As a developer in my 40's, I see things like this and worry that the software industry will come to rely only on the young because they don't ... I don't want to say care ... but put as much emphasis maybe? ... on work-life balance.
Developement-wise, I can hang with the 20 something crowd, no problems. I just can't compete with the single/no kids thing.
I'm working on a contract tangentially related to this work and it's really not about young people working long hours. There are plenty of older people emailing me at 10 or 11 pm after the kids are in bed that don't know what's going on. This is solely about the quality of the talent.
I encounter people and teams that are just unwilling to adopt contemporary development and deployment practices. The article notes that Hipchat was a struggle to get approval for, yet I often run into people at CMS that never log in to it and prefer tons of emails. Deployments aren't automated and still happen for some teams on calls during maintenance periods once a week. I've had people in technical capacities ask what GitHub is.
The problem is institutional, it really has nothing to do with young people working 10 hour days. I care about my work-life balance -- I'm too old to crash on the couch at my startup's office like I did at past jobs in my 20s -- but I also keep up with contemporary development practices, make a point to study a new language every year, read academic papers, and care about my work. I don't think I can say the same about most devs I've encountered in government. The consulting firms are incentivized to build walls and protect the way they do business in order to keep getting that contract money.
If you're an older dev that is intellectually curious in the practice and art of software development I think you'll be fine.
You might be fine，but I'd be ready to make a lot less money as we move into a more freelance oriented market
the problem is that labor doesn't scale very well. 2 talented young programmers working all-out 12 hours a day on one project will generally be more productive than 3 talented folks with family working all-out 8 hours a day. (Agile, git, etc. all try to fix this to a degree... ) The current economic situation is that startups have very very deep pockets and will pay an insane premium to have stuff ASAP - which will mean very small, very overworked, very talented "rock stars".
If you want to fix healthcare.gov and the president's reputation is on the line, you'll get the rockstarest rockstars you can find and slave drive them till it's done
If you want a good work life balance I recommend the defense sector - but again - expect a pay cut. (like $120K end of career in SoCal vs. $250K in SF)
I see this more as "the people who just show up" vs "the people who actually work when they're at work".
Dividing them up like this the typical "just shows up" person is purely stimulus driven. Nothing happens if you don't tell them to do exactly something. They won't tell you they're blocked on Bob sending a purchase order for a month. They won't tell you because you didn't ask. You didn't ask so they just... they just do nothing.
Or you have contractors who really don't care[1]. They bill by the hour, and if you don't give them tasks then they can take a second contract and bill more.
Most companies I've seen are full of stimulus-response people.
You don't need to work more than 40 hour weeks to be productive. What you need is managers and coworkers who understand what your job kinda entails. People who when you say during the two week planning meeting that you'll fix a typo and that's it, will call you on it saying "that won't take two weeks, what else?".
I've seen competent people (with children) fall into a comfort zone where they can keep up and "perform well" working just an hour or two a week, because nobody else gets any work done so it's not like they're blocking people. These same people actually perform in better companies.
[1] I'm not saying no contractors care. But they have extra reason not to care if they happened to be paid and aren't "stimulated" (in the simulus-response sense).
> Dividing them up like this the typical "just shows up" person is purely stimulus driven. Nothing happens if you don't tell them to do exactly something. They won't tell you they're blocked on Bob sending a purchase order for a month. They won't tell you because you didn't ask. You didn't ask so they just... they just do nothing.
I'm sorry but I'd argue that I cared more when I was younger (mostly because I was stupid). I've spent entire days in someone else's cubicle (not so much pair programming as me standing guard against distractions such as business analysts and quality assurance who apparently kept popping in) making sure they finish their part of work.
Actual code writing for me was fairly easy once the roadblocks got out of the way.
I've told people to shut up in meetings when they start going off in tangents. Clearly, it was not good for my career.
Over a quarter of the top CEO's in the world have an engineering background and the median age is 59.
The world is becoming more and more flat with globalization. If you are limiting yourself to pushing code and not learning business skills you are probably replaceable.
I think decently smart people are all capable of learning business skills. The problem fundamentally later on is that you need skills and a network that is aligned with your goals for your post-individual contributor career.
I'm a decade behind you but having my daughter was a huge wake up call. I was leading a machine learning side project with plenty of of 20-somethings. They were very eager and involved, until my daughter was born. Suddenly half the team quit. One guy admitted he just assumed the project was over as soon as I had a kid, like I was dead or something. I ended up coding a majority of the project by myself.
As a married person with no kids I feel the same way. I'm not 40, or even 30 yet, but I look at my peers and wonder if they'll grow to regret putting in 60 hour work weeks just to make someone else rich. I'm guilty of doing it too, for sure, but it wears you down quick.
