The Big (Employment) Squeeze
It’s funny how information tends to come in waves. Recently, I came across two articles that had similar themes about different victims. The first was the notion that engineers that are over 35 are essentially unemployable. The opinion piece from CNN discusses how “older” workers are perceived as too expensive to hire. It also discusses how the point of mass layoffs is to eliminate the older, more expensive workers and foist more work on less people. Fluxor has discussed the reality of this situation in many of his posts. Shortly before this article came out, another one showed up on Bloomberg. This one had the age of unemployability as 40, but around the same ballpark. All of this has been discussed often on EngineerBlogs. However, what brought this to mind was an article I came across a few weeks ago. This one talked about the other end of the employment…
Hey You Kids, Get Off My Lawn!
This past weekend, Chris Gammell posted about changing demographics in engineering and was kind enough to have a survey on it. I’ve had a chance to preview some of the results and some of the comments from readers that responded. One of the themes that I saw in the results was definitely a case of older engineers essentially saying “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!”. And while I am somewhat sympathetic to that sentiment because it sucks being passed up for someone else, let alone someone (potentially) half your age, it’s pretty lame for older engineers to complain about younger engineers. There are some pretty acute reasons why it sucks to be a young, new engineer. I’ve commented on this in the past, but I’m going to expand it here. On the job training – Back in the day, when companies wanted good engineers, they took competent, dependable people, and trained…