High-Tech Hiring: Youth Matters

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Microsoft (MSFT) is known for the high quality of its hires. Senior Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer David Vaskevitch says younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative. But he adds there is a lot they don't know and can't know until they gain experience. So he says his company recruits aggressively for fresh talent on university campuses and for highly experienced engineers from within the industry. One is not at the expense of the other, he insists. For him, it is all about hiring the best and brightest—age and nationality are not important. He acknowledges that the vast majority of Microsoft hires are young, but that is because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with.

There is lots of competition for these senior jobs. And globalization is making things worse. Companies are increasingly locating their research and development operations closer to growth markets (BusinessWeek.com, 1/18/07). Companies like IBM (IBM) are adding tens of thousands to their workforce in places like Bangalore and Shanghai. Some of these jobs would otherwise go to older and more expensive workers in the U.S.

How Maturing Engineers Can Cope

So the days of lifelong employment for engineers may be long gone. And they face decreasing salaries as they reach their fifties. Research by University of California, Berkeley, professors Clair Brown and Greg Linden shows that even those with masters degrees and PhDs have reason to worry. Their analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census data for the semiconductor industry revealed that salaries increased dramatically for engineers in their 30s but these increases slowed after the age of 40. After 50, the mean salary dropped by 17% for those with bachelors degrees and 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs. They found that salary increases for holders of post-graduate degrees were always lower than for those with bachelor's degrees.

The harsh reality is that as engineers progress in their careers, they need to stay current in new technologies and become project managers, designers, or architects. To keep their jobs, engineers need to build skills that are more valuable to companies and take positions that can't be filled by entry-level workers. Experienced engineers can also find rewards in entrepreneurship, teaching, and sales, as well as use their skills to excel in unrelated professions. And as Microsoft's Vaskevitch says, there are computer programmers "who become like rock stars and are unbelievably valuable (and well compensated) as they get older."

Joe Bennett, 44, provides a great example of the approach engineers should take. After working as an engineer for 13 years at Microsoft and becoming senior director of its developer and platform division, he realized that he was losing touch with the technologies he was marketing. So he took a three-month sabbatical to brush up on programming languages and frameworks like C# and ASP.NET, and transferred into a job where he was touting the benefits of different Microsoft technologies. He says that he isn't leading people, but is having fun again and is more intellectually engaged in his work than he has been in 10 years. He believes he is now more valuable to the company.

The bottom line is that we can't slow globalization or require companies to do things that aren't in their economic interests. Let's focus the debate on improving the skills of our existing workforce.

Wadhwa is Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University. He is a tech entrepreneur who founded two technology companies. His research can be found at www.globalizationresearch.com .