Being in my 40s and having been there (in my 20s) I can tell you they will grow to regret it.
That said, its up to people like me running teams and businesses to set the tone - encourage balance while not squandering inspired work.
Re inspired work: I once made the mistake of telling one of my employees "slow down a little, i don't want you to burn out and hate working here".
He had an astute response: "Andy, I'm inspired I have to keep working on this until its done!"
He worked weird hours - night and day for 2 or 3 days ..and when it was done I remember him needing some well deserved R&R.
The message from there on out to my teams is - if you're inspired, work. When you're done, rest. I'm not watching when you roll in in the morning, I'm watching the team's accomplishment and morale.
FWIW, it can be a bit more complicated than that. I spent my 20s working 60 hour weeks to (mostly) make someone else rich, but doing that helped to get me to a better place by my 30s. Having graduated from school immediately after the dot compost, I'm not sure I would have been able to start out in a good tech job from the get-go.
What worries me more is when I see colleagues who have children and are _still_ doing the chronic overtime thing. Missing out on getting drunk in the evenings just to make someone else rich is lame. Missing out on the early years of your kid's life just to make someone else rich is a tragedy.
It depends on what you define as "making someone else rich".
I think it is a good trade off to have someone else shoulder all the business risk while I cap out at ~$330k at a reasonable senior level(Staff SE). IMO, $330k is "rich". Most people could retire from 5-10 years of working after reaching the senior level. Once someone reaches the senior level, I assume that the knowledge gained while hustling to achieve the senior level would let him/her dial down to the standard 40 hrs.
I was watching a documentary on prodigy musicians one time. The person presenting the show was a prodigy himself and he asked some interesting questions. One was, "How much did you practice when you were young?" and the answer would invariably be 12-13 hours a day. He then asked, "Do you regret not spending that time doing other things?" The answer was also invariably "No".
The prodigies in the documentary explained that the time when they were practicing all day was exciting and fun. They looked back on that time with nostalgia because after they got older they neither had the time nor the stamina to practice like that again.
"Nobody ever died wishing that they had spent more time in the office" is a popular quote, but I think it is false. I personally know of several people who after they were diagnosed with terminal diseases chose to spend their remaining time working as much as possible.
The key to what you are saying is the "just to make someone else rich". I think if you are looking at it as some kind of equation where "I have to do X in order to get Y", often you lose out because it turns out that Y was not worth it after all (especially if you are trading your life for money). However, if you are looking at it as "I can't believe I get to do this all day long!", then I don't think you will regret it.
This is not to say that those who prefer a "work-life balance" existence over "work is inseparable from life" existence are much different. It's just that you need to spend your time and energy doing what you love -- getting that balance right. Both groups suffer if they divert their attention away from what is important to them.
For me, things changed ~18 months ago when I had my son and suddenly, I was less willing to travel, more willing to take breaks when he's awake, and I take ridiculously early morning flights so I'm there to tuck him in the night before. Those opportunities are fleeting.
I'm working on a project now that's all single 20-somethings. On the one hand, they are very smart, very aggressive and put a lot of time in on weekends.
On the other hand, I'm crafty, and experienced. Also, I think kids that age do respect the idea of a family life -- I just had a chat this morning and said "have to go, family event" -- it's okay.
While some 20 somethings are workaholics, a lot of them are not, they get their work life balance in at other times in other ways, more periodically. I don't think there needs to be a worry about stigma. Different strokes, and good communication are the most important.
My experience is similar; it's sad, really, because though I enjoy what I do and am often among the most productive, my unwillingness to forgo time with my family in order to work unreasonable hours, often a result of poor leadership decisions, has become somewhat of a liability. After a career of small companies and the occasional startup, I am eyeing the cubicle-and-collars world of B2B software development with more interest.
Well, I work way more than I should, because I have no other occupation outside of work. That's all. I'm not seeing myself competing with more experienced people for one thing or another. I'll take care of my work-life balance when I'll have a life, but in the meantime I'm happy to have something to occupy my brain and people to talk to 8h per day, otherwise I would definitively go crazy.
I find this quite sad. There are a LOT of worthwhile organizations and purposes that need your time - badly - and would add needed balance to your life.
I volunteer with the American Red Cross which needs volunteer personnel for all kinds of purposes ranging from two week deployments to disaster areas to occasional help at blood drives. You'd develop all kinds of new skills and meet a lot of great people, all while having a very tangible impact on the world. And that's just one random example from what I personally spend my time doing.
Look around your area, community, and industry, and find more things to do. If nothing else you'll get a lot of good stories to tell. You might just find your purpose on life.
