The bitter old newly re-purposed senior developers

ywhtptgtfo

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I work in a corporation that has annual waves of attrition. When one of these waves occurs, people in less profitable divisions get laid off and occasionally get re-purposed to serve in more profitable divisions.

My division picked up a large set of senior developers whose divisions were recently demolished. These uncles are significantly older than us and some of them have to serve managers/team leaders who are 10+ years younger than them. Naturally, there's quite a bit of resentment going on. :)

One interesting difference I see between these re-purposed uncles and de-novoly recruited older employees is that the former tend to exhibit many symptoms of know-it-all junior developers:
- Defensive about reviews/criticisms
- Whine about the code being garbage
- Deride existing technologies as being outdated/dinosaur/not as good as what they use
- Try to push outrageous refactors/platforms
- Paying attention to minor details are a waste of time

For those of you who also work in corporate environments, is this a common phenomenon?
 
I wouldn't work in a workplace where developers serve managers. The job of managers is to serve developers by managing the workplace to eliminate distractions to professionals getting stuff done.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html

I work for a (non-incorporated) conglomerate in a semi-development role. We have essentially no movement of developers between divisions. My division has been adding devs, but we don't have any process to specifically get development resources from other divisions and AFAIK nobody in the current team has ever worked in another division of the company. (Though some of them have moved from non-dev roles to dev roles in their division, and vice-versa.)
 
It can not be worse than working for a bureaucracy.

It does add 50% gold and hammers to the capital though.

I wouldn't work in a workplace where developers serve managers. The job of managers is to serve developers by managing the workplace to eliminate distractions to professionals getting stuff done.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html

I work for a (non-incorporated) conglomerate in a semi-development role. We have essentially no movement of developers between divisions. My division has been adding devs, but we don't have any process to specifically get development resources from other divisions and AFAIK nobody in the current team has ever worked in another division of the company. (Though some of them have moved from non-dev roles to dev roles in their division, and vice-versa.)

Many of the divisions including mine were formerly independent companies that got bought some years ago. So the gulf between divisions can be pretty big. Factionalism also is a problem.
 
Take pity on them.

I once had a software development job where I was the oldest person in the company at 45. The CEO was 12 years younger and his salary was less than mine, which was like painting a giant target on my back. To make matters worse, the company was based in London so those managers made less than half of what I did. My boss, who was in his early 30s, once told me that I was over the hill in a young man's profession.

Now that I'm having to go back to work after being retired for 14 years, I face even more age discrimination.
 
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