<story><title>How a team of young people helped rebuild healthcare.gov (2015)</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/?utm_source=atlfb&amp;amp;single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JustSomeNobody</author><text>As a developer in my 40&amp;#x27;s, I see things like this and worry that the software industry will come to rely only on the young because they don&amp;#x27;t ... I don&amp;#x27;t want to say care ... but put as much emphasis maybe? ... on work-life balance.&lt;p&gt;Developement-wise, I can hang with the 20 something crowd, no problems. I just can&amp;#x27;t compete with the single&amp;#x2F;no kids thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notmyemployer</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m working on a contract tangentially related to this work and it&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t know what&amp;#x27;s going on. This is solely about the quality of the talent.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t automated and still happen for some teams on calls during maintenance periods once a week. I&amp;#x27;ve had people in technical capacities ask what GitHub is.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;m too old to crash on the couch at my startup&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t think I can say the same about most devs I&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re an older dev that is intellectually curious in the practice and art of software development I think you&amp;#x27;ll be fine.</text></comment>
<story><title>How a team of young people helped rebuild healthcare.gov (2015)</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/?utm_source=atlfb&amp;amp;single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JustSomeNobody</author><text>As a developer in my 40&amp;#x27;s, I see things like this and worry that the software industry will come to rely only on the young because they don&amp;#x27;t ... I don&amp;#x27;t want to say care ... but put as much emphasis maybe? ... on work-life balance.&lt;p&gt;Developement-wise, I can hang with the 20 something crowd, no problems. I just can&amp;#x27;t compete with the single&amp;#x2F;no kids thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>knorker</author><text>I see this more as &amp;quot;the people who just show up&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;the people who actually work when they&amp;#x27;re at work&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Dividing them up like this the typical &amp;quot;just shows up&amp;quot; person is purely stimulus driven. &lt;i&gt;Nothing&lt;/i&gt; happens if you don&amp;#x27;t tell them to do exactly something. They won&amp;#x27;t tell you they&amp;#x27;re blocked on Bob sending a purchase order for a month. They won&amp;#x27;t tell you because you didn&amp;#x27;t ask. You didn&amp;#x27;t ask so they just... they just do nothing.&lt;p&gt;Or you have contractors who &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; don&amp;#x27;t care[1]. They bill by the hour, and if you don&amp;#x27;t give them tasks then they can take a second contract and bill more.&lt;p&gt;Most companies I&amp;#x27;ve seen are full of stimulus-response people.&lt;p&gt;You don&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;ll fix a typo and that&amp;#x27;s it, will call you on it saying &amp;quot;that won&amp;#x27;t take two weeks, what else?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen competent people (with children) fall into a comfort zone where they can keep up and &amp;quot;perform well&amp;quot; working just an hour or two a week, because nobody else gets any work done so it&amp;#x27;s not like they&amp;#x27;re blocking people. These same people &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; perform in better companies.&lt;p&gt;[1] I&amp;#x27;m not saying no contractors care. But they have extra reason not to care if they happened to be paid and aren&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;stimulated&amp;quot; (in the simulus-response sense).</text></comment>