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Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

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Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#281

Post by gacba »

madengr wrote: post #248
noddingham wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that also works in Boulder, is your compensation enough to allow you to actually live in Boulder?

Yeah, inquiring minds would like to know. I'm in Boulder right now for a conference, and looking at Zillow, it's f'ing insane. Prices seem to start at $1M.

Lived in Boulder County for 15 years until I got married and moved south of Denver.

Boulder itself has ALWAYS been expensive (even when I was in college in the early 90s) for housing. If you're serious about relocating, look at some less insane, but very close communities that the majority of the "Boulderites" live in:

NORTH: - Longmont - Gunbarrel

EAST: - Louisville - Lafayette - Erie

SOUTHEAST-ish: - Broomfield - Westminster - Northglenn - Thornton

You can have a "reasonable" commute, and a less insane house price in those areas. They are all bedroom communities for the area... Personally, I lived in Louisville and Lafayette at least half of my time in the county (the other in Boulder proper, renting, always).

There are always options.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#282

Post by mundo »

ori_b wrote: post #234
InclinedPlane wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks" This kind of thing is the worst in interviews. Like getting asked some fill-in-the-blanks question on the pillars of OOP or to define some random bit of jargon or what-have-you. That coupled with the "have you seen this question before" interviewing is just infuriating.

> That coupled with the "have you seen this question before" interviewing is just infuriating. When I interview someone, I will usually ask if they've seen the question before, so that I can skip it -- is there something wrong with that?

> "have you seen this question before" interviewing

I suspect that this was meant to refer to interview questions with an "Aha!" answer, that are unlikely to be answered correctly by people who don't already know the answer.

For example, I think, "How would you detect a cycle in a linked list?" is a bad question because, if the candidate implements Floyd's algorithm on the whiteboard, the likely assumption is that they remembered it, not that they came up with it on the spot.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#283

Post by eric_h »

sidlls wrote: post #276
int_handler wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really a phenomenon that is exclusive to Bay Area companies though?

I don't about "exclusive" but the very first time a "data structures and algorithms" question ever appeared in an interview I had was in the Bay Area, after having spent 10+ years on the east coast. Prior to that interviews focused almost exclusively on design patterns (not just OO, but general architecture), project experience, and language specific questions where appropriate. I've been here a while now so I have n…

> conflate academic computer science with software engineering

Which is mind boggling. I took an introductory "software engineering" class in (a reasonably prestigious) university ~15 yrs ago which was ostensibly about learning how to use the right tool for the right job, and one of the assignments was to build a web application in C++!

Perhaps the intent of that assignment was to show that it wasn't the right tool, but that was certainly never communicated by the professor.

I didn't really learn any software engineering until I got my first job and had to build software, with a team, that people actually used.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#284

Post by user5994461 »

20yrs_no_equity wrote: post #215
groby_b wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it It's the older women who rock both architecture and quick execution. :) ("I'm sorry, but you opened the door, counselor") Age does not immediately confer advantages or disadvantages - we just often use it as a proxy for "experienced", "more methodical", "slower", "inflexible", "good mentor". (Your pick here) All of those are independent…

You can't have 30 years of experience when you're 20 years old. You're unlikely to have 15 years experience when you're 20 years old, and you're certainly going to have a different perspective when you're more years into programming, which has good and bad aspects. Like I said, you want diversity of ages. I'm in my late 40s, I work with 20 year olds and 30 year olds and a guy whose even a fair bit older than me. Hire…

You can't have 30 years of experience in your job when your job didn't exist 30 years ago.

You can't have 15 years of experience in [whatever thing] when [whatever thing] didn't exist 15 years ago.

Note: 15 years ago = 56k internet, paying by the hour, for the 0.xyz% of select few people on the planet

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#285

Post by foobarge »

vemv wrote: post #11

You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end. If you are a young programmer and your salary merely covers your costs of living (including leisure etc), it seems to me that you need a plan.

I'm nearing 50 and I'm still coding. I'm looking forward to retirement where I'll be able to code more (contributing to open source stuff for instance) and do all the things I don't have the time to do now (more hardware, etc...)

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#286

Post by sporkenfang »

madengr wrote: post #248
noddingham wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that also works in Boulder, is your compensation enough to allow you to actually live in Boulder?

Yeah, inquiring minds would like to know. I'm in Boulder right now for a conference, and looking at Zillow, it's f'ing insane. Prices seem to start at $1M.

