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On Getting Older in Tech

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Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#91

Post by mVChr »

rifung wrote: post #44

> let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30 I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very…

> ...and that Google would very much like to hire senior people as well but they're much harder to find.

> I wonder how much of what he said is true vs ageism.

Of course they want to hire more senior engineers now, it would likely help win their court battle[1] over it.

[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/07/02/0438216/age-discrim...

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#92

Post by gaius »

soham wrote: post #71

Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process. In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job. You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial…

the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds

Algo-on-the-whiteboard interviews favour people who have recently been cramming for their final-year CS exams - by SHEER COINCIDENCE they happen to be in their early 20s...

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#93

Post by mVChr »

lisper wrote: post #74
fulafel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a good big comnunity in Clojure now?

Depends on what you count as "big". If you look at languages used on github, for example: http://githut.info Clojure is doing OK (better than Common Lisp), but not great (worse than Haskell and Emacs lisp).

Not quite as much activity as Scala either. I think the good thing is that functional languages as a whole aren't going anywhere, it's just that the jobs for them are spread very thin over several languages.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#94

Post by vishbar »

onion2k wrote: post #85
jodrellblank wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even today, Common Lisp is still one of the best choices for many applications. Then why don't people build amazing and popular things with it? I don't mean one or two people build one or two things, but lots of people building lots of things. Nobody uses it, but it's the best choice, can't both be true. And 'nobody uses it' is approximately true. It's not a mainstream JVM language or CLR language, it's not an AWS or…

Then why don't people build amazing and popular things with it? The reason is because "best" can have more than one meaning. Languages are usually only "best" at one thing, not for all things. In the case of many languages that people consider to be "best", they've been optimised for the development process (making it nice to write code in) rather than speed (C) or security (Ada) or a specific niche (R) or maintainab…

> There is an argument that Ruby is mostly LISP, so it could be said that lots of people use it very happily everyday.

How is that? I thought Lisp's "killer app" was its extremely powerful macroing system. Does Ruby have an equivalent?

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#95

Post by blauditore »

Out of the software devevelopers I know, only a few percent are 40+, so my sample set isn't very reliable. But from what I've seen, the average (or at least median) skill set was better for younger people, where the best ones I've met are in their 30s.

My assumption is that there has been a point where software/CS started booming and people started getting degrees in that field. Among the 40+ devs I know there's a higher percentage of carreer changers, and with a few exceptions those have been generally less skilled.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#96

Post by lukego »

lisper wrote: post #55

One of the things that has made me old (52) and crotchety is that I learned Lisp very early in my career. That gave me the ability to see that 99% of "new" technologies were really just poor re-inventions of (parts of) Lisp. Even today, Common Lisp -- despite (or, as some would argue, because of) the fact that it hasn't been officially updated in decades is still not only a viable language but one of the best choices…

> And that makes me grumpy sometimes.

If you will excuse a moment of cheekiness...

Could be that you have cause and effect backwards here: because you are grumpy you are dismissing 99% of other language developers' work as rubbish. Could be that it's less than 99% and you are overlooking some great ideas.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#97

Post by jaimebuelta »

rifung wrote: post #44

> let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30 I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very…

The Google process is also veeeery long. I guess is not unusual for an older developer to start it, and get other good offers meanwhile. Another benefit of age is to be able to pull contacts as ways of getting jobs, and reduce the amount of "meaningless" interviews.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#98

Post by misja111 »

soham wrote: post #71

Elephant in the room, IMHO, is the technical interview process. In software engineering roles at big/desirable/fast-growing companies, the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds. Both young and old are put thru the same/similar coding interviews at many of these places, and often faster coders are younger, and get the job. You can't fix ageism without fixing the interview process. Being jovial…

Technical interviews don't necessarily favor faster coders. I have been on both sides of technical interviews and what counts most is that an applicant asks the right questions and chooses the right approach.

What you're definitely not looking for is a candidate that hacks some solution together quickly but with badly structured code, makes a lot of unconfirmed assumptions and doesn't listen to advice.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#99

Post by bbcbasic »

mianos wrote: post #69
rifung wrote: post #44

> let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30 I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very…

Also Atlassian says the same. They said last week that they just can't get senior people in Sydney. Personally I feel older people are not as good at the little puzzles they set as an entry test.

I applied to Atlassian many years ago and what struck me is their refusal to entertain non java devs to cross over. If they want more seniors they should consider c# or other language devs who could cross over.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#100

Post by newmanships »

rifung wrote: post #44

> let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30 I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very…

I wonder how many more people are graduating with CS degrees in the last few years compared to those who graduated two decades ago. I'd imagine there's a lot more today with how popular it is becoming. That's not even counting all the CS grads that have since moved up the corporate ladder/switched roles or careers and aren't applying for dev jobs now.
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