131–140 of 158 posts
I wonder how prevalent the whole ageism thing is. It makes good articles because half the engineers are afraid of it, but how widespread is this? Could be just a dozen isolated cases that the media latches on?
Incredibly prevalent.
I'm in the opposite of this situation, I'm among the 10% of the youngest employees in the company, when around 60% of the company will be retiring within a decade. We're also in one of those high cost housing markets, and while I'm very well paid comparatively to others in my particular part of the technology sector - its still not enough to buy a house, or settle down - but they're somewhat unsympathetic when I talk…
If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t until I was 30 that my wife and I had enough for a downpayment for a house. When I graduated, my salary was $40k. And, 3-bedroom houses, in my economically-attractive, but not extravagent, area were around $300k. Rent for a 2br was about $1000 / month, so saving $60k took quite a few years. Of course, several co-workers had well-off parents who bought them their first house…
Yeah, they could have made some different choices and only been, say, $60k in debt, but "it gets better" comes with some pretty big caveats for a lot of people right now.
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From being on HN for years, folly is ok for a lot of VC backed startups. "We know Ruby! Let's do everything in that!", said the team at Twitter. Then performance took a nose dive since the language was known at the time to not scale. Now it's Java or Scala.
Twitter is arguably successful so why would you consider their decision to be folly? It worked for them. Startups have limited resources. If you devote them to solving tomorrow's problems then you'll be beaten by someone who devotes their resources to solving today's problems.
People tend to think, "We'll architect it later" means "We don't have to think now". You need to think at every step. You don't need to know how you'll deal with everything, but there is a lot of rooming for being rational. You should think about fault tolerance when you start. It could be that you think you don't need much since everything will deploy to one box (and you're okay with loosing the whole thing). You need to be rational. You need to know why you did what you did and what the impacts would be.
I'm going to stop picking on Twitter since they are the case study in what not to do. They learned from themselves and taught us all much in the process.
Many startups don't think all this through (even if they only need to think 2 moves ahead). They over-hire. They under design. They make lots of poor choices because they think they have the runway and want to be cool with the latest frameworks. All of these actions I'd place squarely in the folly camp since Uncle Bob and other resources have been free since at least 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsjsiz2A9mg).
I wonder how prevalent the whole ageism thing is. It makes good articles because half the engineers are afraid of it, but how widespread is this? Could be just a dozen isolated cases that the media latches on?
They cry that the market is dry, that the GAFAS bough all the best and that only fizz-buzz worth students remain.
I doubt the whole industry would refuse to hire an expert based on age when they are so much desperate for one.
But I'm young so I have to way to check this yet.
> I wouldn’t want to work in a place where management is close to my age without a gold-plated guarantee they share the “Let’s try it and see” outlook of younger companies.
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Why does an older person cost more? Either they produce more, or they’re overpaid. The first type is definitely worth finding and paying... I’ve seen companies built solely by 22-year old script kiddies and usually the stack can’t scale. At that point, you’re in a trickier spot because a 40-year-old who can inject some good sense at the beginning of a project is a lot more abundant than a 40-year-old who can lead a t…
> Why does an older person cost more? Let's take an example case where two engineers are working in a second tier city earning $85,000 per year in salary. One is 25 years old, one is 53 years old. The company covers the entire cost of the employee health insurance. The health insurance for the 53 year old will cost a minimum of 2x what it does for the 25 year old. The cost of health insurance begins to aggressively i…
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Twitter is arguably successful so why would you consider their decision to be folly? It worked for them. Startups have limited resources. If you devote them to solving tomorrow's problems then you'll be beaten by someone who devotes their resources to solving today's problems.
I wouldn't use Ruby/Python for web development given their know issues. I'd use Java/C#/Go/Closure; two of these existed at the time Twitter was made. While those two are more verbose, the IDEs make most of that easy (I use Eclipse and AOP to generate almost all of that bulk). So picking something that's good at the start will save you in the end. People tend to think, "We'll architect it later" means "We don't have…
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It is not just about the interviews. Google and others in the big five also evaluate "career trajectory". That means you need to show continuous progression in your career as a non-entry-level hire. Someone who has reached a plateau in salary usually doesn't have that, a "grizzled" tech veteran won't be able to show continuous career progression after surviving ups and downs in the industry (layoffs, failed companies…
That's a misunderstanding. They want you to show growth at Google , and if you are hired as an entry-level engineer . It isn't about what you did up to that point. Source: did a lot of hiring at Google.
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I wouldn't use Ruby/Python for web development given their know issues. I'd use Java/C#/Go/Closure; two of these existed at the time Twitter was made. While those two are more verbose, the IDEs make most of that easy (I use Eclipse and AOP to generate almost all of that bulk). So picking something that's good at the start will save you in the end. People tend to think, "We'll architect it later" means "We don't have…
Wow I don’t even know where to begin with this. Perhaps the biggest flaw is confusing language with architecture. Twitters scaling issues had to do with non-trivial architecture issues that are much more widely understood now than they were a decade ago. It’s very easy to sit in your armchair now with your pipe and claim how bad their approach was, but the fact that you think it has to do with choice of language show…
I do want to nuance this a bit. If you're doing AI or stats, Python makes sense. There are ways to scale that too. Use the right tool. My general argument is that Python is seldom the right tool for any at-scale web system.
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If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t until I was 30 that my wife and I had enough for a downpayment for a house. When I graduated, my salary was $40k. And, 3-bedroom houses, in my economically-attractive, but not extravagent, area were around $300k. Rent for a 2br was about $1000 / month, so saving $60k took quite a few years. Of course, several co-workers had well-off parents who bought them their first house…
This comment kind of illustrates the knowledge assymetry. We're talking about people in their thirties. People who graduated in 2008 and were amazing candidates but couldn't get a job because there _were none_. People who were then passed up for internships in 2013 as things got better because every hiring manager who graduated in 2006 (with maybe 20 grand in debt easily paid off) or boomer (who had no student debt b…