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Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

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Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#231

Post by scarface74 »

lj3 wrote: post #230
souprock wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-metropolitan areas can be nice. I suppose bit twiddling is specialized. There are fewer jobs, but also fewer people seeking those jobs. That relative lack of competition goes in your favor. High-level developers (Java, JavaScript, Go, Python...) are being pumped out at a frantic pace.

Say I were a web developer looking to transfer into a lower level developer role. How easy would it be for me to get and pass an interview? I'm guessing it's going to be extremely difficult to prove I have the skills you're looking for.

I had to reread your post. I’m assuming you mean “develop at the lower level” of the stack and not “be a junior developer”.

I usually groan at the leetcode style interviewing questions because as an “enterprise developer”, you’re mostly going to be working with prebuilt libraries. In my last ten years worth of interviewing, I’ve only once been asked an algorithm question - and that was to write a merge sort. I got the job offer but didn’t accept it. I figured that any company who has interviews for senior developer/Architects where they care more about low level algorithms than high level architecture is not a company I want to work for. If the interviewing and filtering process for a company is broken, that tells you s lot about the company culture.

That being said, when I was a bit twiddler working with a cross platform (x86 and mainframe) C code base, we did have to write all of the low level algorithms ourselves and had to know how to write highly optimized code and analyze the compiler output.

In that case, knowing how to program algorithms and understanding the “how” was very important. I probably would try the leetcode and other interviewing suggestions for working for a FAANG.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#232

Post by geekbird »

gniv wrote: post #180
rdiddly wrote: post #137

A - private office B - WFH C - Android D - few meetings E - good management F - mellow, friendly (probably older) colleagues G - no training of underlings H - low stress I - interesting work Independent contracting/consulting satisfies A and B; some subset satisfies C; D it likely fails; E is orthogonal or maybe slightly negatively correlated (some portion of those who hire consultants, have to do so because they're…

> Anybody else think of any work paradigms that satisfy more of these conditions? Maybe in a university, like a research assistant (I'm thinking med/bio projects that need serious infrastructure). If it's a well-funded university, I could see all being a yes, except C.

No, even the university where I work is dumping its IT people in an open office cesspit next year.

I'm over 50, and I don't mind meetings or mentoring juniors, but I absolutely hate open offices. I will probably start looking for remote jobs next year. I can't wear headphones or earbuds for more than an hour or two a day (I get ear infections), and that still doesn't guarantee some jerk wont come tap you on the shoulder and startle you out of a year's growth.

Open offices are detrimental to health (60% increase in sick time), productivity (25% - 60% productivity drop), and interactions with coworkers (72% less time in face-to-face interactions). They throw away value (productivity, interactions, lower stress) for a small savings on real estate. They are only loved by cargo-cult management, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#233

Post by geekbird »

Aeolun wrote: post #181
zmmmmm wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having seen the difference in productivity, I'd hire a 40+ senior over 3 juniors in a heartbeat most of the time Honestly I think it's not directly ageism, but indirectly, many people are afraid of managing people with significantly more experience or just plain older than them. So if the team lead is 35 with 10 years eng experience, they will probably be worried about a 45 y/o with 25 years eng experience who will…

To be honest, I would love to hire competent 40- 50 year old people, but I’d be torpedoing my own chances of advancement since promoting them (or hiring them in a higher position) frankly makes much more sense. I guess I’d still do it though. We need people with experience like a drowning man needs air.

Experience is underrated. Most companies look for people with the exact toolset that they want, rather than look for related skills and a history of learning.

I work in sysadmin operations. I have often come in and cleaned up a cowboy implementation, or learned a completely new application (usually undocumented) - deployment and operation - to the point that I can turn around and teach it and write documentation and automation for it.

I'm also very cynical about anything that is the "latest and greatest", because I've seen behind the curtain way too many times.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#234

Post by geekbird »

illumin8 wrote: post #44
jvagner wrote: post #19

The bigger companies I worked for in the Bay Area were more like this than the smaller. As a late 40-something who started his own marketing & technology agency to get out of the "working for others and their bad boss habits" conundrum, the one thing I can strongly recommend is that you have to interview companies as carefully as they interview you. I've directly hired more than 100 people in my career, and it was al…

I'm a 44 year old senior engineer, and the one thing I've noticed is that bad managers are almost universal in technology. I've had about 20 managers in my career and I can count only 2-3 that I would consider great managers, the rest ranged from mediocre to incredibly incompetent. This, to me, is the #1 reason I gain much more satisfaction from doing consulting work on the side: I'm my own manager, and I can make de…

Most people leave managers, not companies.

I've gone to work for good managers, then had them leave or get replaced by complete micromanaging incompetent jerks who kiss up and kick down.