I'm a twenty-something and I see this everyday in my peer group. Most twenty-something's have way too much of their identity and self-esteem tied to their career. I would encourage other people my age to go in at 9, leave 5, work at a comfortable pace and take an hour for lunch. If you're good at your job and your employer is well run, that shouldn't be a problem.
The youth helped us mostly because we were able to hop up and live in that house for months in order to be close to CMS - know our customers! But even for us those days are over - we have offices in SF and DC and have multiple more established folks on our team. Just like major tech companies, we want to provide a comfortable environment for skilled engineers of any age and family situation.
As a fellow developer in my 40s, I enjoy getting as much work done in two hours as more junior people get done all week. Of course this isn't a function of age but two decades in the business doesn't hurt.
As a developer in my thirties, I see this more as flexibility and exposure to adopt new technology, instead of sticking with old tech stacks.
It's clear that the earlier contractors didn't know enough about user-centered design, responsive sites, mobile design, online login systems, modern web scalability requirements, benefits of cloud hosting and much more; which is where the younger developers now start.
Also a minute to thank Stackoverflow, for the amazing work it has done in uplifting software development work.
I think that's the case right now with many jobs in mgmt consulting / investment banking. You can end up with a negative situation where people devote every waking hour then feel all subsequent success is owed to them - not great.
> they don't ... I don't want to say care ... but put as much emphasis maybe? ... on work-life balance.
or they just have a different view of it.
You have no need to be home at any particular hour, and your social life is more evening/night based then why not work 10 hours a day. It's dumb, since you risk burning out, but otherwise I'm not really missing out on anything.
The entire culture has to change. Had a female programmer who works in Washington D.C. tell me a few years back the unwritten rule is that unless you're at one of the top rungs of the GS federal pay scale you aren't supposed to talk at all.
She had a boss who met with developers and told them nobody cares about your opinions. You see million dollar mistakes being made and you either accept it or leave government which is what she did.
And this is miniscule. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost hundreds of billions more than they needed to (not talking about whether they should have been started, just the effects achieved for the cost). I flew F/A-18s off the carrier for 6 hour missions that could have been handled by a small propeller plane in country. These missions required a carrier (millions to operate), extra more-costly flight hours ($10k/hour for F/A-18s), and 3 air-to-air refuels (cost of tanker flight time and gas). Not to mention the deterioration of incredibly expensive assets that need to be replaced. I also saw artillery and tanks in country that had no use. Could go on about the waste.
The sad truth is government bureaucracies spend all their budgets so they can ask for more. Limiting cost is the least of their concerns. I applaud 18F and the Digital Service for their efforts to advance and streamline IT and development costs. It’s an uphill battle. There is no reality check in the public sector as there is in the private sector, where inefficient behemoths eventually go bankrupt to more efficient companies.
Outsourcing is supposed to prevent this, but the big contractors just milk it for all it’s worth (Oracle failing to build Oregon’s healthcare website for $250 million is an example, HP and NMCI is another). I don’t believe it’s just the byzantine contract bidding process but the fact it is easier for leaders to say they chose a big “reputable” company so it’s not their fault it failed, whereas if they had chosen a small no-name company and it failed it would be their ass. So real competition and efficiency end up being non-existent in government, unless the president’s legacy initiative is in jeopardy and he throws his weight behind the fix. I don’t know of any way to fix this behavior except to limit the size of government and make it more local so accountability is easier to maintain by the electorate. I wish more good people in government could change things, but there are already a lot of good people trying their best in a top-down system where CYA and optics are more important than efficiency and results.
Government and non-profits alike: people shoot for mediocrity and avoid taking risks. This is how you avoid getting fired. This is what happens when incentives & accountability are misaligned with your organization's supposed goals.
There's also a culture of not recognizing or admitting failure; they're spun into success stories. This means people don't learn from mistakes and keep repeating them.
Smaller teams are weeded out very early. The barriers to entry for working with government and non-profits are high, demanding all kind of certifications and processes to be implemented.
If you don't have teams to build excruciatingly detailed (and inaccurate) proposals (complete with 100 slides presentations), jump through the hoops of procurement and fill up the deluge of paper associated with tracking every single hour working on the contract, you won't land the big contracts.
Personally, I threw the towel in. Enterprise pays more, is more loyal and while procurement can still be a PITA, the overall organization is clearly aligned behind growth and revenue. If you help them do that, you can circumvent or negotiate things.
I too experienced several million dollar efforts that went nowhere. Governments in general are not geared to think about returns on investment, but our current one is quite terrible.
And I'll say, outside of the military, the public sector does not attract competence. There are exceptions, certainly. But the pay and the level of bullshit tends to attract those who either want to play politics, or who want a secure paycheck and benefits with little accountability, or just can't really perform at the level most private sector work demands.
