How the Valley treats experienced people
rachelbythebay.com
How the Valley treats experienced people
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Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#2Sailing the world sounds boring. It's too passive. I'll be working creating new things until they carry me out in a box.
I go out on sightseeing trips now and then, and very predictably at about 10 days I'm itching to go home and get back to work.
I did go on a 3 day cruise once. By the third day I was bored out of my mind. I tried to get a tour of the engine room but the crew wasn't having any of that. I also annoyed the crew by complaining that they'd changed course to avoid a storm.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#3Someone correct me, but is the article generalizing some one young CEO to represent the entire Silicon Valley? If yes, is that accurate?
I’ve come across those types of people in my career. They were cancerous and didn’t last long. I’ve learned to tune out the noise and cut off people like that. Fortunately for me, I’ve never had run ins where these people had power over me. If they did, it’s a shitty company IMO to bring in people like that and I’m better off elsewhere.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#4The tech industry has a reputation for being hard on older engineers, and I’m sure there is some of that, but I doubt it’s the problem it’s made out to be. Anectdote, I know, but the older engineers I know are doing fine, one gentleman pushing 70 recently came out of retirement to work on Ethereum.
The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty years now. Even before you subtract programmers who moved into management or got out entirely, there’s just not going to be that many.
This is more for y’all youngsters who are afraid you’ll be put out to pasture when you turn $age-you-think-is-old. No reason to think it’ll happen, experience is useful, you’ll be fine.
Yes, you’ll find some ageist managers out there, who won’t hire you if you’ve been legally drinking for more than ten years. Good! You dodged a bullet there, such people invariably have other bad habits.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#5Someone correct me, but is the article generalizing some one young CEO to represent the entire Silicon Valley? If yes, is that accurate? I’ve come across those types of people in my career. They were cancerous and didn’t last long. I’ve learned to tune out the noise and cut off people like that. Fortunately for me, I’ve never had run ins where these people had power over me. If they did, it’s a shitty company IMO to…
That's basically the conclusion of the article.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#6When I started programming I was very productive, even more then today, but I was ignorant about performance, data races, xxs, sql injects, lower level programming, sysadmin, general CS, etc. So I think the problem is managers see new guys being more productive, but the old "slow" guys gets paid double.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#7The tech industry has a reputation for being hard on older engineers, and I’m sure there is some of that, but I doubt it’s the problem it’s made out to be. Anectdote, I know, but the older engineers I know are doing fine, one gentleman pushing 70 recently came out of retirement to work on Ethereum. The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty years now. Even before you subtract progr…
Shhhh, you’re busting the narrative. But seriously, I’ve worked with some amazing older engineers. I’ve always had great relationships with them, and I’ve learned so much from those kinds of people. In my experience many older engineers are much more chilled out and willing to give their time to help others.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#8The tech industry has a reputation for being hard on older engineers, and I’m sure there is some of that, but I doubt it’s the problem it’s made out to be. Anectdote, I know, but the older engineers I know are doing fine, one gentleman pushing 70 recently came out of retirement to work on Ethereum. The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty years now. Even before you subtract progr…
Shhhh, you’re busting the narrative. But seriously, I’ve worked with some amazing older engineers. I’ve always had great relationships with them, and I’ve learned so much from those kinds of people. In my experience many older engineers are much more chilled out and willing to give their time to help others.
Flat out, they have experiences. Sharing those matter. Maybe the other person can avoid more bad experiences.
I love working where there is a mix of young and old, where they get along.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#9The tech industry has a reputation for being hard on older engineers, and I’m sure there is some of that, but I doubt it’s the problem it’s made out to be. Anectdote, I know, but the older engineers I know are doing fine, one gentleman pushing 70 recently came out of retirement to work on Ethereum. The number of developers has roughly doubled every five years for about thirty years now. Even before you subtract progr…
Shhhh, you’re busting the narrative. But seriously, I’ve worked with some amazing older engineers. I’ve always had great relationships with them, and I’ve learned so much from those kinds of people. In my experience many older engineers are much more chilled out and willing to give their time to help others.
Same here. I must say, in my work experience, I had problems only with engineers as young as me (or around my age) who had a big ego, a very bad personality or the I-am-very-smart syndrome.
Instead usually the "old" engineers who stick in a tech position were always extremely humble even if having a ton of domain and company-specific knowledge with the willingness to share all of it.
Re: How the Valley treats experienced people
#10I took a bunch of time and focused on helping coders instead of coding myself. I came to coding naturally and never thought of it as much more than intellectual self-stimulation. It was a lot of fun, and there is some value to it -- but it tends to get a lot more attention than it should simply because it feels so good to do it well. Successful startup founders say that coding is no more than 2-3% of the total effort of providing value to people. I've found nothing to prove that false; and I've seen a lot of companies and startups.
Recently I'm back to focusing more on coding. I find two things most interesting:
1. As I get older, I struggle with attention span and short-term memory more, but I have greater ability to see deep and widespread cross-cutting patterns. It's probably an even trade.
2. I'm not so sure that smart people should be coding. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that good coding is managing cognitive complexity. You're always trying to make it work, then make it easy to understand and maintain. When I think back on all of the multi-billion-dollars I've seen in project/program disasters, none of it was because the problems were hard. They were all a combination of poor customer/user participation and smart folks taking a problem of n complexity and making it into a problem of n^n complexity. Usually the two were related: tech was constantly used as sort of a band-aid to fix people problems. It never worked, but it kept a lot of coders employed for a long time.
Hopefully this wasn't cynical. I love coding and I love making useful things for people. I have a deep passion for helping developers lead happier and more productive lives. But I also feel an obligation to be honest about what happens. It looks a lot different at 50 than it did at 25.
Think about it. Seriously, would you want somebody telling you that you wasted three years of dev time and could scrap what you have and roll something useful to production in a month? I've done that several times in my career, at various ages, and nobody ever liked hearing it. As I got older they liked hearing it even less. In this business, inexperience, raw intelligence, and enthusiasm are the things we reward. They come mostly with younger folks.
Tech development is amazing and incredible because we create our own realities. But part of that awesomeness is the fact that left alone, we create realities that look like ourselves. It is the nature of the work.