Follow-up on old engineers

My previous post on why it sucks to be an old engineer became a comment thread on a computer programmer’s forum.

If you want to read through the comments, be aware that they suffer from survivorship bias. This means that older people who used to be computer programmers/software engineers but dropped out of the industry don’t post there, so the existence of older programmer types saying that my warning is false is not at all representative because you are not hearing about the older people who used to be computer programmers.

It appears that several of the posters there have co-authored programming books, which tells you about the kind of dedication and expertise required to stay relevant as an older computer programmer/software engineer. In contrast, in just about any other profession, you don’t have to be a published author in order to stay employed.

Reading through the comments demonstrates something about the personality of computer programmer types. They believe they are smarter and better than everyone else, and therefore on account of libertarian economic theory in which smart people create value and value creators are always rewarded, they have nothing to worry about. For some reason, nearly all computer programmer types buy into libertarianism and they all think they are like Howard Roark. (White American computer programmers, that is. The Indians are more likely to be clock-punchers who happily claim it took them four hours to fix a very minor bug that I could have fixed in 15 minutes, back in the days when I did that stuff).

One commenter looked down upon my mention of immigration, on account of the assumed fact that anyone who is smart and competent like himself welcomes competition from immigrants. This is obviously an aspergery way of looking at the world. No one who wants to make money welcomes any competition. No one gets rich when there is competition. I was involved in an industry in which there were two major companies, both losing money and headed towards bankruptcy, but then they merged and as one company they became very profitable because they could raise prices and they were no longer subject to suppliers having them bid against each other. The CEO who walked away with 9 figures of profit was sure glad that there was no more competition.

Changing topics slightly, here is one comment I’d like to comment on:

I work at a software company that most likely will be bankrupt by year end due to a young developer’s desire to rewrite our flagship product from the ground up using “new” technology. Three years later this new product has 40% of the functionality of the previous version and has customers canceling contracts that have been with us for 10+ years.

I know why the young developer wanted to do this. So he could put down on his resume that he worked with the new technologies and could therefore get better jobs. This is necessity for those who want to stay relevant and employed. Too many years working in VB6 (that’s an excellent software development tool from the 1990s that’s now looked down upon with disgust because it’s not “object oriented,” and it was abandoned by Microsoft) and the result is technological obsolescence. Maybe the young developer sunk the company (who knows if the commenter is exaggerating?), but he will probably get a better job out of it. This anecdote explains why a lot of software sucks. The developers’ interests in staying technologically relevant are at odds with the need of their employer for reliable software that works.