I think government, in general, is built to be slow and deliberate, but as the pace of tech change has accelerated, the responsiveness of government hasn't kept up. Git was invested in 2005, for example.
Yeah, I have to think that the only reason this story exists is because there was a very public humiliation for the Administration, and that the original project is business as usual 99% of the time. I highly doubt billions of gov't contracts are now being rerouted to "young people," and in fact (on a parallel track), the last 18F headline I saw was that they came out with a to-do list.
Changing the government contracting process is going to be the slowest part of this -- yep nothing drastic is different now that a few years ago. But the winds of change are in the air. The fine folks at USDS are working hard to fix this from the root. There was a recent California child welfare software project that was broken up into smaller pieces and served as a prototype of a contract that was made to appeal to modern firms, and reward sound development practices. Expect more of this to shift the playing field and lay the groundwork for competition to do the rest.
I dealt with this in the military, and it left me with a completely fatalistic look on work in general.
Welp, you're signing my paychecks. I will do whatever you want me to do for 40 hours per week. If that's productive work that makes a difference, awesome. If that involves me wasting a gazillion dollars on something stupid, I'm not paid to think, man. I just work here. If you want me to think, then pay me to think.
On the bright side, I have absolutely zero stress when it comes to workplace drama because I couldn't care less to begin with.
Since I find non-descriptive headlines like this annoying (edit: looks like it's been changed on HN to be much better), here is a quote from the article that surprisingly provides its own TL;DR:
>Here is the tl;dr version of their story: Marketplace Lite, or “MPL” as they came to be known, devoted months to rewriting Healthcare.gov functions in full, working as a startup within the government and replacing contractor-made apps with ones costing one-fiftieth of the price. And when, nearly a year after the initial launch of Healthcare.gov, the website’s second open-enrollment proved much healthier than its first, it was the MPL team who celebrated.
And perhaps the biggest takeaway of the whole article, buried in the middle of it:
> Instead, if the successes of the MPL team confirm any guiding principle for the future, it is this: Technical workers—not only engineers but designers—have to be involved with a process from the beginning. They will know that features must be described separately from needs, and that, when building software, smaller teams often perform better than larger teams.
Speaking as someone who worked in the past for a government contractor (DoD, so these issues may not be entirely the same with the feds, but I bet they're very similar), the issue isn't solely that bureaucrats don't get tech, it's also that the bureaucratic red tape that evolved to try and keep costs down has instead led to them rising, -especially- with software.
From what I saw, government contracting requires all requirements up front. It then floats a bid, and the cheapest bidder wins. Whether or not the contract has been met is determined by that list of requirements; even if you fail to deliver on a non-functional requirement that is obvious ("the system should be able to scale out and handle X simultaneous users"), you aren't penalized if it wasn't one of the requirements. In fact, delivering on obvious things that aren't part of the contract -hurts the contractor-; it requires development time and effort (and thus eats into profits), and the government is legally prevented from taking such things into account on future contracts (that is, they can't say "Well, company A is the cheapest, but the last contract they took was a broken piece of shit; company B is a little pricier, but they delivered quality, we'll go with company B". No, you go with the cheapest, period, because if they fail to deliver what you specify you can sue, and if they fail to deliver what you -wanted-, but failed to specify, too bad). It's possible to renegotiate the contract mid-stream, but it's expensive and time consuming.
So the contractor has every incentive to make sure that there is no time spent on quality, security, stability, scalability, etc, unless that's -explicitly- what was asked for. This article points out that having developers involved from the get go on the Healthare.gov rework led to it being successful, and that's very much true; you need technical people who care about more than just making bank to point out non-functional requirements that are missing. And, in general, trying to list all requirements up front is a fool's game, but such is the government's bidding process.
I was a little too quick on the upvote for your comment. Your first paragraph is spot-on, but your second is not.
> the government is legally prevented from taking such things into account on future contracts (that is, they can't say "Well, company A is the cheapest, but the last contract they took was a broken piece of shit; company B is a little pricier, but they delivered quality, we'll go with company B". No, you go with the cheapest, period
This is absolutely wrong. There is no requirement that the federal government must go with the cheapest bidder or that they cannot take performance into account. The government can and does regularly reject bids because they are unrealistically low; in fact, I was on one DOD program where both bidders were told to go home and come back with something realistic. Past performance definitely factors in to what the government considers reasonable. It's one of the reasons the government requires labor tracking even in situations where the labor expended doesn't affect the final cost, such as fixed-price contracts and uncompensated overtime.
That's some comfort then. I never saw any indication of it; across multiple projects I never saw any drive to refactor, or any of the signs I associate with developers taking pride in one's work (documentation above what is asked for, root cause analysis even when a surface issue has been taken care of, or really, any addressing of non-functional requirements that were obvious, but which had not been demanded in the contract). Perhaps because they were mostly long running projects that had already been bidden on, and just having the domain knowledge meant that they'd continue to have the advantage on any future bids to extend it.
