That's when I really stopped looking at pedigree or even what degrees the person has, it's never proven to be a great indicator to me.

Edit;spelling.

> We hired him anyways to get favor with his family, figured we would churn him out and keep everyone happy.

If you don't mind my asking, which country were/are you located in and what line of business were/are you working in?

At that time, Austria doing Ecommerce and enterprise web dev.

1.) Average stay in company is 2 years, so whether someone grows wizzard in 10 years is immaterial.

2.) If you are hiring for vague sense that person grows in 10 years, you are extremely likely to be biased for all kind if cultural and demographic signals that have zero with actual performance.

3.) Old are not wizards now, for dame reason why young are not wizards now. Nobody can know everything and wizardly is moving target - half composed of myths and half of smokescreen.

It is not to say that great people don't exist, they absolutely do. But they all have expertise in what they do now and when they change jobs, there is learning curve.

> Nobody can know everything and wizardly is moving target - half composed of myths and half of smokescreen.

These people do exist, though. Just like in any sufficently deep intellectual field, there are people who are very gifted and have insane focus. Compounded over years, they grow to be real beasts, just listen to any talk by John Carmack or Jonathan Blow. The bad news for the employees is that they tend to start their own companies, as typical firms don't have appropriate spots for them (as someone else mentioned, these people provide 10x value but are typically only paid 1.5x-2x).

The other thing is, those 'wizards' typically have deep knowledge, not broad. Would most of either of the two people you mentioned really be all that wizardly at an average web startup?

Sure, a games company or similar, but would Carmack be a 'rockstar' on something like a node.js stack? I'm sure he could pick the tech up quickly, but most of his skills lie elsewhere. And yet there is the expectation in tech that truly experienced people will be good at everything, just look at the post about 'things I don't know' from yesterday to see examples of this expectation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780065

I mostly agree. Talented people can often demonstrate that talent across a wide range of situations. But it's naive to expect truly world-class expertise developed over decades to be readily transferable to other areas. It's easy to say people should keep their skills up to date. But if your compensation and reputation is based on a deep understanding of a narrow area that took years of experience to create, it's easier said than done to just learn something new and expect to be compensated similarly.

Sure. And they are great in their area of expertise and able to learn new areas too. When they are changing to slightly new area, they look less like wizards unless given benefit of doubt.

But also, they tend to be less of talkers and presenters which is another separate skill. As in, they are rarely public face.

I'm going to assert without evidence that no one in this industry is thinking 3 years out, much less 10. Heck, the chance someone you hire today is going to be working for your company in 10 years approximates 0.

Why ever hire people with no experience then?

1. You need somebody.

2. They're cheap.

3. They went to the same school/non-school/frat/boot camp you did.

4. They look like they'll be fun to hang out with.

5. You also have no experience.

>but the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already?

Not everyone started in college, or started college at eighteen.

But what are the chances that the college hire who had became the wizard is still in that same company after 10 years? It's ridiculous to hire with that kind of long-term expectations.

> The college hire might grow to be a grand wizard in 10 years, and become a massive asset to the company.

I'm not sure if employers are aware of this, but people staying at companies over 10 years are getting exceedingly rare.

Only because employers don't orient pay and promotion schedules around market rates and experience levels.

If you're ten years at the same company, it's exceptional that you couldn't get an offer for significantly more money. Paying "market rate" is a policy for new hires, not existing devs as much.

> Paying "market rate" is a policy for new hires, not existing devs as much.

And as you pointed out, that's a huge mistake. To this day I cannot understand why people simply don't do meetings where somebody says "okay guys and girls, we have a new need in the company; you 5 here aren't heavily loaded -- or we can relieve one of you of their current duties to work on the new thing -- is somebody up for it?"

I have witnessed such an approach I think twice for 17 years of career. And it worked really well the both times. Re-negotiating salaries is a matter of understanding and realizing that you now bring more value and/or carry more responsibility. For some reason HRs and CEOs absolutely hate raising wages of existing employees. They might hire somebody new at 3x the salary of a current senior engineer (seen that as well, and the new hire had significantly less expertise!) but they will be damned before they allow that current engineer get a higher wage.

It might be that they are afraid that if they raise one wage then everybody will demand the same. But I don't see how this would be different with a new hire. No more than 2 months in they will be sharing details of their arrangement with the other colleagues during the lunch break. Same thing, cat get outs of the bag sooner or later.

That phenomena -- huge resistance to raising wages of existing employees -- remains a mystery to me to this day.

> It is still possible the older person is going to become a wizard later, but the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already?

The vast majority of coders are not and will never be a "wizard". And that's OK. You can still be valuable to a company if you aren't a recent college graduate or a wizard.

Edit: also, be ready to pay through the nose for any actual wizard you want to hire. They can demand bucketloads of money.

My experience over 25 years suggests that wizards can readily command 1.5-2x and deliver beyond 10x. If you can find and engage them, they're one of the best semi-secret bargains in tech.

But to attract them usually requires a lot more then money. You're project needs to interest them, to start.

Every "wizard" I know makes 500k-1mil, some in all salary. I guess that's 1.5-2x some places.

who stays at a company for 10 years?

Unfortunately I might fall in this category. I am a Sr level manager/influencer at a Dow 30. Ex-programmer. Been there 7 years. I just got accepted at kellogg emba. So unless I switch jobs after 1 year I will be this guy.

One of the reason i got stuck is that 3 years into my job; my ex-VPs, who are both CTOs now, asked me to build cloud based eCommerce platform for this top 5 online retailer.

where i was I charge of digital transformation for the entire online space except the infrastructure.

This was 3 year journey. That put it into 6+ year mark.

It’s less common than it used to be but I was at one job 13 years, another 8, coming up on 9 at my current one.