Comment on Silicon Valley and the Talent Crunch by Jeff Dickey

And after you hire those young people, explain to them how you'll work together to help them out of the technical track, where ageism and cost-cutting are going to declare them obsolete by the age of 30. After that many years in software, I still learn a language or two every year, but I've also been around enough not to make the wet-behind-the-ears mistakes that too-commonly doom career-starting startups. Out of maybe sixty good developers I've known who started roughly when I did, all but about five are in completely non-technical jobs now, or are long-term unemployed. Three are senior development managers in large firms, and there's one other guy who learned Chinese and moved to Shanghai ten years ago. Very, very few other crafts, trades or professions kill off their talent as systematically and arbitrarily as development does. Sorry for restating the obvious, but every time I see someone emphasize how "YOUNG people" are somehow intrinsically superior to others, I get angry. It's the most reliable, inexcusable troll bait I've seen in thirty years online.

Post originale: http://gigaom.com/2010/10/13/silicon-valley-talent-crunch/#comment-299698