There are a lot of things that influence me taking a job, but leaving comes down to 3 things: management, environment, and respect. Bad management, crowded, noisy environment and lack of respect for me and my peers will get my resume on circuit pretty quickly. I've been burned too often.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#235

Post by geekbird »

Joeri wrote: post #119
wisam wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do think is the reason that most managers in technology are bad? I tend to think of management as abstraction. A mid-level manager provides an abstraction of the work for high-level management and at the same time is provided an abstraction of the work by the low-level managers or engineers. Assuming that my understanding is right, are these abstractions leaky? is the lack of technical knowledge the reason why ma…

The thing with managers is that they have to understand the work being done well enough to make decisions about direction and resource allocation, while also having tons of people skills. In tech you either get a manager who doesn't have a technical background and just doesn't understand the thing they're managing, or you get someone with a technical background who stereotypically doesn't have the necessary people sk…

A good technical manager needs to be able to switch modes - from maker to manager - and back. A person can be a good technical manager even if they don't know the exact technology if they know how to ask good questions of multiple sources and listen (and synthesize) the answers. Nobody teaches this.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#236

Post by geekbird »

ethagnawl wrote: post #124
jcadam wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, as an employed engineer I only have so many vacation days I can burn on interviewing (esp. since I like to take an actual vacation every so often). This usually amounts to interviewing at 2-3 companies a year given each one involves multiple rounds, travel (if out of town), etc., only to hear, yet again, that I'm not a "cultural fit." So, I reach a point each year where I'm turning away companies trying to recr…

> So, I reach a point each year where I'm turning away companies trying to recruit me). I know this feeling very well and, it sounds like, for the same reasons. I don't know about you, but my family/friends look at me like I have two heads when I tell them this -- as do the recruiters at Twooglezon. (It also must make me sound like an arrogant ass ...) I've decided that, based on recent experiences, interviewing with…

Yeah, I regularly turn away recruiters from big name companies that brag about their "young" culture and "hip open office" or are a more than 30 mile commute in the SF Bay Area. BTDT, still have the t-shirts and the burnout. They would have to offer me a huge jump in title, pay and interesting work to get me to do it.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#238

Post by loco5niner »

throwaway172852 wrote: post #120

Speaking as someone who is a 40+ IC Eng at one of the FAANG companies (and previously worked for another) let me give you some advice: - First, at the risk of being blunt, you come across as someone who needs to get off their high horse with your list of "demands". Take the open office. This is the norm. IME this has always been manageable with headphones. YMMV. - The biggest issue is not wanting to exhaust yourself…

> Take the open office. This is the norm. IME this has always been manageable with headphones. YMMV.

As someone who has developed tinnitus from this, I disagree.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#239

Post by souprock »

lj3 wrote: post #230
souprock wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-metropolitan areas can be nice. I suppose bit twiddling is specialized. There are fewer jobs, but also fewer people seeking those jobs. That relative lack of competition goes in your favor. High-level developers (Java, JavaScript, Go, Python...) are being pumped out at a frantic pace.

Say I were a web developer looking to transfer into a lower level developer role. How easy would it be for me to get and pass an interview? I'm guessing it's going to be extremely difficult to prove I have the skills you're looking for.

There are probably a few effective approaches.

One is to get another degree. That looks like a career reset.

The easiest is probably Open Source projects. You could write the sorts of things you are interested in, even if it has been done before. For example, you could write an emulator for a calculator or for an old 8-bit home computer. You could write something to transform executables, for example from i386 to x86_64. You could create part of a valgrind clone, just doing the JIT or even a simple interpreter. You could write a compiler. You could port a compiler to output for a different architecture, or port an OS to run on a different architecture. For example, I think there are Open Source RTOSes that do not yet run on RISC-V. If that isn't true, there are so many other architectures to choose from.

Doing well on the pwnable.kr site without cheating is good. There are public write-ups available, so you'd have to demonstrate that you actually understand things on your own. Getting near the top ranking ("front page is pretty respectable" according to a coworker) would be good.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#240

Post by jf22 »

madeuptempacct wrote: post #76
Yenderman wrote: post #56

When I was 30, people just looked at me and assumed I was a competent software engineer because I looked exactly like a very senior software engineer, and I presented myself in that way. But I was very junior, having made a recent career change. Yet they paid me like a prince, and I rose so rapidly through the ranks that I became an executive. Now I'm 50, and my company folded and I went to the curb, and am looking f…

The prospect of being a senior dev and 40 is terrifying to me. The only ones who are treated with any respect are the "real" wizards - i.e. the guys who spent every spare second if their life breathing tech. The guy who decompiles third party code at 4 am to see why their update caused an error in our system (real recent story). The other (very competent) older people get actively harassed. Some little *es from my co…

That sounds like a shitty company to work for.
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