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How the Valley treats experienced people

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Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#71

Post by lscotte »

aidos wrote: post #16
WalterBright wrote: post #2

Sailing 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 annoye…

Must have been a strange sailboat to have an engine room :-) Sailing the world certainly isn’t a passive activity, especially if you’re sailing around the world . Ocean sailing involves all sorts of skills (and nerves) as you need to nurse a boat around while using your ingenuity to solve the challenges of things breaking that you can’t replace for weeks. You need to prepare all the food (victualling), learn how to s…

> Must have been a strange sailboat to have an engine room :-)

He wasn't talking about a sailboat, but anyway any sailboat built for ocean passages will have a diesel auxillary.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#72

Post by lowercased »

nikanj wrote: post #69
humanrebar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, I find that technical interviews for experienced developers tend to be harder, which makes me infer an "up or out" culture. A dev with 20 years of experience isn't even evaluated for normal individual contributor roles, instead they are chief code wizard or unqualified. Younger devs, especially college hires, are given more leeway to train on the job and grow into their level of aptitude and interest. A…

I think there’s an element of expectation there. The college hire might grow to be a grand wizard in 10 years, and become a massive asset to the company. It is still possible the older person is going to become a wizard later, but the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already? College hires are seen as unscratched lottery tickets, older workers are seen as known variables. I’m not saying…

> but the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already?

An aspect of this thinking is that people don't always know how to identify those 'wizards' if they can only evaluate someone against the company's own internal tech/lingo.

Someone very well might be a 'wizard' - demonstrably so with experience on visible projects. But if the interviewing staff can't parse out those skills in to something they grok, there's still a mismatch.

Another way of putting this: I've seen people in companies who were considered 'wizards' because they could do everything 'the company way', even though the 'company way' was demonstrable and horrifically both inefficient and insecure. Boat-rockers were not welcomed, regardless of the potential for positive impact.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#73

Post by loup-vaillant »

Terretta wrote: post #63

On a contrarian note: Below a certain age, tooling and practices knowledge is likely to be up-to-date. First thing they learned was today’s ways. Above a certain age, it takes additional expertise to assess whether the individual kept learning every year or just kept relying on the first thing they learned. Recruiters and contentless managers often fail to tell the difference, so mis-bias on age which doesn’t cause b…

> Below a certain age, tooling and practices knowledge is likely to be up-to-date.

There are exceptions. C++ game devs for instance often shun the STL for good reasons (compilation times, performance of debug build…), and then the junior fresh from college must unlearn most of what they believed about "modern" C++. They're up to date on the standard all right, they're just not up to date on the best practices of the field they're getting into.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#74

Post by alanning »

I wonder if part of the issue is a kind of unspoken fear that the “dream” outcome may not be as common as people want to believe. If I am a young developer with more stock options than salary I want to believe that I will have the option of retiring early. Seeing older devs who were not able to “cash out” plays poorly with that narrative.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#75

Post by krapp »

nikanj wrote: post #69
humanrebar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, I find that technical interviews for experienced developers tend to be harder, which makes me infer an "up or out" culture. A dev with 20 years of experience isn't even evaluated for normal individual contributor roles, instead they are chief code wizard or unqualified. Younger devs, especially college hires, are given more leeway to train on the job and grow into their level of aptitude and interest. A…

I think there’s an element of expectation there. The college hire might grow to be a grand wizard in 10 years, and become a massive asset to the company. It is still possible the older person is going to become a wizard later, but the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already? College hires are seen as unscratched lottery tickets, older workers are seen as known variables. I’m not saying…

>but the question is: if they have it in them, why aren’t they a wizard already?

Not everyone started in college, or started college at eighteen.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#76

Post by state_less »

WalterBright wrote: post #18
aidos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must have been a strange sailboat to have an engine room :-) Sailing the world certainly isn’t a passive activity, especially if you’re sailing around the world . Ocean sailing involves all sorts of skills (and nerves) as you need to nurse a boat around while using your ingenuity to solve the challenges of things breaking that you can’t replace for weeks. You need to prepare all the food (victualling), learn how to s…

I understand that sailing on the ocean is no small feat, but my problem with it is it doesn't actually accomplish anything. I want to do things that matter.

More things matter than one might initially expect.

We all have a causal wake behind us.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#77

Post by mark_l_watson »

WalterBright wrote: post #2

Sailing 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 annoye…

I am the opposite. I love to cruise, my wife and I have been on 23, many for long duration.

I like to write and getting coffee at 5am, taking a walk around the ship (outside weather permitting), and then a couple of hours working on a book project in the ship library is a great way to start the day and sets me up for exploring a new port later in the day or reading a good book and enjoying the ocean if it is a sea day. Then at night a fine dinner and a good show. A nice life, and it doesn’t have to be all idle time.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#78

Post by leemailll »

shmat wrote: post #68

Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions. In my career, I followed a pattern of going to a company just a bit too late to get the really low priced options. I've ended up with dozens of former co-workers who are multimillionaires. I had a family and was (in hindsight) too conservative about when I went to a company. I also was a "paper" milliona…

That sounds quite unfortunate for your stock options. But why don't you sell your options, pocket it, and set up an investment portfolio to reduce risk after the first crash?

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#79

Post by loup-vaillant »

gaius wrote: post #47
avip wrote: post #36

Ageism is real in many verticals. It is healthy to acknowledge that. It’s equally important to face facts related to age: I am noticeably less focusable, and my memory is not as good. I slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows (or feels). Most importantly, I have many out of work responsibilities - parents (not getting younger) and kids (not getting older in sufficient pace). Consequently, odds of…

slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows For me, it's the exact opposite. Containers? Oh yeah, they're just like zones on Solaris. Kubernetes? Works like a VAXcluster. Cloud? Been there, done that, let's not make the same mistakes. ML? Well we used to call it predictive statistics, the only real difference now is we run it on GPU not CPU. I pick up "new" techs easily because I can step back and se…

Many people (possibly most) don't see the similarities between ostensibly different things. They just don't make the connection.

I once had 2 different classes about stereo-vision (3D reconstruction with different view points). On the same year. One class was ostensibly about ecology. The other was ostensibly about computer vision. Only I noticed they taught the same thing, and everyone looked at me dumbstruck when I pointed this out. They didn't make the connection even when I made it for them.

Learning ability does slow down with age. If you compensate with making connections with past experience, it doesn't translate to less ability to learn new tech. On the contrary, as you pointed out you learn them faster, because you already most of it. If however you fail to make the connection, you will feel that slow down.

Re: How the Valley treats experienced people

#80

Post by loup-vaillant »

gms wrote: post #52

Article commits a classic fallacy: one bad example leading to a general statement because the latter makes a better headline. Rather like going from ‘my friend’s house got robbed’ to ‘all houses get robbed’.

Because the author related 2 anecdotes din't mean they're the only ones they witnessed. They may have seen a pattern over time.
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