Also, while I've seen bid wins/losses talked about from the perspective of the quality of the solution, I've not seen them talked about having been won/loss due to past performance. I hope you're right that that's a consideration, but the lack of controls around quality, and the obvious apathy I saw, lends me to think that if that's a consideration, it's not one the government knows how to actually judge.
>From what I saw, government contracting requires all requirements up front.
Strictly speaking the government has loads of flexibility at defining exactly what form contracts should take. It's just that in reality, most people who decide on the form of government contracts rarely have the skills required to imagine doing things better. Furthermore they have very little incentive to do so. So the least risky and the simplest option is to "do what didn't work last time". After all, everyone involved (on the government side) will continue receiving paychecks no matter what, so why bother?
Also, if you think about it - if you are a median government worker who lacks the skills required to actually perform the task for which you are writing/monitoring the contract - what is the probability that you will do a good job getting results on the taxpayer money you are spending?
In the big picture, the taxpayers must employ the most skilled and talented people available to imagine/design/oversee technical solutions acquired by the government if they want any to see value delivered for outgoing tax dollars. This constraint is completely incompatible with the existing civil service personnel policies.
To add one more thing, the red tape itself adds non-negligible costs. I once worked for a sovereign native nation, and the community manager was explaining that the amount of money that he got from the Feds for paving a road (IIRC maxed at $50K) was mostly eaten up in labor expended to cover their reporting requirements.
Hey all, i'm one of the team members of Nava, the public benefit corporation that emerged from the MPL team to continue to improve how the government serves its people...happy to answer any questions!
A lot of the most effective pushback we end up never seeing at all -- it happens in decisions and conversations we aren't party to. We do think in the long run delivering a radically better product will win out... But the presence of pushback does really demonstrate the need for tech-savvy partners inside the government, like those we have been lucky to work with at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and a reformed contracting process. The only way there will be better technology in government long term is if the people signing the checks are able to discern between the modern way and the old way, and insist on a better way of doing things. (Apologies for brief responses - on mobile)
The core of the issue was that EIDM, the old system, was an assembly of products designed for corporate intranets on the orders of 1000s of users -- it was never meant to be used for a consumer system. So all this super complicated permissions logic was bogging everything down.
They mitigated the effects for a while by running it on bigger computers - when we came in it was running on Oracle's BIGGEST computer, the Exadata. $6MM per environment. Terabytes of ram. But still just completely bogged down by a set of software not designed for its use case.
We basically rebuilt things from scratch on a node/MySQL/nginx stack while providing the same API as the old system, and were able to swap it out. We have become masters of the strangler pattern of software design...
We had the dubious fortune of coming in in a crisis situation, which let us insist on our way of doing things. (Bringing own computers, AWS, modern stack, quick hiring, etc)
Even then, though, launching our first product (App 2.0) to production was really uphill as we fought to earn the trust of CMS and the other contractors, who didn't really believe we could deliver.
But after we shipped, and people saw that we could deliver working software, things got way easier. Now we are consulted on major software architecture decisions and are a key part of the design process.
It goes the other way round though as well -- we have learned you have to respect your partners and champions on the inside, and conform a bit as well. When you are dealing with really sensitive personal info you can't play as fast and loose as you could in a brand new startup.
we are at a point now where we can often look at the underlying need and suggest alternate ways of approach. For instance after a big breach a few months ago security wanted us to use some VPN for all our prod systems- we managed to compromise on amazons MFA which is quite solid but gets us the enhanced security they were going for
Long term we want to help reform contracting so that requirements are not framed in this lots-of-boxes-to-check-none-having-to-do-with-serving-users mindset
We love 18f!!! We work a little more closely with USDS as our relationship with them is more complementary - they find opportunities in government and will often consult with us and other modern firms on how to approach big problems like identity management, identity verification, etc. we don't work directly with 18F but feel very much like we are part of the same movement towards reforming the ecosystem
The sad thing about this is that said young people didn't get paid anywhere near the $250-500 million paid to the contractors and cronies[1] who built the broken healthcare.gov in the first place.
This is a hard problem to solve perfectly. I'm still stuck at the ID verification step, after sending in my documents. Never heard back. I'm the perfect corner case though, having gotten a green card recently, left a job, moved to another state, so on so forth...
Same, I was never able to get past this point, apparently because I don't exist in Experian's system due to having no credit history. Attempts to proceed beyond have never been successful the few times I've tried since, so I've given up.
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Developement-wise, I can hang with the 20 something crowd, no problems. I just can't compete with the single/no kids thing.
