[am1m]

Originally Posted by low_rider

What I have seen is that majority of IT recruitment focusses on the task at hand and not on creating a long term pool of talent.

Let's take an example of any new age technology like Blockchain.

Well articulated and spot-on!

Even when there is a shortage of good or even suitable candidates, managers and recruiters stick to their "shopping list" as opposed to evaluating candidates for potential.

My job function can easily be reduced to 'x' years experience with 'abc' tool. I've had so many arguments with HR and even my team management that tool usage can be picked up in a matter of months, what we need to be looking for and hiring is logical thinking, interest in learning, and culture fit. But no, so many good candidates get dropped because they don't have a specific tool on their kitty (which any idiot can learn!) and we are forced to interview/hire a less suitable candidate who just happens to have included that matching keyword in their resume!

If Indian IT needs to ramp up and go beyond the IT services cost arbitrage model, as so many people say we will be forced to, one of the main things that need to be revamped is the way we hire.

[Gummybear]

IT service sector started in India around start of this century, so right now people in 40s are probably first generation 40ers in this sector and they are learning to handle this hairpin curve firsthand. But IT guys who are now in 20s and 30s, would have no reason to say that they didn't see it coming. They have even narrower bottleneck ahead as number of freshers joining IT in last decade is exponentially more than those in early 2000s. So, take risks and carve your own path before you hit this curve.

[PreludeSH]

Originally Posted by Gummybear

IT service sector started in India around start of this century, so right now people in 40s are probably first generation 40ers in this sector and they are learning to handle this hairpin curve firsthand. But IT guys who are now in 20s and 30s, would have no reason to say that they didn't see it coming. They have even narrower bottleneck ahead as number of freshers joining IT in last decade is exponentially more than those in early 2000s. So, take risks and carve your own path before you hit this curve.

There should be people in their early 60s in IT sector in India Even early 90s, it had started growing very well.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Gummybear

IT service sector started in India around start of this century, so right now people in 40s are probably first generation 40ers in this sector and they are learning to handle this hairpin curve firsthand. But IT guys who are now in 20s and 30s, would have no reason to say that they didn't see it coming.

I am in my mid 50s and IT service pre-dates me. In fact, services was the original IT industry. Products and ITES came later.

What is happening now is the first shrinking of the industry. Until recently, the industry kept growing in numbers.

[AltoLXI]

Originally Posted by PreludeSH

There should be people in their early 60s in IT sector in India Even early 90s, it had started growing very well.

In 90s, SEEPZ Andheri was the place to go after finishing the CS degree. Texas Instruments, TCS and Infosys (in Koramangala) were sought after companies whoever wanted to move to Bengaluru. Some joined Aptech, NIIT as faculty member teaching dBase, C and Pascal. The salaries were around 3000 pm for fresh software engineers then. A guy got 6000 pm in TI and it was considered as insane salary in those days

Once Y2K craze started, everyone joined the bandwagon. I remember, graduates whether from engineering stream or not, joining mainframe courses paying 50k to 1 lakh in some institutes here in Residency road. These guys later went to US and "settled down". Many have become successful entrepreneurs in US now. Even early 2000, salaries were not high with most people hankering to go to US on H1B.

@Gummybear - Having experienced on how it is to live on less salary, most people in 40s/50s are prudent enough to know how to save for the rainy days (forget about all the guys who are already citizens of USA). It is the guys who started earning insane salaries and thought the party will go on forever, who need to be cautious.

[Gummybear]

Originally Posted by PreludeSH

There should be people in their early 60s in IT sector in India Even early 90s, it had started growing very well.

Agree, but it was towards mid/end of 90s and start of 2000s where private engineering colleges started cropping up and gave supply of software engineers in mass scale and most IT companies started recruiting in bulk.

That's why, this is kind of 1st timer 40s, in bulk facing bottleneck in corporate ladder.

[Romins]

Here is a nice video about "Does Age Matter in Development?"

TL; DR

Embrace Change!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaeHxxhc58A

[download2live]

Originally Posted by Samurai

What is happening now is the first shrinking of the industry. Until recently, the industry kept growing in numbers.

And I agree with you. While ChatGPT created a firestorm in media, GitHub co-pilot kind of flew under the radar. I have seen its capabilites and it is not boding well for the mediocre mid level developers.
Essentially what has happened is that there is no need to go to stackoverflow to look up for code snippet/syntax (that pesky random number generator !) no matter what the coding language is.

It does mean that you can end up with code which might be logically incorrect or fails at edge cases but then in reality I have seen code from stackoverflow blatantly copy pasted in production codebase.

Ideal? No.
Unfortunate reality? Yes.

One one end individual end to end solution creator/provider will get a steroid like boost in productivity. And on other hand I think we are looking at a future where less of us will be needed.

[Samurai]

I have always wondered why plenty of software engineers stop coding in their 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. It feels like pareto principle is at work here. If you start as a programmer fresh out of college, it feels like only 20% of them are still programming as they enter 30s. Same could be repeating every decade. This is not based on any extensive survey; it just feels like it. By this hypothesis, only 8/1000 programmers would be still programming after crossing 50. This number actually feels high.

