451–460 of 808 posts
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I presume you wouldn't hire someone who expresses a strong distaste for your software stack, regardless of age (unless their job is specifically to replace it).
I was once hired for a C++ position _because_ I hated on C++ during the interview.
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It's a race to the bottom. You could pay more for better work that gets done more slowly (fewer hours as people have families, etc,) or you could pay less for worse work that gets done more quickly. Well, iOS11 needs to ship on its annual schedule, non-negotiable. And the SVP will really complain if I ask for more money this quarter. So, cheap it is. If a bridge falls down, it's really obvious and people die. If bill…
In my experience, worse work typically gets done a lot more slowly than good work.
If the timing of that bad hacky solution being shipped is critical, then it's actually the perfect solution and the right work was done quickly, which is great. If it's not, and is rather the first piece of a new feature intended to last for a while, then the work on that feature as a whole may be slow as a result, so then it looks more like bad and slow work.
I think with experience comes the ability to choose the appropriate approach for the problem at hand, whereas inexperience will usually lead to the short term quickest easiest route being chosen every time by default.
Another subtlety is that, typically, more experienced people will actually deliver the 'good' solution faster, which results in a double win if that is indeed the correct course of action.
It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? I have heard that companies like recent grads because they are (1) more malleable and (2) can be paid less. But neither of those reasons seem to me strong enough. I'm talking completely about the company's own interests. Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the co…
Doesn't YC have a max age for founders? I imagine there is similar logic for their cutoff. Not saying it's valid, but last I checked (long ago) they had a max age. Disclosure: I am a bootstrapping old fart.
It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? I have heard that companies like recent grads because they are (1) more malleable and (2) can be paid less. But neither of those reasons seem to me strong enough. I'm talking completely about the company's own interests. Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the co…
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So would it also be illegal to advertise your job positions in teen Vogue but NOT in AARP magazine? It doesn't seem much different in this case. Bit methods target young people.
No of course not. Anyone can buy either magazine. Those two examples are completely different. In the magazine case you are taking out an advertisement with no ability to discriminate. In the Facebook case there is a specific setting based on age to show job ads . Job seekers over the age of 40 are protected so this is discrimination against a protected class. The problem is not that young people were targeted, the p…
The only true way to solve this is to force by law to hire older people (e.g. 30% of your workforce must be over 40); otherwise all this proxies like trying to regulate third-party ads and else its just an endless cat-and-mouse game.
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I agree with you, and this is a hard lesson to learn. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. Software should really only be measured by the value it provides. If a terribly buggy piece of poorly written code still saves hundreds of man hours a week, it's a win. (Unit tests be damned) If that big ball of mud that's using 20 year old technology still prints a billion dollars a year - that's a win. (Microservic…
This is what I call the Mediocre Mercenary Mentality, this idea that "as long as we can make money off of it, it's good enough". This mentality is the reason why sometimes -- but not always! -- my phone won't play music in my car until I restart the _car_. This mentality is why game development companies get away with charging full price for unfinished, bug-ridden games with crippled features and missing content. Thi…
I don't know if the world is getting a shittier place. But it surely is getting less reliable.
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In my experience, worse work typically gets done a lot more slowly than good work.
I don't think they mean slow development. Rather, overall rate - all other things equal, someone who insists on no more than a 40 hour week will accomplish less than someone willing to work 60-80 based on whatever metric you use (KLOC, story points, etc)
You're the second person. When was the last time you encountered anyone using KLOC's (per 1k lines of code) as a measurement of work done? Are they working on mainframe codebases?
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If billions of computers become vulnerable to malicious actors and a few hundred or thousand people suffer dramatic personal damages, well that's a nice and quiet problem which will be quickly forgotten in the 24-hour news cycle. This. I do development coaching and training. I’m totally burned out because my job doesn’t matter. These companies don’t care. They hire me to “increase code quality” but that ends up being…
The topic of your rant is something that it took me forever to accept as a software engineer. Nobody cares about quality. Your method is refactored to be super-fast and have no branches? Nobody cares. Elegant, re-usable architecture? Nobody cares. You've optimized an inner loop in assembly and increased speed by 30%? Nobody cares. Made it to zero compiler warnings? Nobody cares. No known crashers left in the bug trac…
It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? I have heard that companies like recent grads because they are (1) more malleable and (2) can be paid less. But neither of those reasons seem to me strong enough. I'm talking completely about the company's own interests. Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the co…
Here's my experience with an elderly coder in his mid 50s. He was a decent delphi and .net coder, he was a decent human being, but he had health problems. Most of the week he had hospital appointments. He required nose surgery. His blood levels were low. He needed vitamin d and iron supplements and during our four month acquintance, he never got any better. He constantly forgot things and he feared his lack of iron h…