I encounter people and teams that are just unwilling to adopt contemporary development and deployment practices. The article notes that Hipchat was a struggle to get approval for, yet I often run into people at CMS that never log in to it and prefer tons of emails. Deployments aren't automated and still happen for some teams on calls during maintenance periods once a week. I've had people in technical capacities ask what GitHub is.
The problem is institutional, it really has nothing to do with young people working 10 hour days. I care about my work-life balance -- I'm too old to crash on the couch at my startup's office like I did at past jobs in my 20s -- but I also keep up with contemporary development practices, make a point to study a new language every year, read academic papers, and care about my work. I don't think I can say the same about most devs I've encountered in government. The consulting firms are incentivized to build walls and protect the way they do business in order to keep getting that contract money.
If you're an older dev that is intellectually curious in the practice and art of software development I think you'll be fine.
the problem is that labor doesn't scale very well. 2 talented young programmers working all-out 12 hours a day on one project will generally be more productive than 3 talented folks with family working all-out 8 hours a day. (Agile, git, etc. all try to fix this to a degree... ) The current economic situation is that startups have very very deep pockets and will pay an insane premium to have stuff ASAP - which will mean very small, very overworked, very talented "rock stars".
If you want to fix healthcare.gov and the president's reputation is on the line, you'll get the rockstarest rockstars you can find and slave drive them till it's done
If you want a good work life balance I recommend the defense sector - but again - expect a pay cut. (like $120K end of career in SoCal vs. $250K in SF)
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Dividing them up like this the typical "just shows up" person is purely stimulus driven. Nothing happens if you don't tell them to do exactly something. They won't tell you they're blocked on Bob sending a purchase order for a month. They won't tell you because you didn't ask. You didn't ask so they just... they just do nothing.
Or you have contractors who really don't care[1]. They bill by the hour, and if you don't give them tasks then they can take a second contract and bill more.
Most companies I've seen are full of stimulus-response people.
You don't need to work more than 40 hour weeks to be productive. What you need is managers and coworkers who understand what your job kinda entails. People who when you say during the two week planning meeting that you'll fix a typo and that's it, will call you on it saying "that won't take two weeks, what else?".
I've seen competent people (with children) fall into a comfort zone where they can keep up and "perform well" working just an hour or two a week, because nobody else gets any work done so it's not like they're blocking people. These same people actually perform in better companies.
[1] I'm not saying no contractors care. But they have extra reason not to care if they happened to be paid and aren't "stimulated" (in the simulus-response sense).
Most companies I've seen turn perfectly good work-driven people into stimulus-driven wrecks.
I think it should be punishable, since it's very similar to a more labour-oriented employer creating circumstances where physical accidents happen.
I'm sorry but I'd argue that I cared more when I was younger (mostly because I was stupid). I've spent entire days in someone else's cubicle (not so much pair programming as me standing guard against distractions such as business analysts and quality assurance who apparently kept popping in) making sure they finish their part of work.
Actual code writing for me was fairly easy once the roadblocks got out of the way.
I've told people to shut up in meetings when they start going off in tangents. Clearly, it was not good for my career.
Most 20 somethings know a stack or two but don't have any domain knowledge to understand how to make it useful in the "real world".
Check out: https://hbr.org/2014/11/the-best-performing-ceos-in-the-worl...
Over a quarter of the top CEO's in the world have an engineering background and the median age is 59.
The world is becoming more and more flat with globalization. If you are limiting yourself to pushing code and not learning business skills you are probably replaceable.
Really it should be age at which they started to dictate product direction.
That said, its up to people like me running teams and businesses to set the tone - encourage balance while not squandering inspired work.
Re inspired work: I once made the mistake of telling one of my employees "slow down a little, i don't want you to burn out and hate working here". He had an astute response: "Andy, I'm inspired I have to keep working on this until its done!" He worked weird hours - night and day for 2 or 3 days ..and when it was done I remember him needing some well deserved R&R.
The message from there on out to my teams is - if you're inspired, work. When you're done, rest. I'm not watching when you roll in in the morning, I'm watching the team's accomplishment and morale.
What worries me more is when I see colleagues who have children and are _still_ doing the chronic overtime thing. Missing out on getting drunk in the evenings just to make someone else rich is lame. Missing out on the early years of your kid's life just to make someone else rich is a tragedy.
I think it is a good trade off to have someone else shoulder all the business risk while I cap out at ~$330k at a reasonable senior level(Staff SE). IMO, $330k is "rich". Most people could retire from 5-10 years of working after reaching the senior level. Once someone reaches the senior level, I assume that the knowledge gained while hustling to achieve the senior level would let him/her dial down to the standard 40 hrs.
The prodigies in the documentary explained that the time when they were practicing all day was exciting and fun. They looked back on that time with nostalgia because after they got older they neither had the time nor the stamina to practice like that again.
