We live in a society obsessed with youth. Tech is no different from the wider culture. Startup culture in particular thrives on the idea that you’re past it by the time you’re 30. Mark Zuckerburg is 33 years old. Some Facebook employees quietly started call him Uncle Zuck while he was in his still in his late 20s. Brutal.
Younger founders and employees are willing and able to work longer hours, and really grind it out. They have higher stamina, and generally don’t have families they want to spend time with. They can completely commit to the job at hand. Most mathematical breakthroughs are discovered by younger people. It is true that today’s tech leviathans were founded by people in their 20s – Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft. Amazon is a bit of an outlier – Jeff Bezos was 30 years old when he founded the company. He was already a bit more mature.
And what a company he built. Amazon is one of the companies most likely to be worth a trillion dollars in the next few years. This video by Scott Galloway is the best take on the Four Horsemen, those most likely to hit that mark. Amazon is crushing it, Amazon is dismantling retail, Amazon is going to “kill brands”.
So who is hiring to drive the next stages of its growth? A bunch of 22 year olds, right? Not. So. Much. Amazon has a lot of time for seasoned talent, in the executive and technical ranks.
It just announced it is hiring James Gosling, one of the original inventors of Java. He is 62 years old. We don’t know what he’ll be doing at Amazon – he’s just as likely to be designing a fleet of underwater delivery drones as driving programming language innovation. But he is an inspiration, and he’s still coding. He could work on AWS-specific JVM optimisations. But it’s all conjecture for now.
Meanwhile James Hamilton continues to completely kick ass in compute, network, and data center design for AWS. He cut his teeth in database technology. He’s in his 50s.
Tim Bray, one of the inventors of XML, joined Amazon in 2014. He’s another Sun alumni. He’s 61 now. He still codes.
When you sit down with one of the AWS engineering teams you’re sitting down with grownups. At a guess median age would be 40-45, someone like Andi Gutmans, now 41, one of the original creators of PHP, who now runs Search and New NoSQL for the firm.
Adrian Cockcroft joined AWS in October 2016. He graduated in 1982, not 2002. He is VP Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, a perfect role for someone that helped drive Netflix’s transition from on prem Java hairball to serious cloud leadership.
Great engineering is not maths – it involves tradeoffs, wisdom and experience. Great engineers are generally great teachers. Fintan recently wrote about the reality of the distinguished engineer.
“A distinguished engineer not only leads; they also take responsibility. A distinguished engineer will not throw any of his or her team under the proverbial bus to protect themselves, nor will the make technical decisions that involve a massive pay back later (technical debt) without explaining why and getting buy in and understanding for the decision.”
His description fits the people AWS is currently hiring quite well. The company puts such a premium on independent groups working fast and making their own decisions it requires a particular skillset, which generally involves a great deal of field experience. A related trend is hiring seasoned marketing talent from the likes of IBM.
Some other older companies have older distinguished engineers because they grew up with the company. AWS is explicitly bringing that experience in. It’s refreshing to the see a different perspective on value.
AWS is a client.
Photo credit Peter Campbell under CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.
jr says:
May 23, 2017 at 6:33 pm
Adam Bosworth joined in September.
Pieter Humphrey says:
May 24, 2017 at 6:44 pm
interesting, i remember him from BEA.
Peter Yared says:
May 24, 2017 at 1:53 am
Note of the kids do infrastructure software
jgovernor says:
May 24, 2017 at 11:33 am
Hey Peter, was that a typo – none of the kids?
Twirrim says:
May 24, 2017 at 4:25 am
I don’t know what teams you’ve been dealing with in AWS, but from personal experience the teams skew *heavily* towards fresh out-of-college. It’s the only way they can keep up with the burn out rate. The hours and culture at Amazon are hardly conducive to having a family life.
As someone in my mid 30s I was on the older side of the equation. Occasionally we’d be chatting at lunchtime and something like the Y2K bug would come up as we reminisced, and co-workers would point out they’d barely even used a computer when that was happening.
Yes there are a bunch of older people around in more senior consulting roles, but they’re the outliers, not the norm.
jgovernor says:
May 24, 2017 at 11:32 am
hey Paul thanks. My view is obviously mediated by who I meet – who skew to senior people for sure. So that’s a useful view. loving the idea of AWS engineers never having heard of the y2k bug. i guess i just noticed the outliers. hopefully my shining a positive light on the subject might encourage the average age up a bit.
Evan W. says:
May 24, 2017 at 12:54 pm
A very encouraging and motivating read. At 51 yrs of age (yes, I also remember Y2K) I recently decided to switch career direction from IT Ops Management to AWS and am currently working my way through the AWS Solutions Architect related courses, with my goal being to get the SA Professional Certification. Re:Inventing myself to kickstart my next 25 years in IT! 🙂
jgovernor says:
May 24, 2017 at 8:52 pm
hey evan that is awesome. well done. retraining is super important. let me know if i can try and help you find a role when you’re ready.
jpop says:
June 1, 2017 at 7:54 pm
Hey Evan – I’m 47 and last year I did a bunch of retraining in cloud, and now I am a SA for AWS. This article hit spot-on for me and they really don’t look at age when considering for employment (no, they really don’t). I have kids at home and a life away from work otherwise and I can tell you, it’s no problem here. Good luck!