Yeah I'm finding it's basically impossible to purchase a house inside the city limits. Last weekend I saw an 850k two bedroom cottage on a half acre in Boulder, and a three bedroom (nearly twice as large, had a full basement) house on a full acre near downtown Longmont right off the BOLT line for 400k. It's not worth the price to live in Boulder when I can live 20 minutes away with enough room. Plus Longmont has fiber!

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#287

Post by Clubber »

ryandrake wrote: post #204
polartx wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think that age is correlation, not causation. Agreed. I started working in tech when I was 22--now I'm over 30. I've never witnessed old-age discrimination. What I have witnessed are start-ups, built on newer tech, (AWS over on-prem, nosql over relational, etc), passing on candidates whose last reference book was the Data Warehouse Toolkit and still want to be called WebMasters. The law of the tech industry is whe…

There is a difference (both in terms of perceived and actual value) between "never stop learning" and constantly being on the language/framework-of-the-year treadmill.

It's funny, I've been in the industry so long and I usually stay at places 5+ years, so I've been able to skip quite a few trends. When new guys come in, I'll ask about the stuff I've skipped wondering if they are still relevant. Sometimes they are and sometimes I hear things like, "oh, that's so old, this is the new thing."

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#288

Post by kamaal »

stcredzero wrote: post #121
tjic wrote: post #2

I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world. I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discri…

San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places. The rapidity with which people flip the idiot bit on you, due to puddle-shallow signalling in the Bay Area really takes my breath away. - The sound of keys clicking in a phone interview automatically means you are Googling the answer in an interview. Never mind that you are a dynamic language programmer and you are writing a 10 second s…

>>You must be able to mad-libs complete the paraphrase of recent CS textbooks, or you obviously never covered the topic.

Only recently a friend of mine narrated an interview tale. I don't exactly remember the precise question, but apparently he was asked to solve a problem in 30 mins(Two problems is what interviewer expected him to solve in an hour). One of such problem apparently he couldn't solve it in the time complexity the interviewer expected him to. Though he got some solution working in an hour.

He later on went and googled it and apparently the algorithm couldn't be solved unless you knew about Suffix Automata(http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/20861)

Long story short, these days apparently without everyday exposure competitive programming exercises(spending hours every day on sites like codeforces, SPOJ and hackerrank) there is no way you can clear interviews.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#289

Post by anexprogrammer »

user5994461 wrote: post #284
20yrs_no_equity wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have 30 years of experience when you're 20 years old. You're unlikely to have 15 years experience when you're 20 years old, and you're certainly going to have a different perspective when you're more years into programming, which has good and bad aspects. Like I said, you want diversity of ages. I'm in my late 40s, I work with 20 year olds and 30 year olds and a guy whose even a fair bit older than me. Hire…

You can't have 30 years of experience in your job when your job didn't exist 30 years ago. You can't have 15 years of experience in [whatever thing] when [whatever thing] didn't exist 15 years ago. Note: 15 years ago = 56k internet, paying by the hour, for the 0.xyz% of select few people on the planet

Except it probably did. 15 years ago I'd been working mostly online for nearly 10 years. Sure the world was a different place when newsgroups were uucp over a (very expensive) 64k leased line and before the web, but still surprisingly recognisable.

Some of the details have changed, the languages, the size of the databases, the devices involved, and a million frameworks for front end have come and gone.

Some of the time 20 years experience feels like 4 years experience repeated 5 times with different buzzwords. The same screw ups, the same lack of understanding from missing the same point, the same management wish to do SEO and security later. Or to budget 2 weeks for bug fixing.

Now you know 5-10 languages all with good and bad points so tune out most of the zealotry of the latest fashion to try and get to real distinguishing points.

All that experience can help a lot. It's far from dead. We can even have the same emacs vs vim argument that happened in 1990.

Re: Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry

#290

Post by learc83 »

serge2k wrote: post #223
mixmastamyk wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rotary phones are from the 70's and earlier.

and people born in the 70s aren't millenials. Really, the oldest are mid 30s, and I think even that is a stretch.

It's not a stretch, generations generally span about 15 years and millennial is what people settled on. I'm 32 and we were always part of generation Y/millennials.

Most sources put the end of generation X as 1980. So unless you want to come up with a micro-generation for people born between 1980-1985, we're stuck in the millennial group.

The thing is that if we stick with a 15 year span, the youngest people who should really be called millennials are around 21 or 22, but it seems like each year the lower bound for millennial grows (I occasionally see news reports referring to children as millennials).

I'm assuming this trend will stop when we settle on a name for the next generation.

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