"Nobody ever died wishing that they had spent more time in the office" is a popular quote, but I think it is false. I personally know of several people who after they were diagnosed with terminal diseases chose to spend their remaining time working as much as possible.
The key to what you are saying is the "just to make someone else rich". I think if you are looking at it as some kind of equation where "I have to do X in order to get Y", often you lose out because it turns out that Y was not worth it after all (especially if you are trading your life for money). However, if you are looking at it as "I can't believe I get to do this all day long!", then I don't think you will regret it.
This is not to say that those who prefer a "work-life balance" existence over "work is inseparable from life" existence are much different. It's just that you need to spend your time and energy doing what you love -- getting that balance right. Both groups suffer if they divert their attention away from what is important to them.
PG talked about it here - http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html
Fun fact: My son's initials are QA. I made sure the paperwork was signed and out of the room before I pointed that out. ;)
On the other hand, I'm crafty, and experienced. Also, I think kids that age do respect the idea of a family life -- I just had a chat this morning and said "have to go, family event" -- it's okay.
While some 20 somethings are workaholics, a lot of them are not, they get their work life balance in at other times in other ways, more periodically. I don't think there needs to be a worry about stigma. Different strokes, and good communication are the most important.
I volunteer with the American Red Cross which needs volunteer personnel for all kinds of purposes ranging from two week deployments to disaster areas to occasional help at blood drives. You'd develop all kinds of new skills and meet a lot of great people, all while having a very tangible impact on the world. And that's just one random example from what I personally spend my time doing.
Look around your area, community, and industry, and find more things to do. If nothing else you'll get a lot of good stories to tell. You might just find your purpose on life.
It's clear that the earlier contractors didn't know enough about user-centered design, responsive sites, mobile design, online login systems, modern web scalability requirements, benefits of cloud hosting and much more; which is where the younger developers now start.
Also a minute to thank Stackoverflow, for the amazing work it has done in uplifting software development work.
or they just have a different view of it.
You have no need to be home at any particular hour, and your social life is more evening/night based then why not work 10 hours a day. It's dumb, since you risk burning out, but otherwise I'm not really missing out on anything.
She had a boss who met with developers and told them nobody cares about your opinions. You see million dollar mistakes being made and you either accept it or leave government which is what she did.
The sad truth is government bureaucracies spend all their budgets so they can ask for more. Limiting cost is the least of their concerns. I applaud 18F and the Digital Service for their efforts to advance and streamline IT and development costs. It’s an uphill battle. There is no reality check in the public sector as there is in the private sector, where inefficient behemoths eventually go bankrupt to more efficient companies.
Outsourcing is supposed to prevent this, but the big contractors just milk it for all it’s worth (Oracle failing to build Oregon’s healthcare website for $250 million is an example, HP and NMCI is another). I don’t believe it’s just the byzantine contract bidding process but the fact it is easier for leaders to say they chose a big “reputable” company so it’s not their fault it failed, whereas if they had chosen a small no-name company and it failed it would be their ass. So real competition and efficiency end up being non-existent in government, unless the president’s legacy initiative is in jeopardy and he throws his weight behind the fix. I don’t know of any way to fix this behavior except to limit the size of government and make it more local so accountability is easier to maintain by the electorate. I wish more good people in government could change things, but there are already a lot of good people trying their best in a top-down system where CYA and optics are more important than efficiency and results.
There's also a culture of not recognizing or admitting failure; they're spun into success stories. This means people don't learn from mistakes and keep repeating them.
Smaller teams are weeded out very early. The barriers to entry for working with government and non-profits are high, demanding all kind of certifications and processes to be implemented.
If you don't have teams to build excruciatingly detailed (and inaccurate) proposals (complete with 100 slides presentations), jump through the hoops of procurement and fill up the deluge of paper associated with tracking every single hour working on the contract, you won't land the big contracts.
Personally, I threw the towel in. Enterprise pays more, is more loyal and while procurement can still be a PITA, the overall organization is clearly aligned behind growth and revenue. If you help them do that, you can circumvent or negotiate things.
ref: https://bhc3.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/consumption-spreads...
Welp, you're signing my paychecks. I will do whatever you want me to do for 40 hours per week. If that's productive work that makes a difference, awesome. If that involves me wasting a gazillion dollars on something stupid, I'm not paid to think, man. I just work here. If you want me to think, then pay me to think.
On the bright side, I have absolutely zero stress when it comes to workplace drama because I couldn't care less to begin with.