Metalstorm says:
May 25, 2017 at 1:24 pm
“and co-workers would point out they’d barely even used a computer when that was happening” != “idea of AWS engineers never having heard of the y2k bug”
Robin D Wilson says:
May 26, 2017 at 12:17 pm
In a recent meeting, I made a reference to a scene from the movie, “Stripes” (Bill Murray fan) and all the “kids” in the meeting looked at me like I was from Mars. They had never even heard of the movie. It was then that I realized I was officially “old”.
Ian says:
May 28, 2017 at 5:47 pm
I had an experience like that recently when I mentioned the Ballmer Peak and nobody knew who Steve Ballmer was. SMH.
jpop says:
June 1, 2017 at 7:52 pm
Lighten up, Francis! 😉
Nick says:
May 24, 2017 at 12:21 pm
My personal experience at Amazon was very different. Working for Amazon Instant Video in London, recognised as being one of Amazon’s more intense divisions, I worked with engineers, Product Managers and Program Managers of varied ages and experience. It was ambitious and hard working but rarely was there pressure to work very long hours. There was also a high degree of flexibility over time-keeping to help when this was necessary.
Regarding this article, I found that the Amazon teams with more experienced leaders had plenty of time for a personal life, got the job done and did high quality work with a minimum of angst. Its great to hear that Amazon is investing in experience as well youth.
kylog says:
May 24, 2017 at 1:56 pm
My personal experience at AWS is different. My team has a mix of ages from 20s to 50s in individual contributor roles. I’d guess the average is late 30s, median early 30s. Also, the work-life balance is quite reasonable, comparable to any of a half dozen tech companies I’ve worked at. (We are not in Seattle, so may be atypical.)
That said, the individuals mentioned in this piece are all in very high-level roles – distinguished engineers and VPs are not demographically significant. It’d be super interesting to see hard demographic data in this regard.
Joseph Brenner says:
May 28, 2017 at 6:19 pm
My experience with Amazon’s team of on-line spin control efforts has been rather uniform. It’s a little unusual for these guys to forget and use the same first sentence twice in a row, though.
Vaughn Vernon says:
May 24, 2017 at 12:11 pm
And, James Gosling makes crepes 😀 That’s an ideal programmer to have on your team.
james says:
May 24, 2017 at 1:22 pm
You’ve named 5-6 old guys hired out of literally a workforce of thousands. I don’t see how that’s demolishing the cult of youth.
jgovernor says:
May 24, 2017 at 8:54 pm
so i am querying myself? “[email protected]” some high profile hires can be a useful palliative to the cult of youth, imho
Lisa says:
May 24, 2017 at 1:45 pm
Minor quibble – alumni is plural, alumnus is (masculine) singular. FWIW, most of my AWS teams have been a good mix of people my age and older (40s – we were there for the dot-com crash in the late ’90s/early 2000s) as well as those fresh out of college. I love being neither the oldest nor smartest person in the room.
How AWS Cloud is demolishing the cult of youth | Ace Infoway says:
May 24, 2017 at 3:19 pm
[…] AWS Cloud is demolishing the cult of youth {$excerpt:n} submitted by /u/speckz [link] [comments] Source: […]
Bob Cooper says:
May 24, 2017 at 4:43 pm
They may hiresome hire profile olds, but I’m very skeptical that any more than a tiny percentage of developers are over 40.
How Amazon hopes to win the cloud by hiring older engineers ⋆ US-News.net | Latest News of the USA | US-News.net | Latest News of the USA says:
May 24, 2017 at 6:33 pm
[…] previous? By Redmonk analyst James Governor’s reckoning, the median age of an AWS engineer is between 40 and 45 years previous. Governor’s knowledge […]
Doug K says:
May 24, 2017 at 9:43 pm
hiring Tim Bray, James Hamilton, Adrian Cockcroft, James Gosling – is hardly ‘demolishing the cult of youth’.
Those are some of the best minds of my generation. It’s a symptom of the cult of youth, that it’s remarkable that they can still get hired.
See also Tim Bray’s post on old geeks,
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/09/14/Old-Geek
The rest of us have to be starving hysterical naked and unemployed, or possibly Cobol Cowboys..
jgovernor says:
May 24, 2017 at 9:59 pm
doug – fair. i just thought it was kind of cool. watch this space though, let’s see if we can do a thing
Wolfgang Gentzsch says:
May 25, 2017 at 6:37 am
The headline of this article is certainly somewhat provocative, and that’s why it attracts a lot of readers, I guess those above all who are beyond their 30s. And my 30+ years of business tell me that the message isn’t new at all; there were always a handful of guys around me with kind of a relentless and admirable standing and charisma who work very hard even in their 60s and are still able to motivate the young ones. Other geniuses burn out with 30. It’s simply how mother nature has equipped us. Still I like your article very much because it reminds us to be careful with prejudices concerning age and experience.
