Gray Hair? Read and Weep!

[Matthew Gillen]

On 08/31/2010 01:40 PM, Seth Gordon wrote:
> Ethan Schwartz wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Mark Woodward <markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-dark-secret-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-age/
>>
>> >From the article:
>> "As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm,
>> whereas the young can pull all-nighters"
> 
> ...
> 
> So whenever I read about an IT workplace where sixty-hour weeks are the 
> norm, I don’t think “workers who burn the midnight oil because they have 
> the vigor of youth”; I think “workers who waste time because they are 
> poorly managed”.

Perhaps you were including this in "poorly managed", but there's also
the self-management aspects; the youthful traits of
 - inability to estimate amount of work involved
 - inability to fight/manage scope creep
 - inexperience at extracting requirements vs. nice-to-haves
 - inability to communicate with management effectively (give
trade-offs, risk assessments, etc instead of vague statements of discomfort)

Basically, all the 'soft' skills that go into software engineering.
When I was young, I made up for all those deficiencies by coding a lot.
 You end up either throwing away a lot of code (if you're smart), or
having enormously complex systems that you threw everything including
the kitchen sink into.

Now that I'm older, I find I'm much better at preventing the emergencies
from happening, and I do that by being better at the soft skills.  I
/could/ pull an all-nighter, but I've realized that if you're in a
situation where an all-nighter is a good idea, you've long since run out
of good ideas and you're probably already screwed.

(Of course, you can never get away from it: if you manage your projects
well, then you'll be called in to put out someone else's fire.)

Matt