>Here is the tl;dr version of their story: Marketplace Lite, or “MPL” as they came to be known, devoted months to rewriting Healthcare.gov functions in full, working as a startup within the government and replacing contractor-made apps with ones costing one-fiftieth of the price. And when, nearly a year after the initial launch of Healthcare.gov, the website’s second open-enrollment proved much healthier than its first, it was the MPL team who celebrated.
> Instead, if the successes of the MPL team confirm any guiding principle for the future, it is this: Technical workers—not only engineers but designers—have to be involved with a process from the beginning. They will know that features must be described separately from needs, and that, when building software, smaller teams often perform better than larger teams.
here's the prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9857662
Many HN'ers suspected this was a "submarine" piece.
From what I saw, government contracting requires all requirements up front. It then floats a bid, and the cheapest bidder wins. Whether or not the contract has been met is determined by that list of requirements; even if you fail to deliver on a non-functional requirement that is obvious ("the system should be able to scale out and handle X simultaneous users"), you aren't penalized if it wasn't one of the requirements. In fact, delivering on obvious things that aren't part of the contract -hurts the contractor-; it requires development time and effort (and thus eats into profits), and the government is legally prevented from taking such things into account on future contracts (that is, they can't say "Well, company A is the cheapest, but the last contract they took was a broken piece of shit; company B is a little pricier, but they delivered quality, we'll go with company B". No, you go with the cheapest, period, because if they fail to deliver what you specify you can sue, and if they fail to deliver what you -wanted-, but failed to specify, too bad). It's possible to renegotiate the contract mid-stream, but it's expensive and time consuming.
So the contractor has every incentive to make sure that there is no time spent on quality, security, stability, scalability, etc, unless that's -explicitly- what was asked for. This article points out that having developers involved from the get go on the Healthare.gov rework led to it being successful, and that's very much true; you need technical people who care about more than just making bank to point out non-functional requirements that are missing. And, in general, trying to list all requirements up front is a fool's game, but such is the government's bidding process.
> the government is legally prevented from taking such things into account on future contracts (that is, they can't say "Well, company A is the cheapest, but the last contract they took was a broken piece of shit; company B is a little pricier, but they delivered quality, we'll go with company B". No, you go with the cheapest, period
This is absolutely wrong. There is no requirement that the federal government must go with the cheapest bidder or that they cannot take performance into account. The government can and does regularly reject bids because they are unrealistically low; in fact, I was on one DOD program where both bidders were told to go home and come back with something realistic. Past performance definitely factors in to what the government considers reasonable. It's one of the reasons the government requires labor tracking even in situations where the labor expended doesn't affect the final cost, such as fixed-price contracts and uncompensated overtime.
Also, while I've seen bid wins/losses talked about from the perspective of the quality of the solution, I've not seen them talked about having been won/loss due to past performance. I hope you're right that that's a consideration, but the lack of controls around quality, and the obvious apathy I saw, lends me to think that if that's a consideration, it's not one the government knows how to actually judge.
Strictly speaking the government has loads of flexibility at defining exactly what form contracts should take. It's just that in reality, most people who decide on the form of government contracts rarely have the skills required to imagine doing things better. Furthermore they have very little incentive to do so. So the least risky and the simplest option is to "do what didn't work last time". After all, everyone involved (on the government side) will continue receiving paychecks no matter what, so why bother?
Also, if you think about it - if you are a median government worker who lacks the skills required to actually perform the task for which you are writing/monitoring the contract - what is the probability that you will do a good job getting results on the taxpayer money you are spending?
In the big picture, the taxpayers must employ the most skilled and talented people available to imagine/design/oversee technical solutions acquired by the government if they want any to see value delivered for outgoing tax dollars. This constraint is completely incompatible with the existing civil service personnel policies.
They mitigated the effects for a while by running it on bigger computers - when we came in it was running on Oracle's BIGGEST computer, the Exadata. $6MM per environment. Terabytes of ram. But still just completely bogged down by a set of software not designed for its use case.
Even then, though, launching our first product (App 2.0) to production was really uphill as we fought to earn the trust of CMS and the other contractors, who didn't really believe we could deliver.
But after we shipped, and people saw that we could deliver working software, things got way easier. Now we are consulted on major software architecture decisions and are a key part of the design process.
It goes the other way round though as well -- we have learned you have to respect your partners and champions on the inside, and conform a bit as well. When you are dealing with really sensitive personal info you can't play as fast and loose as you could in a brand new startup.
we are at a point now where we can often look at the underlying need and suggest alternate ways of approach. For instance after a big breach a few months ago security wanted us to use some VPN for all our prod systems- we managed to compromise on amazons MFA which is quite solid but gets us the enhanced security they were going for
Long term we want to help reform contracting so that requirements are not framed in this lots-of-boxes-to-check-none-having-to-do-with-serving-users mindset
[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-28/all-the-co...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/healthcare.gov-sends-p...