Technology: why the Culture of Youth?

A lively discussion flared up in our IRC channel. The maddening pace of new technology, it was posited, is designed to make older and more-experienced technology professionals obsolete. There are two interesting aspects here. The first: is it even true? And second, if it is true, why?

I've spent a fair amount of time over the past 6 years, due to extenuating circumstances, doing a lot of interviewing and working at a lot of jobs. I've been in the consulting version of the business (where a vast majority of these interviews/jobs happened), but also the full-time "tour of duty" version, and from my N>30 sample of jobs in technology over those 6 years, I've noticed a few traits:

• The main/top job skills required are nearly universally for technologies that have only existed for 5 years (often less)[1].
• The other candidates for the same position are recent college grads.
• The compensation doesn't vary by much, and is definitely weighted toward the bottom end, acceptable to a single male with no family and low housing costs.
• Any experience in technology I have from before 2005 is completely irrelevant, and experience from 2005-2010 is only occasionally even mildly interesting.

Speaking with others about their experience in the industry doesn't lead me to believe my N>30 sample is especially unusual or suffering from sample bias. It is a foregone conclusion among those I've spoken with that more than about 10 years of experience in technology is simply uninteresting.

Let us assume for the moment that I've proved the case that there is a culture of youth in Silicon Valley and the technology industry as a whole[2].

Why are things this way? Is there a conspiracy? Others I've spoken to did posit this, but I think it's just a perfect storm of aligned incentives.

First of all, Silicon Valley runs on hype. Press releases and public relations are central to how businesses are funded, built, and eventually exited. A business built on boring old tech solving boring old problems do not make click-bait headlines. The first pressure comes from the venture capitalists, and the CEOs that work for them.

Second, the underlying infrastructure of the technology industry is itself changing rapidly. The Moore's Law of CPU speeds, I/O capacity, and storage sizes have us doing things with computers in 2015 that we barely imagined in 2000. Distributed database technology, with which I'm intimately familiar, has gone from a faint idea on Google whiteboards to commonplace. Similarly, someone entering the work-force today should be at least familiar with the CAP theorem and its demands on distributed workloads, whereas PhD graduates from 1995 didn't even understand there was a problem to be solved.

Third, when everything is new, the youngest are the quickest to embrace it. The older and wiser (in the literal sense of that word) have seen computing fads come and go. Summoning the will-power to learn tech X[493] when techs X[1-492] all failed and went away is somewhat difficult. The youth don't have this mental hurdle to overcome. To them it's awesome new tech X[2] which will change the world.

Fourth, the previous effect has a nice side-effect both for the youth and the bean counters[3].

For the youth, having 6 months of experience with tech X is just a matter of spending a few nights and weekends learning it, and after 6 months? That's 6 more months of experience on tech X than the venerable elder's got. This is a huge advantage rarely seen before in history, where someone with 6 months of experience in the field can legitimately claim the same seniority as someone who's been working it for 20 years[4].

And for the bean counters, this is a god-send. Nearly the entire work-force is made up of people who just graduated college in the last 5 years. The cost of doing business in the technology field must be staggeringly smaller than in other industries that change more slowly.

There's no conspiracy. It's just that everything's happening in a way that makes technology an attractive field for those who just recently joined the work-force, and far less attractive for those who've been in it for 20 years.

I've deliberately skipped a lot of details and nuances, because honestly I don't have time to write a book. Maybe a discussion, with some lively comments and debate, can cover some of those. Thanks for reading!

[1] I work in the Big Data analytics space. A Java developer, for example, working on his decades-old tech, may not see the same level of "newness" that I have, but I suspect even the Java developer sees a lot of new libraries every year. And besides, there's a lot of Java in Big Data.

[2] Feel free, in the comments, to post your disagreements.

[3] Who are, let's face it, really the ones calling the shots when it comes down to it.

[4] It might be interesting to hear what happened those other times in history where an entire profession went through total self-reinvention in the span of 1/5th a career length? I've not read up on it.