BTW: At the Plug & Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale I see a lot of kids, but I also see that about half of the people are already beyond their 30s, and at least a dozen or so beyond their 50s and still energized by new ideas… And yes, I am coming from Sun as well 🙂
jgovernor says:
May 25, 2017 at 1:43 pm
thanks Wolfgang I did indeed write rather a tabloid style headline 🙂
Mary Branscombe says:
May 25, 2017 at 11:47 pm
yeah, it’s like saying Microsoft is demolishing the cult of youth because Leslie Lamport is at MSR. look at neither the mass of developers nor the standout VPs who’ve made headlines before but at the PM & equivalent level to see what the demographic is there. I think your headline is really some big name people in tech* are going to Amazon when they once mostly went to Google if they weren’t already at Microsoft’ *who might have to think about what their healthcare plans are going to be
Ordway says:
May 24, 2017 at 10:31 pm
HAHA, I’ll believe it when i stop interviewing burnt out 25 year olds with AMZN as the only entry on their resume.
ppj says:
May 25, 2017 at 6:45 am
You can obtain software that pretty much does all the hardware provisioning for you. Just provisioning the hardware is self is left up to you. Most of the Amazon EC2 platform will be extinct within a decade or only used for legacy implementations. But no growth. Their control plane implementation wont last that long. It’s too top heavy and it went into the wrong direction just mere months before containerization became mainstream.
They will not have the projected growth you say, I guarantee you that from a developer point of view.
JMR says:
May 27, 2017 at 2:46 pm
You’re darling. Containers are not the death of AWS. Containers aren’t even an evolutionary branch that’s likely to survive at all (know of a lot of production work using Docker right now? Go to a conference and watch the hands go down when the speaker asks “So how many of you are using it in a production environment?”
We’re a gnat’s eyelash away from the explosion of serverless computing, and guess who pioneered that?
How Amazon hopes to win the cloud by hiring older engineers says:
May 25, 2017 at 7:45 am
[…] old? By Redmonk analyst James Governor's reckoning, the median age of an AWS engineer is between 40 and 45 years old. Governor's data may be […]
Fred Stein says:
May 25, 2017 at 2:58 pm
AWS is an enterprise compute engine – it’s higher priced, higher reliability, feature rich and offers global reach. There are lots of other SaaS and IaaS competitors at lower price. Lots of scrappy startups use these lower priced XaaS.
No surprise that an enterprise compute company hires deeply experienced enterprise compute engineering talent.
Charles Cosse says:
May 26, 2017 at 2:33 am
An analogy is today’s youth and cooking-from-scratch. For example, the other day there was a youngster who had never seen pizza crust made from primary ingredients like flour and yeast.
jgovernor says:
May 26, 2017 at 10:01 am
charles – *love* this. it’s a really interesting point about abstraction and deep understanding.
Peter Varhol says:
May 29, 2017 at 1:03 pm
Since you mention abstraction, don’t forget Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions. Ultimately, abstractions are useful, until they aren’t any more.
Lisa Erickson says:
May 28, 2017 at 3:15 am
I’ll bet they couldn’t make an app work in 64K, or create overlays in a linkage editor. …snickering softly
John Lewis says:
May 26, 2017 at 2:40 pm
If I could, I’d hire Richard Stallman (64) tomorrow. Top guys in AI are Raymond Kurzweil and Geoff Hinton who are both pushing 70. Kristen Nygaard, Alan Kay were both doing good work in their 70’s. I still code (Scala).
Bad Process SIGKILLs | CR 258 | Jupiter Broadcasting says:
May 28, 2017 at 10:13 am
[…] AWS is Demolishing the Culture of Youth […]
Peter Campbell says:
May 28, 2017 at 11:47 pm
I took that photo of James Gosling. I am happy for you to use it but could you please provide attribution as per the CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence?
jgovernor says:
May 29, 2017 at 10:16 am
Peter – yes so sorry. that’s a bad oversight. thanks!!!
Challenge and Triumph of Older Tech Workers - JobberTalentTalkJobberTalentTalk says:
May 30, 2017 at 2:25 pm
[…] where older tech pros are not only relevant, but also dominating. As RedMonk helpfully pointed out in a new blog posting, Amazon Web Services has hired many of tech’s most notable figures, including James Gosling […]
David says:
May 30, 2017 at 3:43 pm
At first I thought I had stumbled onto a thread about mixed martial arts, or some other intense contact sport that will beat your body into submission at a young age. Perhaps I’m simply in denial, but I can’t believe we are talking about 30’s and 40’s being considered over the hill in the context of IT. Sure, I can see the attraction companies have towards young employees. There are no wife and kids to compete with them for your precious time. That being said, we shouldn’t be too concerned about this since it’s illegal to discriminate based on age, right?
David says:
May 30, 2017 at 3:47 pm
Let me correct myself. I should have said: “spouse and kids” instead of “wife and kids”. I was phrasing my response based on my personal situation. Habit. 🙂
Gosling Moves to AWS, Project Jigsaw Pieces Coming Together, and Java Language Type Erasure! - developerWorks TV says:
June 1, 2017 at 1:43 pm
[…] firm Redmonk, in this post suggested that AWS is “demolishing the cult of youth” by bringing the 62 year old […]