There are many reasons for it, lack of technical career path, obsession with titles, lack of interest in programming, developer burnout, peter principle, etc.

I came across an excellent analysis on Quora about what makes a good software engineer, which obviously correlates with their longevity in that role. He is so spot on!

[Jaguar]

Originally Posted by Samurai

There are many reasons for it, lack of technical career path, obsession with titles, lack of interest in programming, developer burnout, peter principle, etc.

I feel lack of interest in programming is a major reason.
Just last week during a team dinner the topic of interests came up and the majority admitted that a career in software development was not their first choice. A lot of these people are very good at their job but they do it just as a job.

Other than medical aspirants taking up engineering due to not getting an mbbs admission, the popular reason was parents not allowing them to pursue arts or sports. And unfortunately I hear the same people tell that they don't want their kids to go into arts as well. So the cycle continues.

[finneyp]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I have always wondered why plenty of software engineers stop coding in their 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

In India, IT companies don't want software engineers with more than say 6 years of experience to do coding!
Why would they keep programmers with higher salaries when the same coding can be done by freshers with say 1/4th of the cost.
Hence, software engineers are forced to move up the chain as Tech Leads, PM etc.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by finneyp

Why would they keep programmers with higher salaries when the same coding can be done by freshers with say 1/4th of the cost.

That only applies to low end of programming spectrum, usually handled in IT services companies. They are plenty of very high end programming roles in products, which cannot be done by freshers or even those with 15 years of experience. It is not about the years really, but about the extensive experience on what works and what doesn't in a given domain. That comes with multiple decades of experience at different levels. Programmers at this level can design entire architectures, while addressing the needs of high availability, scalability, redundancy, performance, resource economics, etc.

I know a friend who is a principle architect at AWS and he is 65. Of course, this is in USA. He does plenty of coding and shares his code on AWS knowledge base.

[airguitar]

Originally Posted by finneyp

In India, IT companies don't want software engineers with more than say 6 years of experience to do coding!
Why would they keep programmers with higher salaries when the same coding can be done by freshers with say 1/4th of the cost.
Hence, software engineers are forced to move up the chain as Tech Leads, PM etc.

Not disagreeing totally, but trying to qualify the response a bit more.

We cannot compare a 5 year experienced person with someone with 15 years experience ( assuming similar academic pedigree or IQ or skill normalized by experience ). In my experience, many newbies are smart, well-prepared for interviews and day to day stuff as far as communication goes but tend to be extremely short-term focused. They hit the ground running and deliver things quickly. At first glance, they will always be better than an ageing but wise workhorse. Only a small percentage of them stay long enough to build something meaningful for their employers.

If you are building a house or a residential complex: the architect will be the most expensive to employ. Then your civil engineers. Then your contractor (mestri). Then your skilled labourers. If one is going to say that ultimately you could hire daily wage workers that know how to lay bricks and pour concrete and get the walls and eventually the house done and don't need others because they are expensive, well, then Good Luck. Goodlooking and kind flight attendants and food become the defining factors in a flight only if the flight is safely helmed by an experienced pilot ( more so if the flight hits a trouble or a rough patch ). The experienced people pulling their weight in the IT industry are akin to pilots, only that there are more number of 'pilots' needed here. And no, I'm not talking about junks that sit all day around talking pompously about their experience : I'm talking about those that really pull their weight despite a good two decades of experience.

And heck, in many places an experienced hand is paid almost the same or only marginally above the new ones being hired from campus who are to be moulded into finished products anyway by the experienced hand. So it's a bit of an anti-thesis here. A fresher joining at 180k USD at a big firm may still have to be guided by a senior hand drawing 1.2 Crore INR in India.

[dragonfire]

Originally Posted by finneyp

In India, IT companies don't want software engineers with more than say 6 years of experience to do coding!
Why would they keep programmers with higher salaries when the same coding can be done by freshers with say 1/4th of the cost.
Hence, software engineers are forced to move up the chain as Tech Leads, PM etc.

This is true to a very large extend in service companies. Most of their projects bill their client on a per hour basis. So irrespective of whether the programmer is a 5 year experienced guy or a 10 year experienced guy, their billing rates would be the same. So for the 10 year guy to command a higher salary has to upskill/reskill and move into a higher(paid) role.

[Samurai]

Try finding a network expert these days. Most of them are in their late 30s, 40s or even 50s. There are no younger network experts because cloud computing has completely dumbed down network configuration.

But there are computing fields that need deep knowledge of networking (like VOIP), and it is really frustrating when we have to argue with cloud experts on specific network needs. Did you know AWS's NAT gateway that only allows outbound traffic? So there is a generation of cloud experts who don't know NAT gateways can allow inbound traffic too.

Everyone uses APIs these days, so programming has become very easy. But who builds the APIs that has to scale very well? That is where you need highly experienced folks.