But isn't that the point they are trying to make - that sports teams can be effective despite have very high rates of staff turnover because everyone has realistic expectations of the employer-employee relationship?
But this expectation is a natural fit for what they're doing. Playing in the NFL is their life's ambition. It is their life's income. It's their life's glory. You can't just decide that your company should be like that because you would like that kind of dedication and that kind of HR policy.
Does success at these team companies mean anything comparable to what it does fro an NFL player? Is it the pinnacle of their career? The players on a sports team get a lot of glory from their success. They're also in a naturally competitive environment. They want the team to win as much as management of the team does.
I'd actually be interested to see the stats for developers and how long the average career is. Now obviously some people make it to their 40s, 50s and later but I suspect most don't.
I remember realizing that there didn't seem to be any older people around. A mentor pointed out to me "just because you don't see them doesn't mean they aren't around."
To your first sentence: I, also, would be very interested in a statistical analysis of where the 20-somethings of each decade ended up.
Where on earth have you pulled that assumption from?
A well regarded Quora answer and several HN discussions have yielded that the myth is not that people beyond 30/40/50 stop being engineers; the myth is the 25-year old creator/entrepreneur/engineer.
As I said, I'd like to see the actual statistics - I have a hunch one way, but I could well be wrong. But I'd love to see an actual study of the age breakdown of the population of people actually engaged in technical areas.
What do you think they do when they get to that age? Where do they go?
My observation is that age discrimination isn't a brick wall, so much as an increased difficulty in doing things a person should be able to do. It's not like you can't get a programming job after 40, because obviously people do. It's just that job searches are no longer completed in 2 weeks; it's closer to 4 months.
What no one told us in school was that getting better at our jobs, past a certain point, makes job searches harder and more complex, especially because HR drones don't understand our specialties and tend to use them against us. ("Doesn't have 3 years of Swift experience? No hire.") Structuring a society as a pyramid actually works when it is in transition from poverty to industrial wealth, but it's a disaster in a stable state.
In my experience, I've never seen people over 40 have any more issues than younger folks getting programming jobs.
However, the reason you don't see many, is that most don't want that job by the time they are that age. For most programmers, they will hit a glass ceiling on salary somewhere in their 30s. If they want to make more money, and most people do, they transition into management.
The answer to the question, "where did they go?" is pretty simple. Management.
Yeah, that's been my experience as well. I'm 38, and I get pinged for a job about 2-3 times a week, but basically I don't want to work at any of them (ask me again in 6 months).
A lot of organizations, particularly in professional services, are pretty brutal at maintaining a pyramid shaped organization structure - "up or out" as they say.
